The Pulpiteer

If you had asked me when I was going to preach a sermon on sin, I would have guessed never. This is the first of what I expect to become a series: taking a word we've developed an allergy to and asking whether there's something honorable and recoverable in it.I start with a parable about two Habitat for Humanity volunteers and a screwdriver, and why one of them won't touch one. The injury is real. The workaround is understandable. And something about it still impedes the work at hand.Then the engineering diagram that gave this sermon its title. Accuracy is how close you land to the bullseye. Precision is how tight your grouping is. Imagine a target after twelve years of disciplined practice — a dense scatter of holes all around the center and not so many in it. Those holes are the near enemies. Interpretations of sin that make you feel ashamed, or afraid, or angry are some of them: you can tell, because it isn't trying to make you better. It's trying to trigger what keeps you stuck.There's one place the archery metaphor breaks, and it matters. An archer gets immediate feedback — you can walk to the target and pull the arrows. Life doesn't work that way. Life is more like farming: one experiment a season, ambiguous results, three thousand variables. Which is part of why wisdom takes a lifetime, and why we need practices that get us out of our heads and into flow, into play.

"You have access to the deepest wisdom you need within you."This episode explores the life journey through the metaphor of origami. An artist starts with a single square. They fold and fold — never cutting, never tearing — until a flat sheet becomes something complex and organic. And then, if they wish, they can unfold it all the way back to a square. The shape is gone, but its story is still in the paper: an origami master can read the crisscrossing creases and tell you what was made there.Every choice you make after a moment of real discernment is another fold. Most of the time we cannot see the shape we're making, and our own unfolded sheet looks like nothing but crossing lines.Along the way: the Quaker Clearness Committee, which is not an advice circle — the others in the room may only ask open, honest questions, because the wisdom you need is already in you and what you need is community to hold the space while you find it. Eckhart Tolle on looking for truth elsewhere. And the four ashramas from Age-ing to Sage-ing, along with my quarrel with them: we have learned what the monastic life has to teach. What we need now are deeply spiritual householders.I also say a word about what "worship" means, and why our inherited version of it may not have been healthy.Our Great World House holds the ICE shooting of Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez in North Austin, and the vigil at the site. Woody Hibbard reads the Voice of Wisdom, from Joseph Chilton Pearce. Recorded live at San Gabriel Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Georgetown, Texas.

"Your contribution to the work does not define your worth."A shorter episode than usual — homily length. Before the service we held a teams fair, where congregants could visit every team that makes this church function internally and do justice work in the wider community. This is the message that followed."Take your place" is not the theatre's places, everyone. It is not a performance, and it is not a way to earn prestige or credits toward the chosen afterlife. It is an invitation: to claim your place if you know it, and to find it if you're still searching.Along the way I say something I have been working toward for a while. Maybe the simplest, most reductionist account of a life — a meaningless stew of atoms and chemistry that we happened to emerge from — is the simplest explanation without being the truest. Maybe there is something that called you into being and calls you forward into meaning. I spent more of my life believing the reductionist view than I have believing what I believe now, so I'm comfortable with the skeptical eyes in the room.Then the paradox at the center: an ecosystem has no spare parts because an ecosystem is all spare parts. Health and resilience depend on redundancy and abundance — but redundant and abundant are not spare, because spare is the language of scarcity. Three other people can step up when you're away, and your contribution is undiminished.And a near enemy worth naming: the expectation that work which feeds you should be easy.Our Great World House marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of September 11th, and why I did not participate in our town's day of service. Kris Verdeyen reads Lynn Ungar's "Camas Lilies." Recorded live at San Gabriel Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Georgetown, Texas.

"When you shed a tear, it is likely that some of the water in your tears has been cried before. Maybe many times. Maybe countless times."This is a recording of our Water Communion service. I've left the voices of congregants sharing their blessings in the episode, so that those blessings might be passed on to you as well — sixty-odd voices, one to three words each, spoken into the water before it was poured into the bowl. Some are ordinary and some will stop you.The ritual began in November 1980, at the Women and Religion Continental Convocation in East Lansing, Michigan, in a service called "Coming Home Like Rivers to the Sea." It was co-created by Carolyn McDade and Lucile Schuck Longview, who gathered women from around the country and asked them to bring water from their home places. It was a feminist gathering and a social justice gathering, and its founders asked that congregations keep changing the ritual rather than preserving it. We take them at their word.In the message I turn to residence time — how long a water molecule stays in a given reservoir. Hours in your body. Nine days in the sky. Millennia in the ocean. Over a million years in the deepest Antarctic ice, which means a mastodon's frigid breath became a cloud, fell as snow at the bottom of the world, and is still there. And the arithmetic that beckons the deeper truth: a single cup passing through you today carries enough molecules to add fifteen hundred of them to every other cup of water on earth.Our Voice of Wisdom is an excerpt from Carolyn McDade's water song, read by Sarah Smith. Recorded live at San Gabriel Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Georgetown, Texas.

"We are not free from triggers, but we can develop the skills to recognize those triggers when they happen."In this episode I work line by line through a dense passage from Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed — the one about the oppressed having internalized the image of the oppressor and become fearful of freedom — and ask what it has to do with an ordinary Sunday morning.I start on a running trail, with two dogs and a man who tenses up. One dog is what I call a stimulus-jerked puppet: it reacts because reacting is all it has. The other has learned some space between the trigger and the response — until its handler's anxiety travels down the leash. From there I get to a canceled credit card, thirty-six seconds of unkindness to a bank employee, and why I'd rather tell you that story than let you think I'm finished with this work.Then Freire, a line at a time. Oppression as something that dehumanizes everyone who participates in it, including those it benefits materially. Autonomy as owning your choices even when they are coerced. Responsibility and accountability as the opposite of entitlement. The Portuguese word conquista, which is broader than the English "conquest" and means something closer to won through struggle. And freedom not as the absence of obligation, but as the ability to choose the relationships that bind you in obligation.Our Great World House marks the 105th anniversary of Freire's birth. Judy Mayo reads the Voice of Wisdom. Recorded live at San Gabriel Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Georgetown, Texas.