“Make Me an Instrument”
A Sermon by Rev. Robert M. Hardies
All Souls Church, Unitarian
Washington, D.C.
Sunday, 7 December 2008
Our reading this morning is the famous prayer of the 12th Century monk, St. Francis of Assisi.
Dear God, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me
sow love; where they is injury, pardon. Where there is doubt, faith; where there
is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy.
Dear God, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be
understood as to understand, to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we
receive. It is in forgiving that we are forgiven. And it is in dying that we are
awakened to life eternal. Amen
Not long ago, I taught a class on prayer at one of our Unitarian seminaries. You know, there’s an old joke about Unitarians and prayer. It goes, “How can you tell when a Unitarian is praying?” “When she begins, ‘To whom it may concern.’” [Laughter] And I think there’s some truth to this little joke. Because if there’s one piece of prayer that Unitarians seem to have the most difficulty with it’s how to begin. How shall I address the holy? I think it comes from Unitarians’ healthy respect for the mystery of the “other” to whom we pray. It would be a mistake, however, to infer from this self-deprecating humor that therefore a Unitarian’s prayer is any less heartfelt or authentic than the prayer of her orthodox brothers and sisters. After years of teaching prayer among Unitarians I’ve discovered that once we get past that complicated salutation, our prayers reveal a yearning for relationship with the holy. Our prayers express the deep longing of our hearts.
So back to my class. To get this class of graduate students and ministers talking about prayer, to kind of ease us into the subject, I asked folks to tell a story about when they first learned to pray. Who taught them? How old were they? What feelings do they associate with that experience? I found that oftentimes our earliest experiences of prayer end up shaping our beliefs and feelings about it well into adulthood. So I thought we could examine those early experiences.
The students told lots of stories. Some shared fond childhood memories of parents or grandparents teaching them to pray, memories that conjured up feelings of safety and assurance. Others learned early to fear God by anxiously confessing their childhood sins to a god who judged and punished. Many of these folks hadn’t prayed much since. And still others said they had never learned to pray, that no one had ever thought to teach them. For me, I shared the story that I learned to pray at my grandmother’s house. I stayed with her a lot as a child and, every night when she tucked me in for bed, we’d say together, “Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep.” And then we’d say the names of those for whom we prayed – family and friends, the occasional pet.
So there we were going around the circle, sharing our stories about prayer, when we came to a female colleague of mine, Mary, who is now approaching retirement age. And Mary took me by complete surprise when she began her story by saying that as a child, “I first learned to pray in the sanctuary of All Souls Church in Washington, D.C.” Turns out that back in the 1950s, when she was growing up, Mary’s parents didn’t go to church. But when she came to be about eight years old, she decided that she did want to go to church. Her parents talked to their friends and they decided that, well, All Souls would be a good place for their child to receive a generous and broad and liberal religious education. And so, they would drive to the corner of 16th and Harvard on Sunday mornings and they would drop little Mary off on the corner. Presumably, they’d go home and read a few more sections of The Washington Post before coming back an hour later after she’d gone to Sunday school and pick her back up again. Well, that worked for a few weeks until this precocious child felt that Sunday school just wasn’t really right for her. Soon, after her parents dropped her off, she would come into the sanctuary, all by herself, and sit among the adults for worship.
Now, to fully appreciate the chutzpah of this little girl, it helps to know a little bit about what that church was like back in the ‘50s. You’ve got to know that at that time the church’s pastor, A. Powell Davies, was one of the most famous liberal religious voices in the country at the time, one who used this pulpit on a weekly basis to speak out prophetically about issues of the day from segregation to McCarthyism to the danger of atomic energy. Davies’ prophetic sermons drew overflow crowds on Sundays and we’d have to pipe the sermons into Pierce Hall where people would listen on closed-circuit radio. The crowd was not only large; it was distinguished. The congregation included such folks as Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas and Senator Adlai Stevenson. And so it was into this crowd of D.C. movers and shakers that this little eight-year-old girl would kind of wedge her way into the pew to attend service on Sunday mornings. And while they were all there to listen to Davies expound on the issues of the day, Mary found herself drawn to something different. For all Dr. Davies’ fiery rhetoric, what she remembers most are his fervent prayers, his calm and reverent tone. And for all Davies ripped-from-the-headlines sermon titles, what she remembers most is the day that he recited the words of a medieval monk, St. Francis of Assisi. One day, Dr. Davies ended his sermon with the prayer of St. Francis: “Dear God, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light.” Maybe it was the plaintive simplicity of St. Francis’ words. Maybe it was Dr. Davies’ reverent tone. But 60 years later, Mary remembers that moment as the moment that she learned to pray. “Make me an instrument of your peace.”
That plea of St. Francis stirred something in Mary. It spoke to a desire within her. And in that moment, not only did she learn to pray, but she heard a calling, a calling to serve, to serve love, to serve peace. In that moment, Mary first wondered if she might one day stand in a pulpit and lead people in prayer, if she might one day become a minister. And I have to say that I just love that image, of an eight-year-old girl in the 1950s, tucked there in between William O. Douglas and Adlai Stevenson, hearing her call to the ministry.
This sanctuary, this space, is holy ground. Not because of its elegant architecture or its high pulpit or its magnificent organ. It’s holy ground because of what takes place within these walls. These walls are hallowed by all of the people who, in this space, have heard a higher calling, have discerned the voice of the holy whispering to them, calling to them. This is the place where the Reverend James Reeb heard the call to Selma, a call that lead to his martyrdom for the cause of civil rights. And it’s where many of you – I know because you’ve told me your stories – where many of you have discovered the courage and the strength to leave behind the security of the familiar and to strike out on a new path. This sanctuary is the place where dreams are born, where plans are hatched and where protests are plotted, all in response to that longing of St. Francis. “Make me an instrument.” Let my life be a channel of love.
It’s not just individuals who hear a call. It’s communities, too, communities like us, like this congregation. And for nearly two centuries now, the people in this sanctuary and the two sanctuaries that preceded it since the founding of this congregation have been wrestling with a calling, a calling to live up to that vision that is inherent in our name – All Souls. But what is that vision? Sometimes when I’ve shared it with folks I’ve found that some people seem a little flummoxed. Let me tell you a story. Not long ago, I was talking with someone here in Washington, D.C., a D.C. native, and I told him that I was the pastor of All Souls Church. He kind of looked at me curiously and said, “Well that’s funny; I thought All Souls was a black church.” And I said, “Well, you know, my two predecessors were African-American and All Souls is a multiracial church. You know, it’s a church for all souls.” And he said, “Oh, so it’s a white church.” [Laughter] And I said, “No, it’s a church for all souls.” And he said, “Well, you’re gay; it must be a gay church.” And at that point, you know, mustering all the love and charity that I could gather up in my heart at the moment, I said, “Friend, what part of that phrase, All Souls, don’t you understand?”
All. That first word, all, speaks to the glorious diversity and particularity of the human family. That second word, “soul,” speaks to that piece of us that is common to all of us, our common worth and dignity. All souls – when you put them together, what you have is a vision of a community that affirms unity amidst diversity. You know, when I’m talking about this, I’m not talking about some politically correct manifesto, or some corporate affirmative action mandate. Too often in our culture conversations about multiculturalism and diversity are reduced to these kinds of discussions. What I’m trying to talk about is what I believe is the profound spiritual longing at the heart of many religious traditions. In Christianity, it’s called atonement – “at one-ment.” Right? In Judaism, they have an image called tikkun olam, the gathering together of the shattered pieces of creation. Dr. King called it “beloved community” – a vision of racial harmony. Here, we call it “All Souls,” a vision of the human family reconciled and whole, a spiritual reality into which our lived reality has not yet reached. Our mission is to become a beacon of that vision, a laboratory where we experiment with how to make that vision a reality. “Make us instruments of your peace.”
But when communities discover a calling, it is incumbent upon everyone within that community to own their piece of it. Right? It just can’t be a vision that we embrace corporately. It has to be something that each of us personally buys into and each of us personally finds our way to contribute to it. You know, many of you have come up to me and said, “Rob, I am on board with this vision, but what can I do personally to help achieve it?” And so, I just want to talk about a few of the ways that each of us individually can participate and further this vision. Some of these things you’re already doing; some of them may be new to you. But I want to invite you to think about all the different ministries of the church. One of the ways we achieve our vision is through our ministry of social justice. I want to invite you to go out there and march for a cause that is not your own. If you’re a straight person, go march against Prop 8. If you’re a United States citizen, go raise your voice on behalf of the undocumented immigrants. Practice solidarity. And don’t stop marching and raising your voice until you come to understand the ways in which our struggles as human beings are linked and are one and the same. Take a trip to New Orleans. Work alongside the residents of that city. Learn about how Katrina wasn’t just a natural disaster. Learn about the human politics that affected that. So, social justice is one way that we can participate in this.
Another way is in worship on Sunday morning. On Sunday mornings, let us lift up this vision together and celebrate it together. Emerson said, “What we worship, we become.” He understood the power of worship. On Sunday mornings, when we share spiritual and musical gifts from many traditions, let’s not just take them for granted, but let’s learn something about the spiritual struggles that shaped those traditions, that shaped those gifts.
We can further this cause through our own spiritual growth and our education as religious beings. I believe very strongly that one of the ways we can affirm particularity and unity at the same time is we have to stretch our souls. We have to have large and supple souls. Hard and brittle souls can’t embrace all of that at once. So pray. And meditate. And in so doing, enlarge your soul. Make it large and supple. Take an adult education course; learn how to dismantle racism. Learn a language that is different from your own. Or teach someone else yours, like our ESL tutors do every Sunday afternoon.
But finally, all of it comes down to building relationships. I like to say that the great family of all souls will be built one soul at a time. Ultimately, it’s about one human being reaching out across a barrier to another human being. And so, at a very simple level, what can we do? On Sunday mornings, when we turn to greet each other at the beginning of the service, don’t just say your name and ask another person their name; imagine that moment of greeting as a sacrament, a sacramental welcome to stranger and friend. And then, when you walk into Pierce Hall after church, you know, how we’ve got those round tables and you know how you always sit around the same round table and talk with the same folks after church? Sit at a different table in Pierce Hall on Sunday morning. Talk to someone new. Don’t do church business with the people you always have to do business with. Reach out and build a relationship with someone new.
And most importantly, find one of the ways that we have in the church, like a covenant group or a parent group or a committee where you can build relationships with people over time, deep relationships, relationships of accompaniment and solidarity. The great family of all souls will be built one soul at a time.
Now I can hear some of you saying, “Rob, you’ve got this great vision of the human family whole and reconciled. And then when you say how to achieve it, you tell us really simple stuff like shake someone’s hand on Sunday morning or go have a conversation in Pierce Hall. And those things don’t seem to add up.” But really, I believe that that is the way that this work must be done. Mary Oliver says that “the work of the world is as common as mud.” When you botch it, it crumbles and it turns to dust. But if you take the mud and, with intention and with skill, you form it into a vase or a pitcher or some other beautiful thing, then suddenly that simple thing is transformed into something great and something beautiful. I believe it’s the same way with this work. Very simple tasks, imbued with intention and with purpose.
Let me close by saying that our vision is large and our task is great and our challenges are many. But I think back to that little eight-year-old girl in the sanctuary in the 1950s and I think back to how she, at that time, when there wasn’t a woman minister in the country, imagined herself as one day standing in this pulpit and being a minister. And then I am reminded that we can sometimes overcome obstacles that we thought were impossible, that the challenges that lie ahead of us are nothing compared to the power that lies within us.
May it be so. Amen