A Sermon by Kenneth W. Phifer
Delivered at First UU Church Ann Arbor
10/19/03

                                      WORDS TO LIVE BY


How important are words?

Very important indeed. 

Words enable us to communicate. We can invite people to tea, admire 
someone's dress, let the family know that supper is ready.

Words enable us to remember. We can take minutes at a meeting in order 
to recall later what happened. We can write histories so we know the 
stories of peoples and nations. We can make lists for shopping so we 
get what we want and need, not what the stores want us to buy.

Words enable us to shape ideas. Words give form to inchoate thoughts 
and structure to notions and fancies. Words help to create theories and 
systems so that we understand the world more clearly. Words sometimes 
even help us to know what we think.

Words enable us to explain. We use words to tell how to put something 
together, how to get from one place to another, how to make beef 
croquettes or potato salad, how we came to be where we are doing what 
we are doing.

Words enable us to learn. We learn the rules of our place of employment 
through words, and the laws of our city and state and nation as well. 
We learn of the past and of far distant places and of outer space and 
of inner space with the help of words.

Words enable us to express our feelings. The Letters to the Editor in a 
newspaper or magazine will often feature short pieces that are pure 
feeling, usually anger but sometimes delight. We can tell our children 
that we love them—and we should! often!—and speak such feelings to our 
partners and parents and siblings and friends as well.

Words have power because of what we are able to do with them.


Words matter. Profoundly.

Among the most important words we use are the words that we live by, 
mantras if you will, words and phrases that help us to state briefly 
what it is that inspires us, what ideals we are trying to live by, what 
principles guide our behaviour, what helps us to pick up the pieces 
when everything around us has fallen apart.

Such words and phrases will not be the same for everybody. I recall a 
sermon illustration my father once used about a long-married couple 
being asked the secret of their marital longevity. They replied with 
one word, "Corn." Early in their years together there had been an 
incident in a cornfield that had tested their mettle and proved each to 
the other their worth as human beings. In the darkest moments of their 
married life, all one of them had to do was say that one word, "Corn." 
It invariably ended disagreements, melted anger, made trivial whatever 
they were struggling with, and brought a smile to their faces. 

Now the word "corn" is not likely to be helpful to everybody, but it 
was for them. What each of us must do is to find those words and 
phrases that speak truth to us, that lift up our spirits, that give us 
courage and insight and hope.

As I tell you of some of the words that I live by, you can be recalling 
words of your own that help you to get up in the morning, to get 
through the day, and to greet the night-time with calm.

In the week just gone by I have had occasion to bring to mind words I 
say at least once annually: wait till next year. For those of us who 
are baseball fans, that means that our team was not the one team that 
ends the season triumphant, but among those that won too few games to 
enter post-season competition or, entering it, ultimately lost the last 
game they played. 

Fans of the Chicago Cubs and the Boston Red Sox are not alone in the 
wait for next year. The fans of almost every team feel that way. Doris 
Kearns Goodwin even wrote a memoir of her childhood in Brooklyn as a 
fan of the Dodgers using the title WAIT TILL NEXT YEAR.

The importance of this phrase goes beyond mere sports. It bespeaks the 
courage in the face of defeat to proclaim hope. It says that despite 
the current sadness, we shall return to play again, and we shall spend 
the intervening time figuring out how to play better so that we shall 
finish the final contest next season in victory. 

There is something wonderfully resilient in saying "wait till next 
year" when defeat has descended. In baseball there is a rhythm to it 
because we know when the next season will begin. But the lesson can 
apply to any aspect of life, even those in which there is not a regular 
rhythm: the loss of a job, a health problem, the end of a relationship. 
We all need to feel that sense of possibility embedded in the words, 
wait till next year

Wait till next year can also be a reminder of events in which we take 
delight that occur regularly each year. There is an absolutely gorgeous 
Japanese maple tree in our front yard that in spring and then again in 
autumn blooms with such beauty that it catches the breath. 

There may be an annual family gathering around Thanksgiving, Christmas, 
or some other holiday that we eagerly wait for all year. It may be a 
friend we see only at the annual convention of our profession, or a 
trip that we take every year: to Stratford to see plays, to some 
challenging environment to test ourselves, to a place of silence and 
meditation to refresh ourselves.

Wait till next year is a mantra of hope!

A second phrase that I hold dear is one that I learned from one of the 
great preachers of the 20th century, George Buttrick. He was the 
Preacher to the University at Harvard during my college years, and a 
man generous with his time for those of us intending to study for the 
ministry. 

I have never forgotten what he said was necessary for good preaching. 
We should always strive "not for the usual use of unusual words but the 
unusual use of usual words." That is harder to practice than it sounds, 
and even he was not always able to do it.

He gave an example. Everyone knows the meaning of the words, sweet, 
parting, and sorrow. What we preachers want to do with our words is 
what Shakespeare did with those words in ROMEO AND JULIET: "parting is 
such sweet sorrow." Everyone understands that sentiment, and the phrase 
is unforgettable.

I do not meet that high standard, but it is the standard to which I 
hold myself. It is the standard of clear communication, without which 
the most brilliant ideas are of little value.

The wider lesson is that we should always strive to communicate as 
clearly as we are able, not to befuddle people with words they do not 
understand. A doctor explaining a diagnosis to a patient can overwhelm 
that patient with fancy technical terms that will mean nothing to the 
lay person whose body is being talked about—or the doctor can, however 
hard it may be, use terms that ordinary folks are likely to know.

So is it with lawyers and their clients, teachers and their students, 
writers and their readers. Strive not to use unusual words usually but 
to use usual words unusually.

Some years ago the Children's Defense Fund originated a slogan—now used 
by the current administration--that speaks a deep truth and a high 
principle : "Leave no child behind."

Leave no child behind means that every child counts—his education, her 
health care, his safety, her curiosity, his suffering, her pain, 
everything counts when we are talking about children. They did not 
choose to come into this world and we who have been here longer, we who 
are adults and supposedly mature and responsible, have a profound moral 
obligation to take care of our children.

Leave no child behind.

That is what Helen Caldicott meant when she said that no laws should 
ever be passed by adults meeting alone. Children should always be 
present, babies in diapers, rambunctious two and three year olds, 
gentle energetic seven and eight year olds, frightened early teens and 
surly later teens, children in all their incarnations and stages and 
ages. 

Rabbi Michael Lerner, founder of the Politics of Meaning movement, has 
called for every piece of legislation to have a clause in it explaining 
the impact of that law on the lives of children. No law should be 
passed that does not have minimally a neutral effect on boys and girls 
and preferably a positive effect.

Leave no child behind means that we fund our schools fully and staff 
them with competent and caring teachers, that we make certain that 
every child is given full medical coverage, that we have playgrounds 
that are safe and plentiful, that we say NO to any form of child abuse 
and mean it, that we craft international policies that will support the 
lives of children in every nation.

Leave no child behind is an inspiring phrase, but only if we take it 
seriously and order our priorities accordingly.

Gregory Knox Jones wrote of the British in India establishing golf 
courses, only to encounter a problem they could not have imagined: 
monkeys. Monkeys living near the course delighted in joining the game 
by picking up balls and dropping them in other places, sometimes 
nowhere near where the shot had landed or the hole for which the golfer 
was aiming.

Fences were, of course, useless in keeping the monkeys off the course. 
A new rule had to be instituted: play the ball where the monkey drops 
it. That could be in the rough after a beautiful shot landed your ball 
in the fairway. It could be two feet from the cup when you had put your 
ball in a sand trap. 

Playing the ball where the monkey drops it was sometimes fortunate and 
sometimes disastrous, but they could think of no other way than this 
rule to deal with the reality of monkeys joining their golf game in an 
entirely unpredictable way.

It is a good phrase for us to keep in mind, for often life is like the 
monkeys. 

We are going along swimmingly and suddenly out of nowhere comes a new 
burden: having to take care of an ailing relative, having to adjust to 
an unexpected decline in income, having to face the sadness of a 
relationship ending. Change that we could not have anticipated turns 
our life upside down. The best we can do is play the ball where life 
has dropped it.

Similarly we can be in the doldrums and out of the blue be lifted up by 
a promotion we did not think we would get, a disease that seemed 
endless just going away, a windfall of money that takes us out of 
financial distress, or that most wonderful of experiences, falling in 
love when we thought that would never happen again. The best we can do 
is seize the moment and squeeze every possible bit of happiness out of 
it that we can.

Play the ball where the monkey drops it. Play life whatever happens.

Some years ago, when I was a college student, I was struggling 
desperately to hold on to the faith of my childhood, a faith in God and 
Jesus Christ and all the usual elements of Protestant Christianity that 
accompany such a faith. I felt despair because my faith was just oozing 
away and I seemed helpless to stop it.

Then I took a course about modern religious thought and read Paul 
Tillich, specifically his book THE COURAGE TO BE. I have never 
forgotten the last words of that book: "The courage to be is rooted in 
the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt."

Those words offered me hope when I had none. They told me that it was 
all right to let go of my childhood faith. They assured me that in the 
darkest moments there are truths to be found that could help me to hold 
on.  They said that doubt was a legitimate factor in the development of 
a faith that would stand the test of time.

I do not in my theology use God-language, but the power of these words 
that do use God-language is still present in my life. The God of my 
childhood is long gone, save as a historical artifact, but something 
stronger has taken the place of that God. 

For me, the courage to be is rooted in the God that is Love—or, as I 
prefer to say it, the Love that is God. I find courage in seeing time 
and again the strength of love: the love that rises above our 
individual selfishness and enables us to form deep and abiding 
relationships, even when we hurt one another; the love that enables us 
to sacrifice for our children, for a cause, for a community so that 
more just living is possible; the love that transcends death and keeps 
the spirit of our lost loved ones alive in us, with their encouraging 
voices and their smiles and tears and dreams.

The love that roots what courage I have enables me to do the work of 
justice, to believe ever and always that non-violence is better than 
violence, to strive with what energy and intelligence I have for a 
world that is genuinely peaceful, to believe that all peoples 
everywhere are my sisters and brothers, and that there is indeed in 
every person an inherent and sacred worth. 

The God I left behind was often an angry and judgmental God, and I am 
well quit of that deity. That God brought more fear and confusion than 
the God who has come into my life when God disappeared "in the anxiety 
of doubt." What courage I have to live, even when life is full of 
difficulty, sadness, and suffering, comes from the Love that is God 
that I find in my family and friends in such great abundance.

Some years after I read Paul Tillich I came across some words of George 
Eliot that complement the courage to which Tillich refers. "What do we 
live for," she wrote, "if not to make life less difficult for each 
other."

What indeed do we live for? 

Some live to accumulate possessions, having literally bought into what 
our society—drenched in commercialism—tells us we should live for. One 
of  the earliest calls to action by the president after 9-11 was for 
Americans to go out and buy!

What a unhappy way to live! There is rarely time to enjoy this moment 
and the things we now possess. We are caught up in an endless desire 
for more of what we have, for what our neighbor has, for something new. 
More toys, more clothes, more food, a bigger house, a larger car, more 
points and more victories because we want to be Number One! 

That way lies misery. The path that George Eliot points to enables us 
whatever our circumstances to feel a sense of value at what we can 
contribute. 

The doggerel verses of the aged poet which daily she composed to the 
delight of her sister with whom she had come to live.

The cheerful voice of a phone receptionist making us feel glad we 
called the business she represents or the lawyer's office she works in 
or the school where she spends her daytime hours.

The kindness of a surgeon who walks with a woman who has to go back 
into the operating room, holding her hand and speaking reassuring words 
all the way.

The child who, after being spoken to angrily by her mother, goes out 
and picks a dozen bright yellow dandelions and presents them to her 
parent with the words, "I could tell you were unhappy and I wanted to 
make you happy with beauty."

Simple acts, each one of them, but each brightened the day for those 
who experienced them, their lives a little bit less difficult than they 
had been.

Think on a more grand scale of people like Mother Teresa, the group 
that rebuilds destroyed homes in the West Bank, those in Northern 
Ireland both Protestant and Catholic who have labored to bring about 
peace that the people in the Six Counties might be able to live free of 
the fear of violence, and hundreds, thousands, even millions more who 
spend their days in large and small ways trying to make life less 
difficult for each other. 

What a wonderful ideal by which to guide our actions—do that which will 
make life less burdensome, less sad, less frightening for someone else. 
If the whole world lived that way, we would know first hand what it is 
like to live in peace and justice.

Neither time nor your patience permit my sharing an exhaustive list of 
the mantras of my life. I should point out that I have violated one of 
the mantras that most of you think I hold high and holy, though 
truthfully I only apply it some of the time. I am referring to my 
frequent statement that "I am going to make three points." Actually 
today I have mentioned six things—wait till next year, the unusual use 
of usual words, leave no child behind, play the ball where the monkey 
drops it, the courage to be, and making life less difficult for each 
other.

It is my hope that you have been ruminating on your own words to live 
by even as I have shared some of mine. While our personal phrases may 
differ considerably one from the other, there are some words that those 
of us involved a lot or a little in this religious community share with 
each other.

There are, first of all, the words on the boulder at the entrance to 
our building that read:
FIRST UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST CHURCH OF ANN ARBOR
                        COMMITTED TO 
                        LOVE NOT HATE
                        RESPECT NOT CONTEMPT
                        OPENNESS NOT EXCLUSION
                        THIS CONGREGATION IS 
                        A SAFE HAVEN FOR ALL THE
                        PEOPLES OF THE EARTH.

I read those words every time I enter this building, as many of you do, 
and I re-pledge myself to them every time.

The other words by which we as a congregation try to live are spoken 
every Sunday morning in our Words of Affirmation:
                        THE SPIRIT OF THIS CHURCH IS LOVE
                        AND SERVICE IS ITS LAW.
                        THIS IS OUR COVENANT WITH EACH OTHER:
                        TO DWELL TOGETHER IN PEACE,
                        TO SEARCH FOR TRUTH IN LOVE,
                        AND TO HELP ONE ANOTHER.

These are the words by which we try to live. As we do so, we are 
helping to make the world both happier and more just, thereby making 
clear just how important words really are.


Copyright 2003, Kenneth W. Phifer, All Rights Reserved