Reverend Janet Parsons

Gloucester UU Church

September 27, 2020

Louis Newman refers to himself as having been a model child.  We all know some of those – perhaps we were one of them.  The child who seems naturally well-behaved, who doesn’t get into trouble.  Perhaps such children live charmed lives; loved, appreciated, finding an easy path in the world.

But Louis Newman knows that there is another side to having been a model child; and that is the expectation that he would never do wrong.  Newman, a Jewish ethicist and professor at Carleton College, speaks of the pressure that developed in his life.  As he put it, “I could never admit to myself that I’d done something wrong. I had to figure out some way to hide it, or run from it, or make it better immediately.”  (interview with Krista Tippett, On Being, September 17, 2014. (https://onbeing.org/programs/louis-newman-the-refreshing-practice-of-repentance/)

Feeling that way is not unusual, even if we were never an ideal child.  We try to avoid any reckoning, any consequences, any accountability for our mistakes.  We don’t develop the muscles to take responsibility for those times when we let ourselves or others down.  We make excuses, offer insincere apologies.  And then we try to bury the feelings of guilt or shame, until the next time, and the pattern begins again.

This evening, the Jewish high holy day, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, begins at sundown.  Tonight and tomorrow is the culmination of the practice beginning on Rosh Hashanah, the New Year, the practice of turning inward, reflecting, and confronting incidents in which we failed, or caused harm, or missed the mark.

This practice is known in Hebrew as ‘teshuvah’, or turning, or repentance.  We turn inward, we take stock of all the ways we failed, and we vow to do better, and to make amends.  In the words of our Litany of Atonement just now, “We forgive ourselves and each other; we begin again in love.”

Repentance can be a tricky word for many of us.  It might conjure up the image of an old-time preacher in a movie, shouting “Repent!” in order to avoid eternal damnation.  Most of us don’t really believe that.

But what if we were able to turn back to confront our actions, our mistakes?  Louis Newman explains that we cannot undo what we have done.  But by confronting our errors, we can change ourselves.  We can move past our mistakes, by learning from them and vowing to become a better person, vowing to not be the same person who wronged someone, or lied, or cheated, or stole.  That is teshuvah, repentance, turning.  And it requires work on our part – a genuine effort to reform ourselves, to become someone new.  The practice of fasting on Yom Kippur represents that commitment to effort, to being willing to become uncomfortable in order to set one’s spiritual house in order.

In discussing this service and the readings, Lucille pointed out a problem with our litany, where we say, “We forgive ourselves and each other; we begin again in love.”  Lucille raised the question of whether we can actually forgive ourselves, or whether we should.  This is a question that deserves a full sermon itself someday.  But I started looking at our familiar litany with new eyes, and I realized that what it does is to take the first step toward repentance: it offers confessions.  Think about some of the things we heard:  “For remaining silent when a single voice would have made a difference,”  “For each time that we have struck out in anger without just cause,” “For the selfishness which sets us apart and alone,”….  We then said in response, “We forgive ourselves and each other.  We begin again in love.”  We acknowledged mistakes. But we forgot a few steps in the process of repentance.  To truly repent, we would need to apologize to the person we had wronged.  We would have to figure out how we could change, and then make the effort to do it.  We would have to turn away from the side of ourselves that had made those mistakes, over and over again, until we truly had become someone new.  We would need to experience discomfort. And then we could forgive ourselves.  In other words, just now we went directly from confessing to forgiving, and we forgot about atonement; about feeling remorse, about taking action to correct our path.

The ancient story about the Jewish High Holy Days, the Days of Awe, is that on Rosh Hashanah, with the blast of the shofar, the Book of Life is opened, and the names of the righteous are inscribed in it.  Jews have the 10 day period of the Days of Awe between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, to ensure that their names are inscribed.  The inclusion of one’s name in the Book of Life is a symbol for connection with the Holy; it demonstrates a return to wholeness, to reconciliation, to love.  There is another pronunciation for atonement:  Picture the word in your mind for a second as I say: “at-one-ment.”  Atonement, at-one-ment, is the act of turning from all that might separate you from a life of loving connection.

Truly, to achieve atonement is an act of spiritual maturity.  It is intentional, and lifelong.  And more and more, I see that it is a practice that is desperately needed in our country.  We do not know how to repent; how to turn, how to atone.  And we are paying a terrible price for our unwillingness to apologize, to admit the errors of our past.  Of course, I am talking about our country’s founding sins:  racism, slavery, genocide, white supremacy. We cannot face these.  Too many of us cannot admit that slavery and genocide were evil, or that racism and white supremacy poison our country every single day.  We cannot turn toward wholeness, toward reconciliation, toward unity. 

Some of the words in our litany struck me particularly this morning:  “For each time when our greed has blinded us to the needs of others.”  “For losing sight of our unity.”  We have made terrible mistakes, committed far too many acts of hatred and violence, and we refuse to look closely, to try to reform our society, or ourselves.  It is so much easier to proclaim that none of what is happening is our fault.  And so here we are, stuck, refusing to turn, to repent, to atone.  And year after year we fight the same battles, and refuse to confront the guilt and the shame of our past and our present.  It’s as though America is acting like the model child that Louis Newman described at the beginning.  We are the model country. We proclaim that we are the shining city on the hill, the country that offers liberty and justice for all.  We learn those words as children.  How can we admit that we fail to live up to them?

Louis Newman had this to say, “the ultimate benefit of doing teshuvah is that it offers us a way to overcome our past precisely because we have confronted and taken full responsibility for it. It enables us to escape the sense of guilt, in some cases even despair with which many of us live. In its place, we come to live with self-acceptance and hope, because we know that moral renewal is always a possibility.”  (quoted by Krista Tippett, On Being, ibid.)

My friends, moral renewal is always a possibility.  It’s never too late, if we remember that the goal is not to undo what we did, but to restore ourselves to wholeness.  And if we can learn the practice of teshuvah, turning, perhaps we can finally help our country to turn and to atone as well.  In these days ahead I wish for you the opportunity to turn, to repent, and to feel whole, and I pray that our country can find a path toward repentance as well.

May it be so,

Amen.