Lovely Day — Reclaiming Faith as a Present-Tense Practice, with Bill Withers and Ross Gay by Eric Hepburn

As Bill Withers sings, "Then I look at you, and the world's alright with me. Just one look at you, and I know it's gonna be: A lovely day!" Think of this as a love letter to the congregation and to all those who gather in joy and in sorrow to work toward the beloved community that signals a lovely day for all.

We will have our Annual Congregational Meeting after service.

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Podcast Transcript

Lightly edited for readability: transcription errors corrected, filler words reduced, punctuation repaired. Bracketed items are editorial.

[00:00:00] Eric Hepburn (host intro): Welcome to the thirty-fifth episode of the second season of The Pulpiteer. I'm your host, Eric Hepburn, and I'm glad to have you join us for today's episode. Today's episode is called "Lovely Day," in honor of the song by Bill Withers. Here at the end of the second season of the podcast — and my second year in the pulpit at San Gabriel — this episode is a love letter to the congregation and to you, podcast listeners, and a gesture toward reclaiming faith, and defining faith in a way that unifies rather than divides. We'll begin with our Great World House segment, and then our Voice of Wisdom, read by Michelle Augustine.

The Great World House — Eric Hepburn

We now pause to honor the Great World House, of which we are a part — lifting up the needs, the hopes, and the voices beyond these doors.

Today is Flag Day. The Stars and Stripes were adopted by the Continental Congress on this day in 1777 — and I'll be honest, when I read the story of this holiday, it is a history of wars. Every time we've taken a step toward formalizing Flag Day, it was to rally a nation in crisis. It happened during the Civil War, and once during each World War.

But here's what I keep coming back to. What if we choose to view the flag not as a banner of war, but as a symbol of covenant — a symbol of the powerful promises we've made one another that are bigger than national identity? Life. Liberty. The pursuit of happiness.

Life is a promise. But it's not just a promise of the freedom to live — it's a promise of duty not to limit the lives of others.

Liberty is a promise. But it's not just a promise that you get the free exercise of your own energies — it's also a promise of duty not to limit the free exercise of the energies of others.

The pursuit of happiness is a promise. But it's not just a promise that you're free to pursue — it's a promise of duty not to hinder the pursuit of happiness for others.

If the flag is a promise, then like every promise worth making, it has been both broken and renewed. And the renewing is done by people — people in small rooms, deliberating, disagreeing, voting, and staying at the table anyway.

The congregations that became Unitarian have been governing themselves — gathering, deliberating, and voting — since before there was a flag to fly. And Universalist congregations have been doing so for almost that long. And this afternoon, in our congregational meeting, we'll do it again.

So this Flag Day, I'm inviting us to honor the symbol by doing, in our own congregational polity, the highest thing that it points toward: that we practice covenant, and that we practice democracy. Amen.

A Voice of Wisdom — read by Michelle Augustine

We're going to enter a still place within. I'd like you to open your hearts and your minds to receive the Voice of Wisdom. We welcome a Voice of Wisdom carried through Mr. Ross Gay, and we'll take a time after these words are spoken to breathe and settle in. Remember — these are the words of Ross Gay:

"It is common to see public statues in our country carrying guns. Statues of men adorned with guns. Statues of white men adorned with guns. You'll probably notice this in our public squares — often near city halls, near county courthouses like ours — which is an unambiguous assertion of cultural values, lest that slip by.

"All of which amplifies, or magnifies, my delight today when passing the Hoagy Carmichael statue on campus. Hoagy is leaning over his piano, almost embracing it — maybe he's working out the chords of 'Stardust,' or maybe 'Heart and Soul.' His hat's tilted back on his head. His outstretched hand atop the piano is open just enough for some flowers to fit in there — which someone, or some ones, have decided is just what they should do. These some ones have slid an explosive allium flower, probably pilfered from a spot nearby, into his hand. The allium is such a fortuitous flower for many reasons, but in this case, it looks like a wand — or some other magical and pointedly nonmartial baton. There was also another flower, whose name I don't know, made of a torrent of petite violet bell-shaped flowers. And the third flower, also unknown to me, was a yellow one — which made me realize that this was a collaborative effort, endowing Hoagy not only with a wand-centric bouquet but with a beautifully composed one: complementary shapes and colors.

"Seeing this, I was reminded of how often, in fact, we have the impulse to adorn our statues, our public figures, with flowers — sometimes coins, or fruit. I suspect this statue-adorning impulse, whether or not we know who the public figure is, is evidence, more evidence, that our inclination, our nature, is to communicate the beautiful and the fragrant however we can. To make of the world a bouquet. Or a vase."

The Sermon: Lovely Day — Eric Hepburn

From breath to word, from silence to speech — we enter the Unfolding in Word.

Evidence. More evidence that our inclination, our nature, is to communicate the beautiful and the fragrant however we can. To make of the world a bouquet, or a vase.

We didn't put an extra gun in the statue's hand. We didn't wrap a bandolier of bullets around its neck. That wasn't what the heart of the people saw. They wanted to put there an offering of sustenance, or beauty.

I know we show up to a world every day where it feels like there are a lot of people who don't want the same future that we want. But that might be just a slight failure of imagination on our part. Now — certainly, I would agree that they are not doing things that do much to bring that world about. But I think we all know, from our own experience, that it's easy to convince yourself that a misguided course of action might be the right one — when you get all up in your head about things, or when you get buried in your own feelings about things, especially if those feelings are coming from places of past trauma and difficult experience.

So part of that nature — part of that inclination to make the world beautiful — is also an inclination to make the world just and fair.

In the last year, a member of this congregation thought it was important to remind me that it was possible for me to preach that life is beautiful. I know I spend a lot of time up here talking about the pitfalls — the things that happen that draw us off the narrow path, or that make it hard for us to find or see or appreciate the narrow path between what we might call pollyannaish optimism and soul-destroying pessimism. And I am suggesting to you that the narrow path does lie in an interesting place between those two poles. There's a kind of grounded realism that's just accepting that the world is the way it is, while still seeing the gap between how it is right now and the yearning — the shared yearning in our breast — for it to be better.

But what I want to preach about this morning is the other side: the side that draws us into a kind of productive optimism. Not Pollyanna. Grounded. The kind that understands what Bill was singing about, and understands what Ross Gay was writing about when he says there's no secret cabal of people who decided to do the flowers. It's just some people, acting out of their own impulse, who stop and pick a flower. I'm reminded of those images of people putting flowers into the muzzles of tanks and guns, using them as a vase. What a lovely use — second best, maybe, only to plowshares. But if we've got enough to eat, turning them into vases works for me.

So I want to honor that idea — that I could preach a sermon on beauty. And I got there through this Bill Withers song.

Then I look at you

And the world's alright with me

Just one look at you

And I know it's gonna be

A lovely day

Now, in the past, I've always thought of those lyrics as romantic ones — he's got a muse, or a partner. But earlier this week, as I was trying to figure out what I was going to talk about today, that wasn't how the song landed for me. It landed as a love song to this congregation.

After a week — or sometimes two — of news, and war, and all the corruption and exploitation and extraction that are still rampant in this world, when I start to sense my own despair hovering around the corners of my peripheral vision: I get to come here. And I get to do this. And I get to see all of you.

Then I look at you

And the world's alright with me

Just one look at you

And I know it's gonna be

A lovely day

That's my truth. I get to come here and look at all of you. And we get to sing together, and meditate together, and reflect together, and think together. We get to be together. And that restores me. And I hope that it restores you.

Now — I couldn't leave this just that feel-good. I had to dissect something intellectually. For those of you who are about to feel disappointed: don't. I'm going there. And for those of you who are relieved: I'm sorry, but I want you to show up as your true selves, and so I have to do my version of that too.

There is a distinction I want to make. You don't just restore my hope. You restore my faith. And I think that's a distinction worth spending a few minutes on.

You see, hope is a future thing. Hope is: I hope it gets better one day. I hope there's a day out there somewhere with less corruption, more wisdom in our leadership, more sensibility in our organization of material and political culture. More space for my grandchildren. More flowers in bloom. All that stuff that fits inside the big fat Venn diagram of our shared hopes, dreams, and aspirations.

But that hopefulness about some future floating out there is not what's renewed for me when I show up here. The thing that's renewed for me is faith. And faith, I want to define as a present-moment thing.

Now, I spend a lot of my time talking about the things that get in the way of us living that faithfulness. But I don't know that I've told you what I mean by it. So I'm going to try to do that this morning. I'm going to use the Buddhist language, because I think it's clearer without getting into the weeds.

The Buddhist language, for me, lands like this. There's the eightfold path. The eightfold path of Buddhism says: right view — a right way of looking at the world. Right intention — based on the work of Karen Armstrong, probably that would be intention rooted in love and compassion for other people and for life. Right speech. Right action. Right livelihood. Right effort. Right mindfulness. And right concentration, or focus.

I know that's a long list. I don't know if any of you have noticed this: life's complicated. If I could teach you to do this stuff and you only had to pay attention to one or two variables, I would do that version. But I think the Buddhists were onto something with the eightfold path — that there are at least eight critical dimensions going on in this complicated thing that we are, that we have to keep an eye on. Because otherwise, one of them is the thing that goes into the red — and then suddenly we're in a reactive space instead of a spiritually grounded, fecund space. The eightfold path is one way of thinking about that constellation of things we have to pay attention to.

But what does the faith mean? What do we mean by this faith?

The faith is that if we do those eight things well — if we keep those eight gauges in our own life in the green zone — then those conditions that we hope for and yearn for become possible in our daily lives. Not as a future thing. As a present, experienced thing. And — this is important — as a contagious, present, experienced thing.

It's contagious. The contagiousness of showing up in right relation, with right intention, non-harmful speech, non-exploitative ways of sustaining our body and our household and our income — if we get those things tweaked into the green zone, then when we show up, people are like: "What's going on with Joe? Have you noticed? Joe seems different lately. Something's going on with Joe. I don't know what it is, but it makes me want to emulate it."

Like contagion. Leadership is just another word for contagion, folks. Leadership is just another word for a kind of contagion. When a leader figures out how to keep their things in the green, people are like: "Huh. What's going on with that? I think I might like to have some of that mojo. Whatever it is." Any Austin Powers fans in the room? Yeah — I've got to get his mojo. We've got to find the mojo. This is the mojo. I'm trying to tell you about the mojo.

I've spent a lot of time talking about the things that distract us from these eight aspects of this path. But I think the other thing I've spent a lot of time doing, in the two and a half years that we've been together, is trying to make my belief — my faith — contagious to you. That when we do those things, the better world that we all dream of and despair of starts to become more and more possible. Not as hope. Not as delayed gratification. As lived experience. As lived, contagious experience.

And that's asking you to join the leadership — this broader culture of leading in this way, where other people go: "How are they so calm when things are crazy over there? How is it that when I'm in their presence, I feel more grounded, and I can feel both my joy and my sorrow more deeply, without feeling afraid and unsafe? That's weird. I'm used to feeling unsettled."

Even Brené Brown writes about it — she writes about foreboding joy. Every time something good happens in my life, I'm just waiting for that other shoe to drop. "Oh, okay. Yep. Reality came back. There's the shoe. I was worried we were on the way to the kingdom here on earth — that all my fantasies were going to come true. But luckily, something bad happened to dissuade me from thinking that was really possible. Nope — still a s-h— show out there." And I'll try not to finish that, so I don't have to check the box on the podcast later that says we used profanity during the service.

So there are a couple of strands to this. Last week, during the flower communion, we talked about one: this belief that we, individually, are not enough. And we attacked that: you are both enough and worthy. And then there's the weird next one in the chain: you are enough and worthy — and while you are special, you're not that special.

You are a super unique snowflake. Right? And every snowflake is unique — true. And yet they're all made of a crystalline structure that's relatively similar. And it ends up the similarity in this room is over ninety-nine percent. The genetic variation among humans is less than half a percent. So you are ninety-nine-point-nine percent your brother's keeper. You are ninety-nine-point-nine percent each other.

Now, we've got this weird stuff that happens — we live different life courses and experiences, and we show up very differently. We talked last week about how this whole tabula rasa idea was a bunch of bunk. If you've ever raised children, you know they didn't come out like blank slates ready for your will to be impressed upon them. They came out saying, "I've got my own ideas, thank you." And some of us were very insistent — "but I had my ideas first!" — and they're like, "yeah, you did. But I don't care. I'm still going to do my own thing." Now, some of them decided that when they were six. And some of them waited until they were fifty-six to say: "Nope. I've had enough. I'm done being who you want me to be. It's time for me to be who I need to be." Some of them, with their early compliance, fooled us into thinking they were on board with the tabula rasa ride. But eventually they show up and say: "I know you have your own ideas. But — yeah. Me too."

So: special. But not that special.

Why am I bringing this up? You are worthy and enough. And so is everybody else.

"Oh, wait. Do you mean everybody? I've got a list in my head of names I'd really like to exclude from the 'everybody that is worthy' you've just mentioned. Justifiably! For very, very bad behavior."

I talk a lot about how that need and desire to sit in judgment is one of the things that blocks us from the eightfold path. Look — we can't make those other people, who are currently stuck in bad behavior, stop. If I had my Harry Potter wand and knew the spell, I would already have done it. But we can change how we show up to the harm they cause. We can change how we organize ourselves and respond, and with what kind of energy. And in our response might be the healing that the universe is yearning for, along with us.

That's the confidence I feel when I come into this pulpit, and we unpack together how to avoid the pitfalls, and reclaim the ability of showing up well, and human, and whole.

And we're not showing up to our healing because we're selfish. This is the other thing I preach about a lot, and I'm going to try to say a kernelized version of it quickly. I didn't show up to my own healing and my own life because I thought, "oh, I need to be the Buddha," or "I need to be enlightened." I was going through a crisis with my adopted son — who I would die for — and I realized that I was unwittingly handing him the damage from my life, because it was stuff I had walked away from. The traumas from my early life were going to get handed down to him unless I stood up. That was where my motivation came from. I wasn't willing to do all that hard work just for me.

And I came to a very stark realization. When our own trauma triggers show up in our life — whatever they are, whatever shape, whatever season of trauma they come from; whether it's a mental block because you have this view of the world, or something that happens emotionally, or your body literally doing the fight-flight-freeze thing — when that moment comes up for you, if your reaction is, "oh, I do not want to deal with that; can I just have a strategy that keeps me away from that trigger?" — you are going to, inevitably, take that thing out on the people you love most. There's no berth wide enough to give that thing in your life. You have to walk into it.

"Oh, man. Here's another one. Here's another thing in my life that's not healed yet. And it just came up for me — this day, this week, this hour, this minute." And when it shows up, you walk into it and say, "I'm going to experience this. I'm going to open my heart and my mind and myself to it, and I'm going to find a healing path through it. Not because I'm worth it in some crazy egocentric way — but because y'all don't deserve for me to pass it on to you."

We don't do healing for ourselves out of selfishness. We do healing because it's the flip side of that responsibility I was talking about when I went through life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I said: yes, I want you to experience liberty — and I need you to promise not to get in other people's way, so that they can experience it too. Leaving your traumas unhealed makes it impossible to steward other people's liberty. You can't get out of other people's way when you are a forest of trauma triggers.

And it's contestable, and contest-worthy — but I think at this phase in our evolution, most of us are still carrying a lot of that around. I discover new stuff in myself on a weekly, monthly basis. Some new trigger comes up and I'm like: "Oh man. I really thought I had that whole room cleaned out. And then I found another box. Oh — that's not good stuff in that box. That's hard stuff in that box. Can I just close the box up and put it back in the closet?"

And it's just like a real box. For those of you at a certain point in your life, you might be thinking thoughts like this. Sure — get out your double-strength tape. Tape the box up nice and tight. Don't label it. Sneak it into the bottom of the closet. And it can stay there until you die.

So who's unpacking it? Whoever you bequeathed it to. And you're gone. You don't get to pick anymore — you are gone. But somebody's got to come open that box of sh— and unpack it after you're gone, because you decided you didn't want to deal with it. And that is a metaphor for what I'm talking about. You decided you didn't want to mess with that box. You shoved it in the closet. You conveniently forgot about it. And you just bequeathed it.

Faith, for me, is faith that we don't have to make that choice. There's a different choice we can make. And when we make it, we get better — and I don't mean just the individual who made the choice. "I wish this box didn't exist. But it does exist. It's part of my reality. I'm going to unpack it, and distribute it, and do a cleansing ceremony — whatever I need to do — and I'm going to deal with that box, so I don't bequeath it." Because it's not going to disappear magically in the bottom of the closet. It's not going away through some magical dis-apparition. It's going to be there until somebody deals with it. And it's going to be you — or it's going to be some future generation that you're leaving it to.

I grew up with one half of my family who absolutely played the Ozzie-and-Harriet-everything's-fine game. So I had to spend forty years figuring out the shape of all the stuff they refused to talk about. Because it wasn't fine. And it didn't take a magician — just a child — to notice that everything was not fine. But they had very full closets, with lots of tape and wrappings to keep everything sealed up. I think they were pretty sure that if you left the stuff in the closet long enough, Star Trek technology would show up, and that stuff would eventually get teleported out of the closet to some other magical space where it didn't exist anymore. But it's not. It was bequeathed, from one generation to the next.

The Hindus and others talk about samsara — the cycle. We can get out of the cycle of suffering if we start showing up to our work. That's my faith.

That's the faith that, when I look at all of you, and I ask what it is we're trying to do here together — like: I can't make the world out there suck less than it does right now. There's some bad stuff going on. Bona fide bad stuff. And I am not of the "we should sit quietly and it'll pass" school, either. I'm not suggesting that. But what I am suggesting is that I believe that you — that we, together — can find a space of mature wisdom and equanimity with which to face all of it. And that means that even as things continue to be broken out there, we can experience wholeness in our lives.

That is leadership. That is an infectious agent — inviting others to see what it looks like when we show up for one another, and treat each other with respect, and share each other's struggles to live in a way that's aligned with our own values. If we do that, then that Kingdom-of-God thing — so misinterpreted, so mis-projected — is actually really possible. Right here. When our left foot is planted on one value, and our right foot is planted on our other value, and the mysterious calling of this life is held in our hands like a lever, and all of us are gathered here together.

There's a famous quote — a small, committed group of people can change the world; in fact, it's the only thing that ever has. [Congregation: "Margaret Mead!"] Thank you — Margaret Mead. People who had figured out what their values were: they had a place to stand. Archimedes — a place to stand, and a lever to move the universe. And Margaret Mead showing us what it means: they figured out their values; they had a place to stand; they had a lever in their hands — their calling in this life, the things they were uniquely suited to do, the gifts they brought to bear. And together, we put all those levers on the boulder, and we can move it.

But it's not just about the boulder. When you are in that place — standing on your values, with your own life's purpose in your hands — you get to experience what I experience every Sunday up here, which is that this makes the world all right. There's joy in it. There is joy in it. It's not just how rough things are.

I know that faith is a dirty word for some of y'all. I know that it's been weaponized against you, in other contexts, some of you. But I think every weaponization of the term mistakes it for some other kind of hope — some other thing happening in the future. And our ability to reclaim it, and own it, and live it, is about not living in the future. It's about living in the present, with our feet planted in our values, right now.

And if my invitations and inveigling help you get to that place in your life, then we can stand together, and we can experience the deep community that we long for. And then what's true for me, I hope, will become true for you:

Then I look at you

And the world's alright with me

Just one look at you

And I know it's gonna be

A lovely day

Amen.

[00:39:58] Eric Hepburn (host outro): Until next time — thank you for joining us on The Pulpiteer. If you enjoyed the podcast, you can help others find it by liking and subscribing. If you'd like to support the podcast directly, you can make a donation at sangabrieluu.org/give. The Pulpiteer podcast is a production of the San Gabriel Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Georgetown, Texas. The podcast is hosted on Spotify, and theme music is by John Faber. Our live recording tech crew is Frank Sanders, Rob Berthold, Keith Hutchinson, and Andrea McDaniel. The podcast is produced and performed by Eric Hepburn.

[00:40:39] Eric Hepburn: As I said, this is the final episode of season two — so we'll see you in July, when we'll start a brand new season of The Pulpiteer.