For the last couple of days my Facebook feed has been full of tributes to the late, great Pete Seeger—as well it should be. A genuinely remarkable man, Seeger spent his long life seeking justice, fighting oppression, telling the truth as he understood it, even in situations where the truth was most unwelcome. (If you haven’t seen the transcript of when he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, do yourself a favor and read it.) He stood in front of the crowds to protest war, and he sailed up and down the Hudson River fighting pollution. But more than that, he had a gift for bringing people together, for turning a crowd into a community through the power of song.

He was extraordinary, but here’s what strikes me. Anybody who really wanted to could do what he did. Sure, he was a good musician, but there are lots of people with better voices—walk into any college conservatory in the country and you’ll find a singer with a rounder tone, a more operatic sound. Sure, he was good on the guitar and the banjo, but there are people in my personal acquaintance who are better. He wrote some wonderful songs, but they’re hardly models of musical sophistication. His talent was considerable, but not really anything amazing—maybe not even all that special.

What was so incredible about Pete Seeger was not any singular gift or talent. What we celebrate, what we remember, was not a man who could do things no other person could, but rather a man who spent his whole very long life walking with a whole heart toward what he believed in. Whether it was his 70-year relationship with his beloved wife Toshi or an afternoon’s connection with a crowd at a concert or a protest, Pete was fully present, fully engaged, ready to be connected. He was a man who knew the power of the people, and who used the considerable force of his personality not to draw attention to himself, but rather to engage people with each other, and with their ability to create positive change. He gave himself, and he kept giving—not as a martyr, but as someone who found great joy in the giving.

He had, in short, the power of the music. Not the power of musicianship; not the prodigy talents of a Mozart or a Yo-Yo Ma. No, Pete Seeger had the power of living in his music, living through his music. He knew the power of music to tell truths in ways that people could hear them. He knew the power of music to draw folks together through the interweaving of voices. He understood the power of music to raise energy, to call forth energy, to move people forward. He sang, and invited people to sing with him, because he understood the deep connection between music and love, and between love and justice.

And he just kept on doing it, decade after decade. We’ve lost a unique spirit this week, a man who put his whole heart into everything he did, a man who had a whole heart, unbroken by cynicism or despair. But I think what he would want us to know is that any of us could do what he did. Any of us could stand up to injustice, work for peace, speak our truth, sing out and keep singing. Any of us could be an instrument of freedom, of joy, of connection and the power of the gathered will of the people. Any of us could. Pete Seeger did.

(Today, I preached at the ordination of a new minister in my denomination, Unitarian Universalism. Her name is Rev. Lara Campbell, and I shared the pulpit with Rev. Michael Tino. Here is my half of the sermon.)

“Do not demand immediate results but rejoice that we are worthy to be entrusted with this great message,” wrote Olympia Brown, the first woman to be ordained by a denomination—the Universalists, in 1863. And we know that she did not demand immediate results, she who worked for women’s right to vote from girlhood and finally was able to cast a ballot in 1920 at age 85.

I think of Olympia Brown, loving this faith despite the widespread discouragement she had to face in order to be ordained and the challenges she faced in ministry her whole life. I think of Egbert Ethelred Brown and Lewis McGee and so many other groundbreaking ministers of color who fought, against resistance and sabotage, for the right to lead Unitarian and Universalist congregations, who stood by this faith. And I think of all the people who still struggle to be able to devote their gifts to this faith, for a variety of reasons.

We do not demand immediate results but rejoice that we are worthy to be entrusted with this great message, their lives say. Their ministries say. Their legacies say. Their legacies are very much with me tonight as I preach, for the first time, wearing a stole given to me after the death of one of my mentors, Rev. Gordon McKeeman, who died in December. Gordon, a stalwart Universalist, who devoted his life to this faith, is now here with us, lending strength and companionship, reminding me that he has entrusted me with leadership, reminding us that he entrusted his life to Universalism and ministry.

I think of these people and I think of all the bold, visionary Unitarian Universalist ministers, ordained and not ordained, right now, some of you sitting right here, who have dreams of new applications for our faith, who believe that our faith calls us to stand with those lofty ideals of equity, justice, lovingkindness, in this miraculous yet devastating world. Who imagine ministries with unusual new shapes and contexts and methods, all of which seek to bring more love into the world.

I think of ministries beginning in coffee shops—Beloved Café, envisioned by seminarians at Starr King School for the Ministry—and yoga classes—Create Meaning, out in Denver—and in the streets—Faithful Fools, which has been inventing street ministry for decades now—and AWAKE ministry in Annapolis, and the Sanctuary in Washington DC—all bold, visionary new shapes for our future. And each week, with the Church of the Larger Fellowship, we live into these new shapes as we try new ways to find each other, to care for each other, to care for our word from all across the globe.

And deep within me, I say, yes! I am so grateful that you stand by this faith! All of you! All of us! I am grateful that so many work for it and sacrifice for it! I am grateful that all of us are here today, attesting to its value, when we could be doing so many other things on a Sunday afternoon!

But then, right there with the yes, something in me whispers, but…just a little whisper that says, but.. yes, but… but I wish you, and I, didn’t have to dream our dreams alone so much of the time, wish some of our best and brightest lay and ordained ministers weren’t still fighting for support the way that Olympia Brown and others have had to fight for support. I wish each vision could be surrounded by others who supported vision and faith, that we could find ways to reach out better beyond our individual enterprises and make common cause, collaborate with one another, build something bigger than our congregations.

In this era of union-busting, I am longing for a Spiritual Union. I want spiritual collective bargaining. I love Unitarian Universalism, and I love the way that our congregations are self-determining and unique, but I believe in those old songs that I was raised on, about how “The Union makes us strong.” I take to heart those words in our hymnal from Dr. Martin Luther King, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” And I say, when do we realize that we are that garment, instead of behaving as if our purpose on the planet is to pull apart the threads?

What might we do if we embodied a place of spiritual union with one another? When I say we, I don’t mean only Unitarian Universalists, I mean all of us who believe that people are worthy to be entrusted with carrying and sharing love so deep it will not let us go? What if that name that’s been assigned to us when we wear bright yellow shirts that say Love on them, The Love People, was really our identity? What if we cast fear aside, if we dared to believe that humanity, collectively, is worthy to be entrusted with the message that there is power of love so big that it can’t be held by any one set of religious metaphors and beliefs?

And who might we entrust with our faith? Who might we trust as prophetic voices in our wider faith, a faith not bound by traditional buildings or denominational stakes in the ground? How might we live into spiritual union with the people whose leadership we need in order to challenge and take down the notion of the saved and the damned, the chosen and the unchosen, the deserving and the undeserving, which dominates the US and so many other countries as much now as it did when John Calvin’s concept of predestination, that some are born saved and some are born damned, was widely believed to be true?

Where might we find union and create more love with other people, of every faith and no faith, who dare to proclaim that all people have inherent worth and dignity? Where are the voices saying, YES, African American youth and other youth of color, you are worthy to be trusted! Youth of color, queer youth, youth in general—you are worthy to be trusted! You are the people we need to have as union stewards in our spiritual union.

Where are the voices insisting, YES, people on public assistance, you are worthy to be trusted! More spiritual union stewards, whose leadership we need. Where are those whose witness proclaims, YES, immigrants without all your legal documents in order, you are worthy to be trusted! We need you as leaders in our spiritual union.

What might we do? Who might we dare to be? We have seen some of this in our work for marriage equality, immigration rights, voting rights, in our anti-racism work, as we join other religions and organizations and people to work together, but what if we had real spiritual union?

Whatever configurations our ministries with one another and the world take, whatever architecture we use for buildings, whatever technologies we employ, our own sense of Unitarian Universalism’s worthiness must be a part of the structure. But the time for clinging to small identities is over. The world is far too small now, we are too closely connected to even imagine that we do not have neighbors on every side who care about what we care about.

It’s scary. It means letting go of so many structures and identities that we have confused with worthiness—structures of privilege, or comfort. It means swimming in the ocean rather than in the small pond which our relational faith can become. But love will save us, again and again, when we are afraid, when we are confused, when we make mistakes, when we can’t get our bearings.

We are worthy to be trusted, not because Unitarian Universalists are the chosen people. Worthy, instead, because we have devoted ourselves to faith in a force–call it truth or God, life or love–a force much bigger than we are ourselves—which will not let us go, and which will not be confined or defined.

We have been entrusted with a great faith, and that faith whispers, shouts and sings, You are worthy! Worthy to wear the mantle of this great faith.

There’s an old Zen story that does like this:

Once there was a great warrior. He had never been defeated, and he continued to win every confrontation into old age. He was known far and wide as the only warrior who had never suffered a defeat.

This of course was a challenge to younger warriors, and one day a young man appeared to challenge the old warrior. He, too, had never suffered defeat. His technique had become famous: he allowed his opponent to make the first move, then exploited that move and always won the day.

Despite the concern of his students, the old warrior consented to join in combat with the young man.

On the day of the battle, the young man walked up to the old warrior and spat in his face. The old man did not move. Then the young man began to hurl insults. This had no affect either. Then the young warrior began to throw dirt and stones at the old warrior. The old warrior stood, impassive.

Finally, exhausted by all his effort, the young warrior bowed to the old warrior, admitting defeat.

After the young man had left, the disciples of the old warrior gathered around him. “Teacher! I would have split that young man’s skull open! How could you allow him to hurl such insults at you?”

The old warrior replied, “Consider this: if someone offers a gift and you will not receive it, to whom does that gift belong?”

Nonviolent resistance embraces the techniques of both the old and the young Zen warrior. Like the old teacher, nonviolence does not accept the gift of violence or insults. Like the young warrior, nonviolence provokes a first response, then watches the opponent to see what the first move will be.

On April 12th, 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. was arrested in Birmingham, Alabama for parading without a license. There wasn’t a great deal of reading material in the jail, but one of the people arrested with King had been allowed to keep a newspaper he had in his pocket. That newspaper contained an editorial written by eight Euro-American Alabama clergy titled “A Call for Unity.”

The editorial began with the premise that, yes, African Americans deserved equality, but—that said—that said equality should be allowed to happen slowly—in the fullness, shall we say, of time. Without hubbub and marches.

King had heard this argument many times—just calm down and let the South change, slowly but surely. He had heard it from Euro-American centrists; he had heard it from within the African American leadership itself.

King began writing a response immediately. He used the bottom of his shoe for a desk. He wrote first on the margins of the newspaper; then on toilet paper; then on scraps provided for him by an African American trusty in the jail.

What he wrote is one of the great documents in US history, up there with the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address. What he wrote is an argument based on the Unitarian thought of Henry David Thoreau’s masterwork, “Civil Disobedience.”

MLK knew that violence was the nature of racism. But it is also a basic human response to threat. In his letter King says this:

In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps:

collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist;

 negotiation;

 self purification;

 and direct action.

We have gone through all these steps in Birmingham.

Besides the moral high ground of nonviolence, King also knew that his cause itself stood for a higher order of morality. In “Civil Disobedience,” Thoreau had asserted, “If I have unjustly wrested a plank from a drowning man, I must restore it to him though I drown myself.”

King was asking for that plank back. He saw the higher moral order, as did Thoreau and  Tolstoy and Gandhi before him. Rather than getting the plank back, the Civil Rights movement got a small concession: I’ll let you hold onto my plank once in a a while, when you’re going down for the third time.

This is the unfinished business of what King started. And the continuing challenge to those who strive for a higher moral order. Still, today, I must restore the plank that I wrestled from a drowning human being. And there are many, many of those.

King’s letter is there still to remind us: “An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law.”

And,

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.

 Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

OK, we’re now a week into the new year, which is about the time that people’s New Year’s resolutions generally start biting the dust. I have a theory about why this is the case, why all our good intentions dissolve so quickly. It’s my conviction that the problem with most resolutions is that we resolve to do stuff that we don’t actually want to do. Nobody wants to go on a diet. If you liked exercising you’d probably be doing it already. You’re addicted to TV or video games or Facebook because you enjoy them. If you wanted to give them up you would have already done so.

Most resolutions, it seems to me, come out of some Calvinistic, judgy part of ourselves that knows that we are inadequate, broken, and need to be fixed—in this case not by the grace of God, but rather by that fiction know as Will Power. (Wouldn’t “Will Power” be a great name for a super hero?) We are determined to finally make ourselves right, good, admirable, slim. We are broken, but we’re going to get fixed.

And then we fail to fix ourselves, leaving us all the more convinced that we are broken to begin with. But what if our resolutions started with the conviction that we are blessed, gifted, wonderful—but still learning? Then we might resolve not to tidy up our many flaws, but instead to enjoy our growing edges. I still remember with admiration a seminary classmate who, when invited in a class to consider her health and eating habits, and to come up with a change she would make for a month, returned to class the next week having done her homework. “I thought about my eating habits,” she said, “and decided that I like them just fine. So I decided to have dessert every day for the month.” I still have the recipe for Chocolate Decadence that she handed out more than 20 years ago.

OK, so my friend’s solution might be a growing edge in more than one sense of the word for some of us, but something in her resolution struck a chord. She recognized the health she already had, and decided to revel in it a bit.

I’ve made and dropped the usual variety of noble resolutions over the years. One year, however, I made a resolution that stuck. More than that, it changed my life. My resolution, from several years back, was simply this: More dancing! (Always with the exclamation point.) I realized that New Year’s that I liked dancing on those occasions when my spouse and I got around to it, but it wasn’t very often. What I wanted was not to fix something that was broken, but rather to give a way for something that was already whole and healthy to grow. So, with the enthusiastic support of my wife, we started dancing. A lot. More and more. For weekends, or even weeks at a time. We got good at it, but we also found a community, a new connection to each other and a whole lot of joy.

Of course, dancing is very likely not what you want to grow in your life. But there might just be something, some seed of a resolution, some inkling of a revolution of joy that you want to feed. You might want to resolve to get out more in nature, Skype your grandkids, sing in a choir, take up belly dancing, teach your dog to do tricks, grow a garden, travel to Spain. You might want to search your life for what feels most precious, most joyful, most connected, most creative, and make a space for that thing to grow. You might want to vow to have dessert every night for a year. If so, let me know. I have a terrific recipe for Chocolate Decadence.

Early in ministry, there are skills to be learned. Preaching, counseling, the coffee-hour nod that says, “Yes, I’m listening,” even if it’s not true. Oh, and another one. Boredom. Overcoming it? No. Letting it pull you down below where you can breathe, and then holding you there. For hours. It’s important to know how to be there, in boredom. But for me, it was something that didn’t come easy. Some skills will take practice.

Apprentice clergy go through a form of ritual hazing known as Clinical Pastoral Education. Here’s how it works.  For a few months, full-time, you’re a hospital chaplain. Your mission? To offer support when situations get bleak. To help people face pivotal, primal questions just at the moment something vital is being torn from their lives. And also? Despite the plastic badge that says “Chaplain,” you have not the foggiest how a person would do this. Like when someone lifts her tear-stained face, and says, “Why would God let this happen?” And, in response, you decide now is the time to fetch everyone coffee.

Later, with other glassy-eyed lambs of the chaplaincy, you gather in a conference room with a senior chaplain, to think about what you have done. You do this through something they call a “Verbatim.” It’s just like it sounds—a blow-by-blow you write up of some fumbling interaction you’ve just had with a patient. The purpose is to reveal how very far your attempts are from whatever it is Jesus might have done, had he himself served a turn as a summertime chaplain. With a Verbatim, the lambs become wolves, tearing each word apart. Why, for instance, when the conversation turned to cancer, did you launch into a long story about the time your aunt thought she had leprosy, but it only turned out to be a bad rash on her neck?

Still, basic incompetence has never stopped me, and it would not this time. I got myself assigned to the edgiest units. Ones with names like “Critical” and “Emergency.” No hang-nails for me. No mere broken limbs. Give me “touch-and-go.” Give me “hours to live.” Throw in the surprise arrival of an estranged sister, and I’d be all a-tingle. I strolled the halls, seeking crisis. Buttered up the tough nurses, so they’d let me know when anything truly awful went down. The family room outside surgery was a good place to find trouble. The family room is where the dutiful adult children endure their hopeless grown siblings as loved ones off somewhere undergo God knows what. The dutiful ones keep information in a folder, and they keep track of the time. The hopeless ones are tear-stained wrecks, sprawled on a sofa that’s strewn with wet Kleenex. With luck, they’ve been drinking. Here’s how a chaplain can stir up some business. Walk into a family room, perch on a chair and murmur, “So, tell me, how is everyone?” Like fish in a barrel, friends. Fish in a barrel.

As we breathlessly parsed the Verbatims, the chaplain supervisor rarely ever spoke. He hailed from the great state of New Hampshire, and was a motionless model of the state’s famed reserve. One got the sense that you could have taken a bucket of ice water filled with dead mackerel and dumped it over his head, and the most he would do would be to glance out the window, and emit a slight sigh. It was clear, however, from the way he would occasionally purse his lips in the midst of my Verbatims, that he was of the opinion that a person could stand to tone it down just a hair. Of course, those dry lips that pursed and un-pursed could have meant anything. In the absence of a bucket of ice water, and the way the hospital air-conditioning sucked all the moisture right out of the air, it could have been simply that the poor man was just parched.

In any case, my ministry was one of inserting myself where I wasn’t strictly required. For example, a sober conversation with the heartbroken family of an eighteen-year-old about whether the time had come, finally, to turn off the machines that had kept their boy alive. Already, the small room held the hospital’s medical ethicist, a representative from the organ donation company, and another chaplain named Frank. Did they benefit, as well, from my luminous presence, the guttural tones of my active listening? Because the answer to that question was not yet clear to me, I made sure to be there. Up in critical care, I appeared in the room of a man who was dying alone. He was beyond speech by now. Conversation was out. Companionable silence is something I can do for two minutes, three tops. At last, I hit upon an idea. What the old fellow probably needed was for me to hum hymns. So, that’s what I did. “Old Rugged Cross.” “Amazing Grace.” And, even though it was the middle of summer, “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.” In my defense, I did hum it slow so it came out a dirge.

Later, in the Verbatim, someone gently mentioned the effect that even a brief outburst of humming can have on the nerves on a typical day, let alone in the hours one is attempting to peaceably die. A otherwise kindly soul said that, in fact, my humming might have helped to hasten the poor man’s demise. Another wondered whether the nurses who had popped in and out all afternoon might have been not actually smiling approvingly at the humming young chaplain, as I had reported, but instead only smirking.

An old friend says I went into ministry for the second-hand thrills. The chance for a front-row seat to life’s wreckage. As if I were a ghoul. Which, years later, still seems off-base. I went into ministry for a regular paycheck. God knows I was not ever going to be any good for much else. You know how all the want ads say the employer is seeking a “detail person?” Well, me, that is not. I once spent ten minutes looking for my glasses only to realize that I was wearing them. My only talents are whistling and catching peanuts tossed into the air in my mouth. Besides, since I was a kid, people have sought me out to tell me their problems, and—God forgive me—through it all, I have been fascinated. Fascinated by how people can manage to get themselves into such an intractable mess. And fascinated by how they can get themselves out. Or else learn to live with it. Or how sometimes they learn to live with it, but then are transported out of trouble through no effort at all of their own, in a way that some will call grace, and others call luck. If there were bleachers on the sidelines of human society, I would enjoy sitting there, watching. Well, watching and cheering. Taking honest delight. Perhaps with buttered popcorn. Yes, I had advice, but I offered it like anyone sitting up in the bleachers who calls out advice—with the full confidence that it will be ignored. By the end of my twenties, it had dawned on me that, to get by in this world, I would probably need to get paid doing something. And ministry seemed easier than teaching kindergarten. So, I was in. And, ok, maybe it promised a front-row seat. Not to the wreckage. But to what stirs within it.

There came the day, late in the summer, when nothing was happening in Critical Care. Nothing in Emergency. I was bored, restless. So, I wandered up to other units, outside my assignment. In one room, a woman lay dying, her family gathered around. But the nice-enough priest sitting there didn’t seem to grasp that this was his moment to shine. I forget how I convinced him, but soon, I’d replaced him, intent on marching the whole family through all the stages of grief, perhaps twice, before the old woman had even taken her last dying breath. Was I badgering these poor souls? Who can say. But, whatever the case, I was summoned for a chat with the chaplain supervisor.

He said that if I went into parish ministry without learning how to be bored, there would come a Tuesday afternoon when things would be slow, and I would stir trouble up out of my own need for action. For the rest of the shift, he said, I was to walk the halls, but to visit with no one. To practice being bored. For me, that afternoon, ghosting the halls without purpose, was more difficult than responding to people who’d been hurt in a wreck. It took some time before I was able to breathe. Walking by rooms where people seemed upset, especially, was like walking by the donuts at a Weight Watchers meeting. Just one? But I couldn’t. And, I will tell you that, as I walked, I realized that, even without an eager chaplain on hand, people would continue to suffer and also to find ways to lessen their suffering. They would die, and the ones they left behind would figure out how to live. Sometimes, these things would happen more easily if I were not there. Sometimes, my absence helped more than my presence. The Taoists have a word called “wu-wei,” the power of inaction. It is there when one is in harmony with the Tao. With the way of all things. Another person might say, “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me.” As if there were a power beyond the merely human.

For over ten years, I have served the same congregation in the same little town. Have I stirred up trouble? Oh, yes. Ask my people. They’ll tell you. But, here’s the thing: without ongoing study in the practice of boredom, without learning wu-wei, a ministry composed purely of action could have made things dramatically worse.