Reading: “The Lamps” by Mary Oliver – Read by Johanna Fitt

Eight o’clock, no later
You light the lamps,

The big one by the large window,
The small one on your desk.

They are not to see by—
It’s still twilight out over the sand,

The scrub oaks and cranberries.
Even the small birds have not settled

For sleep yet, out of the reach
Of prowling foxes. No,

You light the lamps because
You are alone in your small house

And the wicks sputtering gold
Are like two visitors with good stories

They will tell slowly, in soft voices,
While the air outside turns quietly

A grainy and luminous blue.
You wish it would never change—

But of course the darkness keeps
Its appointment. Each evening,

An inscrutable presence, it has the final word
Outside every door.

Sermon: Keep the Candle Burning – Rev. Eric Banner

Have you ever noticed just how many lights you have in your life? I did a quick count of our house the other day. Four bulbs in the bathroom upstairs, and another four in the downstairs bath. Two bulbs in each bedroom, plus the ones in the living room, the family room. The task lights in the kitchen, to make a safe workspace, the overhead light in the dining room. Then there are the lamps. And the outdoor lights. And the blackout curtains we have in the bedrooms to keep out the light of the streetlights and cars at night. There’s more, of course, and you will have your own count, depending on how big your home or apartment is. But they are everywhere.

We don’t have to light candles, or keep them burning anymore, but the metaphor seemed so apt this time of year, when the sun sets at 5:00 in the afternoon, and we wake up to a world still dark outside our windows. We don’t have to carefully light them, or trim their wicks, and truth be told, the fire department is probably grateful for that.

At risk of stealing the message from myself for next week, I’ll just say that what it means to keep a candle burning is all about this kind of waiting we are talking about this month, this season of Advent, as it were. Sometimes waiting means laying down long enough to let what is coming wander its way to you, like a young puppy that has danced away during training. Sometimes, as Rev. Teri reminded us last week, it is about the time when toast and eggs are slowly becoming a person, ensconced in the warmth of a mother’s body. And sometimes, sometimes a time of waiting is also a time of preparation, active waiting you might say. Getting ready for what you know is coming, preparing a space, or ourselves, for what we can see, but cannot hasten or prevent. It is about reading the signs of the future present already, taking stock of the world around us, thinking about what we know, what we know is, whether or not anyone else realizes it, or is ready for it, and doing what we can to be prepared.

Sure, Christmas. The decorating, the house cleaning, the shopping, the cooking, the list goes on and on. The staff gave me a hard time this week when I casually said out loud that there were only two weeks left until Christmas Eve. I’m not done yet, either. The shopping or the decorating, much less the food.

But it is so much more to this time of year, this season of waiting, and preparing. Even if you mark the holidays alone, and your decorations are de minimus, as they say, there are always times in our lives when we are in between. When we are forced to ask ourselves what is coming, and what we ought to be prepared for.

If you’re a cook you know the phrase mise en place. It’s a French phrase, and it means everything in its place. It’s rooted in the professional kitchen, where the dinner rush means that everything has to be prepared so that you can get the plates out as quickly as possible. There is some dispute about its applicability to the home kitchen, whether you really need to be Rachel Ray or Bobby Flay and have all your ingredients measured out precisely in little bowls, salt here, cumin there, and so on, in advance.

In our house, it’s a little less stringent than all that. For us it simply means making sure we have the tools clean and ready, the knives, the measuring spoons, the bowls, and the ingredients ready for the work. There’s nothing quite so disruptive as working your way through a recipe only to discover you don’t have enough flour, or some child has eaten all your chocolate chips as candy, instead of leaving them as ingredients in the cupboard.

But I also mean it in another way. The way that sometimes the world isn’t really ready for us, or what we have. Times when we look out and we see the life of a community we are part of that needs our voice, our witness, our love, but that just isn’t ready for it. These are also the times when we must keep the candles burning, maybe not filling the whole house, but just a lamp, trimmed and burning, preserving the warmth, the light, until the time is right. Until the work of preparation has built high the stacks of wood, the baskets of kindling, and the hearth is ready for what we have known was coming for so very long.

Last month a colleague of mine made a passing reference to a story she thought we’d all learned in seminary, and which I assure you I had never heard of at all. It was a story of caution and preparation, and it was a story of pudding. Kind of.

What caught me off guard was it was a story about someone I had known about, but a part of his story I had never heard. His name was Charles Chauncy, and he was probably the most well-known minister in Boston in the 1700s. He held a prominent post, first as assistant minister, then as the senior pastor, for 60 years at First Church, the oldest church in the city. I knew of his commitment to rational religion, his opposition to enthusiasm, as he put it, that left people riled up by passing evangelists, only to have them unchanged by the experience. But what I did not know, or had long forgotten, was that he was, in some ways, the first Unitarian Universalist, only he was sure he could not share it aloud. At least not when it first came to him.

I bet you know the experience. You’ve got something in you, or about you, but the world isn’t ready for it yet. And so, you have to be careful about what you say, and who you say it to. You have to workshop it. Test it. Try it out with people. No spotlight, but just a candle burning in the quiet of your heart, or your study, or wherever you do your deepest work.

Or maybe you’re worried about the future. I know a lot of us are worried about the next administration. What it might mean for us, or for our family members. What rights will be rolled back, whether we will be able to count on the rule of law. Questions about who, and what, will be safe, and where we will be safe. And it’s coming. Elections have consequences. We know that not everyone’s risks are the same, but we also know that all of us face times when we hold something true about ourselves or our thoughts or ideas, and we have to decide how to prepare ourselves, and if we’re lucky, to lay the groundwork for a different future, even if it isn’t coming soon.

Charles Chauncy was one of the most prominent people of his time and place. He held the most prominent pulpit in the most prominent city in New England. His great-grandfather was the 2nd president of Harvard. His father was a successful merchant in town. He held privilege and power, and yet he, too, knew the risks of being out of sync with the prevailing thoughts of his time. He knew the risk of speaking his truth when it came to him, so he didn’t print up 300 pamphlets and have his name put on them to be spread all over Boston. He went underground, or at least he took his idea there.

Now, what idea could be so dangerous, so threatening to his livelihood, you might ask. Universalism. His was a world of Calvinism, where the prevailing view was that we were all sinners in the hands of an angry God, as Jonathan Edwards had famously put it just a few years earlier. You were damned, or you were saved, and you were probably damned, and there was nothing you could do about it.

But it didn’t sit right with Chauncy. He sat down with the source of his truth, scripture, and he asked what it said, and he began to write. The text eventually came to be known as “The Mystery Hid From Ages and Generations,” and over the course of nearly 30 years he worked out why he thought it wrong to believe that God would damn anyone to hell for all eternity.

He shared his thoughts only with his closest confidants. So worried was he about the consequences, should word get out that they referred to the document not by a title, or even by its theme, but, I kid you not, as pudding. He asked trusted confidants before they shared it with someone new, “Doth he relish the pudding?” Mise en place, indeed.

And then, he kept the candle burning. Slowly, surely, he did the work of preparation, making sure to consider the consequences of what he thought was true were measured in tandem with the consequences of saying it aloud. He asked for input and feedback. He worked to refine the text over decades. He kept on doing the regular work at First Church, careful not to mention the text in any public way. Not to preach it. Not to print it. Just to keep moving his congregation, step by step, along the way to his other heresy, Unitarianism.

Even when he finally had it sent to the printers, published for one an all, it was published anonymously. He’d been minister of First Church for 58 years by that point in time. Preparing, and waiting, you might say, for what he was sure would rock the church world of New England, not just because of what he was saying, but because of who was saying it. Speaking to his imagined opponents, he wrote “In one word, you imagine the divine glory will be advanced by immortalizing sin and misery; I by exterminating both natural and moral evil, and introducing universal happiness. Which of our systems is best supported, let reason and scripture determine.” And by then the text was 400 pages long.

These dark days of winter are times when we are called to wait. But we are not the first, nor will we be the last, to have to wait in our lives. Sometimes we have to keep our lamps lit, working diligently, steadily, preparing for the time to come. This, I think, was part of what Mary Oliver wrote in our reading this morning.

“You light the lamps because
You are alone in your small house

And the wicks sputtering gold
Are like two visitors with good stories

They will tell slowly, in soft voices,
While the air outside turns quietly

A grainy and luminous blue.”

Candles, and old-fashioned Christmas lights, they burn out, unless we tend them. They light the twilights of our days, when the air outside turns quietly, and when we are stuck waiting.

But the question for us, for all of us, is whether we will let the lights burn out, or whether we will tend them, using the illumination they give to us to prepare ourselves for what is coming. Waiting can be passive, or it can be active, and it is up to each of us to decide what we are preparing ourselves for, and how, with who, and when the time is right for us to let out into the world the truth we know.
Your candles may be just the light needed in a dark time for someone wandering in the night, worried about what is coming. A beacon in the distance, in a world filled with hurt or anger, or sorrow. Your spark may be what kindles the blaze of a future yet unseen, a message of hope and possibility that wipes clean the world of evils that Chauncy, and so many others saw.

And if you are in a time of waiting, a time of preparation, and you use your time wisely, feeding the flames of possibility, slowly, steadily, patiently, you too might find the pudding cooks, just in time to change the world.

So may it be.