Call to Worship (Rev. Leah Ongiri)
”This is the season of repair…”

Chalice Lighting (Rev. Joanna Lubkin)
”We light this chalice in honor of Yom Kippur…”

First reading: Micah Chapter 7, verses 18-20

Second Reading: “Ne'ilah” by Marge Piercy

Prayers:

This morning, during our time reserved for prayer and meditation, I am inviting us into a Tashlich ritual. This new year tradition dates back to medieval Judaism and finds its basis in the passage from Micah you hear earlier. This symbolic “casting off” represents the letting go of that which is holding us back from living into our truest selves and being in right relationship with one another and the sacred.

Typically, it is performed with crumbs of bread in a moving body of water. Today, we will be using stones and bowl of water, which includes a few drops of the water we blessed at water communion. In a moment I will share this Tashlich prayer from Rabbi Jill Hammer. During the rest of the service, I invite you to continue reflecting on what you need to let go of and what you need to repair in order to return to wholeness. During the postlude, if you feel moved, you are invited to come forward and take a stone and place it in the water on your way out of the sanctuary, as a symbol of your intention to begin this new year in love.

The Offering: A Tashlikh Prayer by Rabbi Jill Hammer

I cast this gift to the water.

It is my past: blessing and regret.
It is my present: reflection and listening.
It is my future: intention and mystery.

It is what I did
and did not;
it is yes and no and silence.

It is what was done
and what arose from what was done
and what arises in this body remembering.

I let it all go. I own
neither the sting nor the sweetness.
I hold on to nothing.

The river has no past.
Each moment of rushing water
Is a new beginning.

Harm that has been:
heal in the rush of love and truth and time.
We who are lost:
let the current take us homeward.

May these waters churn what is broken
into what is whole.
May each separate droplet
reach the ocean that is becoming.

The journey awaits.
I have no power to refrain from it;
only to steer it when I can.

May the One who is
the great Crossroad
guide my turning.

Three times I declare:
It is finished.
It is born.
It is unending.

Three times I listen:
It is love.
It is the river.
It is before me.

May my offering go where it is meant to go
and may the one who offers it
find the way.

Amen.

Lord’s Prayer:
While we are drawing on Jewish tradition in today’s service, we are a religiously plural congregation with Christian roots that we honor every week by reciting the Lord’s Prayer. Will you join me in this version, composed by Quaker teacher and writer Parker Palmer?

…
Let forgiveness flow like a river between us,
From each one to each one.
Lead us to holy innocence
Beyond the evil of our days —

Sermon:

During my time working at the congregation in Portland, I developed a particular fondness for the services that happened outside of Sunday mornings. Winter solstice, Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, Christmas Eve, and the Jewish high holiday services for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Some of the most joyful and moving moments of my ministry were during these services. Most are held in the evening, and I always find something a little magical about evening service. And there was an earnestness to them. People were there not because it was habit or part of their social calendar but out of a deep desire to engage with the observance. They tend to involve a little more ritual, a little more heart and less head. And, perhaps most importantly, they were tied to liturgical calendars. Most Sundays here I get to decide what I feel like talking about and then I do it. And God Bless Catherine who is willing to make order of service changes on Sunday morning, if I’ve chosen a reading and on Saturday it feels too hard to preach from, I can just change it.

But these services were out of my control. They are tied to cycles and seasons and ancient calendars I can’t change. Christ comes whether or not I’m ready. The light begins to return even when I feel stuck in the dark. Seasons of repentance and forgiveness come when we’re still feeling defensive, nursing anger and licking wounds. It is in these humbling spaces, where I am not in control of the narrative, that I feel closest to the sacred, to the great and beautiful and awesome mystery at the heart of all that is.

This was true last year on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. I am not Jewish, but I was delighted to be asked by our Jewish senior minister and several Jewish members of the congregation to assist in the service. My Hebrew pronunciation is terrible, so I was put in charge of the English portions of the service and was asked to help lead the Tashlich ritual that we learned about earlier.

During this time, the church was in a moment of conflict. Can you imagine? Did you know church’s had conflicts? I jest, but it was a hard season. People were hurting. People had hurt one another. And those of us leading the service were not exempt. We had not healed; the conflict was not resolved or transformed. We were still deep in the middle of it, when the Days of Awe rolled around.

But we read the prayer. We invited folks to drop their stones into the water. I do not know what was on their hearts when they did but I knew we all had plenty to atone for, plenty to forgive, plenty to cast out into the sea. At the end of the line, our senior minister and I dropped our own stones in, and then each poured a bit of water on top as a symbol of the rushing water, the moving sea. We were both nursing our own pains, hurts, regrets, as we led others through this ritual. I was moved to tears by it. It was so deeply human, this line of tender and fragile and flawed people here together, trying to find our way forward, casting our regrets into the water with a prayer that some ancient magic would work on our hearts.

Now we were doing other work as a community, holding listening circles and workshops, thinking about covenant and repair and right relations. That work was slow. Sometimes it felt like one step forward and two steps back. Or three or ten. It was work that wasn’t tied to a liturgical calendar and was taking the time it needed to take. But there was something powerful about pairing it with a ritual that said, ‘The time is now.” There were no committees about how to form the committee who would come up with the plan for doing repair work. It was just that time in the liturgical cycle and we were all there, together, casting our stones, whether we were ready to or not.

Now, I don’t want to imply that the high holy days are only about ritual. The Jewish tradition of reflecting on our actions, repenting for the way’s we’ve fallen short and hurt one another, and repairing those relationships goes far beyond liturgy and ritual. There is a deep body of spiritual and scholarly work within Judaism on how one actually goes about repairing harm and seeking forgiveness. It is not metaphorical. Many of you may be familiar with this through Rabbia Danya Rutenberg’s book “On Repentance and Repair” that served as the UU common read two years ago. Drawing on the work of 12th century Jewish philosopher Maimonides, she lays out five steps for repairing harm, that are worth repeating, even if you’ve heard them before.

1. First is clearly naming and taking responsibility for the harm
2. Next is beginning the process of inner change, things like studying and reading, maybe removing yourself from communities that enable the harm, going to therapy or support groups. This stage is about learning and transformation
3. Third is accepting the consequences of your actions and making amends and restitution for the harm caused.
4. Fourth is apologizing. This step doesn’t come until you’ve already begun the work of transformation and restitution.
5. And last is making different choices. The work is complete when you have an opportunity to cause the same harm again and choose a different way.

This work is clear and concrete. It goes beyond liturgy and ritual. Beginning the New Year by casting our sins into the water does not mean we don’t take accountability for them. And Yom Kippur is not a get out of jail free card. Talmudic law says you can’t just ask God for forgiveness on Yom Kippur without first trying to repair the harm you’ve caused. And importantly, the work of repairing harm doesn’t just happen at Yom Kippur. Rabbinic teaching says the gates of Teshuva, or repentance, are never closed.

But this good, hard, real work is still anchored and tied to ritual, to an appointed season of repentance and repair with a familiar liturgy. What I experienced during the Rosh Hashanah service last year is something that sacred traditions have been teaching for millennia. Liturgies and rituals can be powerful aids in this work. This is why multiple faith traditions have rituals of confession or time set aside annually to reflect and repent. Think about lent or Ramadan for example. It may seem rote or forced, but it is ancient technology and there is so much wisdom there that remains relevant to us today. Maybe even more relevant than when Rabbi Ruttenberg wrote her book a few years ago. For there is still so much hurt and injustice in the world, but the backlash to attempts at making restitution has been fierce. The current administration is removing park signs and museum displays that attempt to tell the truth about our own nation’s sins, of indigenous land theft and slavery and anti-LGBT violence. The moral reckoning of the #metoo movement feels like a lifetime ago. The work of repair is no less needed but rational arguments for it are failing. I wonder if now, more than ever, is a time to return to the sacred rituals that accompany this work and let them ground us in a world that keeps trying to tell us repair and forgiveness are for the weak. I want to lift up a few gifts of these rituals of reflection and repair.

First, it is a reminder that we don’t do this work alone. I hate to do the preacher thing where I tell you the etymology of a word, but it’s not going to stop me. Liturgy comes from a Greek word literally meaning “the work of the people.” There are many ways in which repentance and repair is collective work. We need partners to help call us in, keep us accountable, learn and grow alongside us. Sometimes we hurt people as an institution, a community, a nation and restoration becomes literal collective work. But even when the harm is ours to own individually, rituals like Tashlich remind us we all have sins we need to cast into the ocean. We all mess up, we all hurt people. And we are all capable of repair. When we stand in line with others to drop our stone into the water, that reality is made visible. We are reminded of our humanity, our place among other humans just as human as us.

Second, it helps us practice. Danya Ruttenberg refers to the liturgy of the High Holy Days as a way to “build muscle memory” for repair. It helps us get into the habit of reflecting on our actions, naming harm, making amends and beginning again in love. We learn that this work is hard, yes but not impossible, and never ever shameful. It can even be beautiful and freeing. When we do it regularly, it’s so much less daunting when we must do it unexpectedly. When we hurt a friend, or say something racist or ableist at work, or let down a loved one. We know the process and the structure. We know the work is sacred and we are held in love while we’re doing it.

Third, it helps us understand this work as cyclical. Work we will always have to return to but we don’t have to stay in permanently. Liturgical calendars, from the Pagan wheel of the year to the Christian movements from advent, to lent, and Pentecost, tend to mimic lifecycles. There is usually an arc of life and death and life again with seasons for joy, seasons for growth, seasons for lamentation. This isn’t an accident. Liturgical time gives us a chance to remember these cycles and to practice the various stages that comprise them. We will never be perfect. Even when we apologize, repair, accept forgiveness, we will hurt one another again, intentionally and unintentionally. We will break promises and vows and fail to live up to our most sacred values in a million different ways. Repentance and repair is not one and done work. But we don’t have to stay in a spiral of shame. Exposure to rituals and religious cycles remind us there are steps for a way forward a way out and beyond, and other joys, celebrations and remembrances that lay on the other side. Benedictine nun and author Joan Chittister speaks movingly about the richness of these cycles, writing “Like a great waterwheel, the liturgical year goes on relentlessly irrigating our souls, softening the ground of our hearts, nourishing the soil of our lives until the seed of the Word of God itself begins to grow in us, comes to fruit in us, ripens in us the spiritual journey of a lifetime.”

And finally, and perhaps most importantly, rituals open us up to the mystery at the heart of it all. They help us live into the enduring questions that define our human existence. Why do we mess up in the first place? Why do we cause one another suffering? Why do we find forgiveness even when we don’t think we deserve it? Why are we offered the gift of teachers and companions who help us return to our truest selves? And why through it all, no matter how many times we fail, is the divine spark inside us never extinguished. We remain held, always, in the embrace of an all-encompassing love. There is no rational explanation for any of this. We will not find the answers in any workshops on conflict resolution or workbooks on restorative justice. We can only hope for sideways glances at the ineffable through the poetry and movement that happen in sacred spaces. Brief Glimpses of a truth beyond words that keeps us committed to the concrete work. This is what happened to me as I wept, in the midst of pain and conflict, at the sight of my community lined up for the Tashlich ritual. It was a moment of pure grace. And it moved me deeper into community, deeper into the concrete work of repair and conflict transformation we were doing together.

May such moments find you in these days of Awe. May you seek them out, through rituals and traditions that keep the sacred at the heart of our ongoing work to let go of our regrets and return to right relationship with one another. And may those moments remind you that you are a human, a carrier of a divine spark that can never be snuffed out but also flawed and fragile, destined to make mistakes over and over, and always, always capable of beginning again in love.

Benediction:
A litany of Atonement by Rev. Rob Eller-Isaccs
#637 in Singing the Living Tradition (grey hymnal)

“The Offering: A Tashlikh Prayer”, by Rabbi Jill Hammer, is shared under the a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 4.0 International copyleft license. Accessed Dec. 22, 2025.