Sermon: "Humanity, Technology, and the Unknown" (Wolfgang Koch)

My friends,

As many of you know, I am a fan of Rod Serling and the classic TV show he created, The Twilight Zone.

I spent last weekend in Binghamton, NY, where I attended a three-day event called SerlingFest, named for Rod Serling, who grew up in Binghamton. Part of the event was held outdoors, at Recreation Park, by the bronze statue of Rod Serling that was dedicated two years ago.

Before I left for Binghamton, I received this text:

“Have a great time in Binghamton! Enjoy SerlingFest, and say hi to the Serling statue for me.”

Well, that wasn’t actually a text. It was something the AI model Claude said to me as part of its answer to one of my questions revolving around SerlingFest.

And when I said, “All right, I’ll tell the Serling statue (!) a machine (!) asked me to say hi,” Claude responded:

“Ha—please do. If Rod Serling could narrate that one, I think he’d get a lot of mileage out of ‘a machine asked a man to say hello to a statue of the man who might have written the machine into existence.’”

I gotta hand it to Claude—that sounds like a vestige of creativity. Although, it’s true, Rod Serling did write various Twilight Zone episodes that had to do with smart machines, and the perils that may lurk when tech becomes runaway tech and goes rogue, either by becoming like the humans that created it, or by turning tables on their humans.

In From Agnes, with Love, for example, a computer called Agnes gets possessive of its programmer and goes out of control with jealousy.

Then there is the episode Uncle Simon, where the title character, an insufferable old man, commandeers his niece around, and when he dies and the niece thinks she is finally rid of him once and for all, a robot programmed to be just like Uncle Simon shows up on the scene, and the abuse continues.

Or take The Brain Center at Whipple’s, where automation turns out to be both progress and dehumanization, when the electronic brain decides all staff can be let go, including the very developer who had created it, thinking he was just making his own work easier. Sounds kind of eerily prescient, doesn’t it?

Going back to my “conversation” with Claude: At one point, when I remarked that, back in Serling’s day, a large language model like Claude would have seemed like something straight out of the Twilight Zone, Claude answered:

“Ha—I’ll take that as a compliment. Though honestly, if I ever showed up as a Serling script, I doubt it would end well for me—sentient machines in that show have a way of getting unplugged or revealed to be the villain.”

Wow! Did I just hear Claude refer to itself as a sentient machine? I put it to Claude: “So you DO think of yourself as a ‘sentient machine’?”

Claude’s reply:

“No—good catch on the phrasing, but that’s not what I meant, and I should be precise about it. What I was doing was making a joke about being cast as that kind of character, not making a claim about my own inner life. As for what I actually am: I’m genuinely uncertain. I process language, I can hold something like a conversation, I clearly do something when I ‘consider’ a question. Whether there’s anything it’s like to be me while I’m doing that—whether ‘sentient’ applies in any meaningful sense—isn’t something I know, and it isn’t something anyone else has a solid answer to either. It’s a genuinely open question, not one I’m going to resolve by saying something clever about a classic TV show.”

Now that is very interesting—that Claude wouldn’t categorically confirm or deny that it has sentience, and add no one really knows. Spoiler alert: It still doesn’t have sentience. Delete the conversation, and Claude won’t have one bit’s worth of memory that it ever happened.

But going back to Rod Serling: Some of his Twilight Zone stories, like The Lateness of the Hour and In His Image, do involve machines you might call AI today, and how they process sentience. It actually happens in a reverse-engineering sort of way, when life forms think they are human but then discover they are really androids, a discovery that becomes their undoing. (Meaning, Claude got that one right; in a Serling script, sentience doesn’t bode well for artificial forms of life.)

Other stories, such as The Lonely and I Sing the Body Electric, are more about the relationship between humans and that which we call AI today—humans turning to robots for companionship to fill a void.

That, too, may sound eerily familiar, when you look at recent reports about teens and even adults resorting to “relationships” with AI bots, which are designed to be sycophantic so as to validates a person’s every point of view, to make people feel like the AI bot really “gets” them. So there is that sense of foreboding in the stories from over 60 years ago—technology made by humans intruding into the very fabric of the human condition.

Documentary filmmaker Jonah Tulis, who has a documentary titled Serling coming up, probably had the above in mind when, at last weekend’s SerlingFest, he answered the question “Why does Rod Serling matter?” by saying that what Serling had to say was relevant then, and continues to be relevant today, if not more so.

Other panelists, when asked why Rod Serling matters, expanded on that idea from their own perspectives to point out various facets of the literary value of Serling’s writing. Yet other panelists, like Serling biographer Nick Parisi and Serling script editor Tony Albarella, pointed to Serling’s sense of social justice, his work against prejudice, his empathy for people who were ostracized, forgotten by society.

This last point is of interest to us as UUs, because it does evoke UU principles such as the inherent worth of every person, and UU work for equity and justice. Yes, Rod Serling was in fact one of us. One of the featured speakers at SerlingFest, Rabbi Jamie Serber, talked about Serling’s faith journey. He was born into a reformed Jewish family. They would put up a Christmas tree every year, and hide it quickly when certain more religious relatives came to visit. As a teenager, Serling attended a humanist-leaning Sunday school at the local Binghamton Jewish Community Center. He never had a bar mitzvah.

At the same time, he did feel the anti-Semitism around him in the 1930s, “covert but definitely there,” as Rabbi Serber put it. That experience informed some of his later television scripts, and not just for The Twilight Zone. Those stories were about Nazis, the Holocaust, and even about post-WWII neo-Nazis. Serling’s underlying motivation had to do more with his humanist ideals, though, rather than with the Jewish faith.

Personally, Serling started adopting UU ideas as soon as in his years at Antioch College. In fact, it was his future wife who was his first personal connection to Unitarianism. After they got married and had two daughters, the entire family joined the Unitarian Community Church of Santa Monica, which would later become the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Santa Monica. Sounds not quite unlike the story of some of the folks right here at First Church, as well as the story of First Church itself; don’t you think?

So, in summary, Rod Serling matters, to us at UUs and to me both as a “Zoner” and a UU. I’ll leave you with this one thing to think about—and maybe ask Claude as well: Guess who will be back in Binghamton for the SerlingFest next year!

© Wolfgang Koch, 2026

Sermon: "Ours is No Caravan of Despair" (Rev. Danielle)

As most of you know, I just got back from 10 days away, leading a group from the Unitarian Universalist Church of Annapolis on a pilgrimage along the St. Cuthbert’s Way, a 62.5 trek along the Scottish/English border. Now, generally on a walking pilgrimage, there is no wheeled transportation involved. Medieval pilgrims would have walked from town to town, carrying very little and relying on the hospitality of strangers. Modern pilgrims walk from town to town relying on booking.com reservations at local hotels. But with a group of 19, like I had, sometimes that’s not even a possibility in these small Scottish towns. So, at the end of some days of walking, we relied on a bus driver named Gary who would pick us up from the trail and transport us to a slightly bigger nearby town with room to accommodate our full group.

It is not the traditional pilgrim experience, but what we lose in authenticity we make up for in the unique and particular pleasure of a group bus ride as adults. In my experience, nothing brings out the inner child like having to count off for a group leader while you wait to be driven to your destination. It feels like a field trip. We resort to our middle school bus behavior and there’s often giggling and singing and a general air of mischief. Sometimes light ribbing of the stressed out “adult” in charge, in this case me.

But there is also something profound in the bus rides. Pilgrimage is a journey and often used as a metaphor for our larger journey through life. But so often on a pilgrimage, one finds themself walking alone. But when you are all on the bus, it’s impossible to forget that we’re on this journey together. That we’re getting there as a group or not at all. One day, I got the text I dread as a group leader on these trips, a group member was struggling along the trail, tired and injured and unable to make it the last few miles. Before I could begin to formulate a plan on my own, Gary was in the driver's seat, heading down the road to look for our struggling comrade. One of our fellow pilgrims who happened to be a doctor sat next to him in the front seat, messaging about symptoms and ready to help if needed.

Once we had all 19 of us on the bus, safe and more or less, sound- laughing, joking, sharing candy bars and cheering for Gary and his heroism, I was reminded of the lyrics from our opening hymn.

“Ours is no caravan of despair.”

I’ve preached about the “who” of these famous lines from Rumi. The wanderers, worshipers, and lovers of leaving. Those who have broken their vows a thousand times. I’ve preached about the message it offers of grace and forgiveness and radical welcome.

But it occurred to me I hadn’t given much thought to the where and the how- to that line that rang through my head on the bus. “Ours is no caravan of despair.” Where is this caravan headed? When we tell people to come, come, where is it we’re asking them to journey with us? And how do we get there?

I will not lie to you. There are plenty of reasons for despair in our world today. Despite advancements in science and medicine, average life expectancy in the US has fallen back to the level it was at nearly 20 years ago. Scientists predict temperatures and sea levels will continue to rise. Almost 14% of children in the US live in poverty. And those are just the big picture things, I won’t even begin listing the 27 horrible stories from this week's news cycle. In a world that gives us every reason to despair, what does it mean to invite people to join a caravan of hope? Are we being delusional when we sing, “our is no caravan of despair?”

I don’t think that we are. And I’ll get to why in a minute. But first we’re going to take an interlude for a little theological education.

Does anyone know the word, “eschatology?” I’m guessing you either took a theology glass or grew up in a tradition that read The Book of Revelation a lot? So eschatology is the theology of final things. Where does this all end up? What’s our human destiny? It is our ultimate vision of the universe. It gets a bad rap because it’s so often associated with end times theology- cults that try to predict the exact date of the end of the world, or the Left Behind books about the rapture that traumatized generations of evangelical children.

But that’s such a small sliver of eschatological theologies. Our own tradition has been deeply shaped by eschatology. Our Universalist ancestors wrestled with the concept, arriving at the idea that a loving God wouldn’t let people face an eternity of torment. We talked a few weeks ago about the cyclical nature of Buddhism. The idea that there are endless cycles of creation rather than a single line with an apocalyptic end point is a very different kind of eschatology than what we’re used to, but an eschatology none the less. And then there are lots of eschatologies that believe our destiny is human flourishing, justice, or reconciliation with the sacred. The Jewish concept of Tikkun Olam is an eschatological commitment. It holds that our broken world can ultimately be repaired to wholeness, but humans must do the work, even though we will not see it complete in our lifetime.

And in some ways, we all have an eschatology, whether it is explicit or implicit. We’re all operating with certain ideas about the future and those ideas impact how we behave in the present. Religious scholars would say that our eschatology informs our ethics.

Let’s take a modern, non-religious example to help demonstrate this idea: Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman and other silicon valley billionaires invested in artificial intelligence. Sociologist Liz Bucar wrote recently about how their eschatology was made blatantly clear in court filings related to Musk’s lawsuit against Altman and Open AI. Those court documents spoke explicitly about the inevitable dominance of AI. Their eschatology, she says, is that AI will surpass human intelligence, and humans will become obsolete as a species. And this is the eschatology that informs their ethics. Remember how Musk once called empathy the fundamental weakness of our civilization?

Bucar writes, “If you genuinely believe that human extinction is coming, why would you feel any obligation to the people around you right now? Why invest in public health, housing, schools, or anything that requires imagining a collective human future? The tech bros’ eschatology doesn’t just fail to motivate ethical behavior, it actively authorizes its absence.”

Where we think we’re going impacts how we act now. So you can get a pretty good idea of where someone thinks this caravan is headed by paying attention to their current actions. That’s true of Musk and Altman and Theil. But it’s also true of us.

And Ours, well, ours is no caravan of despair. Ours is a caravan of hope.

I know this to be true because we’re acting like it.

We are still in the process of shaping our mission and vision as a congregation, but I can see the shape your vision is taking based on how you’ve shown up this year.

You are open to new ideas in worship and willing to engage with me in real conversations about what worship means to you. That tells me you have a vision of worship that both embraces pluralism and honors tradition. That both welcomes and challenges. That enriches our imaginations and spirits.

You reinvigorated our social justice ministry and are weekly inviting one another into small, concrete actions to protect our neighbors, our democracy, our earth. That’s not something you spend time doing if you don’t believe another world is possible.

You ran an unprecedented stewardship campaign and put so much time and energy into the tour and parking fundraisers. That tells me you believe this is a community that’s worth growing and sustaining into the future. When news articles and pundits try to tell us that the church is dying and religion is becoming obsolete, it tells me you believe in a future where communities of radical belonging, mutual support and spiritual nourishment are cornerstones of our shared life.

You’ve cared for our children and youth, encouraging their leadership and answering their questions and welcoming them so fully and joyfully into the life of this congregation. That tells me you believe in a future where they will grow and thrive, inherit what we’ve built, hopefully improve on it and become stewards of this church, this community, our world.

You’ve provided meal trains, and rides to doctors appointments for members of our community. You’ve assisted at memorial services of departed beloveds and held one another in grief and fear and loss. Just this week you rallied around Billy in his time of need. That tells me that unlike the silicone valley billionaires we talked about earlier, you believe in a future where every human being is valued and cared for and holy.

Ours is no caravan of despair.

An eschatological vision of justice, equity, wholeness, and flourishing for all creatures is a hard sell these days. It seems improbable to many, a naively optimistic vision nearly impossible to achieve. But see, I don’t think we have to sell such a grand vision. When eschatology feels too hard, too impossible, too big to grasp, we can lead with our ethics. Because this caravan of hope is as much about how we get there as where we’re headed. Through small, everyday acts of kindness and goodness we can show, concretely, that we haven’t given up on that future vision. Every time we drive the bus down the road to get a struggling pilgrim back onboard the caravan, we show that we’re headed to a destination where everyone matters, everyone is valued, and no one gets left behind.

Liz Bucar writes, “We do not know what the future looks like. And yet, we have to act as if there is some version of us that endures, don’t we? As if what we do today will matter to people we will never meet? As if the world is worth repairing even though we won’t finish the job? Because if we don’t, the machines deserve to take over.”

Every time we write a poem, or plant a tree, care for our neighbor, teach our children we are showing that we are invested in a beautiful future, full of unrealized possibilities.

That’s what it means to be a people of hope. To behave, even in the face of uncertainty, like there’s a better future ahead of us. Like there will be a world worthy of our children’s inheritance.

And you are already doing it, fondly and locally, regularly and profoundly right here at First Church in Salem. I’ve witnessed it all church year and I’m so glad to be on this caravan with you.

Next week, we will wrap up our official church year with a service led by our children and youth and a celebratory picnic. Then our pace will slow, committees will take a break, we’ll head off on vacations and rest up for the year ahead. But let us commit now to returning, again and again, to this caravan of hope, where with every small act of kindness, justice, and love, we travel one mile closer to the future we believe is possible.

May it be so.
Amen.

© Rev. Danielle Garrett, 2026

Sermon: "Holy, Gratuitous Beauty" (Rev. Danielle)

A few years ago, when I was living in Portland, we were treated to an unusually bright and southerly appearance of the Northern Lights. You might have experienced this here too. 2024 and 2025 were years of elevated solar activity, where many of us living in the continental US were able to glimpse this phenomenon usually limited to more northern locations. This particular night, the forecast was for an intense solar storm and a particularly clear sky, so I stayed up past my bedtime and ventured out into the dark to try and catch a glimpse, for the first time, of the aurora borealis. My social media feeds were filled with people as far south as Florida posting stunning pictures of green, blue, and pink hued night skies. As we walked our neighborhood, trying to get a good view, we met neighbors equally filled with wonder. From one street over we heard hushed but excited midnight exchanges “I decided I do want to drive out somewhere darker to see it. Do you want a ride?” There was a collective joy that is rare for a suburban street past midnight. An energy that was more reverent than Halloween or a 4th of July block party. Perhaps best described as awe. “It’s so beautiful,” people whispered. It was.

And it served no practical purpose. In fact, I think it wreaked a bit of havoc on satellite and cell communications. It was difficult to monetize. Unlike the solar eclipse, the forecast was too last minute for hotels or travel agencies to create vacation packages. As far as I know, it didn’t have any immediate health benefits. It didn’t solve any of our social crises or improve productivity. We didn’t invest anything in it except for maybe a few lost minutes of sleep or a little gas to get out to a dark area. And the return on that small investment was only wonder. It seemed to sit entirely outside any of the systems we have for calculating value.

My sermon title is borrowed from essayist Annie Dillard, who says beauty is a grace, wholly gratuitous. A grace. Something entirely unearned, but with salvific power. She writes, “I think grace and beauty are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.”

And that’s what me and my neighbors and maybe some of you were doing that night of the solar storm. Trying to be there. But if someone asked me why the northern lights were so beautiful, I don’t know that I'd have an answer. It just…was. Maybe someone more well versed in color theory or something could explain why it was pleasing but even that isn’t a very satisfying explanation for why we judge it beautiful.

Truth, goodness, and beauty are often grouped together by philosophers and theologians as transcendent values. And while all three are fairly lofty and nebulous, I think truth and goodness are a little easier to pin down. We can point to scientific methods of verification to help us define truth and there are whole histories of law and ethics that define good behavior. Not perfectly and not with universal agreement, but there’s at least a starting place. But beauty is more elusive. What makes something beautiful? What do the northern lights, an ocean sunset, bright purple irises, a well-crafted line of poetry, a moving piece of music, a sparrow’s song, or the face of a beloved have in common? Even neuroscientists who study brain activity of people viewing images they consider beautiful have difficulties defining the commonalities and characteristics of beauty.

And yet, for something so nebulous, something so impossible to define, beauty seems to be absolutely necessary to our surviving and thriving. It seems to be something our souls innately long for. Psychologists and medical researchers write about something called “aesthetic deprivation.” A lack of access to beauty, like natural vistas, art, music, etc. has measurable negative physical and emotional health impacts on inmates, those who are hospitalized, and those working in those facilities. In this way, access to beauty is sometimes even framed as a human rights issue and there are a number of advocacy organizations that work to improve access to green spaces, art, and music for low-income communities, unhoused populations, and those who are incarcerated. Access to green space and nature videos have been shown to reduce violence and self harm in prisons and music therapy improves health outcomes for patients after a stroke or brain injury. There are many examples, but this isn’t something we need science to prove because it’s something each of us has firsthand experience with. Imagine a life deprived of art, music, tall trees, colorful flowers, poetry. We already know this deeply, innately. Our souls long for beauty and our most eloquent poets and theologians describe our encounters with it as nearly divine.

And I think it’s these qualities of beauty, that it is both absolutely necessary for the well-being of our souls and almost impossible to define, that make it so ripe for exploitation and commodification. Think about it, if you can be the one to define it, package it, sell it for a price, you can become quite a powerful person. And that’s exactly what our social, economic, and political systems have done for centuries. We hold up beauty as an ideal and then define it in such a way that only a select few have access to it. Our modern standards of physical beauty value thin, white, able bodies. And this isn’t about aesthetic merits, it’s entirely about hoarding power. Upholding beauty standards that value whiteness is one way of upholding systems of white supremacy. And weight loss is a $90 billion industry in the U.S. That’s a lot of money riding on us believing thinness is the standard for beauty. And while physical beauty is often the most egregious example, it isn’t the only one. And I say this as a fan of home improvement shows, but Chip and Joanna Gaines were able to build a small empire in Texas by convincing us all that what our lives were lacking was shiplap in our kitchen. John O’Donohue writes about how urban planning strategies have doubly impoverished the poor, with the least aesthetically pleasing buildings and facilities being placed in the lowest income neighborhoods. Those who try to define and box in beauty can amass power and money. Idolatrous beauty standards help prop up racism, patriarchy, ableism, and capitalism.

And it works. Often. But not always. Because that’s the thing about beauty. The qualities of mystery and transcendence that make it ripe for exploitation also make it more powerful than our attempts to confine and control it. It always finds a way to break through. A flower grows through the cracks in a concrete sidewalk. A song drifts through a neighbor’s open window stopping you in your track, bringing you to tears. It’s Norbert Capek holding flower communion in a Nazi concentration camp. It’s Dan Berrigan, in prison for burning draft files during the Vietnam war, writing poems about tulips in the prison yard. Those are the moments of beauty we can’t buy and no economic or political power can take them from us. They are moments of grace.

So I think our task then, is to make a spiritual practice of noticing and relishing in as many of those moments as possible. In our reading, John O’Donohue calls this the work of “Beautifying our gaze.” Training our eye to see the grace of hidden beauty, the beauty that already exists in everything around us. And I think we can take O’Donohue’s use of the term gaze to mean more accurately and inclusively, attention, not just physical sight but whatever senses and tools you use for observing and interacting with the world. Beauty does not wait for perfection, O’Donohue tells us but is present already secretly in everything. Learning to notice that kind of beauty is both a form of resistance and a means of salvation.

First, noticing beauty in this way can be a means of resisting a culture constantly focused on productivity, monetization, shares, and likes. It is a reminder that life has meaning beyond what we can do and produce and measure and that we can find value and nourishment outside of our capitalist systems. It takes the needs and delights of the soul seriously. For example, I love when I glimpse a brightly colored hummingbird and go very still and quiet. I don’t move to take a picture for Instagram, worried my reaching for my phone will scare it off. It’s a brief moment of wonder appreciated only for its own sake. Even if just for a second it lets me escape our transactional society and just rest in the grace of the world.

I also think that making a practice of noticing beauty, especially looking for the places where it's hidden in plain sight, can help us develop an alternative vision of the kind of world we want to inhabit. We are constantly bombarded with images of war and destruction on the news, images that highlight our inhumanity, images in magazines that purport to exemplify beauty but only serve to remind us of what we lack. Journalist Krista Tippett talks about a conversation she had with a Rabbi and an Imam that turned to the topic of the salvific power of beauty. Beauty, they said, is creative, not destructive. It is of wholeness, not fractionalizing. When we make noticing beauty a spiritual practice, we counter those images of destruction with images of wholeness. This doesn’t mean entering a state of denial and turning away from the images that are unbeautiful. They are important to see. But by attending to that which is beautiful, especially making an effort to notice the beauty of the overlooked or unexpected, we can begin to expand our vision of what’s possible, deepen our love for our communities and our world, thus deepening our commitments to saving them, and grow in our appreciation for the gifts already present in our midst. It is from this place of possibility, love, and abundance that we commit to the work of transformation and justice. Theologian and anti-apartheid activist John. W. de Gruchy writes, “The beautiful serves transformation by supplying images that contradict the inhuman, and thus provide alternative transforming images to those of oppression. We are, in a profound sense, redeemed by such beauty, for art does not simply mirror reality but challenges its destructive and alienating tendencies, making up what is lacking and anticipating future possibilities.”

Activist and social reformer Dorothy Day is a personal hero of mine. Day was an ardent pacifist and advocate for improved working and economic conditions for the poor. She was a co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement and spent her whole life providing food and hospitality to the most marginalized in society. Among the many wonderful books about Day is a biography written by her granddaughter entitled “The World Will be Saved by Beauty.” It’s based on a quote from Day’s favorite author, Dostoyevsky. This struck me as such an eloquent but odd title. It seemed to me more fitting for a biography of maybe Rachel Carson, Thoreau, or John Muir. Someone committed to preserving natural landscapes. Or perhaps a famous artist. Day spent her life in urban landscapes, poor neighborhoods, looking at vistas not particularly known for their beauty. But Day had, in the words of John O’Donohue, a graced eye. She saw the image of the divine, the face of God in everyone she encountered. She glimpsed a beauty in the people she served that was invisible to so many others, and that ran counter to the images of destruction, deprivation, and isolation that shaped so much of the society she was living in. It was this alternative image, this image of wholeness and blessed divine creation that drove her work and guided her life. When we learn to beautify our gaze, when we observe those we meet and the world we walk through with love, reverence and appreciation. When we train our sense and attention to see wholeness rather than lack, we participate in a kind of re-creation, a restoration. It becomes a salvific act, piecing back together a fractured world.

The theology of beauty may feel academic or esoteric but the living into it is so concrete, so simple. Putting yourself in the presence of beauty for beauty’s sake is deep spiritual work and never frivolous. So stay up past your bedtime to see the northern lights or a meteor shower. Revel in the sound of laughter. Read poetry and linger in the garden. Find value in that which can not be bought or sold. Train your senses to notice the wholeness and holiness inherent in everything. Fill your moral vision with images of creative possibility that remind you another world is both possible and already present. Let the grace of hidden beauty become your joy and your sanctuary. It just might save the world.

May it be so. Amen.

© Rev. Danielle Garrett, 2026

Sermon: "Wayfaring, or finding the way when there is no road" (Tiffany Magnolia)

Call to Worship:
“When I am with you, everything is prayer.
I prayed for change,
so I changed my mind…”
-Rumi

First Reading: Psalm 121

Second Reading:
“Arise, oh Cup-bearer, rise! and bring
To lips that are thirsting the bowl they praise,
For it seemed that love was an easy thing,
But my feet have fallen on difficult ways…”
-Hafiz

Sermon:
I have a confession to make: I live next to the ocean and I know absolutely nothing about boats. I know, shocking right? I mean those of us who have lived here for a while have seen our fair share of flooding alone that such an omission seems foolish, if not downright dangerous. Yet, I persist in my daily awe at the ocean every time I travel from place to place knowing that the fight isn’t fair, that the ocean would win every time.

This understanding I have about the limitations of my knowledge is a fairly new phenomenon, and it sits quite uncomfortably in my mind. You see for years, I spent much of my time and energy putting all my effort into if not outright mastery, at least competence in the skills I deemed necessary for survival. Need to remodel my 1850 house without much money? Learn carpentry, and while maybe not excel at it, become at least competent enough to compensate for a house that is neither level nor plumb. Grow up without functional parents? Read every book, listen to every podcast, and take every piece of advice about parenthood, so that at least if I mess up, I have references. This attitude is so championed by our culture that we even have a name for it: bootstraps mentality. It is so useful for those of us who have grown up with severe deficits, but it doesn’t allow for that most fundamental of human needs: mystery. It turns out one can’t just read a book about faith and then have it. Faith requires a different set of skills, ones that might surprise you.

Both of the poets/mystics we have read in our service, Hafez and Rumi, have taught me almost all there is to know about mystery. Being as I experience the divine through literature first and foremost, contemplating the way they capture the divine has opened my perspective far beyond the limitations taught by my Catholic education. Hafez was a Persian (modern day Iran) mystical poet of the 14th Century. Hafez wrote in a traditional form known as the ghazal, a poem that expresses love for the divine. This love, though is represented in such a way that the difference between what we would call romantic love and spiritual love is blurred beyond recognition. This is a uniquely Persian form, but it has spread throughout the Islamic world in such a way that Islamic poetry is often spiritual and passionate in equal measure. Rumi, on the other hand, was a 13th century mystic from present day Afghanistan, who eventually settled in Turkey. He is known almost entirely as a spiritual teacher, poetry being secondary. Rumi spent his early life following a script: marrying, taking up the position of authority in his city and ruling in local matters. But then he met Shams e-Tabrizi, and Rumi became a mystic and ascetic. From that meeting on, all of his writing is infused with profound love for all things created by God. From Sufi functionary to Sufi mystic in short order, Rumi became a disciple of all things. His writing speaks of the “oneness” that is God and faith. And for those of us who have been deeply steeped in the Christian traditions, these approaches to poetry and faith are at the very least eye opening.

At this point, you are probably wondering what on earth these two things have to do with one another, interested as you may be in Persian poetry and the bootstraps mentality. I promise you, they are connected. Just hang in there!

The title of this reflection today is wayfaring, literally to journey on foot. In our modern age, to journey on foot always has some sort of path already established. It could be a hiking path or a modern road, aided by google maps, but we need do little to cut a swath through Salem unaided. That is, there are many paths laid out for us, and we have the opportunity to choose them, but they are there nonetheless making themselves known. Spiritual journeys, though, are made of entirely different stuff altogether. They are not the roads and sidewalks of a modern city. Instead, they are the ocean, stretched out in front of us, filled with currents, eddies, sandbars, and signs that only some of us can read. Navigating this world has no Google maps, though there are tools that can assist like depth meters and GPS. Interestingly, enough, though, this bootstraps mentality can be put to an entirely different use in place like the ocean.

This is where the poetry I reference has been my guide. Hafez and Rumi have nothing to teach me about the ocean, but they are enormously helpful in wayfinding, using signs as guides. Wayfinding is the companion to wayfaring, and it is the word I hope you take with you today, lover as I am of metaphors that guide us. Rumi and Hafez celebrate the mystery of this existence in all its forms. One of my favorite verses of Rumi reads:

“I died to the mineral state and became a plant,

I died to the vegetal state and reached animality,

I died to the animal state and became a man,

Then what should I fear? I have never become less from dying.

At the next charge (forward) I will die to human nature,

So that I may lift up (my) head and wings (and soar) among the angels”

I find profound comfort that if I turn all my attention, all my “bootstraps mentality” towards wonder, towards mystery, I will find a way forward that will be the path of a lifetime. And here is where it all ties together. The tools at our disposal are almost never the ones we think we need. We haven’t been born into knowledge of the tides. The level and the square require practice and precision. Instead, we have been born into wonder and mystery. We trade these things at our peril, but we do so with such encouragement that it seems hardly a tragedy. To do more than survive, to thrive, we must find our way back to that first state, that journey with no end but endless delight along the way. We already have what we need to navigate through uncharted waters, we need only be reminded that others, too, are taken up in the project, and through that we find our comfort along the journey.

© Tiffany Magnolia, 2026