(Sermon only) What You Can Depend On Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley April 12, 2026

The facts of life.

The facts of life by Pedro Gotuma, the

Irish theologian

and poet.

that you were born

and you will die.

That you will sometimes love enough

and sometimes not.

That you will lie

if only to yourself.

That you will get tired.

That you will learn most from the

situations you did not choose.

that there will be some things that move

you more than you can say.

That you will live.

That you must be loved. That you will

avoid questions most urgently in need of

your attention.

that you began as the fusion of a sperm

and an egg of two people who were once

strangers and may well still be.

That life isn't fair.

That life is sometimes good

and sometimes better than good.

That life is often not so good.

that life is real. And if you can

survive it well,

survive it well

with love and art and meaning given

where meaning's scarce.

That you will learn to live with regret.

That you will learn to live with

respect. That the structures that

constrict you may not be permanently

constraining. that you will probably be

okay,

that you must accept change before you

die, but you will die anyway.

So, you might as well live

and you might as well love.

You might as well love.

At the beginning of Richard P's novel,

The Overstory Story, I imagine many of

you have read this novel, and if you

haven't, catch up. It's really good.

There's a scene of a chestnut tree and a

family that believes it owns this

chestnut tree.

Generation by generation, the family

tends to this chestnut tree as it

survives alone among the three that

originally grew on their property.

As it survives a terrible plague killing

all of the chestnut trees in North

America, this lone chestnut tree far

from all the others survives on their

property. They're proud of this chestnut

tree, proud of their love

for this chestnut tree they believe they

own.

They begin to take photographs.

once a month

documenting the life of their chestnut

tree. Generation by generation,

the members of the family pick up this

strange hobby, photographing their

chestnut tree as life moves, as death

unfolds

all around it.

Here's my question. I I've been

wrestling with how to talk about

entitlement.

Mine and and yours and all of ours and

what is it and where does it come from?

Been thinking about all the ways that I

feel entitled. I certainly feel entitled

to do whatever I want with the trees on

our property.

Since moving in just a not even a year

and a half ago, we have killed, chopped

down, and removed two trees.

We might do it to more.

I notice my entitlement when I speak in

harsh ways, yell even at a customer

service representative on the phone. I

don't yell very often, but I have caught

myself on multiple occasions yelling at

a customer service representative

whose fault it is not

that I'm experiencing whatever

frustration I'm experiencing.

I think about how much of that oil stuck

in the straight of Hermuz I feel

entitled to

as I go and feel the shock of of paying

an exorbitant amount for the biodiesel

that Chevron gas station cheerily

provides for my truck.

As I think about summer vacation plans,

how much of that oil do you feel

entitled to?

Or I think about the moment in my

credentiing process to become a

Unitarian Universalist minister. One of

the steps you need to undertake is have

a congregation sponsor you. Right,

Leisel? This is still still the case. 15

years ago or more when I was uh engaged

in this process, I needed my home

congregation to to say yes, we believe

this this young man could be a minister.

We we want to sponsor his journey in um

but there were a number of people who

would ask the church for that kind of

sponsorship living so close to the

seminary here in the Bay Area. And so

they had a process, but I grew up in the

church and I I didn't really feel like

that process was the right process for

me.

I I thought I was a little more special

than that. These people knew me. So I I

wrote them a letter telling them so.

They thought it thought it sounded a

little entitled.

And of course it was.

And yet there's there's something there,

this complex reality.

They did all know me. They in fact known

me since I was about four years old. And

the reason I was pursuing ministry is

that most of them had told me to by the

time I was 12.

We live in a complex relationality and

it's not always clear when our

entitlement is rooted in a healthy sense

of belonging to this world, to the

people that we love and are loved by,

entitled to the tree of life.

And when we have grown into an unhealthy

sense of entitlement that others or the

earth itself is there to take care of us

and provide for our comfort.

How do you know the difference?

60s something years ago a group of boy

scouts planted I believe they're

ponderosa pines on our property here.

They are the wrong tree

to grow on this hill.

These many years later, we've incurred

expense after expense taking care of

removing these trees as they die and

cause hazards to the property and

neighbors properties.

I'm absolutely sure, however, that the

Boy Scouts were acting with the best of

intent.

Environmentalists, young budding

environmentalists coming up to plant

trees on a barren hillside.

There's something I think about this

difference between intention and impact

between the about the awareness the

ability to understand how we are

impacting

all of the web around us

that has to do with this difference

between a healthy and an unhealthy sense

of entitlement.

I think there's a temptation to

understand

because of the the the mechanistic

and capitalistic materialistic culture

that we arise out of. A temptation to

understand relationality as

fundamentally transactional.

That encourages us to fix the problem

when issues arise.

My house is too small. Build a bigger

house. Cut down some of those trees.

And yet, spiritual traditions have

always pointed to what is instead a

necessary reorientation.

Not a transactional fixing, but a

reorientation. Bring the chickens in.

No, that's not enough. Bring the goats

in. Okay, let's bring the what the

donkey in. Bring it all in

and then be reoriented

by your understanding of relationality,

by your expectations

of what the world will provide.

I do think that unhealthy sense of

entitlement comes down to something

about our expectations.

I think about that first noble truth of

Buddhism, right? You know, duka, this

idea that there is some quality of of of

hardship, of suffering, of pain that is

inevitable in life,

right? Our experience in our human lives

will always find moments of getting

sick,

of not having enough,

of death. This is of our nature, they

would say.

And the Buddha would tell that story of

the two arrows. You've heard the two

arrows. The first arrow is that nature

of reality, suffering, that dooka that

is unavoidable.

But then the second arrow is one that we

pierce ourselves with. It's the story

that we tell about the pain.

And when we tell a story that we

shouldn't have to feel it, that some

other bodies or the body of the earth

itself are responsible for keeping us

more comfortable than we are right now.

We are engaging in that second arrow.

And of course, we don't hurt just

ourselves with it, do we?

This is the way that Rabbi Lawrence

Kushner puts it. He says, "We may never

understand why we suffer or be able to

control the forces that cause our

suffering, but we can have a lot to say

about what suffering does to us,

what sort of people we become because of

it.

Pain makes some people bitter and

envious. that makes others sensitive and

compassionate.

It is the result,

not the cause of pain that makes some

experiences of pain meaningful and

others empty and destructive.

It's the stories.

The stories we tell about those

inevitable moments of disappointment and

frustration when you're on the phone

with the customer service agent or

whatever it is that brings you in touch

with the reality that you're not as

comfortable as you'd like to be. It's

the stories we tell about our

disappointments

and frustrations,

the inevitable pain of human living

that shape the people we'll become.

In the overstory, Nick, the great great

grandchild, I think it is, of the

original planter of that chestnut tree.

He loves the flip book of the

photographs that now have compiled over

decades and decades

of this tree.

Month by month, he flips through the

images, watches that tree both change

and grow, but mostly stay the same.

as

so much changes around it. His loved

ones are born and die. A depression and

a world war,

social change,

anxiety around the planet, this chestnut

tree

stays.

And Nick's an artist. And so as he flips

through them, he discovers an inversion

of that entitlement story that we humans

tell about ourselves. He realizes that

it is not the tree that belongs to them.

But it is them, his family, who have

come to belong to this tree, who have

worshiped at its roots, who have spent

their generations loving it, witnessing

it, photographing it each month.

One more

tree on this property I want to talk

about. There's a an oak tree. It's

fairly young. Had the nerve to to grow

right in the middle of our

million-dollar view

out off the terrace. Just started

growing there one day.

And as you can imagine, that creates

some tensions.

You can imagine how

owning a property like this with the

many people who would like to come up

and use it for their special events,

their occasions of great celebration or

mourning,

would like also to enjoy that

spectacular view off the terrace to see

the Golden Gate Bridge out there on the

horizon leading to the great mystery

beyond.

And you can also imagine the desire to

protect

the kind of tree that really should be

growing on this hill.

The tree that is the keystone

organism

of our ecology

here

out west.

You know, the the oak and the scrubj

evolved together.

H just what the scrub jay needs and when

it needs it. The oak grows and provides.

The scrub jay is accountable for

planting most of those oak acorns that

grow into oak trees all around this

country.

And you could imagine you could tell

that story as a kind of transactional

relationship.

But of course there's a complex

reciprocity happening with I think it's

over a thousand species of caterpillar

that also depend on the oak. I mean,

just this incredible ecology

that is in relationship with the oak and

the scrubj both and in relationship to

their relationship.

Here's the the question I'm wrestling

with that I'm not going to answer today.

It's how do we get from the fundamental

nature of reality kind of rights our

entitlements just for being born and

being alive. The kind of entitlement

that is

impossible to take away that is

fundamental to your relationship to the

ground of being however you describe it.

How do we get from there to those

liberal modern project of of human

rights? Those those kind of entitlements

that I think drew many of us to unarian

universalism when we read them in the

seven principles, the inherent worth and

dignity of every person and the the use

of the democratic process, the free and

responsible search for truth and

meaning. these these liberal

entitlements

or the way we enshrine them so

beautifully in the UN Charter of Human

Rights.

How do we traverse the ground in

between?

The moment of grace for our oak came

when the arborist who tends those for

rubber trees in the atrium.

Heard about the dilemma and said, "Oh,

well, let me try pruning it."

No charge. I want to protect the tree.

and he went out there and pruned it like

a window pane so you could see the view

still through the majestic

arms, the branches of that oak.

It's not a forever resolution,

but it provides a a moment of grace, a

way of relating to the complex

dance of reciprocity

right out there on the terrace.

One last story of a tree on this

property. This one

didn't grow out of the ground but out of

our people.

There was a mosaic artist who came and

many of you along with others who've

since moved on or passed away brought

pieces of their lives, little bits and

pieces of precious things.

a watch face from World War II or

grandmother's

china broken shards of a favorite coffee

mug.

And sitting side by side across

generations at the tables, everyone made

of these broken pieces of their lives,

these fragments of the holy leaves

that eventually were sculpted into the

mosaic tree of life

out on the wall by the preschool.

Out of our brokenness, out of the sharp

edges of our living, we are called to

continually create beauty,

to have for ourselves and build with one

another a community that eats together

of the fruit of the tree of life.

That you will sometimes love enough and

sometimes not. That life isn't fair.

that life is sometimes good and

sometimes better than good. That life is

often not so good.

That life is real. And if you can

survive it well, survive it well

with love and art and meaning given

where meaning scarce. That you must

accept change before you die. But you

will die anyway. So you might as well

live. You might as well love.

You might as well love.

May it be so. And amen.