(Sermon only) Miracles Amidst the Rubble Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley December 14, 2025

We are living in the greatest revolution

in history. A huge spontaneous upheaval

of the entire human race. Not a

revolution planned and carried out by

any particular party, race or nation,

but a deep elemental boiling over of all

the inner contradictions that have ever

been. A revelation of the chaotic forces

inside everybody. This is not something

we have chosen.

Nor is it something we are free to

avoid.

The

prophetic Catholic mystic and monk

Thomas Mertton wrote those words in 1966

naming this era that we continue to

tumult through today.

I've heard it called a poly crisis.

I think I first heard that term a poly

crisis about five years ago in the

beginning of the pandemic. A poly crisis

to name this pandemic crisis covering

the entire world turning up societies

into dramatic upheaval while at the same

time seeing how that crisis was linked

with the crisis of continued racial

inequality.

seeing how the systemic injustice of

racism in our country coming into full

focus after George Floyd's murder was

interlaced

with this healthc care crisis. seeing

how those crises were happening in the

context of a global climate crisis,

crisis after crisis impacting one

another.

It's this kind of thinking, this kind of

understanding of how all of this

disruption and disintegration, all of

the challenges that tug on every one of

our lives are interrelated. that brought

the New York Times columnist Thomas

Freriedman to pen a column this week

calling this the poly scene

and he didn't didn't mean like the

polymerous scene. I want to be clear

here in the Bay Area

the poly scene this time of poly crisis.

I think my earliest understanding of of

something about what what it means to be

living in a poly crisis came through the

young adult section of the bookstore.

You might have noticed too the dominance

of post-apocalyptic fiction in the young

adult section over the last 15 or 20

years

thinking about titles like the Hunger

Games

or the Maze Runner or the Divergent

series. These young adolescent

protagonists are thrust into life and

death competitions or experiments by a

society in disarray all around them.

The settings are desolate city streets

and burntout buildings, factory or

mining towns that have become forced

labor camps contrasted with flamboyant

garish wealth in the capital.

Harsh scorched landscapes, darkened

skies, hollowed eyes, and gaunt figures.

These worlds, they've become more and

more a central feature of our collective

imagination

as the once steadfast temples of our

society, of our social structures have

begun to look more and more like rubble.

Others of course have called this era

not the polyene but the anthroposine.

This era where human beings through our

use of the planet and destruction of its

resources for the comfort of our lives

have begun to reshape the entire ecology

of our world.

John Green, you might know the um

brilliant author of a number of books.

He he put out a podcast that then became

an audio book called The Anthroposine

Reviewed.

He had the insight that uh online

reviews, you know, the ubiquitous little

paragraphs on Yelp or Google or wherever

you find your little online review to

know whether to go to the hairdresser or

not.

He he realized that and end all of them

end with a you know the rating from one

to five stars that then be aggregated

for our feeds.

He noticed that the that form was

actually a a kind of memoir

and so he thought he might go about

sharing his own memoir by reviewing the

anthroposine.

From the querty keyboard, which he gave

four stars,

to CNN, two stars,

to scratch and stiff stickers, three and

a half stars,

to the Lascow cave paintings and diet

Dr. Pepper and Haley's Comet, all four

and a half stars.

At one point, Green takes on sunsets.

What are we to do about the clichéed

beauty of a really phenomenal sunset?

Like whenever I see the sun sink down

below a distant horizon as the yellows

and oranges and pinks flood the sky, I

inevitably think this looks like a

picture that has been extensively

photoshopped.

When I see the natural world at its most

spectacular, my general impression is

that more than anything, it looks fake.

What does it take to awaken us? to snap

us out of the lull, the the deadening

lull

that all of our screens and diet doctors

would enable us to pass through this

poly crisis in

how might we wake up to encounter the

beauty of the world with fresh eyes.

Sometimes it takes a crisis.

We had a crisis like that in our family

this week.

Driving down to the hospital on Stanford

campus to hold vigil around my

mother-in-law. We left early in the

morning after waking up to a 3:00 a.m.

message from the hospital. Now is the

time.

Driving down that stretch of 280, down

the peninsula, the stretch that goes

between the green hills this time of

year into

the beauty

of this beloved place we live. The fog

had come in across the freeway and the

rising sun shined through it. And I

turned to my wife Caitlyn in the back

seat with Robin and said, "They looks

like the gates of heaven are opening

before us."

Hours and hours later, holding vigil

bedside, all of our bodies wearying and

tired, I took Robin out for a walk

around the campus and was led to Rhdan's

sculpture garden there. I'd never been

and I'd never seen before

the gates of hell.

Rodan's

masterpiece work. This work that took

him 37 years of his life working on

it. He was left unfinished.

The building that he was commissioned to

create it for was never built.

But he left us this great gates of hell,

this sculpture of bodies twisting and

turning in the image of Dante's inferno,

writhing,

anguished. And you don't have to believe

in hell to know what he's showing us.

To know what it means to live through

desperate times, to feel desperate

feelings.

And like the moment we were in, the

whole thing was too much, overwhelming,

more than I could process.

the original Hanukkah story,

that one Katherine told about the

Mcabes.

It's a story about that kind of anguish,

writhing in conflict over identity and

assimilation.

The story, the true story of the Mcabes

is much more complicated than the

version even Katherine told or that I

remember hearing at the JCC growing up.

Not simply a liberator gerilla army, but

a group of religious fundamentalists.

The Mcabes felt compelled not only to

overthrow the tyranny

of the colonizer,

but also then to enforce their religious

vision

through the same violence that they used

to free their temple.

In the second chapter of the first book

of the Mcabes, the father Mcabe Matias

is depicted slaughtering a Jewish

idoltor.

One of his fellow Jewish

members of the of the citizenry who

believed in a more assimilatory

approach.

He's quoted there as saying, "Whoever is

zealous for the law and stands by the

covenant, let him follow me standing

over this slain fellow Jew."

Rabbi Benjamin Winer writes about this

as he reflects on Hanukkah in a time of

conflict. He describes realizing that

the other Hanukkah story about the

manora and the light and the oil

It was an invention of rabbis centuries

later who described the ritual of the

holiday in the Talmud, deliberately

leaving out any mention of the Mcabes.

In the Talmud, he says, "The Kaneka

miracle is one of persistence and divine

intervention with no indication that it

was the result of guerrilla warfare.

The light amidst the dark becomes a

celebratory symbol, a unifying and

palatable ritual of beauty, something to

cozy up with, to snuggle close to at the

winter solstice.

So he tries to hold these two images

together of the sword of the Mcabes and

the candle of the manora, inviting us to

find a way to live with both, to own and

understand both as our own, not to let

ourselves be satisfied by the simplicity

of a go down easy story.

Green quotes all the beautiful words

that have been spilled by the greatest

writers about sunsets.

Then he asks, "So, how might we approach

a sunset without being mockish or

saccharine?"

Maybe stated in cold facts, here's what

happens.

Before a beam of sunlight gets to your

eyes, it has many, many interactions

with molecules that cause the so-called

scattering of light.

Different wavelengths are set off in

different directions when interacting

with, say, oxygen or nitrogen in the

atmosphere. But at sunset,

the light travels through the atmosphere

longer before it reaches our eyes.

So that much of the blue and purple has

scattered away before it reaches us,

leaving the sky to our eyes, rich in

reds and pinks and oranges. As the

artist Tacidadine put it, "Color is a

fiction of light."

Have you been enjoying the remarkable

sunsets we've been having lately?

One of our staff members was talking

this week about the moment they try and

catch each day here in the office to go

out and remember go out here. This is if

you haven't seen a sunset here. That's

why we started doing that church to sole

gathering. You said come come Saturday

night. We're going to gather around for

the sunset in the winter solstice.

It's a thing to see. We catch it

sometimes. Sometimes it's foggy.

But I understand that the truth is that

the stunning sunsets we get this time of

year, they come about because of the

terrible air quality created by

all of the smoke from people heating

their homes.

A poly scene.

E Cummings

took on sunsets.

Son of a Unitarian minister. This

beloved poet said it like this. Who are

you? Little I five or six years old.

peering from some high window at the

gold of November sunset.

And if and feeling

that if day has to become night,

this is a beautiful way.

And feeling that if day has to become

night, this this is a beautiful way.

And it's a day when 280 opens at the

gates of heaven and you stumble on

Rodan's gates of hell and somehow life

and death are held in between. It's the

moment when you gather with your family

and friends around the deathbed and

there's mostly quiet and handholding and

waiting that allows the spoken words and

quick releases of laughter and tears to

become

a beautiful way

for day to turn to night.

It's how we find miracles amidst the

rubble. How we re reconsecrate the

temple. How we remember the magic of

childhood as the sky darkens and we wait

to catch the last moment of light from

the last candle melting down.

It's a good poem, Green says.

But it only works because Cummings

situates the observation in childhood

when one is presumably too innocent to

have yet realized how lame it is to

write about sunsets.

That voice of cynicism we were talking

about last week so easily at hand. Such

a powerful player on the stage of the

anthroposine.

It's already seen it all. Already knows

it all. can't imagine being surprised or

delighted or moved because how lame is

it to try and say anything meaningful

anymore.

I mean really

to find a miracle amidst the rubble.

Look closer. The miracle is just more

rubble, more cliche, another holiday

underpinned by violence, another ritual

steeped in colonialism. It is rotten to

the core.

We're way too mature to be moved by any

of this.

But finally, Green does rescue himself

from the cynicism or is rescued maybe

offers us a guidepost as well.

It says, "My dog died last year.

But one of my great memories of him is

playing in the front yard of our first

house at dusk.

He was a puppy then and in the early

evenings he would always come down with

a case of the zooies.

He'd run in delighted circles around us,

yipping and jumping at nothing in

particular. And then after a while, he'd

get tired and he'd run over to me and

he'd lie down. And then he would do

something absolutely extraordinary.

He would roll over onto his back

and present his soft belly.

I always marveled at the courage of

that. He says his ability to be so

absolutely vulnerable to us to offer us

the place that ribs don't protect and

trust that we weren't going to bite or

stab him.

It's so hard to trust the world like

that to show it your belly.

Our dog has been getting the zooies

lately, too.

Just at dusk, right when Robin, our

10-week old, is also feeling the

witching hour.

I get overwhelmed by all the noise and

motion, the awful crying that I feel

helpless to adequately respond to, and I

get infuriated by the dog whose needs I

don't understand.

And it must have been one of those

moments

that I started thinking if any of us, if

any adult cried the way an infant cries,

the intensity and the frequency of an

infant, we would be institutionalized.

And so how impressive it must be really

that any of us are able to do whatever

we do. that you got up and got dressed

and made it to sit in a pew this morning

without wailing.

The extraordinary pain of what it means

to be alive, to be a human being.

The extraordinary writhing and agony and

anguish

that all of us have somehow figured out

how to cope with.

to take the dog out, to read

post-apocalyptic young adult fiction,

to find the manora, and remember to

light the candles, even if just five out

of the eight nights.

How much we're managing every day caught

writhing between the gates of hell and

aruck at the gates of heaven.

So when I'm lucky,

in the midst of the whining and the

growling, the bouncing up and down with

the screams in my ear, I catch a a

glimpse, just a glimpse out the back

door where the black branches of the

plum and pimmen trees, holding on to a

few last leaves cradle the orange sky.

And I feel so lucky to live here with

the big glass back door and a yard

facing out to the west on a planet that

keeps miraculously spinning me toward

the sun again and again.

Worth it comes the blessing of the

candle in the dark. Even as I grit my

teeth and try to get through the

witching hour without adding my own

whales to the cacophony.

Perched

at top the gates of hell is the thinker.

That famous statue that Rodan called

originally the poet.

there amidst it all. Staying present to

all that anguish and yet

watching,

noticing,

letting

the strange alchemy

of suffering turning to beauty occur

within the human soul.

and so right screen I try to turn toward

that sacred light belly out

and I tell myself this doesn't look like

a picture it is a sunset and it is

wildly beautiful

and this whole thing you've been doing

where almost nothing gets five stars

because nothing is perfect. That's

So much is perfect. Starting

with this.

Green gives sunsets his first five-star

review.

May it be so. And amen.