We gather in the nervous joy of a new beginning (not that I'm nervous or anything). And it is fitting that we do so in these days that celebrate the birth of the world and the inherent capacity of the world for newness, renewal — these High Holy Days, and this new year's day, Rosh Hashana. It means the Head of the Year, and so it is.

The ancient ritual of Rosh Hashana recalls where we have been, through what we have come, the overwhelming waters and the flooding tears, the glimmering vistas from mountain-peaks and the promise of what might be. It reminds us of both the promise and the vulnerability of life.

I chose to begin the year this way because there is a depth in these words that we don't normally achieve, a depth that captures the truth of this sometimes precarious journey of life. We think the world changed a year ago, but the world has always had these dimensions, and we are wiser, and better, and larger, when we see those dimensions of life, and feel them, and are not blind and insensitive to them.

The world that is to be is ours to make — ours, the those children's whom we sang out to Sunday school a few minutes ago.

We gather celebrating a new year and a new beginning. But we gather, too, in the shadow of an inconceivable day a year ago, when a perfectly clear, magnificent September day in New York was turned to a mass of choking smoke, dust, and unimaginable debris, a sunless, apocalyptic horror. Three thousand people underwent a horror we don't even know how to conceive.

Utter vulnerability! No Strategic Defence Initiative could have prevented a bit of it and most Americans believe it will happen again, and soon.

A year later the cycle of vengeance grinds on, burns and crushes forward. Bin Laden is still at large, and Mullah Omar.

Terrorist movements can always find those who will think they're doing a favour for God and don't mind dying in the effort, especially when somebody has promised them subsequent reward, in paradise: Because the fuel for the inferno of their designs is the resentful bitterness of the world's dispossessed, so long bulleyed and exploited.

We wondered: would our nation, our leaders, learn, become wiser? The heartbreaking answer was seen, among other ways, last week.

The leaders of the world gathered in Johannesburg for an Earth Summit, and our president has made a point of snubbing the Earth Summit, while our own government, together with OPEC, was busy killing what seemed like an almost certain agreement to set firm targets for conversion to renewable energy sources, in favor of continued growth of fossil fuels. And the message grinds on: consume more, burn more fossil fuels, grab more, there is no crisis another war won't solve. And meanwhile the growing disparity between the richest and the poorest is nowhere more shameful than in the United States. And meanwhile, the world seethes.

There are deadly dangerous forces at work out there. Some of them really do hate freedom. Some religious, like the Taliban, want to extend the domain of their god or religion. But others simply seethe from deep wells of rage because they, and their people, and generations of their people, have been crushed, beaten down, spat upon, shut out, exiled. And too often, the United States has shown too much regard for "National Interest," and too little for the state of our sister and brother human beings or of the earth itself.

And so I turn to the call of these High Holy Days. The terms and conditions of life in this world must change, and they will change when a new humanity rises. It is time, the hour has come, for another step in the evolution of consciousness.

Is this political? Of course it is. Is it spiritual? Utterly or it is a monster. Else there is only the escalating cycle of vengeance. Can we find the way of Love?

Yes, it has political implications, because politics means what we do among us, between us, the arrangements we make, the terms and conditions by which we run our public life. Internationally it means acting like we care about what happens to the Palestinian people, about what it feels like for the rest of the world to be pushed around by its singular super-power.

Some years back, we cared too little about what happened to the Jewish people. I offer you the example of the New York Times, owned by Jews, which received reports about the death camps, and buryied those reports deep inside the paper because of their own discomfort in the face of American antisemitism. It took far too much to bring America to the side of Britain and the remaining free world in the fight against Nazism. Giants of American industry could be seen smiling and chatting with Hitler as they explored opportunities for the expansion of their businesses in Germany.

Our government is us, acting on our behalf, and we have to hold it to a higher standard, and people it with people of moral vision and courage. We must give our leaders no rest. We have to pay attention. We have to take the time and pay attention.

But none of that will do us any good if we do not first attend to our inner life, if we do not finally come home to the divine Love that is our highest human capacity, and commit ourselves to live in that Love and out of that Love and to be consumed by that Love. Is there something more important?

Listen. Whatever we achieve by way of social action, whatever impact for good is to come of our being here, — will be an expression of that Love that yearns to find expression in a more evolved humanity — or it will be worse than worthless.

I believe that is why you are here. I believe that is why 177 years ago a few daring souls broke from the tradition of Jonathan Edwards, so negative about the capacities of human beings for good —

I believe that is why they dared to found this congregation; — why C.C. Burleigh, whose portrait hangs in the social hall, thundered week after week in Cosmian Hall in Florence — where that noble covenant with which we began today's service was proclaimed and cherished.

Is there any hope for the world, or are our dreams to end in a nightmare like the scene burned into our memories a year ago?

Sometimes we think we are secure, and neglect the fact of our vulnerability. Let our vulnerability remind us of the futility of our too-customary reliance on appearances and hype.

Let us face our real task in this world, for ourselves, for our children, that a new humanity may arise.

The horrors of this past year are an ugly, sickening symptom of what is wrong with the terms and conditions by which our public life is conducted, of the spiritual sickness at the heart of it.

Yet in this microcosm of the world that is the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence, let us guarantee that, coming clear through the settling ashes, there is evidence of a fairer, most just world, a clear expression of the love that draws you here, so that this Society shall be and remain an embodiment of that love, and its beacon.

I believe we're all thinking this week about what is going on at the soul of our nation. And we have to think about our place in all this, and the place of our great Unitarian Universalist religious movement.

Our story is so bound up with the dream of America: a dream part realized, part gone bad.

One London morning in early April a year and a half ago, tired from a late night of faxing off those necessary letters to Washington about the abandonment of the Kyoto Protocol, I walked along the glorious Thames to Essex Hall, the British Unitarian Headquarters, for a visit with Jeff Teagle, the General Secretary. He said he had something he wanted to show me but he wasn't going to tell me what until I saw it, and so we went down to the strong room, a basement archive that had survived a direct hit from a Nazi V1 that destroyed the original Essex Hall.

From a shelf he drew down an ancient book with two bronze latches. On the leather cover, in faded script, "Unitarian Society." Inside, the early records of the forerunner of what became the British Unitarian Association.¹ There are minutes of their meetings, held in some tavern. In attendance are the great ones (Don't worry, you won't know all these names; I didn't know them all then, either!): Theophilus Lindsey (Benjamin Franklin's minister), Thomas Fyshe Palmer, Thomas Belsham, Joseph Priestley, Richard Price. There is a letter, dated November, in 1791, to Joseph Priestley expressing their support, appreciation, and moral indignation at his recent persecution at Birmingham, where, because of his visionary ideas, including his support for the American and French Revolutions — a mob has burned his library, and his chapel, home, and scientific laboratory. It was a tremendously moving tribute to him — and then there is the response from Priestley, before he fled England and the burned-out ruins and continual threats on his life [at Hackney] and set sail for America in 1794.

In Aberdeen and in London and Oxford, I searched the stories of Unitarians who dreamed of a better world, a better place. They lived under oppressive regimes that ran crazy wars, restricted civil liberties, made life miserable for poor people, and punished you if you didn't conform to the official state religion. These Unitarians lifted their voices, dared to speak and publish, of their vision of something beyond what the world had ever yet seen.

And they were always going to sail to America. There was Thomas Fyshe Palmer, a former Anglican curate who became the leading light of the new Unitarianism in Scotland. And there was Gilbert Wakefield, a Unitarian minister and professor. I first came across Wakefield's name a few years ago — someone wrote of him, and I quote, "some strange stove raged inside him." Both Palmer and Wakefield planned to sail to America, but William Pitt's regime tried and convicted Thomas Fyshe Palmer of sedition and shipped him off to the Britain's new penal colony at Botany Bay in Australia, by way of a truly terrible journey on a ship called the Surprise; and the same regime threw Gilbert Wakefield into the Dorchester Gaol for a couple of years, and he died. Neither one ever made it to America.

I found the little chapel² in east London — where the Unitarian theologian Richard Price held forth, publishing his daring pamphlets in support of the American Revolution, exchanging endless letters with his friends, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Benjamin Rush — all of them Unitarians and Universalists, as you know. Franklin offered him the position of Secretary of the Treasury if he would come to America. Richard Price is now recognized by some scholars as the most important theoretician of the American Revolution, but he never got here.

Two actually made it — the Unitarian theologian and scientist Joseph Priestley, and the Universalist preacher John Murray — but they found no utopia. Their work here was hard, and discouraging.

And for all their trouble, I swear, a couple of centuries on, they might wish they had stayed home. The American Revolution was compromised from the start, morally compromised by the slavocracy at the South that always controlled American politics, and by a corresponding greed for riches and power at the north. Dreams and disillusionment — Just consider Jefferson: who penned among the most inspired words in any language, in the Declaration of Independence, and who still, when he died, owned 130 slaves to support his aristocratic lifestyle.

We are driven by dreams of better things, and over and over again, we are disappointed, disillusioned.

The great twentieth-century theologian Paul Tillich held that three things make us human:

we have possibility;

we hold within ourselves a dream of better things, and

we are finite.

We are possessed of a dream of that glorious golden city, we have the possibility of making parts of our dream real, but we are finite — a mixture of living and dying, with both possibility and limits. Even while we are thwarted and disillusioned, there burns within us something other creatures cannot know — a dream of a better world, a better life, an unquenchable fire, the strange stove that raged in Gilbert Wakefield and C.C. Burleigh, and rages in you.

The Indian mystic and philosopher Aurobindo described us humans in these words:

This strange irrational product of the mire,

This compromise between the beast and God.

There are those who would dismiss this raging stove in us, this dream, as fantasy, a delusion, at best, terribly unrealistic; at worst, anti-spiritual because our dream of a better world disturbs our peace.

But is it a delusion? Consider where we have come, drawn, driven — by this dream, the journey of the life of this universe.

Five billion years ago the earth was only a mass of heat, gasses, and fumes, conditions that could not have supported life. Yet two billion years ago life appeared, primitive life, and in the universe of two billion years ago there was no place for reason, will, and or intelligence. No sign even of blind animal instinct; certainly no light of consciousness. But through long ages the dream unfolded and found expression in human consciousness and the magnificence of what we are.

So I ask: Can this journey that began with inanimate matter, that brought forth life and summoned it ashore from the deep earth and sea, and brought forth Mozart and Shakespeare and the tender affections of the human heart — can this journey end in blood and bombs, whether in Northern Ireland, or Ramallah, or Zimbabwe, in the violence of 300 million handguns in American homes, in ecological collapse, or in a war in the heavens waged with lasers — as treaties are torn asunder? Can it be? Is this dream only a delusion?

Can we join with William Ellery Channing, the great 19th-century Unitarian who defined our movement, when he responded:

Oh, no. I do not dream when I speak of the divine capacities of human nature.

Look again at that liturgy for Rosh Hashana.

"We may not wait for peace to fall like rain upon us. Peace will remain a distant vision until we do the work of peace ourselves. If peace is to be brought into the world, we must bring it first to our families and communities. Seek peace and pursue it.

"But as night follows day, the candle of our life burns down and gutters. There is an end to the flames. We see no more and are no more seen.

"Yet we do not despair, for we are more than a memory slowly fading into the darkness. With our lives we give life. Something of us can never die: we move in the eternal cycle of darkness and death, in light and life.

"Love is the thread that binds our lives in a lasting fabric which time shall fray,

"Which time shall fray, but only to be rewoven by each generation. Each generation will lift the fallen to their feet and hold them as they learn to walk. And as they learn to walk, the sickness of our time will be healed by those who drink deep from the wells of truth.

"From wells of truth they will draw strength to keep faith with those who sleep in the dust."

v

It is a New Year, marking new time and new possibility, a new world that must begin with new humans. For this task we gather, in the presence, somehow, of those who have been here before us.

The task is immense, and it is forever. You cannot, all by yourself, save the world. This generation will die, and the task will not be done. But something of us will never die; and what we do, and what we choose, the dream we pursue, will matter forever. And that is why we gather.

May we be together in silence.

¹ The British and Foreign Unitarian Association was founded on the same May 1825 day as the American Unitarian Association; it was succeeded by the General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches.

² At Stoke Newington — now Newington Green, London. It is the oldest dissenting chapel in London still in use by its original congregation, but it is a tiny one.