It's during this season of High Holy Days that our most deeply cherished Unitarian Universalist religious values seem most like those cherished in Judaism.

That word that serves as my title today — "Repent" — represents the Hebrew word at the top of your order of meeting, "t'shuv," — literally, "to turn." And that word, "repent," holds very different connotations in Judaism than it does in the fundamentalist Christianity of my youth.

There, the word was heavily loaded with the thick gloom of depravity — a view of human beings made famous by John Calvin and perpetuated by Jonathan Edwards and countless pulpits and revivalist evangelists up to the present.

Depravity — the doctrine that matches our worst despair on our worst days when we are tempted to believe that we really are full of exactly what our worst critics say we are full of!

And sometimes we might feel like that. You have just disappointed yourself, been very small, displayed your ugliest qualities, and you wonder, Maybe I really am depraved, and, as John Calvin taught, incapable of any good!

They felt like that one day down in Enfield, in 1741, when the Congregational minister in Northampton when down to preach to them. This is what he said in his sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God:" Now, there was a great deal more to the mind of Jonathan Edwards, but this he deeply believed. You've read it in a literature class:

Yes, God is a great deal more angry with many that are now in this congregation than he is with many of those who are now in the flames of hell.

Unconverted people walk over the pit of hell on a rotten covering, and there are innumerable places in this covering so weak that they will not bear their weight, and these places are not seen.

Your wickedness makes you as it were heavy as lead, and to tend downwards with great weight and pressure towards hell; and if God should let you go, you would immediately sink and swiftly descend and plunge into the bottomless gulf, and all your righteousness would have no more influence to uphold you and keep you out of hell, than a spider's web would have to stop a fallen rock. Were it not for the sovereign pleasure of God, the earth would not bear you one moment; for you are a burden to it; the creation groans with you; the sun does not willingly shine upon you to give you light to serve sin and Satan; the earth does not willingly yield its increase to satisfy your lusts . . .

The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathesome insect over the fire, abhors, you, and is dreadfully provoked; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are a thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venemous serpent is in ours. It is to be ascribed to nothing else but his hand, that you did to go to hell the last night; that you was suffered to awake again in this world. And there is no other reason to be given why you have not dropped into hell, since you have sat here in the house of God, provoking his pure eyes by your sinful wicked manner of attending his solemn worship.

Ever feel like that? The folks in Enfield felt like that a lot of the time. A contemporary account of it says that in spite of Edwards's monotone preaching and the sermon's two-hour length, the assembly was "deeply impressed and bowed down, with an awful conviction of their sin and danger. There was such a breathing of distress and weeping, that the preacher was obliged to speak to the people and desire silence, that he might be heard."

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So, there you are. And there was I in my former life in that fundamentalist church in Toms River, New Jersey, quaking before an angry God. You're a complete mess. You are such a deplorable mess that God's son, who is also God, had to die to appease the wrath of an angry Father-God. And he's still angry. Oh my.

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So it was no small thing for those first New England Unitarians to say that Edwards and Calvin had it all wrong, that human beings are not born so corrupt at heart that they are in themselves incapable of any good.

They said, instead, that humanity is the crown of all creation, at least all the creation we know of. Yes, sometimes we crash and burn. Sometimes we lose our way. Sometimes we let ourselves be led by our most primitive instincts rather than our highest capacities, which are the fruit of the amazing journey of the evolution of life, and the emergence and growth of human consciousness.

But sometimes — we regress and lose our way and crash and burn. Or — miss the mark. To miss the mark is really what the biblical word for sin means. In Hebrew, it's chyet. In Greek, it's hamartia.

Which brings me to my reason for talking about all this on the morning before the holiest day of the Jewish year, Yom Kippur.

In Jewish theology, sin means just what literally it says in both the Hebrew, and still in the Greek of the New Testament.

There is nothing in all the known universe as grand and magnificent as our humanity, nothing so expressive of the divine Life of this living universe. And sin means betraying the magnitude and grandeur of what we are, our highest human capacities. Sometimes we miss the mark Sometimes our missteps take monstrous proportions — because we have godlike capacities.

But that is not because are, in our essence, fallen and depraved, but like arrows that have gotten off course, we have sometimes missed the mark, and we can help one another get back on course. That is what these high holy days are for.

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There are a lot of ways of missing-the-mark. During the High Holy Days services, litanies are repeated that consist of long lists of different kinds of sins — so that eventually, you will likely come to a few of your own specialties, and then you can say them in a way that combines privacy with community. You don't have to point out to anyone else which ones are yours, unless, of course, there's somebody you've offended and whose forgiveness you need to ask.

Different kinds of missing-the-mark. There are the shared, public things. There are the private things.

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Which brings me to the ancient story of Jonah. I mentioned it in passing last year. But consider Jonah: the prophet sent to the wicked city of Ninevah. He was supposed to tell them to repent.

At first the story is all about public sins. Jonah went to preach doom to Ninevah because of public sins — much like Jonathan Edwards, going down to Enfield.

And what was so bad about Ninevah?

It was the capital of the Assyrian empire. Jonah and the people of his day knew Assyria as the power that had not long before conquered the northern Kingdom of Israel, obliterating it from the earth. To them, Ninevah's brutal imperialism was a very big bad public sin.

But wait. Let's bring this home. Let's give Ninevah a contemporary face. I'm making this up, of course, but just imagine. They've got a corrupt campaign finance system, best politicians money can buy because the people are too lazy to take democracy seriously, and these politicians are owned and operated by big corporate polluters.

So they'll do anything to get more oil and tell the public, who in the hearts know better, that it's really to make the world safe and rescue the people from the very dictator they'd supported just a few years prior, and they all choose to believe it, even though in the heart of hearts they know it isn't so. Meanwhile they do nothing at all about the choking, sickening filth that increasingly envelopes the earth, and the people of the largest district in the great kingdom are about to choose as governor somebody who owns five Hummers.

Now of course I'm making this up. Ninevah couldn't possiblyhave been this blatantly crazed. But just imagine.

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Now — Jonah.

In this Jonah story, we learn something we really have to understand.

Sometimes we have to do the work of the prophet, and call us all in our public life to account for our public sins and to turn. And in doing this work of the prophet, with which we're sometimes uncomfortable and sometimes all too comfortable — we learn where our own demons are.

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Yup! Jonah; — a religious figure sillier even than us. You know his story. It could have ended mercifully at any number of points but it doesn't — goes on for painful chapter after painful chapter, in which the silly fool makes unseemly display of his thirst for vengeance and his downright depression at the happy outcome, when Ninevah actually repents.

I want to draw your gaze toward another player in the same melodrama that Jonah is about. Someone who never leaves us for very long . . . an inescapable companion who sometimes tyrannizes us, sends us down into beast-bellies and out on unbelievable voyages. It's that demon in his own belly, Jonah's shadow.

They're actually filling Ninevah's sky and earth and water with filth because it's cheaper and more profitable in the short range. Their factories are using virtual slave labor, which the public loves because it means lower consumer prices for the entire family.

It's not just a public sin; it's everybody's private sin. After all — Whose lifestyle demands the unceasing escalation of production and exploitation? Whose styrofoam cups are those in the landfill?

But look closer, please.

Jonah's gonna be a prophet, to deliver to the people of Ninevah the call to t'shuvah and transformation.

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First, he doesn't want to do it in the first place. He found an excuse. A whale has to deliver him to Ninevah because he won't get on the plane. First he resists Destiny and Call. Why would he do that? Why would you? The answer's easy. Because it's hard. Maybe even impossible. But he has to do it.

We share a public life; we are not islands separate to ourselves. It isn't just me and my guilt, me and my personal salvation, me and my personal growth. There are times when we must speak out because human society stands at the brink of an abyss, or because human society is betraying its highest possibilities. This religious movement of ours is a prophetic one.

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But it isn't just that. Jonah has a more subtle sin of his own: the people of Ninevah actually do repent, and that's where the substance hits the fan for Jonah. The way he feels about humanity, and presumably his own humanity, is about the way Jonathan Edwards did. He's deeply cynical about human beings. He doesn't really believe in any human capacity to turn, and transcend itself, and fulfill its destiny. What he is missing the magnitude of the human, the seed of the possible hidden in this rubble. Couldn't imagine these people ever being any different. Couldn't imagine himself changing, growing, either. Maybe in his own private life he has not found gentle ways to live his days — maybe he himself has not learned that it's really possible to live in some degree of harmony with the earth and its people. Maybe he thinks he cannot do without the cheap products made by slave labor, and the SUV and the styrofoam cups. Maybe he hasn't found the inner resources to treat his neighbors with kindness.

So Jonah rather enjoys preaching judgment. He projects his own shadow side on Ninevah. His inner demons want Ninevah destroyed, not transformed and healed and forgiven. Why do we need enemies, evil empires?

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But he's got this problem. He's still working on his own spiritual development. The storyteller wants you to know that God is quite aware of Jonah's demons of bitter cynicism, but has called him anyway. Because you can't wait for all your inner demons to go away first before you pursue your calling. We just have to remember that when we call the world to t'shuv or turn that we are always part of our own audience and that we must maintain our own very personal responsiveness to the message we preach.

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So look at Jonah. He will have to pass through the belly of a whale and come out transformed. He will come to see things differently. He will come to see that the message to turn, to repent, is a stupendously hopeful message.

Samuel Johnson, my favorite Transcendentalist reformer, got it right when he said that the person who "is constantly throwing slurs at the moral reformer as [an impractical] visionary" thinks it's crazy to think you can "change organic tendencies, and [expect] to abolish the strifes and abuses this bad human nature is made for." He goes on:

The reformer's criticism implies the profoundest faith . . . He would hold is tongue forever if he did not feel absolute certainty that the people and parties he critises . . . are capable of being masters of nobler ground than they hold . . . His rebukes are the highest compliment that can be paid them . . . But this Jonah, who sees in him[self] a mere scold, is the very opposite of a believer; the prophet has gone out of him. Religious pessimism . . . has necessitated — it only — the theory of an atonement . . . to save a lost or naturally incapable race.²

Johnson himself knew all about the contempt in which reformers can be held by cynical people. He was fired by a Unitarian church³ in Dorchester because its members were too cynical to hear his anti-slavery preaching.

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Whether it is a private missing the mark, or a public one, this is the time to turn. I have come to value this time of year, which feels more like a new year than January does, as a time for turning. A time to remind one another, and support one another, call one another and nurture one another in this process. To take some time apart for this work.

Michael Lerner asks, "Imagine if the entire society, not just Jews, were to dedicate a ten-day period each year to collective self-examination and communal transformation."⁴ Imagine if we were to do that, make it a part of our congregational life. And why not?

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Herman Hesse called human life an experiment. Some would say it's an experiment that failed, like the dinosaurs. There's no doubt that some of our actions are making us an endangered species. We have partly developed our godlike capacities, enough to be a very serious menace to all planetary life. Those capacities must be further developed through struggle, and the pain we feel when we face our own failures.

The t'shuvah, turning to which we must call ourselves and others cannot be just a return to ancient laws and ways. Norman O. Brown writes:⁵

To start a new civilization . . . to change the imagination of the masses . . . . The evolution of humanity inevitably begins with prophecy.

He explains this a little when he says that religions that are not prophetic when they simply ask us to return to some former golden age or impose some rigid and outworn standard or solution, all tragically in vain. And so he says this:

[Great and visionary religious literature like the Koran or William Blake or Finnegans Wake] shows us preexistent traditions, Jewish, Christian, Hellenistic, pulverized into condensed atoms . . . of meaning: . . . Out of this dust the world is to be made new."

Journeys of turning and transformation — through bellies of whales, pulverized into condensed atoms. Sometimes, we feel pulverized.

We feel the pain of our missteps and failures because inwardly we know our pain comes from a depth the divine in which we have our being, from the fountainhead of Life itself, from the roaring engine of creativity that burns inside us.

So I want to leave you with a few more words from the Reform Jewish High Holy Days prayerbook, The Gates of Repentance:

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This is the day of awe. What are we? A leaf in the storm, a fleeting moment in the flow of time, a whisper lost among the stars.

Time, like a river, rolls on, flowing year after year into the sea of eternity. Its passing leaves bitter memories of hours misspent. Now they come back to accuse us, and we tremble to think of them.

For the sin of silence

For the sin of indifference.

For the secret complicity of the neutral.

For the closing of border,

For the washing of hands,

For all that was done,

For all that was not done,

But a greater purpose gives meaning to our fleeting days; ancient teachers guide us; and divine love sustains us.

Let us be delivered from bondage to the past; released from the stranglehold of the habitual.

Let this be for us the beginning of a new season of life and health.

Liberate us from the fear of death.

We, dust and ashes, are endowed with divinity; compounded of clay, we live in dimensions clay cannot enter, regions where the air vibrates with [a Divine] presence.

This is the day of our atonement. We confess our sins on this day, knowing that the gates of repentance are always open.

In this world waiting to be redeemed, our hearts cry out:

Cannot our dearest hopes at last come true?

May we share a silence

And in the silence know the

Immensity Beyond Silence

that embraces us

and

calls us.

¹ 32:35

² Samuel Johnson, in sermon "Living by Faith." In Lectures, Essays, and Sermons by Samuel Johnson with a Memoir by Samuel Longfellow, p. 397.

³ at Harrison Square.

⁴ Michael Lerner. Jewish Renewal (New York: Harper Collins, 1994), p. 371.

⁵ Norman O. Brown. Apocalypsse and/or Metamorphosis. Berkeley: University of California Press, 199.

Litany for Yom Kippur

Born of love to love, we grow weary, heavy with regret, sorry for ourselves, and afraid to know what might have been.

Look now to the cities:

see the broken streets, poor and decayed, and all afraid.

See them and ask: What have we done?

Behold the water and air and soil, and see:

Still we beat plowshares into swords,

and make spears out of pruning hooks.

Disfigured lies the human form divine, estranged from its center! "Your iniquities have separated you from your God."

Vision fades as the Presence recedes;

the voice grows still.

We are alone, all alone, our meaning unremembered.

Here, now, we need not be alone with our failings.

Let us recall, together, blessed moments when clouds parted and the sun appeared.

We looked. We saw.

There was healing and the joy of hope.

Life of life, turn us to the heights where human goodness finds its dwelling; lead us home.

Parting

There are moments when we hear the call of our higher selves, that links us to the divine.

Then we know how blessed we are with life and love. May this be such a moment, a time of deeper attachments to the godlike in us and in our world.

This is the time;

P: We are the people.

All: BE IT SO!

MEDITATION: A Litany for the High Holy Days

Who can say: I have purified my heart, and am free from sin?

There are none on earth so righteous that they never sin.

Cast away all the evil you have done, and get yourselves a new heart and a new spirit.

A new heart will I give you, a new spirit put within you. I will remove the heart of stone, and give you a heart that feels.

Once more Atonement Day has come.

All pretense gone, naked heart revealed to the hiding self,

We stand on holy ground, between the day that was and the one that must be.

We tremble.

At what did we aim? How did we stumble?

What did we take? What did we give? To what were we blind?

Awake, you sleepers, from your sleep! Rouse yourselves, you slumberers, out of your slumber! Examine your deeds, and turn.

Remember who you are, you who are wasting your years in vain pursuits that neither profit nor save. Look closely at yourselves, your ways and your deeds, every one of you!

On this day the fate of nations is in the balance _ for war or peace, for famine or plenty.

So too with every single creature: life and death are in the balance.

Every mortal's record is set forth: our acts and our schemes, our thoughts and desires.

RESPONSIVE READING: A Litany for Yom Kippur

Our origin is dust,

and dust is our end.

Each of us is a shattered urn

grass that must wither,

a flower that will fade,

a shadow moving on

a cloud passing by,

a particle of dust floating on the wind,

a dream soon forgotten.

But there is That which is our life and the life of all; there is an Immensity beyond the everlasting silence.