Today, like every other day, we wake up empty And frightened. Don t open the door to the study and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.

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1 The Rev. Dr. Anita Farber-Robertson First Parish UU in Northboro, MA 3/20/16 Palm Sunday 1 Call to Worship Today, like every other day, we wake up empty And frightened. Don t open the door to the study and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument. Let the beauty we love, be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.. -Rumi, Translated by Coleman Barks First Reading From Take This Bread, by Sara Miles One early, cloudy morning when I was forty-six, I walked into a church, ate a piece of bread, took a sip of wine. A routine Sunday activity for tens of millions of Americansexcept that up until that moment I d led a thoroughly secular life, at best indifferent to religion, more often appalled by its fundamentalist crusades. This was my first communion. It changed everything. The mysterious sacrament turned out to be not a symbolic wafer at all, but actual food-indeed, the bread of life. In that shocking moment of communion, filled with a deep desire to reach for and become part of a body, I realized that what I d been doing with my life all along was what I was meant to do: feed people.

2 The Rev. Dr. Anita Farber-Robertson First Parish UU in Northboro, MA 3/20/16 Palm Sunday 2 And so I did. I took communion, I passed the bread to others, and then I kept going, compelled to find new ways to share what I d experienced. I started a food pantry and gave away literally tons of fruit and vegetables and cereal around the same altar where I d first received the body of Christ. I organized new pantries all over my city to provide hundreds and hundreds of hungry families with free groceries each week. Without committees or meetings or even an official telephone number, I recruited scores of volunteers and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars. My new vocation didn t turn out to be as simple as going to church on Sunday, folding my hands in the pews, and declaring myself saved. Nor did my volunteer church work mean talking kindly to poor folks and handing them the occasional sandwich from a sanctified distance. I had to trudge in the rain through housing projects; sit on the curb wiping the runny nose of a psychotic and stick a mattered woman s.357 Magnum in a cookie tin in the trunk of my car. I had to struggle with my atheist family, my doubting friends, and the prejudices and traditions of my new found church. I learned about the great American scandal of the politics of food, the economy of hunger, and the rules of money.

3 The Rev. Dr. Anita Farber-Robertson First Parish UU in Northboro, MA 3/20/16 Palm Sunday 3 I met thieves, child abusers, millionaires, day laborers, politicians, schizophrenics, gangsters and bishops- all blown into my life through the restless power of a call to feed people, widening what I thought of as my community in ways that were exhilarating, confusing, and often scary.

4 The Rev. Dr. Anita Farber-Robertson First Parish UU in Northboro, MA 3/20/16 Palm Sunday 4 Second Reading People Like Us There are more like us. All over the world There are confused people, who can't remember The name of their dog when they wake up, and people Who love God but can't remember where He was when they went to sleep. It's All right. The world cleanses itself this way. A wrong number occurs to you in the middle Of the night, you dial it, it rings just in time To save the house. And the second-story man Gets the wrong address, where the insomniac lives, And he's lonely, and they talk, and the thief Goes back to college. Even in graduate school, You can wander into the wrong classroom, And hear great poems lovingly spoken By the wrong professor. And you find your soul And greatness has a defender, and even in death you're safe by Robert Bly from Morning Poems. Harper Collins.

5 The Rev. Dr. Anita Farber-Robertson First Parish UU in Northboro, MA 3/20/16 Palm Sunday 5 Thought for Contemplation: Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? -Mary Oliver The Rev. Dr. Anita Farber-Robertson First Parish in Northborough March 20, 2016 Palm Sunday What Is It You Plan to Do? Readings: From Take This Bread, by Sara Miles Robert Bly, People Like Us I love those movies About a stranger Who rides into town On the back of a horse, And proceeds to start A chain of events That makes each person Take stock of their lives, So that after he's gone Everyone's better Or worse for the wear Than they were Before he arrived. 1 1 Paul Bussan, "Who Was That Man?" from A Rage of Intelligence: Poems.

6 The Rev. Dr. Anita Farber-Robertson First Parish UU in Northboro, MA 3/20/16 Palm Sunday 6 So goes the poem: "Who Was That Man?" by Paul Bussan. I love those movies About a stranger Who rides into town On the back of a horse, And proceeds to start A chain of events That makes each person Take stock of their lives, So that after he's gone Everyone's better Or worse for the wear Than they were Before he arrived. But it is not really about old movies is it? It is about life. Except when it happens in life, it is not always what we call entertaining. Being forced or maneuvered into taking stock of our lives often feels like a crises, or generates one. It is no wonder that in the history of things, we find that often the desire or response such an event elicits, is to kill that man, or that woman, the truth-

7 The Rev. Dr. Anita Farber-Robertson First Parish UU in Northboro, MA 3/20/16 Palm Sunday 7 telling messenger who wake us up and insists that we be responsible for our lives That s what happened to Jesus isn t it? He suggested to people that things it didn t need to be the way that they were, that the lowly were maybe important, that the marginalized were maybe the center, that the high and mighty were maybe wrong and that ordinary folks were probably important. That s disruptive all right. On Palm Sunday Jesus arrived in Jerusalem to gathered crowds and exuberant cheering, people waving branches and climbing up into the trees to get a better look at this unusual fellow. He didn t ride in on a horsehad he done that, he would have been mirroring the high mucky mucks who were riding into Jerusalem for the Passover festivities through a different gate on big fancy steeds, assuming their expected position of importance. He, Jesus, chose to ride in on a donkey, a lowly steed, humble and unassuming. It was the beginning of a week that would change the world, demand deep stock taking, a week in which the apparent victors, the authorities who tried and killed him, became instead the villains, the despised and the condemned became the heroes of the story and the final victors in history.

8 The Rev. Dr. Anita Farber-Robertson First Parish UU in Northboro, MA 3/20/16 Palm Sunday 8 No one really knew what had happened, what had hit them as the day and the week unfolded in Jerusalem, but unfold it did, and people were changed. They still are. Sara Miles was changed the day she, for no apparent reason, walked into a church one Sunday morning; Miles, a journalist who reported on wars and insurgencies, and saw hurting starving populations that broke her heart even while she reported on them, who had worked in the restaurant business and trained as a cook, who had grown up in an utterly secular family and was living a utterly secular life, that Sara Miles, one day, for some unexplained reason, took it upon herself to walk into a church on a Sunday morning, and came out feeling fed, and full, and astonished. There are more like us, Robert Bly says. There are more like us. All over the world There are confused people, who can't remember The name of their dog when they wake up, and people Who love God but can't remember where He was when they went to sleep. It's

9 The Rev. Dr. Anita Farber-Robertson First Parish UU in Northboro, MA 3/20/16 Palm Sunday 9 All right. The world cleanses itself this way. A wrong number occurs to you in the middle Of the night, you dial it, it rings just in time To save the house. And the second-story man Gets the wrong address, where the insomniac lives, And he's lonely, and they talk, and the thief Goes back to college. Even in graduate school, You can wander into the wrong classroom, And hear great poems lovingly spoken By the wrong professor. And you find your soul And greatness has a defender, and even in death you're safe 2 That, I think, is what this holy season is about. Holy Week, with Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and finally, Easter, and later in the calendar, Passover. It is about us, confused people entering the journey. Both are holidays that invite us to step into the void, the unknown, the possibly dangerous, potentially transformative unknown, and give it a chance to change us. 2 Robert Bly, People Like Us, in Morning Poems.

10 The Rev. Dr. Anita Farber-Robertson First Parish UU in Northboro, MA 3/20/16 Palm Sunday 10 Sara Miles ended up creating the most creative and comprehensive food distribution program in all of San Francisco, possibly in the whole United States. Thousands of lives were changed most notably, her own. And she didn t pick that. She didn t choose for that to be the case. She wondered and doubted, and tried to run away from it, from this powerful calling to feed the hungry into which she had walked. Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? Asks the poet Mary Oliver. what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? She asks the question on a summer day, but it is a powerful question, and often the right question, on any day, especially when you really didn t want it to be asked. But there it was in front of you, and it wasn t going away. You maybe tried to avoid it, as Sara did, until you knew you had to turn and face it square on. What is that question for you, in your journey? The one you avoid? The one you suspect will change everything if you answer? The one that offers hope, but requires courage? The one that offers release, but

11 The Rev. Dr. Anita Farber-Robertson First Parish UU in Northboro, MA 3/20/16 Palm Sunday 11 requires relinquishment? The one that offers beauty but requires abandoning the expected? The one that offers freedom, but requires risking loneliness? The one that offers joy, but doesn t promise anything? Robert Frost says: Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back. I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. 3 Sometimes we can t just stand there, we have to choose. Yogi Berra was right when he advised: If you come to a fork in the road, take it. 3 Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken

12 The Rev. Dr. Anita Farber-Robertson First Parish UU in Northboro, MA 3/20/16 Palm Sunday 12 Even not to choose is to choose, because unless we have dropped stone dead we are moving. Life is like one of those moving walkways. It just won t stop and wait for you or me, or anyone. We may move passively on in the direction we were moving without intentionally deciding, and hope for the best. Hope the winds won t change, the economy won t crash, the children won t be too needy, and our longing won t be too unbearable. Hope it will keep moving us through life without derailing or without our getting knocked off by some rogue tree limb jutting out and lifting us up and off it entirely. And it might. It might just keep us moving smoothly along like that. I ve heard tales of people whose lives have gone along just like that, straight and smooth without detours or disruptions. I ve heard tell of them. Maybe you have too. But my friends, I have never met anyone of them. And I have met a lot of people in my life. The folks who have peopled my life, have suffered the same vagaries of detours, disruptions, distractions and forks in the road that had to be taken as have our poets, and as have I. I didn t expect to be a minister, yet here I am. I didn t expect to be a seminary professor, yet there I was. I didn t expect to become a specialized Interim Minister,

13 The Rev. Dr. Anita Farber-Robertson First Parish UU in Northboro, MA 3/20/16 Palm Sunday 13 but the whimsy of God or the vagaries of the universe, whatever you want to call it, had their way with me. It says in my high school year book that I wanted to be a social worker. And I did- and I was. I worked as a social worker for Senior Home Care of Boston for six months. And I loved it, I loved the ministry of it. But I was called to congregational life, and it was not to be denied. Maybe you too have nostalgic wonder- what if you had chosen differently? What if you had stuck to the original plan of your life? What if you had become the person you thought you were going to become, instead of the person you really are? Or, terrifyingly, what if you have become someone you are really not, and you know there is a road still waiting for you to take, a road beckoning, now, at this time of spring and of the possibilities of becoming? My guess is that all of those what if s are probably resonating with some part of each of us, even those that are contradictory. Deep truths are not always logical- just unavoidable. We can be fully ourselves, and yet not. We can be trembling in hiding from the truth that is calling, and yet be a deeply brave soul who will take the risk that is necessary. We can be selfish and generous, self-

14 The Rev. Dr. Anita Farber-Robertson First Parish UU in Northboro, MA 3/20/16 Palm Sunday 14 centered and loving, self-protective and wildly compassionate. We are intriguing and complex souls, indeed. Souls on a journey that will take us where it will. No point in fighting it. what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? The specific answer is yours to tell. The answer we offer for our common life is simpler. We plan to journey on, and we intend to do it together. May it be so. Happy spring. Amen. Closing Words These are the days that have been given to us; Let us rejoice and be glad in them. These are the days of our lives; Let us live them well in love and service. These are the days of mystery and wonder; Let us cherish and celebrate them in gratitude together. These are the days that have been given to us; Let us make them stories worth telling to those who come after us. William R. Murray Benediction Extinguishing the Chalice Postlude