[Background: the sermon followed a reading of Debi Gliori's No Matter What.]

I've been hearing an awful lot of talk about signs of the apocalypse. What with the White Sox winning the World Series, and Vanderbilt beating Tennessee, I do have to agree that the laws of Nature aren't behaving quite the way I'm used to. I happened to be in Japan when the White Sox broke their 88-year-old jinx this year, and if I were a superstitious woman, I'd have to start considering whether I'd have to spend next October on the other side of the Pacific, just to do my part.

On the one hand, I know full well that the annual fate of a Midwestern baseball team is not cosmically linked to any rituals observed or omitted by a klutzy, nearsighted Southern chick, or those of any other fan, whether it's wearing a special cap, or turning off the tv during eighth innings, or lighting candles of supplication. On the other hand, the phrases "loyal sports fan" and "logical human being" really don't belong together in the same universe, let alone the same sentence. I was very vividly reminded of this this past Thanksgiving morning, when I ended up chatting about baseball with a niece and a nephew, who are ten and eight or thereabouts. Earlier this year, they moved from Michigan to Minnesota, and they've discovered the joys of rooting for the Twins. Which is fine. At least it's not the Yankees. That said, I was profoundly disturbed when they both casually stated they didn't see why anyone rooted for the Detroit Tigers given how bad they are.

It was all I could do not to turn into pedantic Aunt Peg right then and there. I'm not sure I succeeded, to be honest, although I did manage not to shout "You little twerps!" before explaining to them that there's fair-weather fans and there's real ones, and real ones stick with a team even when it isn't doing well. Even when it doesn't do well for, oh, eighty-odd years or so. I don't think they bought it, and they probably now think of me as crazy Aunt Peg, and it'll probably get worse once they're old enough for us to start arguing about theology. On the other hand, they're definitely easier to cope with than their three-year-old baby brother, whose idea of interaction is pretty much limited to running around squawking "No!" at the top of his lungs. If I'm totally fair about it, my devotion to the White Sox isn't any more logical or less pugnacious than little Michael's penchant for shrieking "No!", but I don't find it any more illogical than the answers one often hears when batting around the perennial questions of faith and spiritual practice. That is, does one pray to God and/or go to church because it makes sense? Because it's prudent? Because it's just what one does? Because of the energy of the crowd? Because God expects it?

For the moment, I'm speaking of "God" in the generic sense -- you can substitute "Spirit" or "Gods" or the concept of your choice -- but one of the challenges of December is that its major holidays force many of us to grapple with who or what we call God, and what our obligations are to him, her, or it, and to those who see God in a different light or incarnation. For instance, I have found my atheist parents-in-law to be very attached to celebrating Christmas Day with family and feasting and gifts, whereas my Buddhist- agnostic mother generally ignores it, and I generally find myself in a state of profound ambivalence. On the one hand, I'm a non-Christian, non-Jewish theist, and what this means in plain English is none of the upcoming holidays feel like they quite belong to me. I do sing Christmas carols, and I also light Hanukkah candles, but as I write cards and wrap presents and reread Charles Dickens, I usually find myself composing a couple of mental apologies to God --something along the lines of "I am thinking of you, but probably not as much or as reverently as I should." I find myself struggling with the celebration of miracles -- the Virgin Birth, the eight nights of oil -- in part because I have no wish to dampen the joy of those who do believe in these reasons for the season, and in part because I'm troubled by theologies of divine rewards and exchanges. I'm particularly ill at ease when I hear ministers encourage the expectation of miracles, particularly as rewards for faith or good works, and I both relish and fret about the stories and television specials where angels, Santa Clauses, ghosts, or flying reindeer come to the rescue.

We could spend the rest of the day dissecting and debating my various heresies and hang- ups, of course, but for me, it's not all that bad: for one, I'm used to being out of the mainstream, and I am capable of regarding "Christmas" as a general season of heightened goodwill. I do encounter quite a few people who find this season difficult or exhausting, however, and who then feel guilty about not having "the holiday spirit" or pressured to be jolly. I myself am not wholly immune to this -- there are people I'm going to enjoy surprising, there are the gatherings I don't want to miss, and there's the fact that I do normally enjoy baking and writing and crafting and singing -- but, I have to admit, part of me simply wants to dive under my sofa and hide until January. There are memories of Christmases where I wasn't with the right person or didn't get what I wanted, and there are other holidays where the balance was just right. There are memories of people I've disappointed as well as pleased, and every year there are more memories of people who used to be friends but who are now dead or simply too distant, or in a few instances, too different (or indifferent, as the case may be). For me, prayer and meditation help the memories stay manageable, as does being connected with my religious community. There are times it helps to remind myself that, no matter how badly I might screw up, I do have a safety net: that, if necessary, the friends I have made in the community will catch me or at least soften my fall, and that my presence matters -- that it's needed to help provide that reassurance to others. I realize that sounds terribly melodramatic, but there are days when I cannot seem to say or do anything right -- something that almost everyone experiences now and then, I suspect -- and what gets me through is remembering my "no matter what"s, no matter how incompetent or inept I'm being.

It's the appeal of the traditional stories, of course: that, no matter who we are or what we do (or fail to do), we will find love and comfort. Needless to say, this is not always what gets preached, particularly in the wake of disasters: after every tsunami, earthquake, and hurricane, some so-called man of God inevitably proclaims it to be a punishment aimed at the godless, be they homosexuals or heathens or what-have-you. Not a God of "no matter what," in other words.

On the one hand, these guys, they're depressing. I would even go so far as to say they're soul-destroying. Some years ago, Rabbi Harold Kushner -- not one of these reactionaries, thank goodness -- wrote about seeing a bumper sticker that said, "My God is not dead; sorry about yours." His response was, "My God is not cruel; sorry about yours." That said, the urge to assign blame is but a subset of the universal craving for meaning: as humans, many of us find it utterly unbearable -- or inconceivable -- that God might be indifferent to what we love and what we do. Thus, when we are confronted with suffering and grief, many of us instinctively agonize over the wouldas, couldas, and shouldas, no matter which belief system we subscribe to. For some people, not being able to make sense of their unhappiness leads to anger and even hatred toward God. It's not a pretty concept, God being unfair, and the season that's now upon us has a way of emphasizing the distance between prayers uttered and prayers granted that can be hard to take if the gap is wide.

I'm sure that some of you have already read Rabbi Kushner's When Bad Things Happen to Good People, it being a bestseller when it was first published, but let me recommend it to those of you who haven't. It looks at grief and suffering from a variety of angles, and while Rabbi Kushner is a theist, he doesn't shy away from acknowledging the difficulties of accepting a God who doesn't intervene in our daily lives. He urges his readers to let go of "unrealistic expectations" of God, which strikes me as almost axiomatic for Unitarian Universalists, what with our historical emphasis on deeds rather than creeds. In the second edition of the book, Rabbi Kushner talks about being asked whether he believes in miracles. His answer is,

Of course I do. But sometimes we have to look hard to find the miracle, because it doesn't always take the form we expected it to take. When the parents of a desperately ill child pray for a miraculous recovery, when the uncles and aunts and grandparents of their church or synagogue join in the prayers, but the child dies, are we to conclude that there was no miracle? Were our prayers mocked? Or perhaps there was a miracle after all. The miracle was not that the child survived; some illnesses are incurable. Perhaps the miracle was that the parents' marriage survived, despite the strain that the death of a child puts on a marriage. The miracle may have been that the community's faith survives even after they learn that this is a world where innocent children get sick and die. When we see weak people become strong, timid people become brave, and selfish people become generous, we know we are witnessing a miracle at work.

Framed another way, the spiritual core of our holidays ultimately resides in what we bring to them, not what happened in a Bethlehem inn or a temple in Jerusalem over two thousand years ago. The celebration is not only of miracles then, but of possibilities now. The gift from God is that we are alive and able to celebrate the here and now.

In spring, Jews celebrate Pesach -- a far more significant festival than Hanukkah, truth be told -- and one of the songs often sung at seders is "Dayenu," which means "enough" -- it averages around twenty verses or so, all on the theme of "If God had only done ____, it still would have been enough -- but God went on to do this next thing, and that would have been enough," and so forth. To me, the miracle of this winter season is not the eight nights of light, but that there was oil to begin with. The miracle is not that the White Sox finally won, but the passionate, irrational devotion of 88 years rewarded. The miracle is not the Virgin birth but the sharing of joy and hope so many hundreds of years later. The miracle is believing in God -- or the Spirit, or humanity, or whatever moral code it is that brings you here -- regardless of whether things are going well or not, or whether you got cut off in traffic this morning. There is a prayer called the Shehechianu that is said by Jews both on the first night of Hanukkah and on other occasions when something new is to be attempted, observed, or celebrated:

Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu melech haolam, shehechianu v'kiyemanu v'higianu lazman hazeh. Blessed are you, Lord our God, king of the universe, who has kept us alive, sustained us, and enabled us to reach this season.