Healing the Cracks- Yom Kippur, Forgiveness, and UU

Take a china plate, and smash it on the ground. Gather up all of the pieces, even the tiny ones, almost too small to see.

Tell it that you’re sorry, and really mean it.

Did it make a difference?

Today I want to talk about breaking and healing. We’re also going to talk about burritos, wolves, and the Japanese art of kintsugi, but it wouldn’t be one of my messages if we didn’t.

There’s been a lot of conversation over the last ten years about where Unitarian Universalism falls on the religious spectrum.

We’re Protestant. We’re Post-protestant. We’re post-Christian. We’re post-modern. We’re a religion, we're a denomination, we’re a movement.

What we’re not, is good at talking about what to do when we have screwed up and offended against our own personal values.

Some versions of Christianity have dogma that says that humans are inherently sinful, that because the first man and first woman screwed up we are all born needing to be cleaned. For some Christians the answer is Jesus- the messiah who washes away all of the sin we’re born with and those we add on later. This is substitutionary atonement, a loving God providing humanity with the only sacrifice large enough to equal all of the sin that ever will be. 

For some of us, this makes sense. For others, Jesus’s crucifixion, suffering, and death are the expected end result of the life of a radical young Rabbi, and the time and political system in which he lived. For some of us, his life and death may have great meaning, but are not ways to erase any wrongs we have done.

Even in mainstream Christianity, however, there are rituals around this forgiveness. 

This atonement.

 Most basic is some group's belief that saying aloud or in your heart that you accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior is enough, at least to begin. For them it is enough to claim the forgiveness you have already received.

Another simple set of Christian words to request forgiveness is The Lord’s Prayer from the book of Matthew: “Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”

The forgiveness is there, but you have to ask for it, and like our broken plate just saying words doesn’t make it all better. You have to believe.

Judaism, too, recognizes atonement. I've spoken a lot about Rosh Hashanah, or the Jewish New Year. The time when the year is done and you are ready to go forward. Yom Kippur comes ten days after Rosh Hashanah and it is the day when you forgive and make it possible for others to forgive you. The day when you atone for your wrongs, and when you accept the atonement of others.

And they’ve got something there, the people who participate in Yom Kippur, something that we need. Not to appropriate in an act of theft, but to understand, and to use as a starting point in approaching forgiveness, and atonement. Something that we can use no matter if we believe in God Almighty, or Divine Humanity, a mother Goddess, or nothing much at all.

Yom Kippur gives us a way to deal with sins, those offenses we make against our beliefs, our Divine, and ourselves, a way to deal with our sin without violating our belief in individual worth and dignity.

It’s funny- as I was writing these words and thinking about sin and forgiveness, I remembered when Chipotle Mexican Grill first opened near me, about 17 years ago. (Here come the burritos.)

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the chain, Chipotle specializes in huge burritos, and when I say huge I mean wrap it in a blanket and people will think it’s a newborn huge. These were the first burritos this size anyone in my neighborhood had ever seen, and it quickly became a thing for some of the very athletic people I worked with to eat a whole one with double meat plus chips and salsa at one sitting.

So this slender marathon runner from my office would run his noon-time laps around the parking lot, and then run up to Chipotle and get his food and he would dash back to eat with us. It was like watching wolves in a National Geographic special, as pounds of meat just disappeared before our eyes, and by the time he stood up this healthy athletic man had a tight belly pushing against his waistband. He was literally bulging with food, weighed down by what he had taken in.

He couldn’t run after lunch on those days. For two or three or even four hours he was pregnant with that food, slow moving with that weight sitting in his gut.

And then it would digest, and he would be himself again.

Food digests quickly, and when I get too full it is a simple thing to wait a few hours and feel right again.

But when my life gets too full, too weighted down, digestion takes a little more effort.

Our burritos are stuffed full of jobs and families, friends, and co-workers. They are sauced with social media, spiced up with news blasts of Syria and the middle east, of crime and punishment and politics and sex and relationships. Day after day we do our best but the world is hectic and sometimes we take bite after bite after bite of life until we are the ones who feel like wolves at a kill, staggering away with bellies dragging the ground, almost too weighted down to move any more.

There is an old children’s story that some of you may know. A monkey sees a jar filled with nuts, and thrusts his hand into the jar to grab a fist full. He grabs as many as he can hold, but now his overloaded hand won’t fit back through the mouth of the jar. Unwilling to let go, the poor monkey sits and cries, and cannot enjoy even one nut.

Relaxing our fists and letting go of some of our treasures isn’t easy, but it’s the only way to enjoy any of them.

Recognizing the ideas behind Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur isn’t about dates. It doesn’t matter when, as long as it’s about the same time every year.

Pick a date that works for you. January 1^st is fine, Rosh Hashanah is fine. It is the end of the old, the time when you stop eating the burrito, the time when you recognize that you cannot withdraw your hand, that your belly is dragging the ground.

And you reclaim the power to let it go.

You take a week or ten days and you examine the previous year. You pick up the shreds and shards of all the plates you have smashed, you digest the burrito.

You walk away from the wolves’ kill.

And when you are ready, there is Yom Kippur.

The day of atonement.

The day when you empty yourself of the weights you have been carrying. All the slights and screw ups of our overflowing lives.

The day when you say “I’m sorry,” and “Forgive me,” and “I forgive you.”

There is a Jewish prayer called the Kol Nidre, which means “all vows”. It is a prayer asking the Divine to release us from all sacred vows we made this past year, and to allow us to start fresh. These are not promises to people, but are promises we made for how we would act in the world based on our view of what is Divine. This is a rough translation:

"In the court of heaven and the court of earth, by the permission of God—blessed be He—and by the permission of this holy congregation, we hold it lawful to pray with those who have erred."

"All vows, obligations, oaths, and things we swore were forbidden, by any name, which we may vow, or swear, or pledge, or whereby we may be bound, from this Day of Atonement until the next (whose happy coming we await), we do repent. May they be deemed absolved, forgiven, annulled, and void, and made of no effect; they shall not bind us nor have power over us. The vows shall not be reckoned vows; the obligations shall not be obligatory; nor the oaths be oaths."

"And it shall be forgiven all the congregation of the children of Israel, and the stranger that travels among them, seeing all the people were in ignorance."

This means that we recognize that people screw up. That we are imperfect, with no capacity for absolute perfection. It means that we are saying aloud “I promised stuff this year- I said that I had specific values and beliefs, and I didn’t always live up to them.”

And I recognize this.

And I should be forgiven.

And I’m going to start over.

It doesn’t matter what belief system you are working within. For a Christian who believes that Jesus’s suffering and death atone, then maybe this is the time of year to contemplate where you have fallen short of your personal beliefs this year, to recognize that you are granted forgiveness through grace, and to resolve to begin again.

For a Buddhist this is a time for mindful contemplation of the past year’s unskillful or unwholesome acts, and a place to begin seeking greater wisdom.

For a Wiccan you might choose to recognize the turning of the wheel on one of the Greater Sabbats, and for a humanist this might be a time for thoughtful assessment of how you are living up to your stated values.

The specifics don’t matter.

One of the things that does matter is willingness, to both forgive and be forgiven for those moments when things didn’t happen the way they should have.

But this is often where the problems start, where I clench my fists tight and hold on to those nuts.

Because I don’t deserve forgiveness or I don’t think I get to say if I should be forgiven.

Because they don’t deserve forgiveness and I don’t want to let go.

You know what? It doesn’t work that way.

I can keep punishing myself, but I can’t control how the people I’ve wounded feel. If I am sorry for what I’ve done, and I recognize where I broke my vows to myself and my world, and I resolve to do better to the best of my ability, then it is enough.

And I can try to punish others for what they have done to me, I can hold hatred and anger in my heart, and then what?

I am hate filled and angry, and they are still themselves.

Forgiveness of others isn’t about whether or not they deserve it- it is about releasing their hold on my life.

The burrito weighed me down, I digest it, and it is gone.

So I pick up the plate I have broken, collecting every shard and shred, and I say I’m sorry. That is Rosh Hashanah.

But then I go a step further.

In Japan there is an art form called kintsugi, the art of repairing with gold.

So I take that plate, the one we broke way back at the beginning of this page, and I use pure gold to form seams everywhere it is broken. I do not try to hide the damage but I heal the cracks using something more precious than the original materials. When I am done, it is a priceless work of art.

That is Yom Kippur.

Amen.