This is (most of it) a sermon I have given before, more than once. But only once here so far, back in 1986, so it qualified for my yearly oldie sermon. This is part of a deal I struck with a newcomers’ class a few years back. The members reasoned that I must have conducted at least some good services here before they arrived, and made points that were important to me --  services that they would never experience, points of view of which they would never know, unless on occasion I do some recycling.

Well, that sounded environmentally sound, and I agreed, but only for one service a year. The church year nearing its end, that time has come. And the timing proved propitious: just last week, on Question and Answer Sunday, someone asked what my favorite sermon message was, and I heard myself answering, the one where I tell you to let up on yourself.

I quickly added that I was also given to the opposite message, that we all need to work for greater social justice and personal creativity and kindness. But I had to admit, as I go on trying to affirm both sides of that balance, I especially welcome the times when I try to offer you affirmation, knowing how unfairly high your expectations can be; times when I try to offer solace and comfort, knowing how hard you try, not always with the success you deserve; and times when I try to offer forgiveness, knowing that life is not easy or simply-solved for anyone.

As Ann Lamott writes, “I don’t know why life isn’t constructed to be seamless and safe, why we make such glaring mistakes, things fall so short of our expectations, and our hearts get broken and our parents get old and don’t always remember to put pants on before they go out for a stroll. I don’t know why it’s not more like it is in the movies, why things don’t come out neatly and lessons can’t be learned when you’re in the mood for learning them, why love and grace come in such motley packaging. But I was reminded of the lines of D. H. Lawrence that are taped to the wall of my office:

What is the knocking?
What is the knocking at the door in the night?
 It is somebody wants to do us harm.

 No, no, it is the three strange angels.
 Admit them, admit them.

For me, the figure in the history of world religion who most reminds me of this message is King David of Israel. Part of his appeal as a religious figure – what makes him so powerful, so fascinating, and even so appealing as a figure – is not just that he was a success in so many ways – as poet, musician, soldier, commander, and Israel’s greatest national leader – but also that his life was so plagued by failure, often of his own causing, resulting from repeated, substantial, even shocking errors of judgment.

 His balance of good deeds and ill was probably not so different than yours or mine; but in the way of things, his great displays of virtue and skill came early and his errors came later, when he had the power to sin mightily and the fame to have his sins on public display.

 And yet for all his weakness and wrong-doing, he was what we might hope to be, not perfect, but humble and repentant when he realized his faults. He wanted to do the right thing; his heart could always be counted on to respond to the guilt of his own behavior with remorse and change. That was why God had picked him as a youth; not for his courage or strength or wisdom but for his heart.

 I don’t mean to say that a well-intentioned heart makes up for vile behavior. I don’t mean to say that wrong-doing is praiseworthy as a moral model if repentance always follows along. We need moral models and guides that raise our higher self-expectations.

 But aren’t we all in fact like David to some disturbing degree, stumbling along, bumbling about, our hearts meaning mostly well but even on our good days not always steering us into firmly enough into every wise and proper decision?

 Maybe there is something healing and helpful in a hero like David, whose sins are even more glaring than our own -- his connivings more duplicitous, his inactions more disturbing, his insensitivities more extreme – but who faces them when he can and truly repents and goes on, goes on with maybe a measure of growing wisdom and in the grace of humility.

 Maybe there is something very helpful and healing in a church that can appreciate that very human kind of religious model as an antidote to our propensities to pride, a church that can honor David and us in the midst of our very mixed success at being the people we would wish ourselves.

 As a movement we have been more inclined historically to another message, and an important one, one that speaks of self-improvement, personal responsibility, and other noble virtues. And that is all to the good.

 But it needs to be balanced with an affirmation of our human weakness as well. We will want to be sure our message includes all that the tradition can muster that is open in honesty, in acceptance, in forgiveness, and in healing to our human frailty and our proclivity for falling short.

 UU churches will no doubt go on being places that urge us toward better futures still available to us, places that try to help us keep in touch with high ideals and alluring dreams. But they need as well to be able to welcome us as the people we remain in the meantime, even on our best days shy of all we might be, and on other days something far, far less.

 It was one of my colleagues, Alida DeCoster, whom I first heard say, “God loves us just as we are, and too much to want us to stay that way.” My family is like that, too, she said, and my friends. The church needs to take on that same spirit of nurturance both hopeful and accepting.

 If there is in the havens we provide a healing for the bruised, the bewildered, and the nearly broken, for those beset from without and within, what is the nature of that power?

 For many, the healing is born of the strength of the individual settled again in the peace and reflection and inspiration of the service. For many, healing is felt to come from a larger power than ourselves into the presence of which we are ushered in worship.

 And for many, the healing seems to come from the community itself. As Jean Vanier writes, “community is not about perfect people. It is about people who are bound to each other, each of whom is their own mixture of good and bad, darkness and light, love and hate. And community is the only earth in which each of them can grow without fear toward the liberation of the forces of love which are hidden in them.” (Community and Growth)

 Many of us feel ourselves renewed from all these sources and from others. For us the church often functions as that precious place where we can bring our brokenness to receive the healing powers of silence, of beauty, of confession, of serenity, of communion, or of God.

 Around the time I gave this sermon first, there were a number of other presentations, some of continental notice, that noted how little emphasis was placed on human needfulness, weakness, and fragility in the hymnbook then in common use, a lack I too had long felt. The closest I had found in that hymnbook was one line from a hymn whose age, theology, and non-gender-inclusive language had generally condemned it to obscurity. The line was, “Frail children of dust, and feeble as frail,” a reality otherwise rarely referred to.

 In response to that complaint, the new hymnbook, the one we use now, has five hymns and eleven readings that qualify for a new category in the topical indexes in the back of the book. The category is, “Failings and Frailties,” but not a one of the selections satisfied me as an expression of our human condition.

 To hear the point most plainly made, we have to go to the evangelical Christians, who can feast as gluttonously on human weakness as UUs can on the human potential for goodness and growth. My favorite text from out of that camp is Charlotte Elliott’s lyric from over 160 years ago, “Just As I Am.”

 Her recitation of our need for homes that harbor the battered soul is set in an atonement theology that I assume is inaccessible to nearly all of us, Christian or not, but her language is superb. “Just as I am without one plea but that thy blood was shed for me… O Lamb of God, I come.” It’s not the theology, it’s those first seven words that so entice: “Just as I am, without one plea….”

 We all have our pleas, our reasons why we have not been as successful nor as kind nor as gentle as we know we should have been. And they are good pleas, they deserve more credit than they get. Our churches should be places where we better understand each other’s pleas – but even more and better, places where we can come when we do not have one plea, where we can come just as we are, “tossed about, with many a conflict, many a doubt, [with] fightings and fears within, without.”

 Those are Charlotte Elliott’s words, and they’re wonderful. Because that’s who we all are sometimes, and the church should be a place that wants to help us toward lives more purposeful and serene, but first that takes us in, without one plea.

 It is certainly too much to ask the church ever to measure up fully to the assignment Ms. Elliott gives God. “Just as I am! Thou wilt receive,/ Wilt welcome, pardon, cleanse, [and] relieve….” But we can try, try at least to be a place where we can unite in honesty with folks as flawed as we know ourselves to be, and learn better to cherish each other and ourselves.

 One of my favorite lines is from D. H. Lawrence’s study of my favorite poet, walt Whitman, about whom Lawrence was less enthused. Whitman wrote, “I am he that aches with amorous love.” And Lawrence replied, “Walter, leave off. You are not HE. You are just a limited Walter.” And I am just a limited Kenneth, and you are just you. And it’s okay.

 John Updike made much the same point as I have tried to this morning, in his poem, “A Pear Like a Potato,” and with it I will close:

 Was it worms, having once bitten
 and then wilted away, or some canker
 known only to nurserymen? Whatever the reason, the pear
 fresh-plucked from the tree where it leans and struggles
 in the garden’s dappled corner, is
 a heavy dwarf-head whose faceless face
 puckers and frowns around a multitude of old problems, its
 furrowed brow and evil squint and pursy mouth
 and pinched-in reptilian ear rescrambling,
 feature for feature, as I rotate
 this weight in my hand, this
 friendly knot of fruitflesh, this
 pear like a potato.

 It wanted to grow, and it did. It
 had a shape in mind, and if that shape in transit
 was waylaid by scars, by cells
 too mean to join in, leaving dents between bulges
 like quilt-buttons, well, it kept on going
 anyway. Our brains
 are like this, no doubt, having swelled
 in spite of traumas, of languages
 we never learned, of grudges never set aside but grown around,
 like parasites that died but forever snapped
 the rhythm whereby cell links up to cell.
 Plato’s was a manner of speaking;
 perfection’s an idea that body and soul
 make a run at. Falling short, they fill this world instead
 with the lopsided jumble that is: the congregation
of the failed yet not uncheerful,
like this poor pear.

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