Lighting of the Chalice

A bell is not a bell

Until someone rings it,

A song is not a song

Until someone sings it.

Love wasn't put

In the heart to stay,

For love isn't love

'til you give it away.

- Chanh Kha

Meditation: The Magic of Love, by Helen Steiner Rice

Love is like magic

And it always will be.

For love still remains

Life's sweet mystery!!

Love works in ways

That are wondrous and strange

And there's nothing in life

That love cannot change!!

Love can transform

The most commonplace

Into beauty and splendor

And sweetness and grace.

Love is unselfish,

Understanding and kind,

For it sees with its heart

And not with its mind!!

Love is the answer

That everyone seeks...

Love is the language,

That every heart speaks.

Love can't be bought,

It is priceless and free,

Love, like pure magic,

Is life's sweet mystery!

Homily: Love, The Perpetual Emotion, by Tom Day, UUCR Lay Minister

I’d like to tell you all a story this morning. A story that I hope, after you hear it, will inspire you, make you think about the relationships in your lives, and want to share the story with others. It’s a heartwarming story, and I think we all could use more stories like this in the world today.

The story is about two families. Families that were about as different as can be, and lived about as far apart as you can imagine. But what these two families have in common, and what drew them together, is what I want to share with you this morning.

The first family is a family of four, living in a small town in southwest Ohio. A contented family, there were the parents – Eric and Rita, who are in their early 40s and work in the computer industry. They’ve been married about 20 years. They have two beautiful children: Olivia, who is 13, and Jordan, who is 9. Olivia and Jordan were both adopted, at different times, and from different homes. They had come to Rita and Eric when they were very young, and living as part of this family is the only life they’d ever known. Their house was filled with love, like most families, and they lived a very contented life in a large house amid rolling hills and farm fields. Plenty of food to eat, clothes for their backs, and a roof over their heads. Like many, they considered their lives full and complete. They had everything that they wanted, but still….

One day a couple of years ago, Rita was reading an article in the local paper. The article told of a family that had adopted a two-year old boy from outside the U.S., and what a joyous experience it had been. And what a difference that had made, not only in that little boy’s life, but in their own lives.

She began researching the issue of foreign adoptions, and learning all she could about it. Adopting Olivia and Jordan, within the U.S., had been challenging enough, but traveling halfway around the world to bring a child into their home? At times, the idea seemed too daunting to even consider. But Rita couldn’t shake the feeling that God was leading her somewhere. So for two long years, she and Eric thought about this often, and wondered what it would be like to expand their family.

One thing they were concerned about was the impact of adopting a single child of a different ethnicity – one that wouldn’t have a brother or sister that looked similar, and therefore might feel out of place. So, being logical and reasonable people, they decided the sensible solution was to simply adopt two children.

Well, that opened up all kinds of other worries. They worried if they would have enough money to expand their family this much. They worried about how suddenly doubling the number of kids in their family would impact Olivia and Jordan. And they wondered if they could possibly give enough time, love and attention to two more children in their lives.

Let’s think about that for a minute. As we’ve no doubt all experienced, love takes on many forms, and comes in all sizes. It can be deep and intense, or it can be meek and fleeting. It can be brotherly, motherly or based on a deep and lasting friendship. But the one thing that love is, above all else, is boundless. There’s never a point in your life when you would think to yourself that “I have enough love in my life”. Or “ I don’t have any more love to give.” Love, in any of its forms, is the second greatest gift we’ve been given, behind life. It can be a wellspring, that seems to grow without limits.

I can remember when Salena was pregnant with our first child, Emily. People would tell us that parenthood would change our lives, and that we really had no idea how profound of an impact this would be. I thought to myself, how can this be? It’s just a baby – I’ve seen dozens of babies. It’ll be like a puppy – we’ve had puppies before, and none of them changed our lives profoundly.

But from the moment Emily was born, I realized she was unlike any puppy we’d ever had. This tiny being, that we had created 9 or 10 months earlier, came with a bond – an emotional link – that I didn’t even know could exist. As I held her in my arms night after night, rocking her to sleep on my chest, I was astounded at how full my heart felt, and the incredible feeling of love for this little child of ours. Now that I had experienced it, I couldn’t imagine not having it – it was just that powerful.

That feeling was made even more intense a short 10 months later when our son, Evan, was born. I expected I would know exactly what it felt like, but when I held my son for the first time, it was like the size of my heart had doubled. What a feeling that is.

Love is an incredibly powerful force that seems to both defy and follow the laws of nature. Unlike matter, for example, love can be created. Like a liquid or a gas, it rapidly expands or moves to fill a void. Like that magic pie that Alison talked about this morning, love is seemingly endless in its depth and breadth. It sustains us, and gives us the power to be who we want to be. Love really is the Perpetual Emotion – the more you give, it seems the more you have.

But back to our story of the two families. The second family in our story led a far different life. They lived halfway around the world, in one of the poorest regions known to man. Their home was Ethiopia.

Ethiopia, the land of parched valleys and mahogany mountains, is in a region that’s cursed by season after season of immeasurable drought, that often produces unimaginable famine. It’s in an area of the world that’s been ravaged by war, which makes it even more inhospitable for people that live there.

The Ethiopian people have suffered mightily, but those that have survived are nothing short of miracles. Rita had once been told by a missionary friend that, in spite of all they have been through, or maybe because of all they have been through, Ethiopian people were ‘beautiful, inside and out’. Somewhere, deep in her heart, Rita remembered this, and as she read the newspaper article, she was again drawn in by the thought that God was leading her somewhere.

Because of all the lives that have been lost in Sudan and Ethiopia, there are hundreds of orphanages that house and care for the children that are the victims of nothing more than cruel circumstance. These orphanages are all that remain between millions of children and death.

There’s an author by the name of Melissa Fay Greene, who has written a book about her experiences in Ethiopia, called “There is No Me Without You”. In an article in the New York Times several years ago, Ms. Greene wrote about what life is like for many of the children living in Ethiopia:

“Behind corrugated iron walls off a dirt road, schoolgirls in donated clothing are throwing pebbles and waggling their long legs out behind them in hopscotch. Other girls sit on kitchen chairs in the shade of a cement wall, braiding and rebraiding one another's hair. They weave in plastic beads in arrangements so tight that the completed hairdo looks like an abacus. Boys lope back and forth with a half-deflated soccer ball.

Virtually all of these children have lost both parents, most to AIDS. Malaria, yellow fever and especially TB are fatal illnesses here, too. The children's grandparents have also died or are too poor and sick to care for the children; the same is true of their aunts and uncles, their neighbors and teachers. But no single one of these children has been isolated by tragedy: being orphaned is one of the common experiences of their generation. Ethiopia has one of the world's largest populations infected with H.I.V. The number of AIDS orphans in Ethiopia is estimated at a million, most of whom end up living on the streets. The total number of orphans living in Ethiopia today is estimated at four million.”

In southern Ethiopia last year alone, 10,000 children died, mostly from malnutrition. In 2005, over 5 million African children died, which was 40 percent of all the deaths worldwide. What a sobering number.

“But inside the orphanages, especially the private orphanages (as opposed to the state-run orphanages), life was a little better. The homey sour smell of injera -- the national bread -- rises from an outdoor brick kitchen. In a sunny, freshly mopped dining hall, the children seat themselves at long tables for an art class. A glass vase of cut flowers sparkles with clean water on a tabletop. The children from rural areas never have seen scissors before, and their fingers wiggle with eagerness when the teacher begins handing out brightly colored plastic scissors. Following instructions, the children generate a blizzard of paper scraps in their first attempts to form snowflakes. (They have never seen snowflakes either). Stocky little Bettye is a pint-size Ethel Merman with a husky belly laugh and a booming voice. She pokes her tongue out the corner of her mouth as she scissors, in classic kindergarten style. The children hold up their lopsided constructions for one another to see, and they hoot in surprise.”

This life is the life that our second family lived. Kids whose only isolation from the harsh realities of the world around them were the four walls of a private orphanage. Their parents died long ago, although no one knew exactly how – the mother most likely from childbirth, the father perhaps from the war. The aunt they lived with simply couldn’t care for them anymore, and brought them to the orphanage in hopes that they might have a better life there. They would get a life better than a mud hut with no running water or heat, but only slightly better. And if fate would smile on them, they would have a chance at an even better life still.

At this point I have to tell you our connection to this story. Rita and Eric are two of our oldest and closest friends. We’ve known them since the late ‘80s, before any of us had children, and we’ve seen each other’s kids grow up to be the people that they are today.

We have shared a lot of wonderful times together, and we feel like we know them as well as anyone. So it comes as no surprise to us that they had decided to open their hearts and home yet again. But here’s where the story turns amazing.

This past April, Rita and Eric decided that they had made up their minds, and that they would adopt one or two children from Ethiopia. They went to an adoption agency to begin the process, and began looking at the children that were available. In particular, there were several kids that caught their eyes – a young family that hadn’t been in the orphanage very long, less than a year in fact. This family didn’t have much, but they did have love between them, just like in Rita and Eric’s family. They had been through thick and thin together, and were bound together by so much more than just their DNA. And Rita and Eric could sense that. There was something in their eyes, and they felt something was pulling them towards these children - as if God’s own hand was on their shoulders, telling them that this was what He had been leading them to.

The challenge that they faced, however, was that this wasn’t a typical family of just a brother and a sister. Or a brother and a sister and another brother. It was a brother, a sister, another brother, and two more sisters – a family of five that was on the video they watched at the adoption agency that day. Rita told us she can remember thinking, “they’re gorgeous kids, but who would be able to adopt all five at once?”. Well, shortly after seeing the video of the kids, Rita said that “God made it very clear that these were the kids for us.”

So like that, they decided to more than double the size of their family. In addition to Olivia and Jordan, their family now includes Heba (13), Nejua (10), Hamada (8), Hanu (7), and Nura (5). Many sleepless nights followed, wondering whether or not they made the right choice, whether they could sufficiently provide for the four of them, plus five more. But they had committed to opening their hearts, and in just a few months, they found themselves in Ethiopia, seeing for themselves first-hand what the new members of their family had known for their entire lives.

When our two families first met, they say it felt like the most natural thing in the world, as if they truly were meant to be together. They spent a few days together finalizing the adoption process, and traveled home, fittingly, on Christmas Day. Rita said it was the greatest gift they had ever received, and I suspect that was true for all of them.

Today their house is filled with 9 incredibly happy people, who celebrate each day as if it’s a new chance to share their love with one another. Rita says “There is more laughter and noise than this house has probably ever seen”. One can only imagine, and we can’t wait to go visit them this summer and meet their new family members.

The kids have settled into routines and started school. They are adapting to eating American food. Apparently fruit is one of the foods that they just can’t get enough of, eating dozens of pounds each week! One of the more interesting things we learned is that in many parts of Ethiopia, they don’t always keep track of exact birth dates. So Rita and Eric were actually able to select birthdates, and therefore the ages, of their children. This helped quite a bit when it came to placing them in appropriate grade levels, and making sure the kids would be best able to adapt.

When Rita told us that they were adopting 5 more children, at once, you could have knocked us over with a feather. We were speechless, and it took us a week to come to grips with what a phenomenally unselfish act this was. When we, and numerous other friends and relatives asked them why they decided to do this, they came back with several reasons. But the most moving reason to me, was when she said “because we realized our family wasn’t complete yet, and these are the kids that God intended to be in our family.” Now some of us in this room might not have had the same mindset. We might not believe in the concept of a God leading us somewhere, or in destiny pre-determining our fate. But in this case, you can’t help but wonder if there was some kind of divine intervention involved. And at the very least, no matter how it happened, we have to marvel at the joy and the love that was created by the union of these two families.

They have set up a newsgroup on the web, so they can share their experiences, and we have followed along with them over the last 6 months, keeping up with all their joys associated with expanding their family. It’s been inspirational to us, as well as the many other friends and family members who are able to read their stories. Through this newsgroup, they’ve touched many lives, including ours and hopefully yours today, with their tale of ever-expanding love. It’s opened our eyes even wider to the horrors that many people outside of these four walls face, and how 1 or 2 people can make a difference. It’s given us even more reason to believe that you can never have - or give – enough love. And it’s helped us realize just how important family is, no matter how far you have to go to complete yours. So in the end of this story, the two families became one. And you couldn’t ask for a better ending than that.

People often talk about leaving a legacy, when they pass from this world to the next. Maybe it’s a building with their name on it. Maybe it’s lessons they’ve passed on to others that touched their lives. Or maybe, like Rita and Eric, their legacy is the impact they’ve had on 5 people, and the people that those 5 people will touch for the rest of their lives. In 20 years, Nura might grow up to be a doctor, developing a vaccine that will save millions of people around the world. Hamada might grow up to be a teacher, who changes the lives of hundreds of his students over the course of a lifetime.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. carried a scrap of paper with him, that contained a quote from Ghandi. He liked to read it and share it with others:

"In the midst of death, life persists. In the midst of darkness, light persists. We can strengthen life, by our personal acts, … by saying yes to life".

Rita and Eric lived these words, whether they knew it or not. In the midst of the darkness in Eastern Africa, they said yes to life and gave 5 children a fresh chance, through a very personal act. It should give us all pause as we reflect on what we can each do in the world with our own extraordinary capacity to love.

As I wrote this sermon Thursday night in the Minister’s Office, the choir was out here in the Sanctuary rehearsing this morning’s hymns. The sounds of the handbells, chimes and beautiful voices of our choir seemed to soar up to the rafters, and reverberate throughout the entire church. As I listened to it, I couldn’t help but compare beautiful music to the love we’ve thought about this morning – you really have to work to try to avoid it. If you’re lucky, it surrounds you every moment of every day. It finds you when you need it most, and envelopes you like a warm blanket on a snowy day. It has a way of breaking through even the thickest of skins, and reaching into your heart and tapping that inner something that we all have, and that we all need to feel. There are no grinches among us here this morning – we all feed off of the collective love that we brought into this room 45 minutes ago. Every Sunday, we say that ‘love is the spirit of this church’. Let’s live that mantra, and go forth from here and share that love with those inside and outside of this room, as if it were our own personal handbell that we ring wherever we go, brightening the days – and lives – of everyone we meet. Let that be your legacy.

Amen.