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I wanna welcome everybody to the month of humility.
But to do that I want us to first listen to a, a story I heard from
a colleague and a friend of mine as he visited the the tombstone of Ralph
Waldo Emerson.
How many of us know Ralph Waldo Emerson?
Some of us...Yay, look at that.
Well, all of you of should, because he is a UU saint, if we kinda have saints, right?
This is a a man who was a Unitarian minister but what makes him most widely
known is
is that he was also a critical thinker, he was a
a person who was a philosopher, and effected all of our American culture
in so many ways. And my friend said that
that the huge shadow, so to speak, of Ralph Waldo Emerson was evident in
his tombstone. Because when he went to visit
the tombstone, right there in that in the graveyard where he is at, it's not really even a tombstone
it's this giant pink
granite rock
and on that is a plaque that reads: "Ralph Waldo Emerson." In the byline, it reads
something to the affect of
that this was
"The mouthpiece,
the voice of the divine."
Pretty impressive on your tombstone, right?
My friend said what struck him most was literally, literally when he went one
row back
from that giant
granite stone, one row back and one to the right,
he found the tombstone of Ralph Waldo Emerson's
brother. And this isn't made up. This isn't a lie. And right in the shadow of
that giant, giant granite tombstone
was his brother's tombstone. On it, it read "Here lies
Edward
Emerson" and his byline
says,
"He did the best he could." [Laughter]
So as you saw in the clip, ah, people laughed.
Ah...and it's okay to laugh. I even laughed after I heard that story. I even felt
sorry for Emerson's brother. That's not a shadow that's that's easy to
to live in.
But then I learned this - My friend, who went to visit Emerson's grave,
also let me know that
that Emerson's brother
was actually as loved as Emerson was during his life.
Now part of that, it turns out, is 'casuse Emerson's
brother had this clever, sarcastic, even ironic sense of humor, as was evident
from the the words that he had put on his grave.
But the other reason,
the other reason that Emerson's brother was loved as much as Emerson was,
was that his brother
loved people
who did their best. He
love people who did their best.
I love that.
And I think that's exactly what this this whole month of humility is actually
about. Right at its, right at it's core,
it's about realizing that we are people that doesn't celebrate greatness
as much as people who celebrate those who simply do the best with their lives.
It's about celebrating and lifting up people who aren't trying to compete with
some kind of status or achieve some kind of societal greatness, but simply know
deeply who they are and live out of that sense of who they are. And because of that
offer all of us and and even life
a great gift.
It is, I guess I'd like to say a a humbler completely different
understanding of what it means to be human. So we have a personal challenge
for everybody;
figure out your own way of being uniquely humble.
Certainly come to all the sermons this month and certainly talk about the topic
in your small group. What we really hope is that everyone will
take the programming and take the discussions of church
and pull it into your own life.
And in the the solitude of
of your own home,
in your own life,
figure out one way to be uniquely
humble. Humility is not about realizing how small you are, or how weak you are, but for us
it's about realizing
you don't have to do life
all by yourself.
And that there are people all around you and behind you and under you, holding you up
all the time.