Last week Thailand celebrated their annual Loy Krathong [lai gra-tong] ritual, which sounds to me like possibly the most beautiful celebration we have in this world. 

 

For this holiday, people construct little bowl-like things that float – that’s what Krathong means, actually, the thing that is made to float, and Loy means floating – the celebrants construct these little floating bowls out of leaves, traditionally, and they fill them with flowers and candles and incense, and then everyone gathers on the one night in November and the krathongs are set off to sail away in a nearby body of water.  And so on that November night in Thailand the waterways are filled with illuminated floating vessels, each lovingly constructed and each lovely in its own way, and these vessels float off down rivers, on ponds, and into oceans.

 

It’s an observance that may be as old as 800 years, or even older, and is usually considered to be a Buddhist practice, although some say it originated with the northern Thais before Buddhism even came to be in Thailand.  But the purpose of the ceremony is agreed upon.  The purpose, it is said, is to make a little home for your misfortunes, your troubles, to fill a little bowl with them, and then to send them all floating away from you.  The purpose is to give you a fresh start for the year.

 

Learning about this celebration made me think of all the other ways in which we human beings have created religious rituals around getting fresh starts in our lives. 

 

A few weeks ago I talked about the trip that former Unitarian Universalist Association President Bill Sinkford made to Japan.  While he was there, Sinkford participated in a Shinto cleansing ritual called misogi.  For this ritual, he stepped into a waterfall at a Shinto shrine. 

 

Shintoists believe that in living our daily lives, we human beings are always moving away from what they call the way of the Kami.  In other words, we are moving away from the way of the Spirit of Life.  This is simply the human condition, this moving away, but it is not ideal for us, and so there is a ritual to bring us back to the right way of living.

 

Bill Sinkford’s experience with the misogi ritual, like the Loy Krathong ceremony, also took place in November.  However, Japan is not as warm as Thailand is.  Sinkford entered the waterfall wearing only a loincloth and a headband as a light snow was falling.  Here is his description of the event:

 

“I loved the experience.  It was unbelievably cold, and I mangled the prayer.  But a priest had to pull me out.  I would have stayed too long for my own good.  All my concerns were driven from my mind.  I could only focus on that moment.  And I emerged from the water feeling…not forgiven exactly…cleansed is really the only word that comes close.  I felt like I was starting afresh.” [1]

 

Religious notions of starting fresh don’t start and end in Asia, of course.

 

One of the most interesting treatments of starting fresh comes from the Judaic tradition, in the form of the Sabbath year[2] and the Jubilee year[3].  These are described in the books of Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy.

 

The cultural context of the Hebrew Bible was agricultural, an agricultural society, and the holy book of that agricultural society mandated a cycle of planting and economy that ran along seven year cycles.

 

This means that the Bible says that you can plant the heck out of the ground for six years, sowing and reaping and harvesting and pruning.  But on the seventh year, the Sabbath year, you let the ground rest.  That means you do none of the sowing or reaping, no harvesting or pruning, in the seventh year.  You can eat what grows out of the ground on its own, but you can’t store it for later.  Anything extra is meant for the poor, who are welcome to eat of all the land as well, whether they own any land of their own or not.

 

Everything in this agricultural society was brought to a stop in the Sabbath year, so that when planting began again in the 8th year – which was really year one again – it could begin again as something new, something fresh.  Both the land and the economic system of employment and ownership and control had a refreshing restart.  Society had hit the reset button.

 

As different as the Sabbath year was from other years in ancient Israel, it is nothing compared to what happened in the Jubilee year in that society.  The Jubilee year was the 50th year, the year after seven cycles of seven years occurred.  In this year, not only did farms and farmers rest, but all debts were forgiven, the obligations of indentured servants was canceled, and land was returned to its original owners. 

 

Yes, that means if you owed someone money, then once every 50 years – once in a lifetime in those days, if you were lucky – once every 50 years your slate was wiped clean.  That’s an impressive way to start fresh. 

 

If you were a bonded servant to someone, who was obligated to work for a certain length of time, in the Jubilee year you were released and you could go back home. 

 

And, if you were someone who had to sell their family’s land at some point in order to pay for something, then in the Jubilee year, that land was returned to you. 

 

Jubilee promises a restoration from the burden of the things we are forced to do to stay afloat and survive in our day-to-day lives.

 

And if you were someone who owned land and who held debt and servants, this was a time of promise for you as well.  In the Jubilee year, you would be released from the habit of holding power over others.  You would be released from the particularly hazardous social position of being someone who has plenty while others around you do not have enough.  That is another way of starting fresh.  Jubilee offers the wealthy a way of reorganizing their lives so that their relationships and their humility are restored, and their priorities are set straight.  Having your priorities set straight is a cleansing gift as well.

 

And so we see how ancient Israel went about starting fresh.  It’s another example of the way in which a group of people express their basic human need to start again.

 

The Christian tradition of baptism also comes from the notion of cleansing, of starting again – perhaps even more so than you may have realized.  The tradition of baptism finds its theological origins in the New Testament story of John the Baptist, a renegade Jew born just a few weeks before his cousin, Jesus of Nazareth.  John the Baptist believed that Jesus was coming to bring a teaching entirely new to the Jewish people, one that would change Jewish life and thinking forever.  Clearly, in such a time, the old ways would not do.

 

So rather than adopt the rich robes of the Jewish leadership of his day, or work from the temple where only the highest priests could enter, John the Baptist took a place in the desert outside of town, dressed himself in camel hair and a leather belt, and ate only locusts and honey.  And he proclaimed to his people that he could offer “a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins”.[4] Meaning, you could come to the river outside of town, and John would dunk you underneath, and you would repent and your sins would be forgiven by God.

 

Or at least that’s the English translation of what John was offering.

 

One of the most interesting things I learned in seminary were more accurate translations for words commonly found in the Christian lexicon.  One of the words I looked at was the word repentance.  I grew up largely unchurched, although culturally Christian, and the word repentance, or repent, was to me one of those scary church words that I didn’t particularly like very much.  It sounded a lot to me like I had done something wrong without knowing it, and I was in trouble, and in order for God to love me, I had to get with the Christian program and leave my own opinions and plans behind.  Not that any of this was terribly well thought out, mind you.  But that’s the general feeling I had when I heard the word “repentance.”

 

So imagine my surprise to find out what was really said in the New Testament when our English translation reads “repentance”. 

 

The word repentance was translated from the Greek word metanoia, which means a change of heart.  What we say as repentance really means “a change of heart”.  “Change your heart and be forgiven!” is a better translation of the baptism message.  Which to me means, if you’ve done something wrong and you have bad habits, change your heart and you can begin again, you can start fresh.

 

To me, that is a vastly different meaning than what I was understanding from the word repent.

 

So now knowing how the bible really reads, we can now look at the early baptism story in a different way, a way that doesn’t make it a terribly different story from the Loy Krathong ceremonies of this month.  We can look at that early baptism story and see that John the Baptist was asking his people to come into the desert where he could baptize them – by dunking them in the river – in order to help them change their hearts.  In order to help them do something new.

 

And a liberal Christian view of this change would suggest that John was asking his people to leave behind their world where might made right, where power and riches were primary, and instead step into a humbler world where love and relationship were primary.  That’s the change of heart that liberal Christianity would say that John promoted.  John offered a fresh start to his people, a fresh start achieved through ritual and water, a change of heart that led to a righting of priorities, with a goal of greater proximity to the Spirit Of Life, to God.

 

I usually try to avoid giving sermons where I say that a whole bunch of world religions are actually about the same thing.  That’s not generally true.  But can you see how similar the goals of these traditions are?  Shinto and Judaism and what became the root of Christianity – these traditions are all giving us a way to have a fresh start in our lives.

 

In a humanist religion like Unitarian Universalism, we tend to first look at the human need that religion meets.  And I would say that this world tour of rituals that help us to start fresh, this world tour tells us something very important about the human condition. 

 

It tells us that each of us has the tendency to fall short of our ideals and our best behavior. 

 

It tells us that each of us has the capacity to drift away from what is True and Right, the Spirit of Life itself, and we all need a way in which we can find the road back.

 

These rituals tell us that it’s probably a good idea to have rituals built into our lives where on a regular basis we can shed those habits that aren’t serving us.  That’s a good use for religion, because religion is handy for creating useful rituals that help us live better.

 

Our world religions tour tells us that every once in a while, we humans need everything to stop, for all the regular things we do to be thrown out, so that we can regroup and rebuild what is most valuable and helpful to us all.

 

For better or for worse, our humanist religion of Unitarian Universalism has tended to recreate the wheel when it comes to ritual.  We don’t do religious things from generation to generation just because “that’s the way it’s always been done.”

 

But if it is true that each of us needs a time in the year or in our lives when we start fresh, that’s something that deserves our attention.  What sort of Unitarian Universalist ritual would you create to meet this need in your community?  In what sorts of ways can you create such an opportunity in your own life, ways to help you feel cleansed of the old and ready for the new? 

 

Every person, apparently across cultures and history, every person needs the chance to express their desire to change their hearts.  Every person, it seems, needs to fashion a bowl out of leaves sometimes, literally or metaphorically, and put things in it that they are ready to be without.  Every person needs to say goodbye to that which doesn’t work for them anymore, every once in a while. 

 

What would you put in your floating bowl, your Loy Krathong?  And in what way would you choose to send it away from you, and set it – and you – free?

 

There are so many manners in which we can find meaningful ways to meet our deepest human longings, our deepest human needs.  If you need to begin again, to start fresh, I recommend taking that need seriously, and consider meeting it through a ritual.  You can pick one of these that were mentioned today, or invent one of your own. 

 

But be sure to give yourself the time and the space, every once in a while, to have your change of heart, to send your bad choices and your bad luck down the river, and to resolve to begin again, this time closer to the way of the spirit of life.  Don’t forget, every once in a while, to put your heart in a holy place.  Don’t forget to set yourself free.

 

Amen.