You may have noticed when you got here today, that our church felt a little more lived-in

this week. Delicious aromas of cooking still linger, the couches and RE rooms look a little more well-loved (if that's possible) and a bouquet of flowers and a Buddhist prayer shawl appeared magically on Friday. All week long, thanks to the efforts of your Social Justice Committee, our church was sponsoring a group of walkers who were walking from Toronto to New York City to build awareness of Tibet's struggle for independence and the religious oppression that they have suffered since they were invaded by the People's Republic of China in 1959.

Professor Norbu, the Elder Brother of the Dalai Lama, was with the walkers and serves as their spiritual leader. They began about a week ago Friday, in Toronto. Does anybody remember what it was like week ago Friday, in Toronto? It was FREEZING! That tiny group of Tibetan walkers, many of them elderly and bent over, had an awful week to be walking outside for 6 hours a day! You might ask yourself, what on earth would possess a small group of people who are in mediocre health, to walk all those miles in the cold?

Well, to know the answer, you'd have to know an awful lot about Buddhist meditation and how it centres on extending infinite compassion to all sentient beings, even your enemy – you’d need to know something about the Dalai Lama and his Nobel Peace Prize for non-violent resistance to his country's oppression, you'd need to know something about the thousands of monasteries that have been destroyed or desecrated in Tibet, and you'd have to spend some time walking in their shoes for a while.

In only the short time that I spent with them, I felt the courage and resolve of these determined people to try and make known the terrible atrocities that their people have suffered - but without resorting to the same sorts of means that were used against them. Speaking to them, I wanted to change the title of this sermon to Walking to New York!

This week, Christians all over the world are celebrating Palm Sunday, Jesus' triumphant entry into Jerusalem. And the question that for many years really puzzled me about Palm Sunday was "Why on earth did Jesus go into Jerusalem?" From what we can tell from the stories that were written, by that point in his ministry, Jesus had begun to attract a following. It was after the Sermon on the Mount, and stories of healing and miracles were following him wherever he went. What we do know for certain was that he was heading into Jerusalem on Passover, into a city that was teaming with high priests and religious officials, and he had already begun to say things that were problematic for religious authority.

To make matters worse, Jerusalem was the seat of governmental authority, the locus of Roman rule in Judea, and Jesus’ words were raising the prospect of local unrest in a way that was alarming to Roman officials. So why, why on earth would he choose to ride right into the heart of the most dangerous place he could possibly be? The answer, I think, was moral courage.

Courage, says Joseph Campbell, often arises when something has been lost or taken - and we must struggle to retrieve it, or to come to terms with the spiritual lesson of its loss.

Courage arises when safety is threatened, loved ones are in peril, illness arrives and health fails, security cannot be assured, peace is precarious, the risks are great, and assumptions cannot be made about the future. This description makes room for acts of great sweeping courage, but does it not describe all of our lives, at different times? Sometimes courage can come to ordinary people in extraordinary times.

One person whose courage I admire is a Dutch woman named Etty Hillesum whose diaries were published as a book called "An Interrupted Life." She was 27 years old when the Nazis invaded, and she later made the remarkable choice of offering to be among the first to go to Westerbork, a transit camp on the way to Auschwitz. She did it knowing full well what her eventual fate would likely be. And she went, it's clear from her writings - not to be martyred, but because she had reached a level of spiritual strength and resilience that she knew would enable her to help others. Here's what she said about the choices before her:

"I feel like a small battlefield in which the problems of our time are being fought out. All one can do is to keep oneself humbly available, to allow oneself to be a battlefield. After all, the problems of the world must be accommodated, must have somewhere to struggle and come to rest, and we, poor little humans, must put our inner space at their service, and not run away." Etty's situation gave an ordinary human being an extraordinary choice, and she chose to let some of the "struggles of the world" come to rest in her soul. One from whom much was taken, chose to respond by giving.

So many people - in the world - in this congregation, finding themselves in extraordinary situations, dig deep within and respond with courage. People who carried messages for the Resistance by bicycle during the Second World War. When I asked about that story, the person of whom it was true simply said "Well, you know, I had a bicycle and a reason to get around, so I was a good choice." Simple reason. Huge risk, and a great amount of courage, to say nothing of a cool head.

Some, like Gandhi or the lone student who stood against a tank in Tiannamen Square, begin with a simple idea, like non-violent resistance or the dream of democracy, and watch it swell beneath their feet to a tide that cannot be turned back. And others, like Rosa Parks, probably didn't really mean to start a revolution, but her simple act of self respect and challenge did just that. "I was just tired and wanted a seat" she said, "And there was one at the front, and I didn't feel like going all the way to the back. So I didn't. And all hell broke loose." An ordinary person, with an ordinary need, in the extraordinary context of extreme racism in the American south found the courage to stand up for herself, and ultimately forced a diseased system to examine itself and change.

Then there is the courage of patience - like that of Nelson Mandela - who in my youth, I could never have imagined would someday be the President of South Africa - and in his decades in prison, I doubt that he could have imagined it either. Like the Tibetans, his courage was the courage of the oppressed and waiting - who muster their strength in response to invasion or violation - and see their struggle as a spiritual one - to hold back hate without hating in return.

Our own spiritual ancestors in Eastern Europe have faced a similar struggle for most of their 400 years of history. The first congregations to call themselves Unitarian exist in a part of what is now Romania, but was then a part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Transylvania. Unfortunately this proud and beautiful country is more well-known because of a Bram Stoker myth and a lot of B movies, but Transylvania, for a bright, brief period in the 16th century - not the most tolerant of times - was a haven for religious freedom. A Unitarian king, John Sigismund, in 1568, issued the first ever "Edict of Religious Freedom" that said, in the era of the Inquisition when heretics were burned at the stake, that everyone in the land was free to worship as their conscience dictated. His land became shelter and harbour for thousands of free thinkers where, as a former parishioner of mine from there said "Tolerance was the State religion!"

This attitude of brave acceptance of others and radical love despite our differences had a profound impact upon the free religious movement that spread across Europe, into England, and ultimately into the Unitarianism and Universalism of our foremothers and -fathers. Sadly, since that time, the cause of freedom in Transylvania has suffered terribly, most recently under the horrible repression that ended with the death of Nicolas Ceacuscu.

In the winter of 1990, just after the fall of the government, I was visiting one of our Unitarian Universalist Theolgical Schools, Meadville/Lombard at the University of Chicago, and I met and had dinner with The Reverend Joseph Kaszoni, who was the assistant to the Bishop in that part of the world (Unitarians still have Bishops in Eastern Europe!) He told me of the years of struggle for religious freedom under Ceacescu - how, as an ordained minister and therefore a person "officially" recognized as religious, for the past twenty-five years, excluding immediate family, he was forbidden to have more than 2 guests in his apartment at any given time. So great was the fear of subversiveness and political unrest or rebellion if more than "two or three were gathered" in the name of all that is good. "What do the people do?" I asked. "They go up into the hills" he said  "beyond the ears and eyes of the watchers." They worship outside, in the churches and cathedrals of the forest. And they wait for the world to catch up with their courage.

I've been told that when the Carolyn McDade song "Spirit of Life" that we so love that we made it the basis of our Church banner, was given to them in translation, they particularly loved the words we have inscribed "Roots hold me close, wings set me free" because it reminded them of the peace they found all those years having church in the mountains. They also love the lines that ask the spirit of life to "move in the hand, giving life the shape of justice" because it speaks to their struggle.

I told this story to the Tibetans, because it reminded me of their struggle, in their beautiful and troubled land. Sometimes just being who you are is an act of courage - be it Tibetan or Unitarian in Romania, or black in the deep south. Sometimes it is an act of courage just to say who you are, what you believe, who you love - to family, to friends, to society. When depression or difficulty strikes, just getting out of bed and deciding to go on can be an act of moral strength. The ways that we are courageous are individual and personal, and communal and sweeping, but none of them are small.

There is the courage of those who see the world with all its injustice and aching potential, and set out to make a difference - to choose the road less traveled by; and those who suddenly find themselves, through no plan of their own, in places requiring courage they didn't know they had – and somehow, miraculously rise to the occasion.

They raise the child on their own, leave the abusive marriage, finish the degree, hang in there with the teenagers, take the second job, fight the depression, walk their friend through illness, face their own death with grace and acceptance.

Well, "the problems of the world must have somewhere to struggle and come to rest, and we, poor little humans, must put our inner space at their service, and not run away." Sometimes we end up being courageous when we had no intention of any such thing. When the choice is to feel more, or less; to act justly, or not at all; to stand up for what we believe, or to hide under the covers, waiting for the world to pass.

Sometimes the braver path is the only path that makes any sense at all. Sometimes our commitment to love, or life or justice takes us all the way into Jerusalem before we know it. But both the quest we choose, and the one that chooses us give us the opportunity to be courageous. Sometimes we choose our destiny, and sometimes it chooses us. But we can always choose how to respond to it, the spirit that we will take with us on the road to Jerusalem.

"And huddled round
They gazed into each other's eyes
And planned instead a feast
Of olives, bread, fruit and wine
To celebrate their journey
And turned, refreshed
Full face into the gathering storm."

In the stories we tell of this kind of courage, success is not measured on any human scale that we can know. The person still dies, the land is still occupied, freedom is but a dream, the unworn path is dangerous, and the road to Jerusalem leads to betrayal and death. But the power and the triumph is in staying the course and putting your soul in the service of something greater than even your own life, sometimes.

Harper Lee in "To Kill a Mockingbird" puts it this way:

"Courage is when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what!"

We never know when we will be called, or tossed, into a time that requires greater courage than we knew we had. We are all called upon to live this kind of courage at times in our lives - to choose the braver path, or the road less traveled by; but we do not know when, or in what way courage will be asked of us, or given to us.

We only know that it is our friends and companions along the way who ease the pain of our choices and chances, and each carrying a piece of the tapestry of life, walk together with us into the city.

William Blake's beautiful poem in the preface to "Milton" was set some time ago to music to create a hymn called "Jerusalem" in which he hopes for a time when a New Jerusalem will reign across the land.

"Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!
I will not cease from mental fight
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land."

It is this vision, of an "earth made fair, and all her people one" that moves so many to acts of courage and unbelievable strength. It is the ability to see the spiritual connection between all people that allows you to walk in their shoes, to take the risk that might cost you dearly, and to let go of your self to do it.

May we, looking into each other's eyes, walk side by side in courage and strength, and may we plan a big celebration for when we get there. So may it be. Amen.