I am going to do something very uncharacteristic for those of you who have heard me speak here before.  I am going to read a prepared speech.  I’m doing this because I feel in jeopardy of being overwhelmed.  There is part of me that feels inadequate to speak to the significance of this year – 2009 and I feel that I’d better stick to the script.

2009 is only four days old, but never in my lifetime have I seen a year so eagerly anticipated by so many people.  Never in my lifetime have I seen a year with so much riding on it. 

We’re facing a financial crisis unlike anything the world has ever seen.  In early 2008, pundits were reluctant to use the word “recession.”  Now, they’ve abandoned that discussion and are arguing about whether or not this may in fact be a “depression.”  It may make one nostalgic for the days when we only had skyrocketing fuel prices, a pair of lingering wars, and the debate about whether or not global climate change was real to worry about.

The New Year… the changing of the calendar.  Not a huge move, in and of itself.  But this year, it’s different.  This truly promises to be very new.   Major changes typically don’t coincide with the calendar.  The attitudes and activities that we most associate with the era that we call “The 60’s” didn’t really get going until the last half of 1963 when Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered the “I Have a Dream” speech and then when President Kennedy was assassinated three months later.  “The 80’s” as we remember them didn’t really start until 1981 when Reagan was inaugurated and MTV went on the air August 1^st.  “The 80’s” ended on October 19^th, 1987 when the stock market fell 22%.  What we call “The 90’s” began then and lingered on until the September 11^th attacks in 2001. 

Now it’s happening again.  This early 21^st century era which never really got a good, widely accepted, shorthand name like “The 90’s” is over… or at least, it’s ending.  The next stage in our collective world history will officially begin in 16 days, but I’ve never seen a “President-Elect” more eagerly anticipated, one with more power and more moral authority than Barack Obama. 

You can see that now with the crisis in Gaza this weekend.  Even conservative pundits are criticizing President-Elect Obama for being on vacation in Hawaii while this crisis is going on.  These are the same conservative pundits who complained about the website “Change.gov” and pointed out that there is no such thing as “The Office of the President Elect” and that, as of right now, Mr. Obama does not have any official authority.

We’re in that “in-between” time when people can feel that a change is happening or has already happened, but they’re not quite sure when or where or what that change is.  Which gets back to my thought that these eras don’t begin or end cleanly with the decades – they don’t even necessarily cleanly begin or end when a new government takes office.  If you look hard enough, you may decide that this change happened well before the election.  Maybe the seeds were planted back in July of 2002 when Toby Keith’s song “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue” was the number one song on the country charts and many people rankled at Keith’s lyric, “We’ll put a boot in your ass, it’s the American way.”  When many people, like me, said to themselves that this is, in fact, most certainly NOT the American way.

The change continued as the current President’s approval rating sank, and as many Millenials (to quote Mr. Obama from his election night speech) “rejected the myth of their generation’s apathy.”

We don’t know where or when the actually “tipping point” was.  We’ll never know.  We can never know.  But there’s something deep in human nature that needs some POINT to look on and say “everything was different after THAT happened.”  That’s why every culture has ceremonies.  This is why you’re here today when you could be at home in your pajamas still reading a book and drinking coffee. 

Someone asked me, leading up to the election, what – exactly – can one person, even the president, do in light of the overwhelming financial and global crises we face?  I said that one of the things I see the President of the United States doing as a leader is providing an example.  I’m old enough now that I’ve been through several Presidents and I’ve noticed that leaders - at every level from the shift manager at the local hamburger joint to governors - consciously or unconsciously mimic the leadership style of the President  They take their cues from him.  Even when they don’t want to.  Even when they don’t like him.

I look forward to this with President Obama.  I think that the transparency, the optimism, the circumspection, and the humility of this man will be a good fit for what our society needs right now.

Everyone knows that Mr. Obama’s beloved grandmother died in Hawaii two days before the election, but what you might not know is that part of the reason he chose for taking his vacation in Hawaii was to attend a memorial service for her. That service took place last week - at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Honolulu.  I can’t quite imagine our current president, or indeed any of our presidents in recent memory, setting foot inside a Unitarian Universalist meeting house.  I’m encouraged by the thought that Mr. Obama and his family found a place like this to be the appropriate setting to memorialize his grandmother.

In preparation for today, I looked at any number of web sites that offered predictions for 2009 and they all had one thing in common – the economy will get worse before it gets better.  I’m not convinced that’s true. I don’t think that’s true because I think people have braced for it. 

Some economists are afraid that people are panicking, but I don’t think so.  I think they’re coming to their senses.

One of the presents my daughter got for Christmas was the first season of Little House on the Prairie on DVD and she’s just been obsessed with it. Which is extra interesting to me because I was also obsessed with it when I was her age – although I could only watch one episode a week and couldn’t rewind when I missed something.   When I was her age – we had a hand pump, a wood stove and an outhouse… okay, so it was out at our camp – but my point is that I could really imagine what it might have been like to live like that more than she could.   But she GETS IT.  She sees how much we’ve benefited from the developments of the past.  She’s beginning to see that we all stand on the shoulders of giants.

Our President Elect echoes that.  He acknowledges that he was “never the likeliest candidate.”  He made fun of his “funny” name.  In fact, as I was typing this, I realized that Microsoft office gives me the red squiggly underline signaling a misspelling under “Barack” and “Obama.” 

As we ask ourselves – “what does 2009 want from us,” we’ll take some cues from our personal circumstances, some cues from the world around us, and some of it we will just have to make up as we go along.

Mostly though, I think our society is ready to really consider what’s really important.  I think that 2009 will be a year where many more people are ready to receive many of the messages of hope and love that the Unitarian Universalists carry. 

I think that we, as a society, are finally ready to listen to those prophetic women and men who have been quietly but insistently repeating the message of sustainability, stewardship, compassion, justice, and healing.

I think that we’re ready to receive a message that we need to respond to God’s love by loving our neighbors as ourselves.

I think that we’re ready to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and reject the idolatry of ideology. 

These are ideas that have been kept safe here, and in thousands of other places like this, for many years – but now it’s time to take these ideas out of the small protective circle and out into society.  Into the ongoing democratic processes that underlie all of our nation’s activities everyday, not just one day in November every four years. 

It’s up to each of us, individually to meditate on the principles that we affirm for ourselves and to decide how each of us want to carry those values out into the larger world – a world that has been starving for them for so long and one that I think is finally ready to receive them. 

On election night, Mr. Obama said, “This victory alone is not the change we seek - it is only the chance for us to make that change.”

2009 holds that chance.  It’s not a guarantee.  Not by any stretch.  It’s just… hope.

Amen.