No Problem!
Rev. Edmund Robinson
UU Church of Wakefield
December 14, 2003

	I take for my title this morning a phrase which seems to be everywhere these days.  According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the phrase “no problem” first made its appearance in print in 1973, but then it was restricted to a meaning as roughly the equivalent of the then-current “no sweat.”  Easy.  Simple.  The OED doesn’t record when it took over the usage which gives me the most hives, that is, as a replacement for the simple “you’re welcome” after someone says “thank you.”  It’s so casual, so unthinking.  I finish my meal, the waitress takes away my dishes and I murmur ”thank you,” and I get back the reply “no problem.”
	I stifle the urge to withhold my tip.  What kind of problem might there be that she is negating?  It’s her job to clear the dishes, and I was thanking her for doing her job.  I wasn’t trying to create a problem, at least I didn’t think so.  It feels like something vaguely threatening has been implied here.  The use of “no problem” has come up in the wake of the tough-guy or gangster use of the word “problem,” as in “what’s your problem?” or “you got a problem wid dat?”.  These are aggressive question, and the phrase “no problem” is what one might answer to ward off a violence.  I really am not threatening violence to this waitress and it seems a bit extreme for her to be protecting herself.
	Now this waitress probably never reflected on the meaning of this little catch phrase, and neither do the rest of us who use it dozens of times per day.  Full disclosure: I have been known to do it myself.  But it strikes me that it is the tip of a very large iceberg of a cultural attitude we Americans have come to have, an attitude which says that life would be better, happiness would be complete, Nirvana would be attained, if in fact we had no problems.  And what I want to say this morning is that that ain’t so.
	Now one of the great perks of being the preacher is that you get to define your terms, so let me start with this word problem. 	The word comes from two Greek roots, BD@ (pro) and $V88,T(ballew).  BD@ is a preposition meaning “away” or “out” and $V88,T is a verb meaning “to throw.”  It is the root of our word ballistic. So the Greek word was BD@$V88,T meaning to throw out or to put forth, and this explains why the earliest English use of the word “problem,” back in the fourteenth century, was a difficult or puzzling question proposed for solution, a riddle or enigma.
A problem is something that is thrown out at us, that is put in our laps to see what we will do with it.
	I think it is timely to think about how much we need our problems at this time of year, because it is at this time of year that they seem to pile up and be overwhelming.  Those of us of a musical bent will find ourselves running to rehearsals and performances and our friend’s or childrens’ rehearsals and performances and all of shuttling back and forth to church events and school events and office parties and neighborhood parties, all the while we may be saddled with illness, debt, depression, addictions, or just disappointments.  How do we fill our regular obligations, pay our bills and still be merry and have fun, too?  No problem, indeed!
	And yet as crushing as our problems seem, it is in the attempt to deal with them that life most truly resides.  In the Thanksgiving reading I do every year is the quote from Helen Keller: “I thank God for my handicaps, for through them I have found myself, my work, my God.”  Or as the psychologist Karl Menninger said “Unrest of spirit is a mark of life; one problem after another presents itself and in the solving of them we can find our greatest pleasure.”  
	I will give you a little confession: I am addicted to crossword puzzles.  Rarely a day goes by that I don’t find the time to work the one in the Globe, and if I have enough time and am feeling especially sharp, to give the New York Times crossword a shot as well.  But after I have finished a puzzle, there is always a sense of letdown, because the greatest pleasure is while you are working it, not that you successfully worked it.
	Now most of the problems we confront in life are considerably more painful than unsolved crossword puzzles.  Yet I maintain that much of what makes life worth living is in dealing with them.  I say dealing with rather than solving because many of the most interesting and challenging puzzles that life gives us don’t have solutions as neat as a crossword or jigsaw puzzle.  Crossword puzzles are problems we construct for ourselves to hone our skills for solving life  problems, but we must not be seduced into the idea that because all crossword puzzles have a solution, all the problems life throws at us have a neat solution.  One of my absolute favorite sayings in the world is from H.L. Mencken: “There is always an easy solution to every human problem – neat, plausible and wrong.”
	December 8 is celebrated in some parts of the Buddhist world as Bodhi Day, the day when Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, attained enlightenment sitting under a ficus tree.  One of the fruits of that enlightenment was the four noble truths, the first of which is that everything is dukkha which can be either translated as suffering or unhappiness.  From a Buddhist perspective, the notion that all problems have a solution is one of the roots of unhappiness. The Buddha counsels us to accept our problems, to work at resolving those which can be resolved, and to accept the ones which can’t.
	Rumi, the Persian Sufi poet, compared life to a Guest house in this poem:
THE GUEST HOUSE" 
by Jelaluddin Balkhi Rumi (1207-1248), translated by Coleman Barks 
This being human is a guest house. 
Every morning a new arrival. 
A joy, a depression, a meanness, 
some momentary awareness comes 
as an unexpected visitor. 
Welcome and entertain them all! 
Even if they’’re a crowd of sorrows, 
who violently sweep your house 
empty of its furniture, 
still, treat each guest honorably. 
He may be clearing you out 
for some new delight. 
The dark thought, the shame, the malice, 
meet them at the door laughing, 
and invite them in. 
Be grateful for whoever comes, 
because each has been sent 
as a guide from beyond.
 
	Be hospitable to your problems.  “Problems are only opportunities in work clothes” said Henry J. Kaiser, the American industrialist who built the Hoover Dam.  And Martin Luther King said “All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another.” 
	Now it seems to me that the worst thing about the phrase “no problem” is that it implies we are denying the problems we have.  I don’t say we should wallow in our problems, or be obsessed by them or let them drag us down, but we need at least to own them. To know which problems are ours and which ones somebody else’s is the beginning of wisdom, the foundation for drawing boundaries.  By contrast, the misery which a lot of good-hearted people fall into is to take on everyone else’s problems as their own.  
	Now I’m not saying we need to be isolated or indifferent to problems of others.  Part of being in community is sharing problems and helping each other solve problems.  But each of needs to be clear about which problems are whose.
	Another thing we need to be clear about is that people have problems, but people are not their problems.  There is nothing more devastating to a child than to sense somehow that he or she is a problem, and this goes for all of us as well.  To be labeled as a “problem child” is to be condemned to a lifetime of low self-esteem.  In my own life, I saw this with my father.  He had a stroke at age 50, and this brought on a bipolar mental illness.  As the illness progressed, he became very difficult for my mother and younger siblings left at home to deal with.  I think he took his own life at age 60 because he defined himself as a problem, to which his suicide was the solution.
	Yet it is true that people can be problems; every one of us has been a problem to someone else at some point in our lives.  At this season of Advent, we look forward to the birth of the Holy in the form of a baby.  A baby is a huge problem, as those among us who are expecting can attest.  The coming of a baby rearranges your whole life, and there is no negotiation about it.  
	Yet many of us seek out just this kind of problem.  For the problem presented by a new baby is just the kind of problem we want to have in our lives. And maybe the problem presented by the birth of Jesus is just the kind of problem we want to have in our lives.    
	Both Unitarianism and Universalism come out of Christianity, but sometimes I think UUs want to disavow their heritage.  Sometimes I think we want to be “no problem” religion.  Hey, that was all fine for the dark ages, but since the enlightenment, we don’t need anything from Jesus – no miracles, no walking on water, no healing, no magic, no atonement.  No, we don’t really know what we think about Jesus because we really can’t be bothered – there’s too much in other religions, in science, in soccer practice and I have to get to the mall to buy my Christmas presents.
	I heard a talk by John Buehrens, the former UUA president, earlier this month on his book, Understanding the Bible, and at the question session afterwards I asked him this question: in the Nineteenth Century, both Unitarian and Universalist scholars wrote books trying to prove that theirs was the true Christianity, that orthodox Christianity went off the rails somewhere in those early centuries, and that Unitarians and Universalists were the true followers of Jesus.  Did Buehrens think these scholars were naive or crazy?  He said, not at all; I think we still stand in that tradition today.  Everything that modern New Testament scholarship has turned up about Jesus has reinforced what our ancestors said, and I am very much about trying to reclaim Jesus for our movement, and our movement as the true followers of Jesus.
	Our orthodox neighbors would hold up Jesus’ death as the centrally important fact of his life, claiming that in that death Jesus atoned for the original sin visited on the human race by Adam and opened the door to eternal life for all those who believe in him.  I would reply that to put that emphasis on Jesus’ death is to ignore his life and teachings.  I see the central message of Jesus as a radical inclusivity: he shocked the Jewish establishment of his time by sharing table fellowship with tax collectors and prostitutes, he healed and ministered to non-Jews as well as Jews in the name of the God of the Jews, and he preached a radical love as the solution to problems.
	You’ve got no place to sleep?  No problem.  The swallows have their nests but the son of man has no place to lay his had.  Got nothing to wear?  No problem.  Consider the lilies of the fields: they don’ shop at Filene’s, they don’t even have a credit card, and they don’t put out Christmas stockings, but even Solomon in all his glory was not decked out like one of these.
	Someone takes your coat?  No problem.  Let him take your shirt also.  Someone strikes you on the cheek?  No problem.  Turn the other cheek and let ‘em hit that one also.  Someone makes you walk a mile?  No problem.  Walk an extra mile with him.
	Hold on, you say.  I do have a problem.  I’ve got a problem with all of that.  No one can live that way.  No one can actually practice the radical love and forgiveness that Jesus teaches.  We tried being hippies, but that was a sixties thing.  You can’t say that’s how we should live now?
	Folks, I’m not saying it, Jesus said it.  The best modern scholars put those words of Jesus as he most probable to have actually been said by him; they can be found in the fifth and sixth chapters of Matthew’s gospel.  And they have been a problem for all humanity ever since.  It was as difficult to live those words in 70 of the common era as it is today. Which is why the early church developed all kinds of diversionary tactics to soften the impact.
	The revolutionary changes that Jesus tries to make are not restricted to the words in Matthew, though.  The reading this morning was the poem called the Magnificat, a traditional advent story where Mary is reacting to the angel’s news that she is to bear Jesus. It can be read as a hope for liberation of a very political kind: God, it says, has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts, he has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things and the rich he has sent empty away.”  This is a God of liberation, a god who becomes a problem for the powers that be, the status quo.  A God who might issue a decree allowing people to marry whomever they liked, which would create a big problem for some people.
	Yes this baby we expect at this season is a problem.  He’s been making problems for two thousand years.  Maybe at this Advent season if folk would quit being hung up on worshiping him as a savior and start paying attention to what he actually said and stood for, we could begin to work on our problems and we could build a better world.  Hey, you got a problem wid dat?
Amen.