December 6 , 2009

In Church, We Do It Together

The Rev. Mark Ward, Minister
Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville

Asheville, NC

SERMON

Some 75 years ago at the height of the Great Depression, Unitarians gathered a panel of what they considered some of their key leaders and deep thinkers to ponder the future of the denomination. Things at the time looked pretty bleak. In the previous 30 years dozens of congregations had closed, and membership was down at most of those that remained. Surveying those churches, they found that few gave attention to their institutional health. Many didn’t even maintain active membership lists.

The report produced by this panel, entitled the Commission of Appraisal, predecessor of our present-day Unitarian Universalist Commission on Appraisal, was a call to action. “Unitarians Face a New Age,” the book-length document was entitled. And it detailed at some length many organizational changes that the authors felt were needed to revitalize this liberal religious body.

But for all the high-level changes that were recommended, the report was clear on where the locus of this revival would have to be: in local churches, congregations, in the words of the report, “made up of human beings organized to promote the development of spiritual insight and power among their own members and in society,” places that used their best energy and resources “to make religion an effective force in the lives of people today.”

Here, as we worked this past year to update and refine the mission statement that guides our work as a congregation we wrestled with naming that which is really core to us. First, we agreed that we hope to nurture individual search of meaning. We want this place to be a crucible where each of us can bring the questions and quandaries, the insights and epiphanies that come to us as we try to fathom the significance of our lives and where we fit in this astounding universe, as we sort out what seems to us to be true and how we might live with integrity.

 We also recognized that there are fundamental values that guide us, principles that we see arising from the history of humankind across many religious traditions as well as taught by wise and prophetic women and men that hold a place of honor among us as tools to becoming fully human living in harmony and peace. We name them as freedom, justice and love.

As abstract concepts, though, those principles are hard to grasp. We need to find a way to make them real, to embody them in our lives, and we do that in community. But here there is a specific kind of community that we allude to. We are aware of, and perhaps at some point have found ourselves bound up in communities that are unresponsive, oppressive, even destructive. What we have in mind is the kind of community that makes it possible to be who we are and invites, perhaps challenges us to act from our better selves and to be in honest, engaged relationship with others, serving our common interests and greater hopes.

One way of framing this understanding of community in the context of liberal religion was offered by one of the authors of “Unitarians Face a New Age,” a man who later became one of the leading theologians of our movement for the 20th century: James Luther Adams. Adams joined the Commission of Appraisal shortly after returning to the U.S. after a stint studying in Germany. In 1935 and 36 he had watched as the Nazi government crushed dissent and prepared for war. He made the acquaintance of dissidents and was nearly imprisoned for associating with church-related resistance groups.

On his return, Adams told friends he was distressed that in Germany he experienced the tendency among religious liberals to meet Nazi oppression by mouthing platitudes of open-mindedness. You can see his influence in the Commission’s criticism of the Unitarians’ philosophical defense of free faith and its call to action.

Adams argued that free church tradition held the seeds not only for its own flourishing but also the preservation of democratic society and progressive social change. That tradition, he said, is rooted in the notion of covenant, a promise of mutual trust and support made freely in the spirit of love.

This was how the earliest churches in America, many of which later became Unitarian churches, organized themselves. It was not a creed but a commitment to support each other in the journey of faith that gathered them. Such a commitment unites our churches today. It is a commitment a person makes that is at once grounded in freedom and responsive to the other. One joins such a church not simply with the end of sorting out one’s self or getting one’s needs met, but to be part of a larger venture, to see one’s own journey as part of a larger journey that brings about the reconciliation of peoples, the making of peace, awakening to the interdependence of all things.

Such, I believe, is the commitment to community that unites us today. We gather not simply to sit with people we find pleasant to be near but to leverage our individual gifts, the wisdom we have gathered, the insight we have found, and the spark of joy and hope within each of us to change ourselves and the world, that we might gain deeper understanding and live with integrity, that by our deeds people will be made free, justice will prevail, and love will guide us and join us and all humankind as one.

Yes, it is global language, maybe even pie-in-the-sky talk, but James Luther Adams does us the service of reminding us that it is accomplished, not in the abstract, but in the concrete, in sometimes struggling, imperfect congregations like ours, day by day, act by act.

I could offer to make my case by citing a slice of life in this congregation of any time period you choose, but for our purposes today let me bring your attention just to what is taking place right here, at this church, this weekend.

We began with a UU 101 class held Saturday morning. About a dozen newcomers gathered in Sandburg Hall shared the stories of their faith journeys and heard presentations from me and church leaders on what this congregation and Unitarian Universalism is about. The initial friendships made and generous sharing person to person across those four to five hours sent out tendrils of connection. Those of us presenting were reminded of the hopes and purposes that keep us here, and the decisions by 11 of those attending to join this congregation offer rich promise to our future.

Hours later, a blustery evening couldn’t keep away about 50 of us, ranging in age from small ones peeking out from shoulder slings to others in wheelchairs, from an evening of Christmas decorating here and in Sandburg Hall that I invite you to look around you and take in. As we held hands in a circle before diving into a potluck dinner, stapled together paper chains, patiently unraveled strings of electric lights, or held ladders for each other for the hanging of wreaths or greenery, we saw in exchanged smiles and glances a quiet recognition: I’m at home among these people. The hopes I have for myself and the larger world reside not in abstract principles but the work we do together, the trust we give, the love we share.

And then, enter the services we hold together today. Let’s begin with this riot of plush in front of me. Stuffed animals that yesterday lay in the bin of a store somewhere have been elevated to the status of agents of justice and love simply by virtue of having been bought and placed at the foot of our pulpit and having been blessed with the intention of offering comfort to children in need. The work of justice, often seeming abstract and distant, is made very real, the gesture of giving hope is made concrete.

As we entered worship, we began by acknowledging the alpha and omega of our existence – lighting a candle to honor the memory of one of our number who has died and welcoming children into the life of this community. Each of these acts not only weaves our community together but also invites us to reflect on the meaning of benchmarks we mark time by. They remind us that we are not simply atoms bouncing off of each other; we are involved in each other’s lives. And these affirmative acts remind us how and invite us in many ways to continue and deepen that involvement. It is not birth and death in the abstract that we are talking about, but this person we have lost who touched our lives, and these new shining faces among us. Each act gives us a specificity, a reference point that reinforces its meaning.

Being together in community, certain moments of the service, or certain words spoken together obtain a resonance over time. The last time that many of us here recited today’s reading was barely a week ago at the memorial service for our member Douglas Cotts. Speaking those words now in worship invites those of us who were there to reflect back on that moment, on the loss we feel with Doug’s absence and the comfort it brings to be able to recite together – “We need one another when we mourn and would be comforted . . . when we are in trouble and afraid . . . when we come to die, and would have gentle hands prepare us for the journey” – and my telling you this invites you into that experience, to reflect on the ways that these words and this community might have meaning for you. Good and comforting words from our hymnal get woven into the life of our community. In a sense, they take on a different life, a different meaning because of the new specificity that has been attached to them.

After this sermon, you will be invited to light candles of joy and concern. You may regularly make use of this ritual, or it may have helped offered hope or clarification at an important moment in your life. Or, it may never have occurred to you to join the line and light a candle. Yet, next week, or perhaps even today, the moment may come when you are drawn to participate, when that single act will settle something, solve something, open something, or close something. The community that we make creates the liminal space where such an act is possible.

As we do each week, we will end our service joining hands to sing our closing song. Shortly after arriving at this congregation, I memorized that song so that I could take my eyes of the page, cast them around the room and take in your beautiful faces. It is a wonderful moment for me before we head off on our various travels and reminds me who we are, what this church offers that is worthy of our commitment, our caring, our sacrifice.

Now I must acknowledge that each of these images I have offered carries a positive, uplifting feeling to them. We need to be careful about painting our vision of community with rose-colored glasses. The truth is that even in the best communities there are moments of difficulty, disagreement, or pain, and we need to make room for that. As Dietrich Bonhoffer put it, “Those who love their dreams of community more than the community itself become destroyers of the latter, even though their personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial.”

The sharing that we do and the trust that we share lays the groundwork for confronting those moments and paving the path to forgiveness for the failures and frailties to which we each fall prey. In the end, community is less a fixed thing than a way, a path to deeper and full engagement in what it means to be human. It is, as the one-time Unitarian Universalist troubadour Ric Masten put it, a dance: moving, swaying, leading, following, in good times and bad, with promises held firmly but lightly, moving to the rhythm of our lives.