Who Will We Be?

The Rev. Mark Ward
Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville

Asheville, NC

May 18, 2008

READING

From The Great Transformation  by Karen Armstrong

All the traditions that were developed during the Axial Age pushed toward the frontiers of human consciousness and discovered a transcendent dimension in the core of their being, but they did not necessarily regard this as supernatural, and most of them refused to discuss it. . . . They certainly did not seek to impose their own view of this ultimate reality on other people. . . . Nobody, they believed, should ever take any religious teaching on faith or at second hand. It was essential to question everything and to test any teaching empirically, against your personal experience. . . .

What mattered was not what you believed but how you behaved. Religion was about doing the things that changed you at a profound level. . . . The only way you could encounter what they called “God,” “Nirvana,” Brahman,” or the “Way” was to live a compassionate life.

SERMON

It was on a May day, much like this one, I imagine, that a nucleus of 10 people gathered in the basement of what used to be the First Congregational Church over on Merrimon Avenue and declared themselves to be the Unitarian Fellowship of Asheville. Fifty-eight years later we gather as the Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville, a community of some 700 members and friends and around 200 children and youth in a beautiful building of our own, a growing community that is known and respected throughout the area.

Now, pull out your crystal ball and gaze 58 years in the future. It is another sunny May morning. What do you see? Chances are that few of us here today will actually get to see that church. But, in important ways we will be there, just as those few who founded this church and many others who participated in this community over the years are present here today.

The future is much on our minds here these days. For the past couple of years we have been engaged in a strategic planning process asking us to describe our hopes for this church. A little over a year ago a Strategic Planning Committee appointed by the board convened meetings in many people’s homes and community centers to hear and record your reflections. Last fall they reported those hopes back to you in the form of a vision statement for our future. Since then this group has worked to tease out the implications of that vision, what it calls us to do and to be. You will hear more about their conclusions at our annual meeting on June 8th.

It is, in my opinion, an opportune time to be asking these questions, to take stock of who we are as a church community and what we exist for. For in many ways the direction that religion will take, both here locally, but also in the larger world, is up for grabs.

In the U.S. every mainline Protestant denomination has seen a steep drop-off in membership and attendance in recent decades, and while the Catholics seem to have leveled off, that is largely because of the influx of Hispanic immigrants, who are transforming that church in ways nobody is quite yet sure of. In years past liberals like us pointed with concern about the growth in the evangelical movement, with the emergence of massive megachurches. Yet, interestingly attendance at many megachurches, too, has leveled off in recent years.

We Unitarian Universalists boast that we are seeing growth in the face of decline elsewhere, yet the truth is that that growth is anemic, in the range of 1% or so, far below the rate of population growth. Should that trend continue we may take comfort in the prospects of continued existence, but we run the risk of being marginalized into insignificance.

At the same time, though, surveys, especially among young adults, a generation that includes our graduating seniors today, show that interest in the fundamentals of religious life remains high. A study last year by UCLA found that while participation in church life had fallen off, more than half of students surveyed considered “integrating spirituality into my life” and “developing a meaningful philosophy of life” to be important. In other words, they value what churches claim to offer, but they’re not especially inclined to go to churches to get it. What’s going on here?

My theory is that as happens with just about every institution over time, churches have become locked into concrete, that rather than serving the vital spark of life and hope within each of us, many have taken to serving themselves. And as a result they have become formulaic, insular, and dull. And, sad to say, we Unitarian Universalists have not been exempt from that trend.

I won’t speak for other traditions, but from my perspective it is a terrible shame that this should happen to us, a religion that I consider so urgently needed in today’s world. And yet, I have seen it: churches that are caught up in internecine battles among humanists, theists, pagans, or other theological perspectives, churches organized largely as social clubs that serve their members but little else, churches hunkered around an in-group who do little to make room for others.

Such ways of being are not only contrary to who we are as a faith tradition, they are recipes for decline and death as a movement. And yet, it can happen. We get distracted. Our focus shifts from the hopeful, life-giving aspiration that was our focus, and we get caught in the idolatry of ego or fear, or we just get tired and stop trying.

But it doesn’t have to be that way, not if we can remain alive to and in touch with that truth within us that brought us here, that sent us in search of a spiritual home where we could be authentically who we are, where we could openly give and receive each other’s questions and quandaries, where a community of support would hold us in care and egg us on into lives of integrity.

My calling as a minister is grounded on the conviction that our religious tradition, one centered in complementing disciplines of freedom and love, is a source of hope for the world, and that our churches are where that hope will be realized. And so as we look to the future of this church, who it is we will be, I want to urge that we put that life-giving hope before us, front and center, that we find ways to remain fresh, alive, committed and engaged with each other and the world around us, committed to serving our deepest values and hopes.

This past year I offered you some initial thoughts on key aspects of our church that will help us do that. Let me recap them for you. I suggested that ours ought to be a church where we learn to live what love teaches. Underlying that statement is the conviction from our Universalist heritage that there is an abiding love that is both trustworthy and available to us all. Early Universalists centered in the Christian tradition framed this in traditional religious language as the love of God. But as Karen Armstrong suggested we need not regard this core principle of our being as supernatural. Buddha and Confucius, two of the Axial Age sages she studied, certainly did not. Yet they, together with the Universalists, understood that there is something unutterably true, incontrovertibly good about each of us. It is the source of our passion and our strength, and we give it voice when we act out of love.

One of the disciplines of our faith, I believe, is to learn to honor and heed that source of love, which represents the best that is in and among us. We are each capable and worthy of love, and if we attend to it, it will prove a capable teacher.

Similarly, if we are able to find such love in ourselves, we can also learn to find it in others, to recognize each other as worthy and whole. None of us need justify ourselves to others or look to others to fulfill us. We each have a fundamental integrity.

Implied in that vantage point is that we bring our whole selves into our spiritual search. We celebrate the sense of wonder that living gives us, the feeling that the poet Mary Oliver identifies when she says, “I would like to write a poem about the world that has in it nothing fancy. But it seems impossible.” Everywhere we look is a source of inspiration and wonder if we will let it be.

But just as we attend to the wonders around us, we also must come to terms with our failures, disappointments and loss, and the evil of which humans are capable. “This being human is a guest house,” wrote the Sufi poet Rumi. “Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness. Some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and attend them all.”

All of it is grist for our understanding, for our awakening to what it means to be human in a complex and confusing world with which our lives are interwoven, yet which makes no special provisions for us. We are invited to bring every dimension of the world that we experience into our journeys, yet at the same time we are urged not to leave our minds at the door. Remember the words you heard from the Unitarian William Ellery Channing: “We grant that the use of reason is accompanied with danger, but we ask any honest person to look back on the history of the church and say whether the renunciation of it be not still more dangerous.”

We insist that religion is not a matter of conforming out beliefs to fit someone else’s but gathering in covenanted community where we test for ourselves what is true. We do not fear the product of reasoning, or honest dissention and doubt; we embrace them as paths to wisdom. What we understand as faith is our own fundamental response to the world, the place where our hearts rest centered on what our experience as well as our hearts and minds have taught us.

We recognize no privileged perspective on the world to which we must submit. We reserve the right to weigh and examine every claim to truth. Yet, at the same time we honor and respect the integrity of each person, and we make room for the perspectives they bring into our community. This perspective leads us naturally to compassion for others, which brings us to the next two propositions that I raised: that we welcome all to our community and that ethical living and service to justice are religion’s truest witness.

You’ll recall that I introduced you to this Jewish prayer: “May this house welcome all who have cares to unburden thanks to express, hopes to nurture, prayers to whisper or to sing. As it has welcomed us, each one, may this house be a home for all who would enter, with wide doors and windows shining welcome.”

Hospitality, true welcoming, is at the center of who we are as a religious community. There is no admission test, no bar to cross. If you find yourself at home here, you belong. There is a place at the table and we are glad of your company. The Universalist poet Edwin Markham summed it up in his quatrain: He drew a circle that shut me out, heretic, rebel, a thing to flout, but love and I had the wit to win; we drew a circle that took him in.

Again, this is easy in the abstract; much harder in the real world. True welcoming means stepping outside of our comfort zones, suspending our judgmental impulses, stretching and making room for others who are unfamiliar to us.

In a growing community like ours it also challenges us to think creatively about literally creating space for each other, about widening the circle when we outgrow our physical confines.

The welcoming we do here carries forward into our individual lives. We learn to be open, generous, principled people. We learn that our own concerns extend far beyond the boundaries of ourselves. In Karen Armstrong’s words, we learn compassionate living, or, as Wendell Berry put it, we learn    that “each day you have less reason not to give yourself away.”

We learn the power that our principles give us, the power to act on our own or in concert on behalf of justice. Theodore Parker, the greater Unitarian preacher, you’ll recall, urged that, “the church that is to lead this century will not be a church on all fours; mewling and whining, its face turned down, its eyes turned back.

“It must be full of the brave spirit of the day,” demanding “as never before freedom for itself, usefulness in its institutions, truth in its teaching and beauty in its deeds.”

Our church, too, must be one that doesn’t stint in the task of justice, one that invites each of us to find a way that we can put the light of our lives to the service of us all. What we are talking about is stepping out of the boxes that divide us from one another and seeing the just interests of others as our own.

In the end, our object as a church community is not to offer a safe, privileged place apart from the world, but to create a vehicle by which we each might awaken to become wise, generous, compassionate people who understand themselves as deeply connected to a wider humanity and the Earth.

As Karen Armstrong suggested, this is not a new approach. Like the great Axial Age teachers, our work is centered not on what we believe but on how we behave: how we behave here in community and how that behavior informs our larger lives and commitments. And, while gratifying, such lives are not always easy. Sometimes we are called to join with others, to celebrate in fellowship, and other times we are called to resist, to stand up against fear, conformity, and oppression. Yet, in community we can find and give each other strength for the work before us.

To the youth in our community who are embarking on a new life away from the homes of your childhood I want to say that we celebrate the people you have become: smart, creative, committed. I hope that in your time in this community you have come to know and experience a bit of what compassionate living is about. It is a life-long journey, and I hope that wherever you settle you will consider making your spiritual home at another of our churches where you can continue it.

As I think about that church of the 2060s that earlier I invited you to imagine I don’t focus as much on its physical dimensions, though given the growth that our community has already experienced I fully expect that it will be a significantly larger presence than the church we know today. Instead, I return to its identity: a vital, active, engaged community of compassionate souls full of brave spirit, a broadly diverse community where all are welcomed, a community of intellectual courage and spiritual depth. It is our calling; it is our hope.

Let us make it so.