WE WELCOME ALL

The Rev. Mark Ward
Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville

Asheville, NC

December 2, 2007

READING

Adapted from A Religion for Greatness by Clarence R. Skinner

Beneath all curious customs and beliefs, deeper than ecclesiastical creeds, more vital and basic than priestly rites, stands out one impressive fact – namely that humankind touches infinity; our home is in immensity; we live, move and have our being in an eternity. This magnificent assertion is our greatest affirmation. Nothing else surpasses it in sweep of imagination or depth of understanding. It is a truth proclaimed by all that we know of modern science, and it stands the test of experience as the enduring reality.

It is humankind’s effective protest against all that lessens and divides. It is our emphatic denial of any attempt to separate us from our home and heritage. It expresses our uncompromising unwillingness to be reduced to insignificance and utter isolation. . . . (This) radical interpretation refuses to be led aside by the extraneous. It insists upon returning to what it the essential core or religious experience; namely, the seeking after and finding humankind’s relation to the unities and universals.

SERMON

These are words from a Jewish prayer I came upon recently: “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.”

It is such a vision that has inspired this service, the fourth in a series I’m offering this year as we go about planning for our future to help us center in on key traits of our church community. So far I have argued that as a religious community we gather to learn to live what love teaches, that we invite and make room for the experience of wonder and the holy and that we regard ethical living and service to justice as religion’s truest witness.

Today I want to add that it is a defining characteristic of this community that we welcome all. That’s it. It’s not fancy: short, to the point, no qualifiers. And yet to my mind it may be the most profound and difficult goal that I have set for us so far.

To be truly welcomed, is, after all, no small thing. I’m betting that if I asked you to name a moment when it happened it would come to you in a flash. There is something unforgettable about it, about that quality of openness, of acceptance in another that puts you at ease and makes you feel, as the prayer suggests, at home.

We proclaim our intentions on our Web site: Whoever you are, wherever you come from, you are welcome in our faith community. And yet we must admit that to be truly welcoming is no easy task. It requires that we suspend our own desires to be recognized and affirmed, that we get over ourselves, and shift the focus of our hearts and minds to another. It means at least for a moment banishing our agendas and our impulses to judgment and being present to another person with sympathy and interest.

True welcoming is fundamental to who we are as a religious community, to our commitment to each other as free beings with inherent worth, worth that cannot be conferred or taken away, and to our hope of creating a community centered at the axis of freedom and love, of reason and hope.

But to say that it is central to our identity to welcome all is not to say that it is something that we always do well. Sometimes we do, but to be honest often we don’t. We may be forgetful or distracted, or perhaps intimidated, or bored. Rather than suggest this as a statement of who we are, I want to offer it as a challenge, as a test of our convictions. If we are going to live what our heritage demands and our principles proclaim then it is incumbent on us to learn how truly to welcome all.

This question of who and how we welcome is very old in our movement. Often it has arisen a result of asking, as we as a church are now: Who are we? What do we stand for? The reading you heard earlier from Clarence Skinner came from a pivotal time for Universalists, around the middle of the 20th century, when that question was being asked with increased intensity.

Born toward the end of the 18th century of the simple affirmation that there was no hell, that a loving God would not consign his children to eternal torment, the Universalist movement had changed dramatically over 200 years. It had grown up as a strictly Biblically-centered religion, duking it out with more conservative Christian traditions over the proposition, in the words of one of its founders, John Murray, that Jesus’ words teach the lesson of hope, not hell.

The movement grew quickly, across New England, into the Midwest and the South, but around mid 19th century it began to stall, and by the early 20th century it fell into steep decline. The closing of rural churches as urban centers grew played a significant role, but so also did the sense that the church’s traditional theological emphasis on Universal salvation was old news, a point conceded by other sects that spoke little to current concerns.

As it was put by the J. M. Pullman, who incidentally was the grandfather of a former minister of this church, Tracy Pullman, “You Universalists have squatted on the biggest word in the English language. Now the world is beginning to want that big word, and you Universalists must either improve the property or move off the premises.”

The movement flirted for a short time with the idea of merging with other more strictly Christian churches, but in the end nothing came of it. Skinner, who was dean of Crane Theological School at Tufts University, one of two Universalist seminaries, raised one of the loudest and most forceful voices for Universalists to chart their own course. Urging that Universalism’s future lay beyond Christianity, he sought to show that religion was rooted in the common experiences of humankind, and that those were reflected in many different perspectives and traditions.

This resonated, too, in the words of Robert Cummings, general superintendent of the Universalist Church of America after World War II. In restricting its scope to Protestant Christianity, Cumming said, Universalism was denying its very name. “For,” he said, “so long as Universalism is universalism and not partialism, the fellowship bearing its name must succeed in making it unmistakably clear that all are welcome.”

To some degree, we are indebted to this modernizing movement within Universalism for the emergence of what is our first principle today, affirming the inherent worth and dignity. For it was in the 1935 Universalist Bond of Union, which Skinner strongly influenced, that the phrase first appeared. This new document shifted the denomination’s focus from universal salvation, the assurance that all would go to heaven at death, to the work needed, in its words, to “establish the Kingdom of God” on Earth. And central to that work was affirming “the supreme worth of every human personality.”

In a sense, this shoved true welcoming to the center of our movement. For it affirmed the words we heard earlier from Walt Whitman: the sum of all known reverence I add up in you, whoever you are. It is our very humanness we honor in each other. We are not means to another’s ends. Our worth is not conferred by some other source. Each of us has dignity in and of ourselves. And religion’s purpose is to serve that humanity. In Skinner’s words, “We protest against all that lessens and divides.” We touch infinity, we experience the vast, unending universe bending forever in time, and are not separated, but integral to it.

The Universalist reformers had a vision that in time the denomination would embrace the idea of what they called “a religion for one world,” a religion that wove together out of the wisdom of all the world’s religions. That vision eventually faded after the Unitarians and Universalists merged in 1961, but their influence continued to be felt when the affirmation of the supreme worth of each person emerged among the new association’s founding principles.

Thirteen years later in 1984 that affirmation rose to new prominence when it was reframed moved to the front of the newly configured principles of the Unitarian Universalist Association, where it remains today. As such it remains the center of our welcome to anyone who joins our community, our affirmation that if you find yourself at home here, you belong. We’ll draw a circle that takes you in. There is no admission test, no bar to cross. There is a place at the table, and we are glad of your company.

But there is also another piece of this story that you should know, a piece that plays into who we are and hope to become. Shortly after the UUA’s congregations approved the new bylaws containing the reconfigured principles, a new movement arose in the context of that first principle.

In 1987 a Common Vision Planning Committee reported finding negative attitudes, deep prejudices and profound ignorance in our churches about bisexual, gay, lesbian and transgender people, even resulting in some people being excluded from becoming involved.

In 1989 a new initiative was approved at General Assembly creating a program to help churches educate their members about this prejudice. To emphasize how integral this work was to who we are and hope to be it was dubbed the Welcoming Congregation program. Each congregation was encouraged to go through a process of education and self study on the many dimensions of oppression involved in homophobia and to vote to declare itself a Welcoming Congregation. This congregation went through this process 12 years ago. Our sister congregation in Black Mountain, the UU Congregation of the Swannanoa Valley, just completed it this fall.

So, know that while we as a congregation aim to extend our welcome in many ways, when we identify ourselves as a Welcoming Congregation, we mean to say specifically that gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people have a place at our table, and we are glad of your company. It is a measure, though, of the work before us as a movement that to date only about 55% of Unitarian Universalist congregations in the United States and 43% in our Thomas Jefferson District have voted to become Welcoming Congregations.

“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.”

We still struggle to draw that wider circle. There are so many ways that we humans divide ourselves from one another. I have heard it suggested that perhaps our mightiest, most needed role as a church is to serve as a place of welcome.

Youth and elders, you are welcome.

Black, white, yellow, brown, you are welcome.

Atheist and humanist, theist and mystic, you are welcome.

Married, partnered, divorced, separated, widowed, single, you are welcome.

Gay, straight, however you identify you gender, you are welcome.

Your mind, however agile; your heart, however full, and your body, whatever its shape, its ability, you are welcome.

However you make your way in the world - retiree, professional, teacher, truck driver, artist, unemployed, you are welcome.

You are welcome in your joy and you are welcome in your sorrow. You are welcome in your grief, your loneliness, your anger, your fear, your shame.

You are welcome in this place, where in covenanted community we join to honor and be present to one another, despite our imperfections, our differences and our doubts. The circle grows within each one of us as we put aside our judgments and our fears and listen to each others cares and thanks and hopes and prayers.

We endeavor to welcome all, believing that the precious humanity we share is more important than whatever divides us, believing that this house, too, might be a home for all who would enter with wide doors and windows shining welcome.

I don’t pretend, though, that accomplishing all this isn’t work, that it doesn’t challenge deeply ingrained habits and ways of thinking in each of us. But I must say I am drawn to the sentiment of Wendell Berry’s Sabbath poem. There is no going back to a blinkered way of living, shuttered in my own, safe space, once I’ve had a glimpse of a larger, more inclusive way of living. As years go by I find old habits of thought that I had clutched so long unknowingly suddenly falling away. More than ever my impulse is to be more generous toward each day that comes and toward each person within it.

What was holding me back before? I suppose some sense that those old habits of thought somehow protected me, that in an uncertain world they were a harbor of safety, that if I gave them up I might be somehow lessened, exposed. The truth is they only diminished me.

No, Mr. Berry, you are right. I have no need of such “protections.” Every day I have less reason not to give myself away.