“The Religious Laboratory: Growing the World of Our Aspirations”
by Reverend Charles Blustein Ortman
January 28, 2007
READINGS: ANCIENT AND MODERN:
The first reading is from Chapter 4 of the Tao Te Ching, by Lao Tsu as translated by Peter Merel:
The Way is a limitless vessel;
Used by the self, it is not filled by the world;
It cannot be cut, knotted, dimmed or stilled;
Its depths are hidden, ubiquitous and eternal;
I don't know where it comes from;
It comes before nature.
The second reading is from Passion for Justice, by the late theologian Carter Heyward:
Love, like truth and beauty, is concrete. Love is not fundamentally a sweet feeling; not, at heart, a matter of sentiment, attachment, or being "drawn toward." Love is active, effective, a matter of making reciprocal and mutually beneficial relation with one's friends and enemies.
Love creates righteousness, or justice, here on earth. To make love is to make justice. As advocates and activists for justice know, loving involves struggle, resistance, risk. People working today on behalf of women, blacks, lesbians and gay men, the aging, the poor in this country and elsewhere know that making justice is not a warm, fuzzy experience. I think also that sexual lovers and good friends know that the most compelling relationships demand hard work, patience, and a willingness to endure tensions and anxiety in creating mutually empowering bonds.
For this reason loving involves commitment. We are not automatic lovers of self, others, world, or God. Love does not just happen. We are not love machines, puppets on the strings of a deity called "love." Love is a choice -- not simply, or necessarily, a rational choice, but rather a willingness to be present to others without pretense or guile. Love is a conversion to humanity -- a willingness to participate with others in the healing of a broken world and broken lives. Love is the choice to experience life as a member of the human family, a partner in the dance of life, rather than as an alien in the world or as a deity above the world, aloof and apart from human flesh.
SERMON: “The Religious Laboratory: Growing the World of Our Aspirations”
There’s an old cartoon that shows a sign on the way to the Pearly Gates that reads: Heaven this Way (with an arrow pointing to the left, and over an arrow pointing to the right the phrase) Discussions about Heaven this Way. All the Unitarian Universalists in the picture are turning off to the right. The implication of the joke is that we might sometimes talk about important things a bit more than we might actually want to do them. I don’t think that’s accurate, though. Perhaps our time together this morning will help to tell the rest of the story.
In just a few minutes, we are about to convene a special congregational meeting to determine a financial approach to complete the capital improvements to our facilities in a responsible manner. It seems to me a rather simple choice will be put before you: whether to borrow some money in order to accomplish our goals more quickly and, in the end, more economically; or whether to draw out the process and increase the costs in order to avoid borrowing any money. I’ve carefully studied the question that will be put before you and it really is, as near as I can tell, that clear cut. If there were any real question about the soundness of the issue before you, I definitely would not speak on one side of it or the other.
So, you might ask, why is this decision being put to the congregation at all? Why doesn’t the Capital Campaign Committee or the Board of Trustees just make the decision and move ahead? The reason is because our By-Laws say that congregational loans must pass a congregational muster. Is this because the congregation doesn’t trust its leadership? No. It’s because this congregation has covenanted together to be in conversation together, to stay in relationship with each other, while dealing with issues that will affect the spiritual, the financial and the structural future of our congregation. In short, in shaping who we say we are and our commitments to the outside world, we want to be sure that this body has made those determinations.
That’s what our congregational polity is all about – the congregation making its own decisions. It’s about covenanting to be together, to be our best selves together. It’s about exploring the meanings and the yearnings of human experience so that our lives and the lives of those in the world around us might have even deeper meaning and more fulfilled yearnings. Congregational polity is about the members of a congregation speaking to each other, so that the congregation can speak to the community, to other congregations and to the world. It’s about making community decisions that best promote all of these important purposes.
Today, you’ll be voting on this loan issue. Just a few, very short months down the road, you’ll be voting on a much more challenging issue, whether or not to change the name of our religious community. This is a great time to be a part of this congregation; there are a lot of important discernments going on, lots of good work.
So this is a good time to ask ourselves – to what end? Are the Capital Campaign and all the improvements to our facilities an effort to make us more comfortable and the experience of being here more enjoyable? I hope that that’s one of the outcomes, but I hope even more that it’s not our primary motivation. I hope our motivation has more to do with being good stewards of these facilities and good stewards of our Unitarian Universalist faith tradition. I hope our motivation has to do with attempting to provide a radical hospitality to those who find us here, to those whom we show the way here and to those who have no idea that we are here – but for whom we can perhaps provide safe haven in a stormy world… perhaps even salvation. And I hope when we ask ourselves the same questions about a possible name change several weeks from now, that we might employ similar motivations.
What great opportunities for exploration both of these questions provide: who we are; to what end do we gather; what does it matter to us that we gather; what does it matter to the world? I’d like to think that we begin to have an understanding of these questions through our Mission Statement: We are a liberal religious community seeking transformation in our hearts, our homes, our community and our world. I’d also like to think that we’ll begin to find even deeper answers to some of these questions throughout the next month as we explore our focus month theme for this year: “Peace: In Our Lives and In Our World.”
“Peace: In Our Lives and in Our World.” Last year, when members of our Religious Education Program came to me with this idea, I have to admit that I was rather reluctant. It’s too easy, I thought, too easy to address peace in such lofty terms that we really don’t have to do anything about transformation personally. All we’d have to do to satisfy our yearnings for peace, it seemed, is claim that we are for peace.
Throughout history, some of the vilest, most violent despots known to humanity – present-day historical figures hardly excluded – have made great oratorical but vacant claims of pursuing peace. In conversation with our Minister of Religious Education, Judy Tomlinson though, I became convinced that we could go deeply and religiously into the subject of peace and indeed promote very profound transformation in spiritual and in even broader ways. Of course, Judy is now on sabbatical – I believe at this moment preparing to climb the green hillsides of Ireland – and she’s left me and the RE Committee to do the work that she’d helped to envision. Time will tell about my efforts towards our goal, but I suspect that she’s left the children’s programming in very good and capable hands.
And so this morning, as we anticipate within just a few minutes the exercise of our congregational polity: through the democratic process, in the meeting we are about to have; and as we stand on the threshold of our February Focus Month and its theme of peace, what a good time it seems to look at a couple of matters that have to do with our relationships with one another here, and also at one of our worship practices. The first has to do with how we sometimes treat one another. The second has to do with our practice of sharing remembrances during our worship service.
Both of these matters have to do with our congregation as a religious laboratory and how we go about working together to grow the world of our aspirations. Both of them have to do with who we are and who we are becoming. And both of them have to do with growing our congregation, in a spiritually disciplined way, so as to grow our congregation into the world. We need to first be the changes we want to see in the world.
The first matter came to my attention this past fall. I’ve always thought of our congregation as a very friendly place. There have always been a few complaints, here and there, about unfriendly incidents but they’ve been relatively few in number. Within about a two or three week period recently though, I can’t tell you how many conversations I had with people who had felt they’d been rudely dealt with, dissed, ignored, sped past, or in other ways felt that they had not been treated in ways affirming or promoting their inherent worth and dignity – let alone their encouragement to spiritual growth. And I was told that such behaviors have been going on for some amount of time.
Although there are some notable exceptions, most people tend not to treat the minister in these sorts of ways. And so I don’t really have much firsthand knowledge of this behavior. So, I figure that makes me perhaps the best positioned to address it. I can address it theoretically, without any blame, and hopefully together we can all move in the direction here that we might want to see out in the world – actually promoting heaven, say, and not just a discussion about it.
We live in a world that’s going way too fast; a world where folks flash a big smile as they cut you off in traffic; a world where there’s a lot more talking the talk than there is walking the walk; a world that has grown hard from indifference and from difficult, isolating experiences; a world where people actually die everyday because no one who could make a difference in their lives, knows or cares enough to make that difference.
Our congregation is a microcosm of that larger world. Here we really don’t need to go so fast, to be so indifferent, to promote isolation. We are here because we need to care, and to care enough to make a difference – in our own lives and in each others. The wonderful writer Annie Dillard has said:
We are here to abet creation and to witness to it,
To notice each other’s beautiful face and complex nature
So that creation need not play to an empty house.
We have a wonderful opportunity here, through a bit of spiritual and behavioral discipline, to be the people we want to meet out in the world. What I’m talking about is an internal growth, but I have to believe that such inward growth would cause a considerable burst in the growth of our numbers. To be intentionally, radically welcoming of every person we encounter here, we would be both better living out the manifestation of our covenant to be the best persons we can be, and we would become better at sharing this incredibly hopefull religious community that we have found.
I would ask each of us to take on, as a personal responsibility of your membership to this community, the role of inviter and the role of welcomer to each person you encounter here – today and everyday. If you accept this request, I suspect that we’ll be able to see that this religious laboratory is indeed growing the world of our aspirations – a congregation and a world that are more peaceful and loving.
The second matter I wanted to discuss, as we go about considering who we are and who we are becoming, is the way we have conducted the Remembrances portion of our worship service and to outline an attempt to do that part of our service in a way that might help to resolve a couple of competing difficulties that have arisen in it. Some of you may remember, not so many years ago, another attempt to adapt the Remembrances that was not so well received by a sizable portion of the congregation. Rest assured that this time the ideas you're about to hear have been fully vetted with the Worship Committee, the Committee on Ministry and the Board of Trustees, receiving the support of each of those groups.
The concerns are first that, when Remembrances are coming from the floor without the benefit of a microphone, they are most often impossible to hear; second, the length of time for the Remembrances has often grown to exceed 10 minutes, at times even 15. Taking a microphone out onto the floor would only exacerbate the time crunch. One piece of background information I would offer is that it is generally considered to be a rule of thumb that as growing congregations reach the size of “Large Church” it is no longer appropriate or feasible to have an open portion of the service dedicated to the sharing of joys and concerns. Few here, including me in the majority, feel that we are ready or willing to let go altogether of this part of our worship tradition.
So, what to do? Melding together our own traditions with models from some other congregations of a similar size, we have come up with a plan. This is not being offered as the only response to our dilemma with religious integrity. It is being offered as a response that has taken in the best thought of some of your church leadership. It is a response that attempts to honor the needs of individuals and the ability of the membership to act responsibly and respectfully with one another.
So, as has been the case since before my arrival, we will continue to have the liturgist read Remembrances that are received by the church office by Thursday of each week. During announcements, we will ask that those wishing to speak their own Remembrances come to the front of the sanctuary near the chalice. Each week no more than three of these will be spoken using the microphone at the chalice. Who will select the three? The people themselves will, by sharing quietly among themselves and then self-prioritizing.
Let me restate the suggested guidelines that are on the blue cards in the pews: if you think that down the road five or 10 years from now, the milestone you want to commemorate today will still be one of significance, then it's a good one to share. This would include particularly special anniversaries or birthdays, births or deaths or other major lifetime milestones. It would not include all birthdays or anniversaries, or movies, or even major political events.
So the onus will be on you to get Remembrance information to the office ahead of time, or to work out with the others who might also want to share, which will be the three remembrances – at most – to be shared, briefly with the congregation. Brief is another key word here; we're talking about less than a minute. Just so you know, members of the Aesthetics Committee are working on a display area where you will be able to put up some of the other events that have previously been a part of remembrances – birthdays, anniversaries, graduations and all.
Why is the issue of our Remembrances important to consider, as we reflect upon who we are and who we are becoming? It is because, if we want to do our part to grow Unitarian Universalism and this congregation, we need to make sure that whatever is said in our worship service has a reasonable chance to be heard by as many people as possible. It is because, if we are going to grow Unitarian Universalism and this congregation, it will be by providing public worship, not so much private worship but public worship, so that anyone coming through these doors will not only know that we are surely here for ourselves and each other – but much more – we are here to find ourselves in awe of, in gratitude and service to that great stream of life that holds us in being. So that for all of us, our lives might be lived out with greater intention and meaning, and so that we might better be agents of transformation in a world that needs so much healing.
We are here to serve and to be served, for sure. And much more, we are here to be provided with, to participate in incredible opportunities of service. In the end, I have to suspect that service, not might, leads to the kind of justice-filled peace that we hope to see in our world. Here is a good place to practice that. We need to remember that practicing is not always about being comfortable. Done well though, practice is a discipline of stretching and growing.
We don’t need to spend too much time talking about heaven, we can go ahead and do our best to try to make it right here, and then we can take what we learn here and do our best to make it in the world.
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