Worship

“The Future Is Calling”

A Sermon for October Focus Month:
Growing Our Roots and Branches
by Reverend Charles Blustein Ortman
October 21, 2007

READINGS:

The first reading is from the Hebrew Scriptures, the Book of Isaiah, Chapter 61:

God has anointed me to bring good tidings to the afflicted; he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound, and to comfort all who mourn. . . .

Our second reading is from the essay, Behavior, by Ralph Waldo Emerson:

There is no beautifier of complexion, or form, or behavior, like the wish to scatter joy and not pain around us. 'Tis good to give a stranger a meal, or a night's lodging. 'Tis better to be hospitable to his good meaning and thought, and give courage to a companion. We must be as courteous to a man as we are to a picture, which we are willing to give the advantage of a good light.

SERMON:

I was invited to attend the wedding of an older couple, Herb and Bernice Hill, at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Stockton, Illinois back in the autumn of 1979. I had never heard of Unitarian Universalism. I had, however, been around the block a few times, especially for a 29-year old.

By then, I’d left, over a dozen years earlier, the Catholicism I’d been raised in. It hadn’t fit and I couldn’t wear it. By then, I was already divorced for 6 years, a painful experience that I’d barely survived, spiritually and psychically. By then I was grieving the death of my longtime closest friend who had died in an auto accident just a few months earlier, while he was en route to visiting me in Illinois from his new home in Arkansas. Questions of the meaning and purpose of life loomed large. By then I had fallen in love once again and had married, and Judy was pregnant with our first child. And questions of the meaning and purpose of life loomed – even larger!

Harold Paterson was the minister. As he began to address the bride and groom and all the rest of us in attendance, I was immediately taken by the humanity of this religious event. It was unlike any I'd ever experienced. By the time we were ten to fifteen minutes into the ceremony, I was literally agape, in total amazement of the experience and discovery I was having. In one instant I recognized two important things.

I realized for the first time how much I had missed being a part of a religious community. It was an experience that I had surely known through an undefined longing in my heart, but one that I had not begun to realize nor even imagine, intellectually, not until that moment. And second, I knew in the same instant that I had just found my religious community – one where matters of faith were expressed in terms I did not have to translate or interpret in order to suit my spiritual sensibilities; one where I did not have to accept a metaphorical expression as the literal, gospel truth. I had found an intergenerational community of kindred spirits.
It was a mystical and gratifying experience, one that has shaped the entire rest of my life. Then, and so many times since then, it has proven to be a life saving experience in so many ways. I was invited to the wedding of people I didn’t even know, and I went and found my people, my spiritual home.

I wonder, what does it mean to you to have found your way here? To be a part of this religious community? A part of this religious tradition?

What I had heard that day is summarized in these words by the 19th Century Unitarian and American literary master, Herman Melville:

“We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us…And among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects. On a daily basis, we affect the web of all existence, just as we are affected by it.”

It is one. We are one. I was invited to a wedding, and by extension into the life-saving experience of Unitarian Universalism, by the sentiments of just such a thought as this of Melville’s. I can hardly begin to express how important it is for us not to wait passively for others to find us, but for us to invite others to come and find what we have found.

I have spoken much lately about why I think it’s vitally important for us to grow this congregation and to grow our movement, our Association as a whole. I’ve talked a lot about the reality of the religious right and how fundamentalism – around the world – has destroyed and continues to destroy so much in the absence of our liberal religious voice. As today we talk about extending that essential invitation though, I want to focus a little more on how it wouldn’t even matter if there were any other religious voices competing in the public square.

It’s important for its own sake, for our own sake, to extend that invitation as best we can. Extending the invitation is about our own spiritual and religious maturity. It's about our identity and ownership of the Unitarian Universalist message, and about understanding that our own needs that are met in this message are needs that exist for many others out in the world.

The short of it is because the world needs our message of salvation, a salvation found in right relationship. The message of Unitarian Universalism, as clearly as we can say it, is transformation. And it’s not just transformation for transformation’s sake, but for the purpose of salvation. The goal of Unitarian Universalism is to save the human enterprise on all levels. That may sound like traditional religious language, but it’s up to us to give it the new meaning that it deserves and requires. We are in the business of salvation.

We are here to save ourselves for decency and for purpose and for joy. We’re no good to the world, no good to anyone else if we are not good to ourselves. Being good to ourselves means taking time for spiritual discipline, taking time for personal growth, taking time to heal and forgive and to seek forgiveness, taking time to enjoy and appreciate this wonderful gift of life we’ve been given. We are in the business of salvation.

We are here to save one another, to allow that which is god, or love, or decency in ourselves to connect with and to uphold that which is god, or love or decency in others. We are called to be in responsible relationships with each other. We are called to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of one another. We are in the business of salvation.
We are here to save our human communities and our cultures. This includes our efforts to eliminate social and economic injustice, racism, homophobia, violence and all the rest. This includes our efforts to promote world peace, a peace that begins in each of us and in our homes, and then reaches out to embrace the world. We are in the business of salvation.

We are here, to do nothing less than to save this creation. This wonderful and precious world, this spinning home of our human life-form is in desperate need of salvation and our spiritual and religious, our individual and corporate response must be to become a part of that salvation. We are in the business of salvation, and we need to find a way to invite others to come and see, and to experience what we have found, what we are doing, so that they might have the opportunity to find similar meaning and determine whether they might like to join our enterprise.

When we first began this focus month on, Growing Our Roots and Branches, I thought it would mostly be an effort to make sure that we understood what is at stake, both here and in the world. And of course then we’d want to do whatever it took to grow our congregation. I asked each of the committees and bodies of the congregation to spend at least some of their time this month discussing how each of them could do their part in this growth. When in fact at the Board meeting a couple of weeks ago we did just that, I learned a couple of things that I’m hoping we can at least begin to remedy here this morning.

I learned that it’s not a comfortable thing for some of us to talk about our religion in public. And I also learned that there is some considerable confusion and discomfort regarding the differences between proselytizing, which is the attempt to convince others to agree with one’s beliefs, and evangelizing, which is the sharing of good news.

So here’s the deal – no one is expecting you to feel comfortable with any of this. Like Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “There are some things about which we should be maladjusted.” We should not be comfortable with a culture of entitlement, a culture of waste and excess, a culture of violence and oppression. We should not be comfortable with a culture of Calvinism, in which the concept of the saved and the not saved is embraced. If Unitarian Universalism has something of value to offer, which is lifesaving for us, our obligation is not to keep that good news to ourselves (which would be a lot like acting saved), but to spread it around so that others might be saved by it, also. So that the world might be saved by it, too!

We don’t need to proselytize – to convince others of our correctness. There’s enough of that in the world. But we do need to figure out a way to extend that essential invitation so that we can offer what we have found to others. So it seems to me that the question is not whether or not we are comfortable doing this work – we are called to it. But maybe the question is – are there ways of becoming more comfortable in sharing our faith, so that we can do a better job of it?

There’s an old story that I like to tell in the New UU class about a matron from Beacon Hill in Boston. She is approached by a younger woman who has recently moved to the city, and the younger woman greets her with, “I love your hat. Where did you get that hat?” To which the matron responds, “Two things, my dear. First, one does not have a hat. One has a bonnet. And second, one does not acquire a bonnet; one simply has one.”

Simply having a faith tradition that honors tolerance, freedom of conscience and the use of reason, a faith tradition that is dedicated to an optimistic hope and a practical social justice, a faith tradition that is a possible path to salvation for this human enterprise is not enough. We can do much better than that.

We can learn to extend ourselves for the purpose of promoting salvation in the way that we define salvation, and how we have found it for ourselves in Unitarian Universalism. There is a young woman, Susan Turner, from one of the UU congregations out in San Diego. In response to the question regarding how Unitarian Universalists go about promoting growth in our congregations she said, “Just do it! Start talking every day to someone about something that happens in your church. By doing it, you'll get better at it. The Unitarian Universalist community will be enriched and made stronger by your being a witness for our faith.”

So here’s the deal – I’m not just asking you to think about whether or not this is a good idea. I’m asking you to do it, to do something about it. And to that and, let’s do something about it here and now.

Using dialogue partners in the pews (And knowing you have a sympathetic listener should do something for your confidence level!).

Talk with your partner about something happening here in the congregation that’s interesting or important to you.
Tell the person why Unitarian Universalism is important to you.
Invite the person to come with you or to meet you here for worship at the U next week.

Coming back together:

What did you learn?
How did it feel?
Do you think with some practice you could do that better?
Will you try to extend yourself in this way with people you know and don’t know?

Some tools you can use:

The video, “Voices of the Liberal Faith”
The hand out, “Like our name says…”

How many of you were invited to come here? And how many of you had to find it on your own? We can so much better at this. Don’t you think we would do well to help others in finding what we have found? It is an essential invitation that we are holding on to. It is up to each of us to make that invitation real.

The book of Isaiah says, “God has anointed me to bring good tidings to the afflicted; he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound, and to comfort all who mourn. . . .” Please, consider yourself to be anointed; go out and take good tidings to all those who would be served well by those tidings.

Herman Melville wrote: “We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us…And among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects. On a daily basis, we affect the web of all existence, just as we are affected by it.” Please, go out and touch other lives for good effects.

The Unitarian president, Thomas Jefferson, was sure that the whole country would be Unitarian in short order. That order has been on backorder for far too long. We are capable though of helping to fill it. We are capable of doing something about making his dream come true. Not by thinking about it, but by doing something about it. Not in comfort, but in compassion. Not by keeping what we have to ourselves, but by extending the essential invitation that invites others into the meaning that we have found.