“Where is the Passion in Compassion?
Where is the Rage in Outrage”
A Sermon by Reverend Charles Blustein Ortman
for New Member Sunday,
October 30, 2005
Introductory Remarks:
Welcome of New Members
New member recognition is always a special and rewarding time in the life of the church. New members are welcomed, recognized and celebrated. Older members are reminded of the importance of this connection in their lives, and reaffirmed in their membership by the newcomers' interest in becoming a part of the congregation.
While there is much commonality in what brings many of us to this faith community, our newcomers each arrive with a unique history and with a wealth of individual gifts. Today, as these individuals make their membership public, I would remind us all that joining a Unitarian Universalist congregation may seem easy because all you have to do is sign the book. But, be assured, it is a most demanding step.
First, we ask that you submit to the most rigorous authority in religious and spiritual matters—the authority of your own mind, heart, and conscience.
We ask that you sacrifice the security of unchallenged points of view, and that you be open to change and growth.
We ask that you be restless in the pursuit of human rights, social justice, and world peace. We ask that you care, both for your fellow church members and for this institution that embodies the liberal religious principles that we enjoy.
We ask you to remember that this is a community of aspiration, not a congregation that has it all figured out. Part of being human is the experience of failure, and part of being in religious community is being there—to pick each other up when we have stumbled.
And we ask that you commit yourself to the service of this church by your participation in it—with your resources: your talents, time and energies, your opinions, criticisms, and your hopes. We ask that you participate with all of these, and more, we ask you to financially support this church. Together, we can continue to build a free religious community in Montclair and in northern Essex County.
We know that you were attracted to this church because you were already supportive of many of the things the church stands for. And we know that you are volunteering to join with us because these impulses and goals fit well with who you are already.
We are happy to welcome you into the rich heritage of this congregation which is now in its 109th year; into the rich heritage of our denominational organizations which date back some 180 years; into the tradition of heresy (a word that comes from a Greek root meaning to choose), a tradition that goes back some two thousand years; and into the heritage of a set of religious values that goes all the way back to the earliest days of human awareness.
May your membership here be filled with meaning.
I would ask those of you who are becoming members to please come forward as your name is read and to sign your name into our membership book. You’ll then be welcomed with the traditional right hand of fellowship as it is presented by our Vice President, Mark Felix, by our Board of Trustees member, Nelia Sellers who serves as the Board Liaison in areas of connectedness, and by myself. Please accept the gift of a flower from Nelia and we hope that its beauty will symbolize your membership here with us.
Homily:
“Where Is the Passion in Compassion?
Where Is the Rage in Outrage?”
This morning, we have welcomed new members to our congregation and into our tradition of liberal religion, which places the onus of responsibility for living a religious life squarely on the shoulders of each of us. Part of our Newcomer Ceremony, the Right Hand of Fellowship, is a tradition that is borrowed from another Unitarian Universalist tradition: the ordination or installation of a minister. Those of you who have participated in one of these ceremonies may remember something about it.
Because from the onset clergy in our tradition were ordained and called by congregations and not by church hierarchy, the Right Hand of Fellowship was employed in our early New England churches as a part of the ceremony where, on behalf of the colleagues in the local clergy association, one of the members would say a few words and extend the right hand as a symbol of welcome. A few weeks ago, some of you were at the ordination of our former student intern, Cheryl Walker, at Community Church, New York. There, my colleague Galen Guengenrich provided the Right Hand of Fellowship with an explanation of it that I’d never heard before, but that I agree with very much. The Right Hand of Fellowship, he said, is not a welcoming to the gang or a welcome to the club sort of thing. Instead, it is much more of a welcome to the work. I think that’s fitting for an ordination or an installation ceremony, and I think it’s quite an appropriate way for us to greet new members to our congregation as well. Welcome to the work.
Welcome to the work of deep and soulful exploration. Welcome to the work of building faith and ennobling hope. Welcome to the work of religious tolerance, of community building, of affirming and promoting every person and all of our planet. Welcome to the work of taking responsibility for your own spiritual and religious beliefs, for taking those beliefs out into the world in order to make a difference. Welcome to the work of joining with others to form a common vision of a better world, yet unrealized except for by the work we might do here together. Welcome to the work; may you find that it gives your life meaning and joy… and good company too.
There is another tradition at ordination/installation ceremonies that I’d like to lift up as a part of our service here this morning, the Charge to the Minister. A colleague, usually a well-seasoned one, will charge the minister, drawing on his/her own experience. They will remind the new clergyperson of the meaning of their call to ministry. Charges usually have three parts: 1) taking good care of yourself and your family; 2) taking good care of the people who have called you into service and those who will yet come to be a part of the congregation, and 3) telling the truth about the world as it is; naming and celebrating its beauty, recognizing and naming its brokenness, and then doing what can be done to heal that brokenness, to create justice and to serve the causes of love and of life in the world.
One of our pre-eminent Unitarian Universalist theologians of the century just passed was James Luther Adams. Adams talked about each of us being called by our lives to the priesthood and the prophethood of all believers. On this eve of All Souls and All Saints Days, it seems fitting to include the thought of the priesthood and the prophethood of all believers. The priesthood is a calling Adams said, “…to express and elicit a sense of the sacredness, the holiness, the preciousness, of all gifts of creation…” The prophethood, he said, is a calling to predict the future, not by sitting back and speculating, but by engaging in the spirit and in the world in a way that promotes a more just and more loving world that is the outcome of inclusive spiritual values. In this way we are all called to be priests and prophets.
We are all called to be ministers of our faith. And so this morning, recognizing that we are all in this work together, I would like to provide a charge to our new members and, by extension, a charge to us all – as Unitarian Universalists and as members of this Unitarian Universalist congregation:
I charge each of us to take care of ourselves and to take good care of our families and loved ones in spiritual and physical ways. Do the soulful work of personal healing; find the paths that lead to the transcendence of your own personal brokenness. Take the time you need so that you can be proactive with your life and not forever jumping in response to those things that have already occurred. Create homes with your spouses and partners, if you have one, that promotes the wellness of all your household members. Do the deep spiritual work of knowing who you are and knowing who you are in your relationship with others, not just in your families, but with your fellow human beings and with your planet.
I charge us, as a congregation, as a sacred community, to care for one another with a gentle graciousness that allows us to hold one another here in acceptance and appreciation, while at the same time holding one another in high expectation, challenging and encouraging each other’s spiritual growth and development. Allow our religious impulse to be in right relationship to have a greater value than our egotistical inclination of being right. Agree to serving a purpose that is larger than ourselves, even our collective selves, never losing sight of our connections, our impact and our responsibilities to the community and the world around us. Remember that we are the current caretakers of this institution which we have a responsibility to make available to and secure for those who are looking for us now and for future generations of those whose lives will be served by our liberal religious way, and who will in turn serve the world more meaningfully for having had the experience which this congregation can provide.
Finally, the world, I charge each of us to employ our passion in our call to compassion and to harness our rage in the expressions of our outrage. We are currently living through a very dark moment in the history of our country and as a result, a dark moment in the history of the world. Cheap, self-serving religion and morality have taken over the religious and political marketplace, leaving the leadership of our times in the hands of those who can best peddle shallow, opportunistic schemes that provide a numbing comfort amid a world of increasing brokenness and expansive disparity between those who have, those who think they have, and those shoulder the burdens of the former groups.
This morning we lit a candle in acknowledgement of the 2,000 US troops and the estimated 30,000 Iraqi women, children and men who have died in that regrettable war. We know that the war in Iraq is an immoral war; that it was pursued on lies and too comfortably absorbed misinformation; that it is a thinly veiled attempt at maintaining access to and domination over oil supplies, and a thinly veiled attempt to establish hegemony and imperialism. The rest of the world has known these things since well before the war began and now even many previously reluctant Americans have begun to recognize the truth in them.
And so I ask you these religious questions: Where is your compassion for the families of those 32,000 who have died so tragically, so needlessly? Where is your outrage over having been deceived in matters of such grave human consequence in order to promote petty, parochial political agendas? Where is your passion? Where is your rage?
We can ask the same questions about so many of the issues of our day. From issues of sexual or heterosexual oppression, from issues of right to life to the death penalty and stem cell research, from issues of classism and racism whose evidence continues to rock the shoreline of the Gulf Coast, we can and we need continually to ask ourselves: Where is our passion? Where is our rage? On this eve of All Saints and All Soul’s Days, we earlier remembered Rosa Parks who died this week. And we remember Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi and so many other saints who from their labors rest, saints who left us great legacies of compassion with passion and outrage that channeled their rage.
Passion and rage are not considered to be polite behavior in our society; we are expected to fall in line with an unquestioning and optimistic patriotism. I charge us here instead to live the religious life, to engage our passion and our rage, to serve with our compassion because we are outraged, to raise the uncomfortable questions, to stand up against principalities and powers who would serve themselves over the common good of serving humanity and the planet.
And so on this New Member Sunday I charge us all threefold: 1) to take good care of ourselves and our loved ones; 2) to take good care of one another, of this congregation and of those who might yet be served by it; 3) to be truthful in our assessment of the world – our vision set by our compassion, our determination fed by our outrage – in our efforts to make this be the kind of world that serves truth, beauty, love and justice in equal portions to all its children.
I offer you my hand, in both companionship and as a colleague, and I welcome you to this most amazing journey and this most demanding work. It is indeed good to be with one another.
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