Sermons

'I Call that Church Free:'

"I Call that Church Free"
A Sermon by Charles Blustein Ortman
For Commitment Sunday
March 3, 2002
At the Unitarian Church of Montclair
67 Church Street, Montclair, New Jersey 07042
973-744-6276 WWW.UUMontclair.org

READING:
Our reading, "I Call that Church Free," is from the 20th Century Unitarian Uni-versalist Theologian, James Luther Adams:

I call that church free which enters into covenant with the ultimate source of existence, that sus-taining and transforming power not made with human hands. It binds together families and gen-erations, protecting against the idolatry of any human claim to absolute truth or authority. This covenant is the charter and responsibility and joy of worship in the face of death as well as life.

I call that church free which brings individuals into a caring, trusting fellowship, that protects and nourishes their integrity and spiritual freedom, that yearns to belong to the church universal; it is open to insight and conscience from every source; it bursts through rigid tradition, giving rise to new and living language, to new and broader fellowship. It is a pilgrim church, a servant church, on an adventure of the spirit.

The goal is the prophethood and priesthood of all believers, the one for the liberty of prophesy-ing, the other for the ministry of healing. It aims to find unity in diversity under the promptings of the spirit "that bloweth where it listeth… and maketh all things new."

HOMILY:
"I call that church free which enters into a covenant with the ultimate source of existence, that sustaining and transforming power not made with human hands." These are the words that the prolific and much loved James Luther Adams uses to begin his description of the truly free religious community.

We have gathered together this morning as a community of worship. As part of our worship we have celebrated the installation of a host of new members. We have each formed an articula-tion of our commitment to this religious fellowship, and we have all joined in a celebration of those commitments.

We each freely enter this community. We each freely choose how and what of our energies, time and resources we will commit to the support of the congregation's visions and the manifes-tation of those visions. Perhaps this is a fitting moment then to raise the question, why do we commit? The answer, I think, is probably most telling as to why we call our church "free."

"I call that church free which enters into a covenant with the ultimate source of existence, that sustaining and transforming power not made with human hands."

None of us are here for an unimportant cause, no matter what that cause. We are here for many reasons, and though those reasons may look to be greatly varied, I suspect that on some deeper level they are more common than we might expect. We are here because we live in a world that encourages us not to take ourselves, each other and the world itself, too seriously. We are here because in some way we want to be more serious students of life than what our culture might promote. We want to find, experience and make meaning in our lives. We want to make sense of this span of time that bridges our births and our deaths, and of each moment that occurs along the way. We want to make the most of this life-time opportunity - to live deeply, to love deeply, to transcend pain and to celebrate joy.

We want to connect and to be with others who recognize this journey similar to the way we do - so that we might be fed, so that we might help in the feeding. We want to be with others so that, as our own lives are transformed, we might act together in concert toward the end of trans-forming the world. We are here because we have great hope for our own lives, and for a world in which the shared hope is for us to accomplish our closest vision of what we might call heaven on earth…for all people, for the entire planet. We are here to stoke and fan the fires of that hope with and for one another so that our hope might be transformed to faith, our faith transformed to commitment, our commitment transformed into the dawning of the truly new great day that awaits each of us; that awaits all of us.

"I call that church free which enters into a covenant with the ultimate source of existence, that sustaining and transforming power not made with human hands."

The ultimate source of existence, the ultimate reality is a concept, a spirit, a principle we are each responsible for claiming for ourselves. That's what makes us free here. That's what makes this a truly liberal religious home. Whatever we claim as giving our life its greatest sense of truth and meaning is what we have empowered to call us into this free religious association.

We aren't here to hide from anybody's gods. We are here to claim our own, whatever we might call it, so that we might-in association with others-come to find, to experience and to make the meaning we have come here to pursue.

So, on this Commitment Sunday, let us commit ourselves to the high cause that brings us here: to be relentless in our search for truth and meaning; to be in communion with kindred spir-its who, like us, are pilgrims on a journey of aspiration; to be sustained by those ultimate sources we claim for ourselves; to be transformed by the possibilities of goodness that are the very nature of those ultimate sources; and to be agents of transformation in a world, so desperately in need of knowing the depth of its abundance and the potential of its embrace.

We are free to come here of our own accord. We are free to be here -- who we truly are. We are free to claim here the validity of our own gods that call us to notice the possibilities of good-ness that are all around us, and to be transformed by them. We are free, not from action but for action, to build the world of just compassion that awaits our construction.

Our goal here is the prophethood and the priesthood of all believers. We are here for the lib-erty of prophesying, and for the ministry of healing. Our aim is to find unity within the great di-versity that freedom allows, as we seek to find our way with integrity, compassion, faith and commitment.

Spirit of Life, we are here to aid and abet you, so that we might be served, so that, in deed, we might be of service.