Filed under: Books (includes sermons based on books), Family Ministry, Inspiration, Sermon Archives and Excerpts, Trends in Religion | Tags: amyg, Arinna Weisman, conflict, covenant, family therapy, healthy congregations, meditaiton, mindfulness, non-violence, organizational consulting, peace, Peter Steinke, spiritual practice, systems theory
Sunday, March 18m 2012
Unitarian Universalist Society, Sacramento
Hymns: Wake Now, My Senses; Spirit of Life/Fuente de Amor; Blessed Spirit of My Life.
Prayer: by Harry Meserve
Singing the Living Tradition #496
From arrogance, pompousness, and from thinking ourselves more important than we are, may some saving sense of humor liberate us. For allowing ourselves to ridicule the faith of others, may we be forgiven. From making war and calling it peace, special privilege and calling it justice, indifference and calling it tolerance, pollution and calling it progress, may we be cured. From telling ourselves and others that evil is inevitable while good is impossible, may we stand corrected. God of our mixed up, tragic, aspiring, doubting, and insurgent lives, help us to be as good as in our hearts we have always wanted to be. Amen.
Sermon
Sometimes when I read an article about politics on a website, I scroll down and look at the reader comments. Big mistake! The lack of respectful conversation–or any true conversation–stuns me. Many who disagree with the writer or dislike the subject will say unfair things about the people involved or the writer. When their opinion is the opposite of mine, their hateful comments can make my blood boil. If their position is one I agree with, then a cheap shot will embarrass and dishearten me: “Wait, I’m on the same side of the issue, but I can’t bear to be associated with such mean-spirited people.” The back-and-forth attacks really upset me. And bad spelling makes it worse.
Yet I must confess, when I’m reading my email, if I feel impatient, hurt, misunderstood, or angry, I have an urge to fire off a righteous retort or a defensive blast. It’s so easy to vent by hitting the send button, and then regret it later. Of course, the internet didn’t give birth to potshots and hurtful or
hateful words, it only gives them a powerful platform, always at the ready.
We live in an age of anxiety and quick anger. It’s easy to take offense, and then hang on to it. Reactivity and righteousness spill over into all our relationships: family, friends, groups and organizations.
Even though it can be destructive, such behavior is based in our survival instincts. It comes from the ancient part of our brain—the reptilian part. The stimulus for survival takes place in a part of our head where brain activity is automatic. Consider: when a reptile sees another being, it does not ask, “Can I eat it?” or, “Will it eat me?” Its brain just reacts automatically. It does not reflect. From this reptile brain comes our so-called “fight or flight” response. There is no rationalizing, just an impulse. We have impulses of which we are not conscious.
Joseph LeDoux, a neuroscientist at New York University, writes: “Contrary to popular belief, conscious feelings are not required to produce emotional responses. [Our feelings] . . . involve unconscious processing mechanisms.”[i] These are primitive circuits, he says. Through evolution, they have been passed along to all mammals, including us.
Even so, what makes humans different from other animals is our ability to think about the future, assess alternatives, make plans. We can reflect on the consequences of our actions. Unless, of course, the reptile brain leads us to react, without reflecting first.
Yet it’s not always easy to reflect. The part of our brain known as the amygdala “can activate [our] arousal system,” if it senses danger, according to LeDoux. This can affect how our nervous system will process experiences in the future. The body’s responses to pain can affect the thinking parts of the brain. In other words, our mental and physical memory of painful events can lead us to react in fearful ways, even when there is no current threat. Panic disorders come to mind, as does post-traumatic stress. Things that objectively should not seem threatening can stimulate a given fear and generate a “fight or flight” reaction.
Few things annoy me more than to be told I am overreacting! However, I can see that a reaction out of proportion to a perceived harm or threat could be a habit of mine, or at least a habit of my nervous system. We can manage our habits for the better, or we can make habits worse.
Because I work and study in the field of religion, I’ve learned a lot about the damage done to congregations by people and groups who let their reptile brains lead their actions. Peter Steinke is a family therapist, Lutheran pastor, and organizational consultant. He studies and works with churches in painful conflicts, and this keeps him busy. At a workshop I attended some years ago, Steinke said, “Not only is church conflict a growth industry, it is getting meaner and nastier.”[ii] In just a few years, his work with congregations in distress had grown by 200%. In many conflicts, some people can be very mean. They do things to one another or say things about one another in contradiction to their stated religious principles.
But churches are not unique. All kinds of organizations have conflicts, some of them in violation of their stated principles and ethics. In corporations, clubs, charities and schools; in committed couples and in families, humans have disagreements and stress. It is part of being in relationship. What matters is how we manage ourselves in the midst of conflict, and how we settle our differences.
In Steinke’s view, most conflicts have to do with anxiety in the system.
Anxiety, of course, is normal. It is our longtime companion. Steinke said: If you don’t have some anxiety, you’ll never make any changes. Just as the pain felt when you touch a hot stove burner can make you pull your hand away, anxiety can serve you in good ways. For example, the anxiety of loneliness can provoke a person to search for a place of community, for friends, or for a partner. Problems in society can provoke the anxiety of sadness, frustration, or outrage. These feelings may lead a person to get involved in making a difference.
The word anxiety comes from a Latin word which means to strangle or choke. That describes the physical sensation of being in a state of high anxiety. And, just as we don’t get enough air if we’re being choked, if we’re highly anxious we have less ability to give attention to the options we can choose when facing a challenge. Anxiety can cloud our awareness the way muddy water clouds a pond. It can keep us from seeing clearly.
Steinke identified several triggers of anxiety in congregations. These triggers include the issues of theology, authority, music, money, leadership styles, worship styles, and staff changes. Anxiety in church life can be provoked by any change between something old and something new. Fast changes can be disconcerting, yet the slowness of change can be frustrating. Growth can trigger anxiety in churches, but so can numerical decline. Sexuality is a charged issue as well. Imagine all the anxiety in those denominations and churches still unresolved on the status of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender church members or the credentialing of gay ministers.
Issues having to do with property, buildings and space are also triggers for stress in a system. Steinke said this is understandable, for building issues are territory issues. Territory is a matter of survival for all animals, including us. Territory—maybe this is why moving is a big source of stress, as well as kitchen and bathroom renovations.
So it seems, a church is a minefield of human stressors—but so is any relationship of importance. In any setting, anxiety-triggers have to do with our sense belonging and safety, with identity and inclusion. We want to be connected to others in meaningful ways. At the same time, we want to assert our identity and be recognized as individuals. In human evolution, identity and belonging have been matters of protection and survival. Even if we can understand the origins of stress and conflict, this doesn’t make it hurt any less.
In all social institutions, Steinke said, there’s been a trend of conflicts with more secrecy, deceit, lying, and self-righteousness. Some groups not only want to get their way, they want to be seen as right. They not only want to be right, they want to punish the losers. I’ve been here for four years, and I think our congregation shows healthy habits, has good skills to engage in disagreement and to respond well in times of challenge and anxiety.
Yet in the country at large, we find ourselves in another big election year. Self-righteousness is on the rise, perhaps more than ever. On television, radio and the internet, all the shouting and interruptions, the attacks and accusations, appeal to the combativeness of our reptilian brain. Yet even as they excite us, they raise our anxiety. They don’t bring us together, they separate us.
In a family system or in an organizational one, anxiety can spread. It can be contagious. According to Peter Steinke, when a group experiences anxiety, there is “an automatic shift of attention and energy” away from reflection and into action. Under stress we are less clear about all the options available to us. The more a group feels the grip of its anxiety, the less available the group’s values will be for it to draw upon. This is often why people in organizations can commit acts that violate the group’s own ethical values. They do not respond, they react. Sometimes individuals, sometimes whole communities, just react.
However, anxiety is a normal emotion. Sometimes it can help us. The question is not how to repress it, but what to do about it when it emerges. If we recognize anxiety—and respect it—we might keep anxiety from ratcheting up, feeding on itself, tightening its grip.
There are steps we can take, as individuals or by group agreement. For example, I mentioned how tempting it is to put my anxiety into an email. For this reason, I try to avoid having important conversations by email. It’s too easy for my words to be taken in a way I did not intend, and easy for me to take another’s words wrong. If, as happens now and then, I decide I will write an email about an issue of some tension or confusion, I try to write a draft and save it for a day, to sleep on it before sending it. This practice lets me vent my feelings, and it lets me reflect. I may revise an email after sleeping on it. Or I may delete it, and pick up the telephone instead.
Steinke gives the same advice to families having troubles that he does to leaders of churches in conflict. This is to maintain clear boundaries between yourself and others. First, be aware that you need not own another’s anxiety, and need not take responsibility for it. Second, learn to recognize your own feelings of anxiety. Own your anxiety, but not that of others.
One way that families and groups avoid inflaming tensions is by the use of I-statements. For example, “I believe that…” is better than “Everybody agrees…” or “It’s clear for anyone to see that….”
In a stressful conversation or disagreement, Steinke advised, don’t label others or question their motives. Instead, say how you feel, where you are coming from, what your intentions are. Rather than make accusations about another’s motives, one can say, “I feel….” or “My intention is….” Rather than demanding, one can say, “I would like this…” or “I am making a request that….”
Rather than attacking another person for making a demand we don’t like, we can say “I am not able to do that,” or, if necessary, “I am not willing to do that….” The emphasis is on I and me, not on judging or labeling the other. By using I-statements, we assert our own needs and set our limits without raising the stakes by accusing others.
It’s good to remember that we have no control over what other people do or say; we have a choice only about what we do. In case of a verbal attack, it can be tempting to fire back a counter attack. Steinke suggested more “I statements,” such as “I feel as if I’m under attack and I don’t like it. I am not able to respond right now.” Sometimes when I’ve heard hurtful words—about someone else or directed right at me—I’ll say “Ouch!” That’s my I-statement.
Leaders can be lightening rods for anxiety—leaders of a country, or a congregation, or a family. For example, a parent is in a leadership role with children. It takes practice to keep from taking a child’s outburst personally, and to keep from reacting in ways that ratchet up the anxiety. In whatever setting you might provide leadership, it can hurt to be a lightening rod. Yet in moments of anxiety, the most important influence we can have on a group is the choice of our own words and behaviors.
We shouldn’t take responsibility for another’s anxiety, but we should accept our own. We can do this by being aware of our own feelings and experiences. No need to repress feelings. Not helpful to take them out on others. We can recognize our emotions without reacting. This calls for building our skills of self-awareness.
One way to do cultivate awareness is to sit quietly to be with our feelings, or go for a walk. The poet Wallace Stevens wrote: “Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.”
A meditation teacher of mine has compared the practice of mindfulness to waiting for muddy water in a pond to settle. The particles of mud ease to the bottom of the pond, and the water becomes clear. So can it be with our minds. This teacher has practiced mindfulness meditation for decades, yet even her mind can play tricks on her. For such an esteemed person, many of her habitual thoughts and feelings are less than flattering.
She admits that her mind and body go through reactions all the time. Everyone’s mind has its habitual thoughts, she says. Mine does. How about your mind? She says that her habitual thoughts and feelings include boredom, irritation, resentment, grief, and judgment. Funny, I thought those were my habits.
Even when going for a walk, or sitting calmly, watching the breath or eating a meal, her attention wanders. The attention jumps to habitual thoughts, especially those of self-blame or self-criticism. But when she notices the mind doing this, she tries to be kind about it. Rather than judging herself for habitual thinking, she just recognizes it. She nods and smiles and takes a breath.
In fact, she regards her habits of mind as her longtime companions, never to leave her. When irritation, self-blame, arrogance or any other unpleasant thought arises in her mind, she greets it: “Hello, judgmentalism, my old friend.” She does not try to fight it off, she just sees it and feels it.
“Ah, resentment there you are again. Welcome!”
“Ah, craving, here you are. Welcome back!”
“Hello, self-loathing, my old pal. I recognize you. I bow down to you.”
She does not fight the feeling. She allows it a moment in the spotlight, but then she lets it be. She gives it a bit of space in the corner of her awareness, but not the whole room.[iii]
I’ve tried her approach in my own practice—and haven’t often been successful. Yet by this stage in life, I am unlikely to discard all of my stubborn mental habits. Rather than despair, I’ll try to see my habitual thoughts and reactions as my longtime companions. They’re along for the journey, but not in charge of it.
Whatever feelings might arise, they are merely our companions; they need not be our drivers. Perhaps we can try to put this idea into practice. When anxiety that comes up—notice it, look at it, even smile at it. Take a breath.
It’s not necessary to do the first thing that any impulse tells us to do. Our anxiety may not have all the truth about a situation we’re in. Especially if it’s hot or strong, our anxiety may need us to take it for a walk around the lake.
Perhaps the practice of awareness is a way to peace—within ourselves, in our communities, in the world. We can aware of what we’re feeling. We can own our feelings and recognize the feelings of others. We can practice patience.
Let us keep a little place for the reptile in our heads. Let us give it good care. But a reptile shouldn’t run our lives. With courage and kindness, let us accept our emotional experiences, and notice our habits of mind. With courage and kindness, let us practice the ways of peace. May it be so. Amen, and blessed be.
[i] “Emotion Circuits in the Brain.” Joseph E. LeDoux. Annual Review of Neuroscience. 23:155–184 (2000). See http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.neuro.23.1.155?prevSearch=leDoux&searchHistoryKey=
[ii] Notes from attendance at a workshop and conversation with Peter Steinke, at Grace Lutheran Church, Palo Alto, CA, 2005. See his books at http://www.alban.org/bookdetails.aspx?id=2830. For consultant resources: http://www.healthycongregations.com/
[iii]Remembrances from a dharma talk by Arinna Weisman, at a retreat at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, Woodacre, CA, 2005. Her book is A Beginner’s Guide to Insight Meditation. Find her blog, videos, etc. at http://arinnaweisman.org/
Filed under: Becoming and Being Part of a UU Congregation, Church Finances and Stewardship, Religious Studies: History, Sermon Archives and Excerpts, Trends in Religion, UU Denomination and Pacific Central District News and Views | Tags: congregational history, liberal Christianity, liberal religion, religious humanist
Unitarian Universalist Society
Sacramento, CA
Hymns:
Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing; Come, Sing a Song with Me;
For the Earth Forever Turning. Vocal music: Bright Morning Stars, duet by Eric and Emily
Prayer
The banners around the top of our sanctuary were created by artists and craftspersons in the congregation in 1982, near the conclusion of Theodore Webb’s ministry here. He served this congregation as minister from 1971 to 1983, and attends now as Minister Emeritus. These words of prayer, written by Ted, were published in a Meditation Manual by our denomination(1984), in which all the poems and prayers came from people of a Universalist heritage—those who had been Universalists prior to the Unitarian and Universalist merger of 1961.
(Read prayer page 45 from To Meet the Asking Years).
Reading
In Sacramento, the first public expressions of Unitarian theology in Sacramento took the form of public lectures in 1858 and 1860. In particular, on May 31 and June 6 of 1860, Thomas Star King came over from San Francisco to give lectures to benefit the Sacramento Library Association. A Universalist minister in Boston, Starr King had been called in 1860 to serve the Unitarian Church in the City, our first one on the West Coast. His preaching and political activism are credited with keeping California in the Union. His fundraising on the coast provided 1.25 million dollars during the Civil War for the founding of a national Sanitary Commission, which later became the Red Cross. This is from his May 31 lecture, “Substance and Show”:
[A] life-spirit inhabits every flower and shrub, and protects it against the prowling forces of destruction.
Look at a full-sized oak, the rooted Leviathan of the fields. Judging by your senses and by the scales, you would say that the substance of the noble tree was its bulk of bark and bough and branch and leaves and sap, the cords of woody and moist matter that compose it and make it heavy.
But really its substance is that which makes it an oak, that which weaves its bark and glues it to the stem, and wraps its rings of fresh wood around the trunk every year, and pushes out its boughs and clothes its twigs with digestive leaves and sucks up nutriment from the soil continually, and makes the roots clench the ground with their fibrous fingers as a purchase against the storm wind, and at last holds aloft its tons of matter against the constant tug and wrath of gravitation, and swings its … arms in triumph over the globe and in defiance of the gale.
Were it not for this energetic essence that crouches in the acorn and stretches its limbs every year, there would be no oak….
Sermon
The sermon today covers the first century of the life of this congregation—its life and near-death experiences. Next month I’ll speak about the last half century of UUSS, a time which many of our members can remember. I’ve been here for only the past four years, but I’ve read our church histories, written by Rodney Cobb and Irma West, and combined and published a few years ago by three of our current members.
Given that the Board of Trustees has scheduled a meeting for the members to vote on calling me as a settled associate minister, it seemed important for me to think about the identity of this congregation, to understand who we are by asking the question: How did we get here?
The Unitarian minister Arnold Crompton attributed the growth of Unitarianism on the West Coast to several factors. First, Unitarians came to the West Coast when other Americans did: after the Gold Rush began in 1849, and after the 1869 completion of the transcontinental railroad made it easier to get here. These “transplanted” New England Unitarians wanted a church like those back home.
Also, the tightening of the lines of [religious] orthodoxy [made liberal Christians seek out others like them]. In the larger society, scientific challenges to traditional theology also boosted the appeal of religious liberalism.
Another factor was that “great ministers… by their preaching, their leadership, and their lives attracted people to their churches and denomination.” The first Unitarian church on this Coast was founded in 1850, in San Francisco. Thomas Starr King, a Universalist from Boston, came to serve it from 1860 to 1864. Then he died of tuberculosis at age 39. His successor, and other Unitarian clergymen from the East, led important churches in the major West Coast cities.
And there was a missionary outreach. Indeed, in 1865, the American Unitarian Association raised $100,000 for the spread of Unitarianism in the West. Energetic ministers and agents of the denomination “established churches or planted seeds of future churches.” One of these men, the Reverend Charles Gordon Ames preached on Sundays in San Jose and in Watsonville, and in 1867, he added Sacramento to his schedule, coming up here in his horse and buggy to preach for us.[i] His tireless ministry led to regular meetings of religious liberals in Sacramento.
Our first minister was Henry W. Brown, who arrived from the East and gave his first sermon on a Sunday evening in December 1867, at the Metropolitan Theater. Three months later, on March 29, a group of people signed an “article of agreement” to “associate ourselves in a body corporate, to be know as the First Unitarian Church of Sacramento.” The purpose of the church was “the worship of God and the service of Men.” With 17 families, the newly gathered congregation established bylaws. Progressive for the time, the bylaws allowed that of the seven trustees of the church, three of them could be women. (p. 14 of In Good Times and Bad, the UUSS history)
Then, about five years later, the church disappeared. This was in the nation’s financial panic of 1873, when banks were closing. Reverend Brown returned to Boston and nothing (apparently) happened for 14 years.
In 1887, a new congregation was established (or re-established). The next minister was was Charles P. Massey, a businessman from Philadelphia. Services were held in various meeting halls downtown, such as Pioneer Hall, and later at a new meeting hall named the Pythian Castle at 9th and I streets.
Another financial panic ensued in 1893. This led the Board to release the minister. Church records show minimal activity until 1911, when Board meetings again took place. But the congregation may have had money saved for a building program, for six months later it bought land at 27th Street between N and O streets. In 1915, the congregation built a church on 27th Street. An article in the Sacramento Bee said it was “constructed of cedar shakes, with brown stained woodwork. The windows are of amber glass in simple leaded patterns…. The structure cost $8,000.” So in 1915, we had our first home, and our first visible symbol in the community, since our founding in 1868. Prior to this, our church history says, the visible symbol of Unitarianism in the community was a person—not its ministers, but a lay leader, Dr. Henry L. Nichols. A charter member, he held one or another elected position in the church for 47 years. Imagine being on the Board for 47 years! A transplant from Maine, Nichols was a leader in Sacramento, one of the organizers of the local Medical Society. He was a crusader for pure drinking water in the city and served as president of our Board of Supervisors, and as California Secretary of State. Another founder of the Medical Society, Dr. Alexander Nixon, was also a Unitarian.
When the church was built on 27th Street, the Reverend Charles Pease was our minister, serving for five years. In the midst of rising inflation, an insufficient salary made it hard for him to stay, and he left in 1918. Later, the denomination sent out an extension minister who served the church for a year.
Then came Berkeley B. Blake. He was a local attorney who was a member of our board. He had run the Sunday School when Charles Pease was minister, and he had some seminary training. The church ordained him, and in 1922, Blake began serving as the part-time minister for two congregations—ours, and the one in Woodland, about 20 miles west of downtown. (It no longer exists.) During Blake’s five years in our ministry, he and the Rabbi of Temple B’Nai Israel held a joint Thanksgiving Day service. This began a long tradition of yearly activities between the two congregations.
Blake moved on to the Bay Area, to serve in the denomination’s regional office.
In 1927 a young minister came to us by the name of Robert E. Starkey. Starkey’s burdens in ministry included religious and political tensions about the 1928 presidential election, between a Roman Catholic Democrat, and a Quaker Republican, who was Herbert Hoover. Then began the Great Depression, late in 1929. Spending declined in the church, and attendance was erratic. In 1931, Berkeley Blake, our former minister and now a denominational official, learned that some of the church’s board members were unhappy with Reverend Starkey. They were planning to meet with him. Blake advised Starkey to recognize his “lack of success” and submit his resignation, for the good of the church. He did resign, to the dismay and protest of many church members. So the Board called a congregational meeting to let members vote on whether to accept Starkey’s resignation. The vote supported his continued ministry, but Starkey left anyway. He moved his family to Berkeley. Six years later, suffering mental anguish and about to be divorced by his wife, he took his life. The crew of a boat pulled him from the water near the newly constructed San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, “his clothing torn to shreds.” Starkey was the first suicide from that bridge.
Though it’s not a surprise that funding declined in the Depression, our congregation had always had a struggle with money. From its early years, it had never been self-sustaining. In the words of our historian, the congregation was “shy about raising money and soliciting members.” The Unitarian Society appealed many times for help to the American Unitarian Association, in Boston. This help came in the form of subsidies for ministers and grants for meeting space. For example, though there was no activity here from 1895 to 1911, there is evidence that Board members applied to the denomination for money in 1901. Money from Boston covered $6,000 of the $8,000 cost of our new 1915 church building (75). In the 1920s, the denomination gave us $2,000 toward Berkeley Blake’s yearly salary of $2,400. By 1927, Blake’s pay was a whopping $3,000 a year, and then he left for the regional job. Our history shows, also, that a number of church families often came to the rescue as financial angels (27).
In 1932, without a minister, we held services at night, so Bay Area ministers could make it here after finishing their services at home. The Depression lasted nearly a decade, during which modest levels of support came from Boston. Our leaders complained that Boston had always sent us ministers who were young and inexperienced. The church needed a skilled minster, and for this it asked for a large increase in aid… for just one year. This is all it would take for us to become self-supporting! The denomination said no. So, in 1935, the 20 remaining members halted Sunday services and rented out our building to a Unity church.
However, the Women’s Alliance continued to meet–twice a month. In fact, during all those ups and downs of church operation over the years, the Alliance met continuously since 1889. It provided literary and artistic programs for the benefit of the city, and raised funds to give to the congregation and other causes. Often, it was the Alliance that kept us afloat. In 1922, the Alliance had 241 dues paying members. The church had only 47. Though women had been limited to only three seats on the Board, they had represented 2/3 of the church’s membership. It was through the Alliance that women expressed their leadership and their power. One of its leaders was Julia Bray, who had joined the church in 1913. She taught in public schools here for 31 years, and passed away in 1949. The first fund created by the congregation for memorial gifts was the Julia Bray Fund for religious education.
For nine years, from 1936 to 1945, the church down in Stockton shared its minister with us. He was Arthur Foote II. He and his wife lived in Stockton. In 1945, the Footes left California for a large church in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Along with changes in leadership and membership numbers, our first 100 years included theological changes, reflecting those of many Unitarian churches. From its early days the Sacramento Society identified itself as a liberal Christian church. Liberal means not only non-Trinitarian, but non-dogmatic and inclusive. Our sermons dealt with the nature of the Divine, the human nature of Jesus, and the importance of his ideals. How inclusive was this Christianity? Well, Charles Massey preached these words:
[there is] a need for religious sentiment with which to meet the emotions of awe, of wonder, of terror, of love, of delight arising from the mystery by which we feel ourselves eternally surrounded. These emotions belonging to such gifted souls as Moses, Buddha, Zoroaster, Mohammed and Jesus have been regarded as revelation.
He said this in 1889! And all of us, he said, even “the humblest among us,” have the ability to test such revelations by our own experience. (17)
The church bylaws in the late 1800s said that the members gathered “in the love of truth and in the spirit of Jesus of Nazareth for the purpose of sustaining liberal Christian worship.” In 1913, the church removed that phrase. In its place, they added this: “We, whose names are here subscribed, associate ourselves together as a Religious Society for mutual helpfulness in right living and for advancement of sound morals and liberal religion in the community; and we … pledge ourselves to bear our part in common cause and to care for the welfare and influence of the Society.” (23, emphasis added)
In the 1920s, divisions arose in many Unitarian congregations—including this one—as religious humanism emerged to challenge theistic beliefs of the liberal as well as the orthodox variety. Humanism affirmed reason, intellect and science, and showed faith in the inevitable, never-ending improvement of humanity. Sometimes humanism saw science as our salvation. The majority of members who identified themselves as holding more “traditional Unitarian” ideas may have felt threatened by humanism. According to our historian, such divisions may have added to the stress on Robert Starkey’s troubled ministry with us in the late 1920s.
In the mid-1940s, however, it was clear that religious humanism was dominant in this congregation. It was also clear that the church was poised for growth in the years after World War Two. Sacramento itself was growing at 1,000 people per month. People were moving to California, and the Baby Boom was booming. Our next minister was Theodore Abell. He had gone to a Methodist college in Ohio and become a Methodist minister. At age 30, he was expelled for his lack of belief in church doctrine. In Southern California, Ted Abell was introduced to Unitarianism and Humanism. He founded and led the Hollywood Humanist Society, and hosted a radio program. He came up to Sacramento and served in the State welfare department as a social worker. He began working for us part time, until the church could raise enough money to pay him full-time. He served us for 15 pivotal years.
His efforts included raising the proportion of men involved in the church from 1/3 to close to 50%, typing a mimeograph for a monthly newsletter and ensuring the retention of it and other records for archival purposes, and encouraging the congregation to pay its own way and stop relying on the denomination for subsidies. This reliance didn’t end until 1951. In particular, Ted Abell urged us to pay for facilities that would be adequate for our needs.
In 1950, Sunday school attendance shot up from 20 to 79 children. The church bought a house next to out building on 27th street, and built a religious education building on the lot. Money still being a challenge, they built it themselves. The chair of the building committee, Wayne Perkins, worked hard on it, even though he no longer had young children. He said he was doing it “for other people’s children” (67). On Easter Sunday in 1951, 200 people attended, our largest crowd ever to that date. In 1953, we held a Big Rally to wipe out the mortgage debt and start a new building fund. In the 1950s, most American congregations were thriving and bursting at the seams, including ours. Soon we would have 200 children.
In 1956, Society members voted to buy a farm of almost six acres, out here, four miles from our Midtown site. Again, members did much of the construction work themselves. This included making the hexagonal molds for the windows in the poured-concrete walls of this Main Hall and the Religious Education building. We raised money in a capital campaign, took out a 10-year bank loan and a smaller loan from the denomination. The first event in this completed church was a strawberry social in June of 1960.
While all that work was taking place, controversy brought a tragic air to our success. Six months earlier, a congregational meeting considered a bylaws amendment that would make a compulsory retirement age of 68 for any minister. Ted Abell was already 68. Voting members balked at this amendment. They revised the amendment to apply only to future ministers, and to raise the age to 70. They passed a resolution praising Ted Abell’s ministry and asking him to stay, but only by a vote of 93 to 40. Hurt by all this, and hoping for unity for the congregation’s future, Abell resigned.
His last day in the pulpit was June 19, 1960. Members thanked him and his wife for their service with a gift of a new 1960 Plymouth Valiant. Yet he was no longer our minister by July 10, when we held our first service here in this space. Why did we have such an awkward way of urging the minister to quit? I’m not sure. Perhaps lay leaders noted a decline in his behavior and his cognitive abilities. Indeed, one or two members had noted behaviors, which later would be understood as symptoms of a brain tumor. By September he was very sick, and on November 22, Ted Abel passed away.
I can scarcely imagine a more dramatic time in the life of a congregation. Well, times got better here, and they became difficult again. Awkward struggle and brilliant success are woven through our history, as they are through most institutions and indeed through most nations, throughout human history. Failures and new starts, heartache and hope are part of our story.
This is our story. It seems to me that those who came before us were doing the best that they knew how. This is all that we can try to do—the best that we can. They did so much work, not only for themselves and their children, but for us and for our children.
They of did so much work not only for their own ambitions and needs, but for us, for all of us who have come after them. It is good to say thank you, and to continue doing the best that we know how. So may it be.
[i] Arnold Crompton, Unitarianism on the Pacific Coast (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957).
Filed under: Becoming and Being Part of a UU Congregation, Comparative Religion, Inspiration, Religious Studies: History, Sermon Archives and Excerpts, UU Denomination and Pacific Central District News and Views
January 22, 2012 Sacramento, CA
Hymns: We Are Children of the Earth, Spirit of Life/Fuente de Amor, We Would Be One.
Reading: #444, This House, by Kenneth L. Patton.
Choral Music: Love Is the Spirit of this Church, James Vila Blake & Jason Shelton.
Sermon
Online computer dating sites invite you to identify your faith, as well as listing your occupation, income, hobbies, hair color, height and weight. In the religion category of the sites I have seen, the most commonly used label is not a denomination’s name, and not Christian, Catholic or Protestant. It’s “Spiritual but Not Religious.” Many people say this also in casual conversation–“I’m spiritual but not religious.” There is no authoritative definition of what people mean by this. I have not read of any study or survey. My guess is that they wish to identify as having a spiritual outlook on life, or a spiritual practice, or a relationship with God. Perhaps they feel humility toward life, or an attitude of gratitude for the gifts of life. Maybe it means they like to hike in the mountains, read poetry, sing gospel songs, hear Bach’s Mass in B Minor, or visit old cathedrals—just not when there’s a church service going on.
When people say “I’m not religious,” they may be thinking of dogmas and creeds; rules and commandments; lifeless theologizing; hypocrisy and abuses of power, and preaching that’s dull. And let us not forget religious intolerance, repression and violence. Religions have done terrible things. People have done terrible things, acting in the names of religions.
Living in the fourteenth century, Hafiz was an Islamic poet of the Sufi tradition. He wrote this:
The
Great religions are the
Ships,
Poets the life
Boats.
Every sane person I know has jumped
Overboard.[i]
A friend of mine is retired from the Christian ministry in a Mainline, moderate denomination. He’s a radical environmentalist and a veteran of Civil Rights demonstrations. He’s respectful of other faiths and knowledgeable about them. And he has no patience for the phrase “spiritual but not religious.” To hold this attitude, he says, is to cut yourself off from history, to be rootless, to be unaware of the source of the modes of spirituality that you hasten to claim. It is to risk falling for the newest fads and latest fashions, he says, to see spirituality as a catalogue item instead of a heritage. My friend writes:
[A man tells me] that he attended a Baptist revival once when he was thirteen and didn’t like all the shouting about sin so he never again has had anything to do with Christianity. Well, once I attended a junior high art show when I was thirteen and didn’t like the pictures there, so I never again have looked at art. [He goes on, asking whether he should] stop having anything to do with any college or university because six hundred years ago all their astronomy faculties taught that the sun revolved around the earth, and one hundred years ago all their anthropology faculties taught that blacks were genetically inferior [to whites], and fifty years ago almost all … were segregated. What enlightened person wants to be associated with such institutions?
My friend can recount the bad stories from religious history, as well as the contributions made by religions. He notes that religious traditions can change, evolve, and even improve. Those of us who choose to identify with a faith tradition have a duty to make it better, to reform and revive it. We have a duty to embody the values and virtues our tradition espouses.
American Unitarians of the nineteenth century took on this duty. I’d like to tell you about three of them. In fact, our big three: William Ellery Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Theodore Parker. You could say they were the inventors of “spiritual but not religious.” To them, religion was not a set of creeds and rules to follow, it was your way of life.
The first generation of Unitarian ministers in the United States were liberal Christians in Boston-area Congregationalist churches. Their faith was Bible-based, yet they said we should use our God-given ability to reason when studying Scriptures. To them, “reason was the friend, not the enemy of faith.”[ii] Their leader was William Ellery Channing. You can see a statue of him in Boston’s Public Garden, across from the church he served.
Orthodox Calvinists believed that all human beings were depraved and fallen, and could do nothing to avoid the fire-y fate in hell that awaited all but an elect few. Channing and the liberals said no. They believed that all people are created in the likeness of God. Hence, all could grow toward God’s goodness and perfection, as Jesus had modeled for us. Channing did not want to fight over points of theology with conservative ministers. That was a distraction from teaching religion as a way of life. Yet as the orthodox ministers continued attacking them as heretics, the Unitarians stood up for themselves. Channing led the charge, giving a sermon as the manifesto of Unitarian Christianity in 1819.
Those liberal ministers got organized in 1825. They grew in number and influence. To them, to be religious was to live sincerely and virtuously. To be religious meant examining your own heart–not for evil, but for the goodness that lives there. It meant showing the goodness in your actions, words, and commitments. Those early Unitarians believed every one of us can cultivate our divine potential. The term used for this approach then was “self-culture.” Nowadays people call this “spiritual growth.”
Sitting in the pews of Channing’s church, and nourished by his preaching, was Ralph Waldo Emerson, a young man whose father had been a Unitarian minister. Waldo’s parents had died when he was a child, and he was shaped intellectually and spiritually by his aunt, Mary Moody Emerson. Channing tutored Waldo privately before the young man entered Harvard’s divinity school. For its day, it was a liberal school, as Unitarians had already taken over its faculty. But for Emerson, the divinity school was lifeless.
He entered parish ministry but didn’t enjoy it. After his first wife died of tuberculosis, at age 19, he withdrew from his colleagues. Then he resigned his pulpit. The stated reason was that he did not wish to officiate at the Lord’s Supper, or communion. He saw it to be an empty ritual. But for him the whole church thing was empty and cold.
Emerson began lecturing and writing essays. He was on fire, and brimming with inspiration. Around him gathered an intellectual circle known as the Transcendentalists. Most of these people were Unitarians, or had been. They said it is not necessary to be Christian to be religious. It isn’t necessary to believe in a supernatural deity to be religious. They emphasized the use of reason, but they celebrated personal intuition more. They tossed out the Holy Bible, or tossed out the idea that the Bible was the primary source of religious truth. The primary sources must be your personal experience, your own soul, and the world around you. They said the word of God is too plentiful and fresh to be bound in one book for all time.
Emerson preached not a religion of the church, but “religion of the soul,” in the words of my colleague Jay Deacon. Instead of a remote God, Emerson felt and imagined a Power that connects us all, and which comes from within each of us. He said that in each of us is “the wise silence, the universal beauty, to which every part and particle equally related; the eternal One.”[iii]
In 1838 the graduating divinity school class at Harvard invited Emerson to give the commencement address, and he accepted. To these new ministers, the ex-minister recounted the corruptions of the Christian church over the centuries, and those of their own church. Conventional Unitarians still accepted the New Testament accounts of the miracles of Jesus as true—to them the miracles were evidence that Jesus was a messenger of God. Emerson condemned this as a monstrous idea. Supernatural tricks have nothing to do with miracle. A miracle is a flower blowing in the wind, or the roaring ocean waves.
Emerson said we can’t rely on others to tell us what God is, or who we are. Everyone must get acquainted “first hand” with the Spirit of Life. He urged the students: Have your own experience of God, and be brave enough to tell your congregations about it. Preach a new message, speak your own gospel. Don’t rely on old ways or old words of theologians and preachers, even the ones you admire.
He meant only to challenge the complacency of the students and their professors. According to scholar Gary Dorrien, Emerson meant to light a fire. Instead he caused a “firestorm.” One Harvard professor called his address “the latest form of infidelity.” The scandal of it gave orthodox critics one more weapon with which to attack the Unitarians.
Emerson was not invited back to speak at Harvard for 27 years. Yet he continued to shape the religious life of the Unitarian churches—and of the nation–as “students, and ministers and throngs of laypeople were reading his essays and going to hear his lectures.”[iv]
Sitting in the audience for the Divinity School Address was the new graduate Theodore Parker. In his journal that night, he wrote that Emerson’s “picture of the faults of the church” was “so beautiful, so just, so true.” Parker took from Emerson the call to a wider circle of religious concern, and he took it further. Parker is famous in our history for his radical abolitionism against American slavery and his opposition to the Mexican War and the government’s mistreatment of Native American tribes.[v]
In his day, Parker became infamous after giving an address called “The Transient and Permanent in Christianity.” This was 1840, 11 years after Emerson’s address, and 21 years after Channing’s Unitarian Christianity sermon. Emerson had celebrated Jesus as a spiritual teacher, just not the only spiritual teacher. Parker now said that Jesus was a great soul, to be sure. But what mattered was not Jesus himself, but the lessons he taught, the spiritual and moral principles he embodied. Those principles are timeless. They would be just as good if they had come from a mathematician in Athens as from Jesus of Nazareth.
We need no church, we need no Jesus, to tell us what is good. We know from our intuition and reason what values are true and lasting, Parker said. The rituals and forms of Christianity are transient; they will fall apart. The true spirit will persist. Rebellious words, for Boston in 1840!
Since Channing’s day, conservatives had been calling the Unitarian church “a halfway house to infidelity.” Now, orthodox ministers used Parker’s heresy to embarrass the Unitarians. Under this pressure, many of Parker’s colleagues avoided him, refusing pulpit exchanges with him, some not even speaking to him.[vi]
Consider a Unitarian Universalist congregation as a halfway house now. What’s our program? What do we offer? I think as a halfway house we try to show the way beyond separateness and spiritual isolation, the way to true connection, authentic fellowship, and a sense of belonging. We encourage every person to self-knowledge and self-expression. We strive to offer, and we seek to receive, the courage to find our personal calling and purpose in the world, and the courage to live out that purpose.
Ralph Waldo Emerson compared each human life to a ship starting on a journey. He asked: “Why should each new soul that is launched out of God into Nature be wrecked at the beginning of the voyage by following the charts of its mates instead [of] the compass, the stars, and the continents?”
For Emerson’s time of stale conformity, rigid social rules and unoriginal thinking, it was good advice. It still is good advice. Yet looking at my own life as a journey on the sea, I wonder what I’d be without the wisdom of other people’s experience from their journeys. Where would I be without the friends who taught the stars to me, the mentors who showed me how to use a compass, the travelers who brought news of continents worth exploring. Where would I be without, the sailboat skipper who said, “Here, take the wheel,” and then stood by me as I tried it out? Where and who would I be without them?
I believe the best way to find courage and a sense of connection is by joining with others, joining by our own free will, making our own decision. In community, we practice our values. We find that living by our values can take work. We need support, and the good examples of other good people who come seeking their own purpose and their own sense of connection.
Moral principles and ethical values matter. Yet values must be embodied for them to make a difference in our world. Values need structures and platforms. It is by institutions that values are carried from generation to generation. Such institutions are families, homes and schools; businesses, governments and unions; congregations and voluntary membership associations of all kinds. People do challenge their institutions, call them to account, and reform them. People will even found new institutions to replace the outworn and lifeless ones. Institutions carry values from one generation to the next. For better and for worse, religious institutions also embody values and carry principles forward. Together, here, let us decide to make it for the better. For the better! Amen.
[i] Daniel Ladinsky, The Gift: Poems by Hafiz the Great Sufi Master. New York: Penguin Compass, 1999, p. 177. Quoted and cited by Jay Deacon.
[ii] Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805-1900. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001, p. 31.
[iii] Jay Deacon, Magnificent Journey: Religion As a Lock on the Past or Engine of Evolution. Westminster, MA: Ground Wave Publishing, 2011, p. 62.
[iv] Deacon, p. 72.
[v] Deacon, p. 65.
[vi] Dorrien, p. 88.
Filed under: Becoming and Being Part of a UU Congregation, Comparative Religion, Inspiration, Religious Studies: History, Sermon Archives and Excerpts, UU Denomination and Pacific Central District News and Views
January 22, 2012 Sacramento, CA
Hymns: We Are Children of the Earth, Spirit of Life/Fuente de Amor, We Would Be One.
Reading: #444, This House, by Kenneth L. Patton.
Choral Music: Love Is the Spirit of this Church, James Vila Blake & Jason Shelton.
Sermon
Online computer dating sites invite you to identify your faith, as well as listing your occupation, income, hobbies, hair color, height and weight. In the religion category of the sites I have seen, the most commonly used label is not a denomination’s name, and not Christian, Catholic or Protestant. It’s “Spiritual but Not Religious.” Many people say this also in casual conversation–“I’m spiritual but not religious.” There is no authoritative definition of what people mean by this. I have not read of any study or survey. My guess is that they wish to identify as having a spiritual outlook on life, or a spiritual practice, or a relationship with God. Perhaps they feel humility toward life, or an attitude of gratitude for the gifts of life. Maybe it means they like to hike in the mountains, read poetry, sing gospel songs, hear Bach’s Mass in B Minor, or visit old cathedrals—just not when there’s a church service going on.
When people say “I’m not religious,” they may be thinking of dogmas and creeds; rules and commandments; lifeless theologizing; hypocrisy and abuses of power, and preaching that’s dull. And let us not forget religious intolerance, repression and violence. Religions have done terrible things. People have done terrible things, acting in the names of religions.
Living in the fourteenth century, Hafiz was an Islamic poet of the Sufi tradition. He wrote this:
The
Great religions are the
Ships,
Poets the life
Boats.
Every sane person I know has jumped
Overboard.[i]
A friend of mine is retired from the Christian ministry in a Mainline, moderate denomination. He’s a radical environmentalist and a veteran of Civil Rights demonstrations. He’s respectful of other faiths and knowledgeable about them. And he has no patience for the phrase “spiritual but not religious.” To hold this attitude, he says, is to cut yourself off from history, to be rootless, to be unaware of the source of the modes of spirituality that you hasten to claim. It is to risk falling for the newest fads and latest fashions, he says, to see spirituality as a catalogue item instead of a heritage. My friend writes:
[A man tells me] that he attended a Baptist revival once when he was thirteen and didn’t like all the shouting about sin so he never again has had anything to do with Christianity. Well, once I attended a junior high art show when I was thirteen and didn’t like the pictures there, so I never again have looked at art. [He goes on, asking whether he should] stop having anything to do with any college or university because six hundred years ago all their astronomy faculties taught that the sun revolved around the earth, and one hundred years ago all their anthropology faculties taught that blacks were genetically inferior [to whites], and fifty years ago almost all … were segregated. What enlightened person wants to be associated with such institutions?
My friend can recount the bad stories from religious history, as well as the contributions made by religions. He notes that religious traditions can change, evolve, and even improve. Those of us who choose to identify with a faith tradition have a duty to make it better, to reform and revive it. We have a duty to embody the values and virtues our tradition espouses.
American Unitarians of the nineteenth century took on this duty. I’d like to tell you about three of them. In fact, our big three: William Ellery Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Theodore Parker. You could say they were the inventors of “spiritual but not religious.” To them, religion was not a set of creeds and rules to follow, it was your way of life.
The first generation of Unitarian ministers in the United States were liberal Christians in Boston-area Congregationalist churches. Their faith was Bible-based, yet they said we should use our God-given ability to reason when studying Scriptures. To them, “reason was the friend, not the enemy of faith.”[ii] Their leader was William Ellery Channing. You can see a statue of him in Boston’s Public Garden, across from the church he served.
Orthodox Calvinists believed that all human beings were depraved and fallen, and could do nothing to avoid the fire-y fate in hell that awaited all but an elect few. Channing and the liberals said no. They believed that all people are created in the likeness of God. Hence, all could grow toward God’s goodness and perfection, as Jesus had modeled for us. Channing did not want to fight over points of theology with conservative ministers. That was a distraction from teaching religion as a way of life. Yet as the orthodox ministers continued attacking them as heretics, the Unitarians stood up for themselves. Channing led the charge, giving a sermon as the manifesto of Unitarian Christianity in 1819.
Those liberal ministers got organized in 1825. They grew in number and influence. To them, to be religious was to live sincerely and virtuously. To be religious meant examining your own heart–not for evil, but for the goodness that lives there. It meant showing the goodness in your actions, words, and commitments. Those early Unitarians believed every one of us can cultivate our divine potential. The term used for this approach then was “self-culture.” Nowadays people call this “spiritual growth.”
Sitting in the pews of Channing’s church, and nourished by his preaching, was Ralph Waldo Emerson, a young man whose father had been a Unitarian minister. Waldo’s parents had died when he was a child, and he was shaped intellectually and spiritually by his aunt, Mary Moody Emerson. Channing tutored Waldo privately before the young man entered Harvard’s divinity school. For its day, it was a liberal school, as Unitarians had already taken over its faculty. But for Emerson, the divinity school was lifeless.
He entered parish ministry but didn’t enjoy it. After his first wife died of tuberculosis, at age 19, he withdrew from his colleagues. Then he resigned his pulpit. The stated reason was that he did not wish to officiate at the Lord’s Supper, or communion. He saw it to be an empty ritual. But for him the whole church thing was empty and cold.
Emerson began lecturing and writing essays. He was on fire, and brimming with inspiration. Around him gathered an intellectual circle known as the Transcendentalists. Most of these people were Unitarians, or had been. They said it is not necessary to be Christian to be religious. It isn’t necessary to believe in a supernatural deity to be religious. They emphasized the use of reason, but they celebrated personal intuition more. They tossed out the Holy Bible, or tossed out the idea that the Bible was the primary source of religious truth. The primary sources must be your personal experience, your own soul, and the world around you. They said the word of God is too plentiful and fresh to be bound in one book for all time.
Emerson preached not a religion of the church, but “religion of the soul,” in the words of my colleague Jay Deacon. Instead of a remote God, Emerson felt and imagined a Power that connects us all, and which comes from within each of us. He said that in each of us is “the wise silence, the universal beauty, to which every part and particle equally related; the eternal One.”[iii]
In 1838 the graduating divinity school class at Harvard invited Emerson to give the commencement address, and he accepted. To these new ministers, the ex-minister recounted the corruptions of the Christian church over the centuries, and those of their own church. Conventional Unitarians still accepted the New Testament accounts of the miracles of Jesus as true—to them the miracles were evidence that Jesus was a messenger of God. Emerson condemned this as a monstrous idea. Supernatural tricks have nothing to do with miracle. A miracle is a flower blowing in the wind, or the roaring ocean waves.
Emerson said we can’t rely on others to tell us what God is, or who we are. Everyone must get acquainted “first hand” with the Spirit of Life. He urged the students: Have your own experience of God, and be brave enough to tell your congregations about it. Preach a new message, speak your own gospel. Don’t rely on old ways or old words of theologians and preachers, even the ones you admire.
He meant only to challenge the complacency of the students and their professors. According to scholar Gary Dorrien, Emerson meant to light a fire. Instead he caused a “firestorm.” One Harvard professor called his address “the latest form of infidelity.” The scandal of it gave orthodox critics one more weapon with which to attack the Unitarians.
Emerson was not invited back to speak at Harvard for 27 years. Yet he continued to shape the religious life of the Unitarian churches—and of the nation–as “students, and ministers and throngs of laypeople were reading his essays and going to hear his lectures.”[iv]
Sitting in the audience for the Divinity School Address was the new graduate Theodore Parker. In his journal that night, he wrote that Emerson’s “picture of the faults of the church” was “so beautiful, so just, so true.” Parker took from Emerson the call to a wider circle of religious concern, and he took it further. Parker is famous in our history for his radical abolitionism against American slavery and his opposition to the Mexican War and the government’s mistreatment of Native American tribes.[v]
In his day, Parker became infamous after giving an address called “The Transient and Permanent in Christianity.” This was 1840, 11 years after Emerson’s address, and 21 years after Channing’s Unitarian Christianity sermon. Emerson had celebrated Jesus as a spiritual teacher, just not the only spiritual teacher. Parker now said that Jesus was a great soul, to be sure. But what mattered was not Jesus himself, but the lessons he taught, the spiritual and moral principles he embodied. Those principles are timeless. They would be just as good if they had come from a mathematician in Athens as from Jesus of Nazareth.
We need no church, we need no Jesus, to tell us what is good. We know from our intuition and reason what values are true and lasting, Parker said. The rituals and forms of Christianity are transient; they will fall apart. The true spirit will persist. Rebellious words, for Boston in 1840!
Since Channing’s day, conservatives had been calling the Unitarian church “a halfway house to infidelity.” Now, orthodox ministers used Parker’s heresy to embarrass the Unitarians. Under this pressure, many of Parker’s colleagues avoided him, refusing pulpit exchanges with him, some not even speaking to him.[vi]
Consider a Unitarian Universalist congregation as a halfway house now. What’s our program? What do we offer? I think as a halfway house we try to show the way beyond separateness and spiritual isolation, the way to true connection, authentic fellowship, and a sense of belonging. We encourage every person to self-knowledge and self-expression. We strive to offer, and we seek to receive, the courage to find our personal calling and purpose in the world, and the courage to live out that purpose.
Ralph Waldo Emerson compared each human life to a ship starting on a journey. He asked: “Why should each new soul that is launched out of God into Nature be wrecked at the beginning of the voyage by following the charts of its mates instead [of] the compass, the stars, and the continents?”
For Emerson’s time of stale conformity, rigid social rules and unoriginal thinking, it was good advice. It still is good advice. Yet looking at my own life as a journey on the sea, I wonder what I’d be without the wisdom of other people’s experience from their journeys. Where would I be without the friends who taught the stars to me, the mentors who showed me how to use a compass, the travelers who brought news of continents worth exploring. Where would I be without, the sailboat skipper who said, “Here, take the wheel,” and then stood by me as I tried it out? Where and who would I be without them?
I believe the best way to find courage and a sense of connection is by joining with others, joining by our own free will, making our own decision. In community, we practice our values. We find that living by our values can take work. We need support, and the good examples of other good people who come seeking their own purpose and their own sense of connection.
Moral principles and ethical values matter. Yet values must be embodied for them to make a difference in our world. Values need structures and platforms. It is by institutions that values are carried from generation to generation. Such institutions are families, homes and schools; businesses, governments and unions; congregations and voluntary membership associations of all kinds. People do challenge their institutions, call them to account, and reform them. People will even found new institutions to replace the outworn and lifeless ones. Institutions carry values from one generation to the next. For better and for worse, religious institutions also embody values and carry principles forward. Together, here, let us decide to make it for the better. For the better! Amen.
[i] Daniel Ladinsky, The Gift: Poems by Hafiz the Great Sufi Master. New York: Penguin Compass, 1999, p. 177. Quoted and cited by Jay Deacon.
[ii] Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805-1900. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001, p. 31.
[iii] Jay Deacon, Magnificent Journey: Religion As a Lock on the Past or Engine of Evolution. Westminster, MA: Ground Wave Publishing, 2011, p. 62.
[iv] Deacon, p. 72.
[v] Deacon, p. 65.
[vi] Dorrien, p. 88.
Filed under: Advice, Comparative Religion, Family Ministry, Graduate Theological school/PSR, Ordeals and Observations of Pastor Cranky not elsewhere classified, Sermon Archives and Excerpts, Stewardship & Finances | Tags: childhood, debt, family feuds, family strive, finances, generosity, gratitude, inheritance, Jacob and Esau, Jacob Needleman, loan shark, stewardship
Filed under: Comparative Religion, Rituals, Prayers, Elements of Worship Services, Sermon Archives and Excerpts, Special Events | Tags: baby Jesus, Christmas eve, Luke 2, Progressive Christianity, Unitarian Christmas, Universalism
Family Minister, Unitarian Universalist Society of Sacramento
Christmas Prayer
Please take a moment to feel settled for a time of reflection and prayer. Feel your body in the seat, your feet on the floor. Feel the breath of life rising in you, and then feel it reaching out and mingling with the air, which joins us to all of life on this earth, in all its generations.
Feel your hopes for this time together this night. Feel your hopes for this season. Your hopes for those you care about, those in your heart or those held in your prayerful intentions.
Recognize your hopes for this whole world, with all its pain and its dangers and threats. Recognize your gratitude for this whole world, with all its beauty and its resilience and creativity.
Take a moment to acknowledge that every human life—including yours—holds mysteries and questions, and doubts. See if you can relax just into a more open acceptance of the gift of life and its questions.
Let your heart receive what it needs as I offer these further words of prayer.
Spirit of Life, Source of Love, on this holiday night, we pause to give thanks for life in all its abundance and all its mystery. We give thanks for the people, places, and experiences that have sustained us this past year. On this night of worship and rest, we remember and give thanks for those who are working, especially those who are caring for others or keeping us safe.
We remember those around the world in zones of conflict and oppression, the ones who serve there and the ones who call those places home. Let us give thanks for those returning safely from military service in Iraq, and remember those still serving abroad. We remember also the refugees, exiles, and prisoners. We long for the end of conflict and pain for all people, for everyone in every land. Let us pray–and hope and speak and work–so that all might soon come to know the gift of peace, which is the message of this holiday, and its promise.
Let us remember that each one of us is able to give gifts to others, starting with the gift of our authentic presence. We can receive and share the gift of respect and kindness. We can receive and share the gifts of listening and encouragement. We can receive, and we can share, the gift of peace and stillness. So may it be in these moments, and in the days ahead. Amen.
Readings
Book of the Prophet Isaiah, 9:2-7 (KJV)
Gospel of Luke, 2:1-20 (KJV)
Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 2 (The Message translation)
Homily
I’m amazed at all the kinds of people who like Christmas. I know Jews, Hindus, Humanists, atheists, neo-Pagans, ex-Christians and people not elsewhere classified who enjoy sending Christmas cards, exchanging gifts–even shopping for gifts amid the rush. They like decorating their home, and singing traditional carols. Some folks make it a point to get to a Christmas Eve service, even though they haven’t been to church in ages—well, they haven’t been to church in a year. They patronize concerts of Christmas music, holiday dramas and comedies on stage and screen. They show up for The Messiah, and of course the Nativity Pageant. Even those of us who stubbornly resist going along with the crowd most of the time…will make room in our hearts to say “Merry Christmas” over and over, and almost never to say “Bah! Humbug.”
I wonder: In our modern secular society, and our consumerist culture, have we concluded that Christmas is merely harmless? Do we think of it only as a treat of carols, candles, and candy canes to get us through a time of darkness and chill in the northern hemisphere? Well, that’s a worthy trait for Christmas to have, but it’s not the only one. And: Christmas is not harmless. I mean the story of Christmas, the divine and human story that gets the whole thing going in the first place. The story that is the reason for the season… is full of danger.
It’s a story of wonder and love, to be sure. It’s got a donkey, sheep, cows, and other animals in a stable. But it’s a story of danger too. As we’ve heard, the Gospel writers explain that Joseph and Mary journey to Bethlehem because Joseph is from there. He has to go to his hometown in order to register for the census of the Roman Empire. “There went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed” –this is how the King James Bible says it.
All the people going to and fro, heading back to the places they had left behind. The roadways–full, crowded in all directions. No Greyhound bus, no Southwest Airlines, just animals to carry you, or your own two feet. Robbers and Roman soldiers no doubt find easy pickings among the vulnerable travelers.
When Joseph and Mary arrive in Bethlehem, the innkeeper has no place for them. They share space with farm animals, and she gives birth in a stable rather than at home or in a midwife’s tent. In those days, infant mortality was a high risk, as it still is today in places of poverty, oppression, and military occupation. Mortality in giving birth was a high risk also.
In the wilderness, shepherds guard their flocks against predators. They’re used to being alone out there. All of a sudden a strange figure appears and calls out to them. They are “sore afraid,” the story says, even though the Angel of God says: “Fear not!” Good news comes in a flurry of wings–more angels arrive, with a chorus of praise for this child. The shepherds follow instructions, risking loss of life or at least loss of some of the flock, as they travel into Bethlehem.
Wise men, coming from afar, follow a dancing star. Perhaps they have a safer trip than the shepherds and the family. Yet they make a deadly mistake. They ask the emperor’s local rep for directions to the Christ child’s location. King Herod, as he’s known, does not hear their good news as good, or as anything but a threat to his status as a local ruler, and to Caesar’s power as a god-and-king in one. The wise men find the baby in the stable. After kneeling to offer gifts fit for a king, the wise men head home. Yet they take another way, avoiding Herod. In his rage, Herod orders genocide–all the firstborn sons. The holy family escapes the ensuing raid, but countless others do not.
This is not a story just about a baby being born, it’s about a baby who will challenge accepted power structures, who will try to bring peace, generosity and kindness to a world accustomed to anger, greed, and brutal force. This baby becomes a prophet.
In these Gospel accounts, the grown-up Jesus proclaims this message: “Blessed are you poor ones, for to you belongs the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry, for you shall be satisfied.” But then he says: “Woe unto you that are rich! For you have received your consolation.” In other words, you’ve already taken about all you’re going to get.
The people in the original Christmas story know of the danger of being born in such a time and place as they inhabit. But can they know of the danger that this baby’s deeds will bring? Can they know what his teachings will inspire, and how far they will spread?
How can any of us know what potential resides in any human being, even in a child we nurture and know as our own? How can we know what any particular birth will lead to?
That simple stable-birth turns out to be an earth-shaking, mind-bending, eye-opening, heart-filling and heart-breaking challenge to that baby’s parents, the rabbis, the Romans, the whole wide world. But you can say that about any birth, any child. I don’t have one of my own, but I’ve listened to some of you, and that’s my impression of the experience of parenthood. It’s an earth-shaking, mind-bending, eye-opening, heart-filling and heart-breaking challenge.
How can we know if any given child will challenge the ways of the world later on: the astronomer in Europe who says the sun does not revolve around the earth, but the earth around the sun… the nonviolent protestors in India who face the bullets of the British Empire? How can we, who bow to greet any new children, predict which ones will show great courage: the African Americans who will not budge from lunch counter protests or let police dogs and water cannons turn them ‘round… Or the college students and other activists of recent days, who “occupy” public parks across the land, calling for economic fairness, and risking pepper spray or a beating as they spark a new movement… Or the Arab citizens who rise up finally against dictatorships, the Burmese democracy activists, the Chinese dissidents. So many stories show the faith and courage that reside in every person—in everyone’s heart—and everyone starts out as a child!
How do we know what child will be a philanthropist, a teacher, a cherished volunteer, a health professional? What child will be a patient parent, loving partner, an actor, an athlete, a good friend?
What child won’t make it?
What child will face medical needs or emotional struggles in life so great that it will draw out of you courage and endurance you could not have expected of yourself?
The Christmas story is, indeed, one of possibility and of danger. Promise and chance.
What children will be hardworking custodians, cooks, farmworkers, musicians, artists, clerks, or inventors of new technologies? Which ones will be givers of military service, social service, automotive service, or givers of care in nursing homes and nurseries? So much potential, in every human life.
Once we draw near to the Christmas story, we can see its theme of danger, and the risks of human life in any age of history. We remember that it’s dangerous to call into question the unjust ways of the world. But what calls us, what draws us to the story, is the surprise of the situation and all its characters.
This unlikely story shows the unshakeable simplicity of life–and the gentleness and generosity of human life.
It shows the power of divine love and human goodness, the power to shine amid the shadows of the world. It shines, and it shows the way to the gifts of life: the way of patience, kindness, encouragement, and courage.
May we walk this way with one another, and may we help one another. Let us all help to show the way, as we make our way to the gifts of life.
So may it be. Amen.
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