Sermon: “Go Tell It”
Posted by revsean on Sunday, June 14, 2009 | Tagged as: Ministry
Opening Words
by David S. Blanchard
Come down off the ladder.
Wash out that paintbrush.
Shake the sand out of your shoes.
Get up off your muddy knees,
and give the garden a morning off.
Fold up the newspaper.
Turn off the coffeepot.
Close up your calendar,
already filled with dates,
and times,
and people,
and places that claim you.
This church is ready for you to fill its rooms,
to create its spirit, to generate its warmth,
to kindle its light.
This church is ready for you to make community,
to create beauty, to bend it toward justice,
to serve its ideals.
This church is ready for you to be here,
honoring our past,
invigorating our present,
and dreaming our future.
This is your church.
Here we are home.
Here we are whole.
Let us begin.
Centering
Spirit of Life,
We begin in gratitude. We have been given the gift of life and we so often take this amazing gift for granted. We have been given roots of love, community, and caring, and we so often forget to say “thank you” for this foundation that anchors us richly, nourishing us through rocky days and stormy nights.
Spirit of Love, we thank you for all the blessings of our lives. For communities that support, sustain, and help us hold on through pain and hurt feelings, sorrow, and loss. For all the people in our lives who we share our humanity, who know our hearts, who stand by us in hard times and celebrate with us in times of joy.
We remember the lines of the Persian poet, Saadi:
All men and women are to each other
the limbs of a single body, each of us drawn
from life’s shimmering essence, God’s perfect pearl;
and when this life we share wounds one of us,
all share the hurt as if it were our own.
Spirit of Compassion, we ask that you help us support and sustain those who are struggling, who need release, who suffer today. May we, at very least, send wishes for peace to the people in Iran who are fighting for freedom and fairness. May we, at very least, hold in our hearts those who wake up again today to war or hunger, disease or want. May we open our hearts to the world and be ready to do whatever we can—-no matter how small it may seem-—to help.
Spirit of Grace, help us be leaders in our lives, acting from a vision of Love in action. Help us give generously, to be the hands of God on earth, mending brokenness where we can, living our lives as an act of gratitude and service.
And when we fail, help us to reach out to each other, a community of grace that sustains us in our doubt, embraces us when we cry and when we laugh. Help us offer the best of ourselves and our community to those we meet, to those we know and love, to those we encounter this day and every day. May our lives speak of love, compassion, and grace.
Amen. Ashé. And Blessed Be.
Reading
“Deeds Speak Louder”
by Rev. John A. Buehrens
I have good news and I have bad news. The good news is that we Unitarian Universalists have a saving message. It is not a new message nor a unique one: Others proclaim it as well. My friend William Sloan Coffin puts it this way in his book A Passion for the Possible: A Message to US Churches:
The chief religious question is not, “What must I do to be saved?” but rather, “What must we all do to save God’s creation”… [T]he religious community has the saving vision. It is the ancient prophetic vision of human unity, now become an urgent, pragmatic necessity. According to this vision, we all belong to one another, every one of us [six] billion people on this planet…
We Unitarian Universalists, who have this vision in our very name, have a particular calling. It is not merely to proclaim the vision. That is easy enough. The bad news is that we are each also called upon to do something about it.
Let’s face it: Most of us have been blessed beyond our deserving. We are a privileged people. Whatever sufferings any one of us may have encountered, most of us have been blessed with a good education, enough to eat, and opportunities to have useful lives.
Unlike some more metaphysical forms of religion, our faith does not treat evil, sin, and death as unreal. It asks us to pray for lives that are worthy of all the good things that are ours. It challenges us to make our deeds the principle answer to our prayers.
As our own Adlai Stevenson once said, “We travel together, passengers on this little spaceship, dependent on its vulnerable supplies of air and soil; all committed for our safety to its security and peace. Preserved from annihilation only by the care, work, and will say, the love we give our fragile craft.”
None of us can do everything. Each of us is finite. We are each limited in talent, time, money, energy, love and wisdom—among other things. But each of us can surely do something. We may begin small and self-involved. Humans do. But we are capable of growth, spiritually and morally.
This is the reason for religious communities. In one sense, our form of religious association is unique. It recognizes at its very core that the important thing about religious living is not what we profess with our lips but how we witness with our lives. It says that your mother was right: Deeds do speak louder than words.
Sermon
Each of us is constantly telling stories. We may not recognize it at first, but we tell stories of our work, our families and relationships, our heath: about what we what and what we believe we are capable of achieving.
We tell these stories to provide structure and direction as we navigate life’s challenges and opportunities. We tell them to make sense of life, even and especially when it feels most chaotic and we are most anxious. We organize our thoughts and experiences into something coherent—a story—that shapes how we see and experience our reality.
The stories we tell are powerful. The stories we live—the deeds that our reading spoke of—is even more powerful. The choices we make and the actions we take or do not take, often reveal that the story we tell and the story we truly believe are not always the same.
“We may start small and self-involved. Humans do,” says John Buehrens.
The stories we tell necessarily begin with ourselves. What do I need? What do I want? What do I think? What do I believe? We start from ourselves, our singular vision, our particular context, our interpretation of what we’ve seen and experienced.
As Unitarian Universalists, we don’t condemn this sense of self. We don’t try to squelch it or squeeze it into a box of “right belief.” We don’t demand that all our children stand together and recite creeds or statements meant to shape their thoughts and beliefs to match ours.
Instead, we celebrate the beauty and diversity of each person. We encourage our children and ourselves to think, to question, to doubt, even to reject what doesn’t make sense to them. Our mission statement here at South Valley says that we “nurture curiosity and learning.” We do this by cherishing every person’s ability to think for themselves, to reason for themselves, and to create and tell their own story.
Historically, this has gotten us in a lot of trouble. Freethinkers are not often welcomed by those who would consolidate power by insisting on orthodoxies—those official statements of “right belief” that are used to separate the obedient from the disobedient. Our story—from the time of Constantine to Calvin, from the philosopher Origen to the scientist Priestley, from the abolitionists to those who protest and question and stand up for equality and freedom today—Our story is a story of valuing and preserving the freedom to think and reason and work out one’s beliefs for one’s self.
Rev. Eric Heller-Wagner wrote chalice lighting words that express our reverence for each person so beautifully:
Blessed is the fire that burns deep in the soul. It is the flame of the human spirit touched into being by the mystery of life. It is the fire of reason; the fire of compassion; the fire of justice; the fire of faith. It is the fire of love burning deep in the human heart; the divine glow in every life.
We honor the divine glow in every life, the spark of humanity and the beautiful uniqueness of each person. But that’s not all. Part of what I liked about the reading from John Buehrens today is that is a reminder that what makes us more than just a cohort of individualists, a bunch of people arguing for our own point of view, is that we know that we need each other. We begin in freedom and individuality, but that alone is not enough. We move on to community, and that is where are values, our vision, and our stories are tested.
Forrest Church, who is probably our foremost Unitarian Universalist theologian and thinker, asked in a sermon he gave to his congregation at All Souls Church of New York in October of 2006:
Why then do we choose to join together rather than exercise our full freedom to believe what we will in the privacy of our homes on Sunday mornings? Simply because experience has taught us that we need one another. We need guidance in recognizing our tears in one another’s eyes. We need prompting to raise our moral sights. We need companions in the work of love and justice to enhance our neighborhoods and to strengthen our witness in the world. And yes, we choose to join our hands and hearts because we know how easily we slip back into mechanical habits that blunt our consciousness. We need and know we need to be reminded week in and week out how precious life is and how fragile. So very fragile. And so phosphorescent. A year can seem to last forever, to the point that we may pray for it to end; yet decades flit past in an eye blink.
We need to be reminded, week in and week out, how precious life is and how fragile. We need guidance in recognizing our tears in one another’s eyes. We need prompting to raise our moral sights. We need companions in the work of love and justice…
We do truly begin with an honoring of the individual. And yet we know that is not enough. The stories we tell are not and should not be solitary stories. We need the viewpoints, the companionship, and the variety of other’s stories to help us see beyond ourselves. We need to be reminded that our needs are not the only needs—and in fact, we may do better to look around and try to help meet other’s needs than to worry about our own.
“We start small and self-involved. Humans do.” But the goal of religious community—especially religious communities built, like ours, on covenants rather than creeds—is to lift our eyes to something larger than ourselves, to remind us that our view is one of many—and that if we explore the mosaic of humanity all around us, we will be enriched, expanded, and able to see more of the world that has surrounded us all the time. And to call us into deepened, reverent relationship with that world.
The stories we tell matter. As Unitarian Universalists, we have a story—some “Good News” in more religious language that we can share. We value each and every person, and yet we are not stuck in isolated individualism. We know the wisdom of the old South African proverb, “You can blow out a candle, but you cannot blow out a fire.” We know that together we are stronger, and have more to give—to each other and to the world.
In his essay, John Buehrens said that the bad news is that we are each called to do something about this vision of community we have discovered. I disagree. I think this too, is good news. The freedoms we’ve been given and the communities we have created demand something of us. They demand that we move beyond that small, self-interested place where humans begin. They demand that we recognize and embrace that our deeds to speak louder than our words. They demand that we refuse to believe stories of powerlessness and despair, and get to work building the lives, the congregations, and the world that we know are possible.
It won’t always be easy. Maybe it won’t be easy very much of the time. It will be hard work, building this kind of community, giving ourselves to the world and to each other in this way. I’m sure that it will hurt as we expand that smallness and give up self-interest for a larger vision of justice and right relationship. I’m sure we will need to cultivate new ways of communicating, new practices of forgiveness and reconciliation, and learn new stories that focus on gratitude for the abundance in our lives. It may be distinctly counter-cultural in this time in which the story is of scarcity and lack. And yet, looking around this room—seeing all your faces, recalling the faces of our children, looking at this beautiful building and the beautiful souls that fill it—how can we not acknowledge all we’ve been given? And how can we not give back in gratitude and amazement?
Our opening words today reminded us that we create the story of this church, just as we create the stories that make sense of our lives. We were reminded that:
This church is ready for you to fill its rooms,
to create its spirit, to generate its warmth,
to kindle its light.
This church is ready for you to make community,
to create beauty, to bend it toward justice,
to serve its ideals.
This church is ready for you to be here,
honoring our past,
invigorating our present,
and dreaming our future.
The good news of our religious freedom and our beloved community is matched by the good news that this congregation, as well as our association as a whole, is always being built as we go. We have the power and the ability to create the community we want to be part of. Our opening words invited us to build a congregation that serves not only our needs, but something larger than us—the vision of human unity and the work of love and justice in our world.
There is a well-loved benediction—a blessing that closes a service—that is a solid partner to the invitation we’ve received. It was written by Rev. Philip Randall Giles:
May the quality of our lives be our benediction, and a blessing to all whom we touch.
May the quality of our lives be our benediction, and a blessing to all whom we touch. We have been given a glimpse of a story in which our presence, our very lives make a difference. A story in which our lives bless the world, and all whom we touch. A story in which each and every one of us matters, and together we are stronger yet. This is the story I hope we will choose to tell, not only with our words, but with our lives and the future of this congregation. Go tell it, my friends. This is our good news. We can bless the world.
May it be so. And may we be the ones that make it so.
Amen. Ashé. And Blessed be.
Closing Words
by Amy McKenzie Quinn
When we say, “Go now in peace,” we mean the peace that asks us to stop grasping after power over and the peace that demands that we live fully, that we love with a fierce love, that we hope with a bold hope, that we pray and sing and struggle.
Remember this: within and all around us is our Source; may we return to it, heed it, and honor it.
Amen. Ashé. And Blessed Be.
