I'm a believer

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
October 13, 2013

It’s Celebration Sunday! We are invited to bring our new pledges, or the affirmation of our 1-2-3 year pledges to the front of the sanctuary in celebration of our participation in this community, its mission and its ministries.

Sermon

One of the passages in the Hebrew scriptures that inspires my ministry here is this part of Isaiah 61

The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me,
Because the LORD has anointed me
To bring good news to the afflicted;
He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
To proclaim liberty to captives,
And freedom to prisoners;

I’m a believer in being part of a congregation of people who are trying to do these things. It seems also to be a perfect description of what we are here for as a church. One of the things we do is to help people find their freedom. One of the things we don’t free ourselves to do sometimes, is to believe. We are skeptics, it is not hard to get many UUs to say what they don’t believe. It is good for us to figure out what we do believe. Several weeks ago we put up photographs of First UU people with captions of what they said they believed in.

“I’m a believer in … reason and observation,”
“I’m a believer in … the community,”
“I’m a believer in … the good in everyone,”

Go around at coffee hour and take a look. At the kick-off for the canvass we had chocolate cake and wrote on pieces of paper where we finished the sentence “I’m a believer in … ” Those are up here in the glass bowls, and they will feature in our celebration after the sermon.

Here at First UU in Austin, one of the things church frees us to do is think about and declare what we do believe in.

One of the things we are not free around is money. We worry about not having any. There is shame around being in debt, around not being able to pay bills. There is fear about what the future will hold, whether we will be thought well of or scorned. One of my friends has a recurring nightmare where he is hearing people at his own funeral say to one another ‘Well, he never did amount to much.” There is even shame around having enough money. How do you provide well for your children without ruining them? How much is too much to leave them? You want them to have enough, to have a stake with which to start life, but you don’t want the amount to be disincentivizing. My spell check doesn’t recognize that as a word, but I heard it on the news this week.

Money is fascinating, and hard to talk about. This is the time of year when we talk about it with one another, when we ask for feedback about how you think the church is going, and where we talk about what the church means to us, and where we invite one another to claim a place in the community, a respectable place, by pledging generously within your means. The amount doesn’t matter – the generosity does. Some of you would be hard pressed to give a dollar a week, and yet I’m going to press you to do that. There is no shame in that, as long as it is generous within your means. Some of you give six thousand a year, and it’s easy for you to do that. I’m going to ask you to give until it feels significant. If this community is significant in your life.

I haven’t been giving enough, so I’m going to raise my pledge by 20% this year, and each year after that until it feels good. I want you all to consider that as well. Let me tell you a few numbers, which will make you glaze over. It costs the church about 1500 dollars per member to keep running. Not per family. The number comes from taking the yearly budget and dividing it by the number of members. I hesitate to tell you that number because it may not represent a number that will be significant giving for you. So now forget you heard that. I worry about people kind of quickly figuring: okay, I’ll just pledge that and cover myself, so it’s all okay. Well, that may be your significant amount, or it may be like the teenager who, when asked to cut the grass in the backyard, said “Why? I never go out there.”

Our aspiration is that we would all be giving about 5% of our income each year, or 2% of our net worth. That may seem impossible right now. That’s okay. First UU doesn’t want to run on resentful money, or forced money. This church wants hopeful money, aspirational money, invested spirit money, full hearted money, excitement money, belief money. Belief in our mission, in where we’re going, in what’s happening here.

Where are we now? Where are we going? We have added a hundred new members in the past two years. We are bursting at the seams, when it’s not canvass Sunday. The Fred dinner attracts between 20-30 people every Wednesday night for movies and classes. We are staffed properly for growth. Let me tell you what this church looks like to me. You all have helped start two other UU congregations. You have kept this church going for nearly sixty years, (it will be 60 years next year, so we need to start planning an anniversary party) You have been teaching children for sixty years, having meaningful conversations for sixty years, listening to great music for sixty years, making brave decisions, prudent decisions for sixty years, creating a theater company within the congregation, an art gallery with changing monthly exhibits. You have been through good times and hard times. You know what? This is a good time, and I believe in you.

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776