Liberty, Healing, Good News

Rev. Meg Barnhouse

May 22, 2011

Reading

UNICORN

I saw a unicorn coming at me on I-85. That’s what it looked like at first glance, anyway. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a sensible person. I know there aren’t such things in the world, but there it was, this enormous gray ridged horn coming fast toward me southbound, and it was angled forward and up, as if pointing to the Blue Ridge Mountains and, after that, the sky. As it blew by me I saw that it was a church steeple on a flatbed truck, being shipped to its new church building.

The odd sight stuck with me. I started thinking about the church group that was getting that steeple. I wondered how much it cost, and I thought about all the things it symbolized. Most basically, the steeple symbolizes the church pointing to God. We all know that God is not literally “up there;” a lot of us Unitarian Universalists think of God as everywhere, and that’s just the beginning of all of our various thoughts on the nature of the One.

I asked myself what would be a better symbol of pointing to God. What direction(s) would it point? It might look like one of those Moravian stars with almost as many points as a chrysanthemum.

I wonder why people wanted to build one more church when there are already so many. Sometimes the reason is a growing population of people who need you, and no church of your kind is near them, so you build one. Sometimes the reason is a split in an existing church, and one unhappy, hurt, and angry group is making a new church where they can become the community they want to be. “All it takes,” someone once told me, “is a grievance and a coffee pot.”

I thought about how much hope it takes to build a church. “This time,” they might be thinking, “this time we will get it right. We will be good people and we will really point folks toward God and there won’t be politics or infighting or cliques and we won’t ever disappoint each other, and we won’t do things in a slap-dash manner, and this, finally, will be the church we have all been dreaming about. We won’t fight about silly things like carpet or moving the piano or the banners. We’ll be kind and respectful of one another, challenging one another lovingly, cleaning up our own hearts before we start trying to clean up other people’s hearts, and it will be like it’s supposed to be.”

I thought about how, from my perspective, a church like the one they may be hoping for is as mythic and elusive a creature as the unicorn. Churches cause lots of joy, but they also cause pain as they strive to improve people, as they strive to instruct people on the right and wrong ways of being a person in this world. Some say: “Don’t ever drink, but you may wear jewelry and makeup.” Some say: “Absolutely no vanity or fancy dress, but you may drink beer, as it’s one of God’s gifts.”

Some churches talk lots about hell and others don’t mention it, even though it’s there, undergirding everything. People try to be kind but often, when we feel passionately about something, it is hard to keep in mind that the other people are more important than correctness of behavior or purity of doctrine. A conviction that the loving God they worship will punish mistakes with eternal hellfire can make some people feel an urgency that comes across as meanness. Some churches are kind but ineffectual, and some are kind and powerful and they do lots of good and they function in marvelous ways.

Churches are like families. Present are the relatives who drive you nuts, the misunderstandings that hurt, and all the destructive behavior that families can have. At church you also get the warmth, growth, shared history, support and love you can find in a family. People act like people no matter where we are. We know we are supposed to be kind and loving and not jump down each other’s throats for not getting the right kind of free-trade coffee. We know we’re not supposed to fight bitterly about the best ways to work for peace. I heard a poem on the radio the other day, part of which was a prayer: “God make the bad people good and the good people nice.” Honey, we’re trying.

Sermon

HOW WE DO CHURCH

Last Sunday I talked a little bit about myself as a minister. I believe it’s good to get oriented at the beginning of an exploration by figuring out who you are, where you’ve been, and where you want to go. I told you about coming from a long family tradition of professional ministry, that I usually wear a teacher’s robe rather than a priestly robe, that I like leading in a collaborative way, thinking together with people about the joys and challenges of congregational life, and putting my energies, experience and training toward helping a congregation grow toward its vision of itself. I talked about me as a minister because that’s what I imagined you all would want to hear about, as I sat and thought about what I’d want to hear sitting in the pew, being curious. On the second Sunday I would want to hear about how the minister thinks about church. The kind of church we’re interested in is Unitarian Universalist church, so let me talk about that one in particular. Where did it come from?

To orient us in that way, I’m going to tell you about the Unitarians and the Universalists, that fascinating tradition of which this congregation is a part. I’m going to go through it very briefly, so trust that if there’s more you want to hear about, you might be able to hear about it more in upcoming years.

Our Unitarian and Universalist ancestors are the liberal Christians and heretics of the Reformation, which happened in the mid-1500’s in Europe. The Unitarians and the Universalists were both Christian denominations until the 1800’s. Unitarians proclaimed that Jesus was a great rabbi, but not God. God was to be worshipped and that was it. The Transcendentalists joined the movement, declaring (influenced by Buddhist and Hindu teachings) that God was in everything. So everything was to be worshipped, really.

Unitarians have been a mix of Christianity and Eastern religions for the past 170 years. The Humanist influence on the Unitarians began in the 30’s, as Biblical scholarship began to poke holes in claims of inerrancy (no mistakes, completely the word of God) of the scriptures. Imagining a world without religious wars, without faith-based limits put on scientific endeavor, without the anti-intellectualism of some religious conservatives, Humanism holds tremendous appeal to Unitarians. In 1961 the Unitarians merged with the Universalists, who were a Christian denomination, a Jesus-worshipping denomination, whose main message was that no one gets sent to Hell for eternity. That’s still good news around these parts, where for most people Hell is not metaphorical. The Universalist strengths of community, spiritual inclusiveness and love made a good balance for the Unitarian strengths of reason, rationality, individuality and democratic process. That’s where we came from, and I believe we are called to honor our ancestors and to stay in touch with where we came from.

In pews and chairs in UU congregations across this continent we have Christians, Jews, Pagans, Humanists, Buddhists, people who do Buddhist meditation along with practicing Christian ethics, people who honor their Jewish heritage but embrace the transcendentalist feeling for God in everything, spiritual humanists, humanists who are uncomfortable with the word “spiritual.” Astronomy professors sit next to Astrology teachers here because Unitarian Universalism has room for all of us. We worship God as we understand God, or we worship the Spirit of Life, the Spirit of Love, or we worship that amazing connection that can happen between and among humans who are focused on the same task, or who are singing together trying to be one voice, or we worship the transformation of life and the nourishment of souls that can happen when people of good will and lively mind come together and call themselves a church, even if they don’t agree on some things.

Our common ground is vast. We want transformation. We are hungry souls who want to be fed, and we see hungry souls around us and we want to create a place where they can be fed. We see a world staggering under the weight of unjust systems and we want to make that right. We want to see justice roll down like waters and like a mighty stream, and we are caught up in the glory of hoping we can be part of making that happen.

We want to be the church where gifts are given: courage, attention, affection, challenge surprise, experience strength and hope to one another. That is who we are now. We are the people who tell their children the stories of Jacob and Rebecca, Abraham and Isaac, Rachel and Deborah. We also help their children paint the face of Krishna a beautiful blue and talk about him playing the flute and partying with the cow girls.

We come to church because we are stronger together. One of you could teach your children that reason is a treasure, and that you should not believe something that injures your spirit, but with all of us teaching the children that, our light shines farther.

One of you could proclaim that it was wrong to believe in a god who did not believe in you. You would get some strange looks, but here we are enough to make that proclamation into a message folks can listen to.

We come to be part of something bigger than ourselves. We join together because many minds are often more wise and creative than one can be.

This congregations have the power to change people for the better, to send them out into the world with good news and a healing hand.

For that, we sit on committees. We clean and teach and write checks and we deal with people who are never pleased, people who voice only complaints and never satisfactions. For that we wrestle with one another over what programs are basic and which ones can be cut, we talk about money because it takes money to make it all happen.

We come together to be a part of things, to make the world a better place. To keep our kids strong against hellfire and despair, we do the small work of washing dishes and working the phones. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like lighting up the world. Sometimes it does.

Somewhere between the loftiest work and the lowliest work is the beloved community. Where we hold one another in love as we go through the chances and changes of life. We visit the sick, we light a candle. We are the hands and we are the hearts, and we work here to nourish souls, transfor lives and do justice. And the question is: What would it take to heal every one?