Come and Join the Dance
Sermon by Steve Edington
October 2, 2005
Some years before he retired from the Unitarian Universalist ministry, the Rev. David Rankin published a little book of vignettes about his years in the ministry. Some of them are very touching, some bring tears, some bring a smile, and one of them offered up an experience that perhaps only a minister would encounter. This one happened when he was the minister of the First Unitarian Church of San Francisco:
"I needed a haircut. I walked down the hill and entered the barbershop near Tommy's Joynt on Van Ness and Geary. It was only a block from the church. The barber was a spry elderly man with a surprising strength in his fingers and an incredible foulness in his mouth. As I submitted to the scissors, he provided Scripture from Penthouse Magazine, the Reading from a dozen dirty jokes, and the Sermon from a personal experience in Occupied France. The obscenities were never ending.
"Finally when the apron was lifted he said, 'I don't believe I've seen you before. So you work around here?' Now, what should I tell him? Should I tell him the truth? Should I tell him I worked at the church? Should I tell him I was a minister? I turned to the barber, handing him the money, and replied: 'Oh, I work for the National Cash Register Company up the street. I'm in District Sales.'
"For even a dirty old man can be embarrassed."
From Portraits from the Cross by David Rankin.
I've never been in a situation exactly like the one David describes, but I've been a few that have come pretty close; like being in a bar with a bunch of strangers watching a Red Sox game, and having things get a little - you know - raucous; and somebody I've been watching the game with will ask me what I do for a living. It's remarkable, sometimes, how the tone changes when I tell them. It's like they think they have to go through some kind of behavior adjustment, and the last thing I want to do is make someone uncomfortable; so I can understand why Dave Rankin said what he said to the barber. It wasn't because he was ashamed of being a minister; he just didn't want to be a party to putting someone else to shame.
While he was fudging the truth about his profession (OK he told a flat out falsehood), David did something authentic as well when it comes to the religion he, and I profess. We don't put people to shame; we don't play on guilt. Rather we look for the best in people - we call it their inherent worth and dignity; some may call it being a son or daughter of God - and we seek and we offer ways of living out that worthy self that each and all of you possess within yourselves.
You each and all brought your worthy selves here today; maybe some of you for the first time on this Open House Sunday. And I'm pleased to welcome you to this gathering of a liberal religious community that goes by the somewhat unwieldy name of Unitarian Universalist.
But are we a religious community? Let's take that one up first. We've had a website up and running for close to ten years now - which is how a lot of folks find us; perhaps including some of you here today. And I continue to be intrigued by the messages we get through the Guest Book section of our website where people who have checked us out can respond with an impression of what they've seen or read. About 80-90%, I would say, are positive and come from persons who find our approach to religion to be very meaningful and inviting. But we do occasionally get zinged pretty well. The zingers usually start out by saying "How can you call yourselves a religion when you don't believe in..." and that is usually followed by a recitation of all the things the person doing the posting does believe in. That's OK. You put yourself out there, and you take whatever comes back.
The funny thing is that we sometimes get some of our most vociferous praise for the same reason that we get zinged. Some responses say: "Hey this is great - a religion that isn't a religion!" And that is followed by expression of relief about all the things we allegedly don't believe in or don't do.
From both ends of the spectrum there's an assumption about what religion, and what a religious community, is - followed by the assumption that we're not it. What both ends of this spectrum are not seeing is that we are not an alternative to religion as such, but we do try to offer an alternative understanding of what religion is and how it is lived out. And that's the point I'd like to pursue for the next several minutes. All I can do here is try to plant a few seeds of curiosity about who we are and what we are about, and then invite you to follow that up with a conversation with me following our time here.
As you've already seen, we act like a religious community; like one in the Protestant tradition, that is. We gather on Sunday mornings in a house of worship in a building that is unmistakably a church. We have a Sunday School for our children, whom you saw earlier. We're blessed with some wonderful music - provided by adults and young people. We pray in our own way, and I can expand upon that a little more in the next hour if you'd like. And - as you are finding out right now - a sermon is offered. Beyond this setting we act like a religious community as well. We have social events, and discussion groups, and meditiation/spirtuality groups, and committees and a governing board, and all those kinds of things that churches have and do. We seek to extend our values and principles into the wider community and world. We have a very active Social Justice Committee. We offer a community-wide coffee house called Simple Gifts. We have fun together. We celebrate the joys and milestones of our lives; and we attend to one another's losses, and pains, and sorrows. We seek to offer, that is, a dance of life.
We do all this without requiring that you sign on to a pre-determined, pre-scribed set of beliefs in order to be admitted to the dance - which is what gives rise to some of those questions and concerns I spoke to earlier, and that occasionally get posed on our website and to me directly, and to others of our members I'm sure: For all these good things you do, are you really a religion? At the risk of sounding like a former United States President, our immediate past US President in particular, I have to say, "That depends upon what you definition of 'religion' is?" Let's take a run at that with a little Latin lesson. I took Latin in high school more years ago that I'm going to tell you and I still remember how we had to take words apart and look at their Latin derivatives and then put them back together and see what we had. (Do they still do this in high school?) When you do that little exercise with 'religion' you get 're' and 'ligare.' Ligare means 'to bind together'. We get our word 'ligament' from it. 'Re' means 'back again' as in words like return or recall. Religion, in this most literal sense is actually a verb: To bind together again. It is an ongoing process, or dance as I like to call it, and bringing oneself back together, of re-storing our personal wholeness from the oftentimes fragmented nature of our lives. In a more cosmic sense it is how we restore our relationship with an often broken world, and how we find a relationship with the universe, with Ultimate Reality, or with God - however conceived. Religion - to bind together again.
That's then end of the Latin lesson for today. But let's try one more definition - this from my friend and colleague in the Unitarian Universalist ministry the Rev. Forrest Church at the All Souls Unitarian Church in New York City. Religion, he says, is "our human response to the dual reality of being alive and knowing that we will die." Here again, religion is more of a verb more than a noun. It has to do with how we respond to our awareness of being alive, to our awareness of having a precious and fragile life, and knowing that precious and fragile and holy life will not be ours forever.
It is with these kinds of understandings of religion that I can say without hesitation that I invite you to be a part of a religious community. For what we seek to offer you is a setting where you can re-store personal wholeness, where you pursue a re-lationship with that which is greater than yourself, where you may attend to the things you care most deeply about in this time-bound life we're all given.
Have you ever been on an airplane where there's a layover at an airport and you're staying on the continuing flight to another destination? In that situation the pilot or flight attendant will sometimes say, "For those of you who are continuing with us our ground time here will be brief." I would submit to you that truer words have never been spoken. For those of us continuing on life's journey, our ground time here is brief. How we live our ground time, and the kind of world we build and leave for those whose ground time outlasts ours, is what the religious and spiritual journey is finally all about. It's what the dance of life is all about. Come and join the dance.
When I said earlier that we don't put out a prescribed set of beliefs, I hope you can now see that I wasn't saying we have no beliefs or convictions or affirmations. Our belief is that as you take part in the dance of a liberal religious community like this one you will discover and you will want to live out those things - those ideals, principles, and beliefs - you hold most dear and that make you ground time here most meaningful. All that said, however, I know that questions about belief are still the ones most continually asked of us. So I'll briefly address the two that that I've found to be those most frequently asked ones; and I do so as an invitation - stated earlier - to join me for some further conversation during coffee hour; and then if you'd like a tour of our church after that we have that available as well. [The Red Sox game doesn't start until 2:00. You'll be out of here way before that.] The two biggies are the God and Jesus questions.
You won't hear the name "God" invoked as often in a UU service as you will in more traditional worship settings. This is not because we've thrown the term out (although some of us do not relate to it), but rather because God means different things to different ones of us. Few of us understand God to be a Supernatural Supreme Being who can directly intervene in the workings of human affairs and in the world of nature - who can, say, call up a couple of hurricanes to punish us for our evil ways as a State Senator from Alabama suggested this past week in response to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. (I kid you not; some fool of an elected official actually said that - right on Fox News this past Friday.). But many of us do believe, or sense the reality, of a force or power or presence that is greater than ourselves and that is both within or beyond us. Some of us call it the Spirit of Life - about which we sing here nearly every Sunday - others call it the Life Force, others call it God, which still others stay away from a name altogether. It is how we find, and live in a relationship with that Larger Reality that is more important to us than what we may happen to call it.
Now, about Jesus. I said earlier that our behavior, or way of being as a religious community, is like that of most churches or religious communities in the Protestant Christian tradition. That is because our historical roots are in the Protestant Christian tradition. The Protestant Reformation of 16th century Europe remains one of the most defining events of western history, and the Unitarians and the Universalists came out of that movement. We no longer regard ourselves as a definitively Christian body, although some of our fine congregations have a liberal Christian identity. But the person of Jesus remains in our midst.
It was one of our early American Unitarian ancestors, a fellow named Thomas Jefferson, who drew a distinction between what he called the religion of Jesus and the religion about Jesus. The religion of Jesus has to do with the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth - and life and ministry centered around a loving God, and one that held forth the principles of love, justice, compassion, and healing. These same principles and values find expression in our Unitarian Universalist Purposes and Principles today. The religion about Jesus is the doctrine and the dogmas that later became attached to his life - as though the only way to Jesus was through these dogmas. Whether the name of Jesus gets invoked or not - and how often that happens varies from one UU congregation to another - I feel right in saying that all UU congregations and their members try to live out the life and teachings he exemplified. We regard Jesus as one of many great teachers of humanity - Buddha, Moses, and Muhammad are others - who tried to show us the ways of love, justice, and compassion for our fellow human beings and who taught us to care for this fragile planet upon which we live as well.
So we are a religious community. We are also a human community. We try to live out the best in humankind - knowing that we sometimes fall prey to the flaws and failings of humankind. I'd like to call you attention to a few lines from a meditation by Rev. Richard Gilbert called "We Bid You Welcome." They speak well to the message we are looking to offer today: "We bid you welcome who enter this hall as a homecoming, who have found here a room for your spirit, who find in this people a family. We bid you welcome, whoever you are, whatever you are, wherever you are on your journey."
There's also a line from a "Shoe" comic strip that speaks to the human dilemma we also seek to address here. It's the one where one of the characters says to another: "I've been thinking about it, and I've decided that its hard to be an individual all by yourself." That's a humorous and whimsical way of stating our reason for being here. We honor and celebrate the individual journeys of the spirit, the individual searches after truth, the individual workings of the mind and heart and spirit - while also knowing that it is hard to be an individual all by yourself. You may know your own steps, but dancing alone is not much of a dance. Come join us - and come sing together with us our closing hymn.
Stephen Edington
October 2, 2005
