1. talking out of turn
2. chewing gum
3. making noise
4. running in the hall
5. cutting in line

In the early 1990’s, the same question was asked of elementary teachers across the country. Their list had changed a bit. (Remember now, these were elementary teachers.) They now cited:

1. drug and alcohol abuse
2. guns and knives in school
3. pregnancy
4. suicide
5. rape

(quoted in Wayne Dosick, Golden Rules:Ten Ethical Values Parents Need to Teach Their Children. HarperSanFrancisco, 1995. p.2)

It is a different world today. It is a much more complex and complicated society in which to raise children today. “No one is immune,” writes one teacher,

“Bewilderment and fear cut deeply into every racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic group. Crime and violence, poverty and despair have robbed an entire generation of inner-city children of the innocence and security of childhood.

Mistrust and alienation, ennui and nihilism have seeped into suburbia, so that even children of wealth and privilege drift without purpose or direction.

Like Alice who fell down the rabbit hole, many of our children live in a world turned upside-down. They swirl, topsy-turvy, in a chaotic abyss, and we who are to be their guides and protectors ache to save them, but we do not always seem to know how….It seems that the very soul of contemporary society weeps in confusion and pain…” (Dosick, p.3)

It’s a different world – it is more difficult, more challenging, sometimes more frightening and less protective world in which to raise children to become good, decent, honorable human beings, with strength of character and depth of moral commitment. That comes as no surprise to anyone looking around at the world today.

But while the world has changed, while the circumstances and the elements of our society have changed greatly over this last speeded-up generation, the nature and tasks of child-rearing have not changed in any fundamental way. Parenthood has never been an easy task. Nurturing children, teaching children sound moral and ethical religious values, helping them find their way to moral maturity, helping them find their place in the world as loving, responsible, happy and productive people has never been easy.

The primary teaching tools of parenthood (common sense, logic, experience, love, and patience and commitment) these have not changed. And while they may seem paltry, these human tools of ours, they remain as ever they were in generations past – as trhey were for your parents and mine, as they were for Gandhi’s parents and Martin Luther King’s parents, as they were for Cain and Abel’s parents. Ultimately all parents must work with the same fallible human tools, within the same limitations of human relationship, to provide children with what they need to make their way through a perilous and wounding world.

And so it is with good reason that families today need all the reinforcement they can find to participate with them in the moral development and guidance and nurturance of children for the few precious formative years that they have with their children. Church is one place where families come in hope and in expectation that their children will be embraced in a safe, loving community, dedicated in part to their well-being and religious education.

Most of us take for granted that our church will have a Sunday school for the children, but you may be surprised to learn that the idea for separate Sunday school programs for children is a relatively modern development in American church history. For the first two hundred years or so in American Protestant church life, there were no formal separate Sunday schools for children at all. It was not until the 1820’s that the modern Sunday school concept evolved in New England Protestant churches, including the earliest Unitarian parishes.

Those early New England meeting houses had no place for children at all. And church sanctuaries today are still decidedly designed as purely adult spaces, with fixed pews designed for adult people sitting in adult posture. (How are your backs feeling right now?) There was really no notion that such rooms as this one would be designed to include or accommodate young people along with their elders sitting together.

Eventually those old New England meeting houses (I preached in one for a dozen years) came to have separate classrooms added on. Clearly, children now have special place and priority reserved in our modern idea of religious community. But least we take it for granted that Sunday school has always been with us, the fact is that the earliest churches in this country had no such thing as Sunday schools for almost two full centuries. As of 1820 there were only some dozen Sunday schools in all of New England, and not a one outside of New England.

Throughout the 1600’s and 1700’s, religious education for children in America consisted mainly of teaching them their prayers, the memorized lessons and verses of the Primer and Bible readings, the Ten Commandments, total and unquestioning obedience to parents and teachers and all other authorities in the community. Given the basic agrarian subsistence society of the time, that curriculum was thought to provide children with all they needed for moral instruction. It was a different world.

In God-fearing Calvinist households, such teachings were primarily received at home, and were underlined by public schoolmasters and ministers on occasion. Older children were expected to attend church with their parents and be seen and not heard as they sat through endless sermons addressed far over their heads and beyond their experience. Small children were not brought to church as a rule, religion and sitting in pews like these being considered a uniquely adult discipline.

There was a long time there in the 1800’s when ministers did pretty much all the teaching in Sunday school classes. The ministers would preach to the adults on Sunday morning, and then teach the children as a whole group on Sunday afternoon. Sunday evening all-church bean suppers were a practical ending for a long day at church for All involved. That’s the reason, incidentally, that church architecture evolved yet another way by the late 1800’s. To the Meeting House and the church school additions were now added kitchens for the first time.

It comes as no secret that different churches and different traditions approach the task of religious education for children in different ways, just as they often teach different truths. What they share in common is the effort to inculcate decent human values in their young people. Christian religious education, Jewish religious education, Muslim religious education, Hindu religious education, and Unitarian Universalist religious education would all claim the same ends. On one level, Fundamentalists, Mormons, and UU’s all want the same things for their children. It is, of course, in the definition of those concepts and the manner of their measurement that the world is made diverse and interesting.

Here in the Unitarian Universalist tradition, we are clear and unapologetic in declaring that the end-goal of of our religious education program is mature religious autonomy for our children. And what does such mature religious autonomy look like?

What we hope to bring forth in our children is the ability to make independent human value choices for themselves. It is the capacity to make sound moral decisions for themselves. We are less interested in creating cookie-cutter versions of future Unitarian Universalist institutionalists than we are in helping our children embrace life with joy and compassion and tolerance and hope.

Our process with children in our Sunday School is not about rote memorization of dogmatic beliefs and creeds, but rather the encouragement of young minds in the discovery of those values that make the world worth living in, worth saving, worthy caring about. We consider ourselves “successful” (as religious educators, as parents, as a church community) if our children learn how to love themselves and others; how to love the earth that is their home; how to carry themselves with a sense of honor and personal integrity; how to respect others without prejudice or prejudgment; how to resist that which is degrading and desecrating to the human spirit.

We accept that we cannot protect our children indefinitely from a world which is often unfair and unjust and full of struggle and pain. But we can prepare them to move through this world with a firm sense of who they are and who they come from. We can show them through our conscious example that fairness and justice are still cared about, that courage is possible, that there is beauty and dignity and meaning to be found and celebrated in this life. And when their time comes to leave us, we can let them go in love and we can bless them on their way. We can give them roots, and we can give them wings.

The Unitarian Universalist way in religious education is to point our children towards religious autonomy, and our curricula emphasize those elements that lead to personal autonomy. We promote and teach a positive view of human nature. We promote and teach a positive self-image for each and every child. We promote and teach respect and love for others. We promote and teach the discovery and exploration and respect for truth as it is expressed in all the great religions of the world. We promote and teach religious literacy for our children, and we trust in their ability to make good decisions – with our help when they are young, and on their own as they mature. We hope and pray that they will not be exactly like us: we hope they will be a bit better, more at peace with themselves, more successful than ever we have been at building a peaceful world.

Self-worth and ethics; an appreciation of right and wrong; a sense of the Good and the True and the Holy; the saving grace of justice and empathy and equity; a sense of the sacred center in their souls and in all creation. These are what we hope to foster in our children in these few precious years they are ours to influence. This why we have A Sunday school in the first place.

But we are wrong, we are profoundly mistaken, if we think or assume that Sunday school exists only for what we can give to our children. We need Sunday school, all of us, for what our children in our midst each week give to us. We need our children in our midst for what they teach us!

Childhood, Harvard psychologist Robert Coles reminds us in his wonderful study, The Spiritual Life of Children, (Houghten Mifflin Company, Boston, 1990) involves among other things time for tinkering with the meaning of things. What children teach us over abd over again if we are paying attention, is that a true spiritual life is a life of musing speculation. One cannot even enter the realms of theology and philosophy unless, like a child, one is willing to wonder. In their spiritual lives, children dare to wonder about all manner of things – even about such things as “heaven,” “God,” and “eternity.” How does Scripture say it? When Jesus gathered the children around him, he cautioned, “Unless you become as one of these, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.”

By adulthood, of course, many of us claim to have put aside such notions, or claim to have figured them out once and for all, or claim that such notions haqve no meaning at all. We claim that even though many of us have simply stopped wondering altogether, or just given up such notions by default. Such wondering, such musing is not something that is honored much in our concept of maturity – unless one is a full-time artist or poet or clergyperson. Such lucky people are given extra permission to be childlike in these matters.

Children’s minds are full of wonder, and in their spiritual lives they visit the heights and depths of human experience; they soar to heaven and descend into hell; they converse with saints and villains; they talk of God, they talk to God, they talk as if God were speaking to them. In time and in experience, says Robert Coles, in their encounters with the world and what people teach them, this magical sense of wonder and openness will lessen; and good and evil will seem less like fantastic forces of magic and more like confused results of all too human behavior.

Robert Coles says that children teach us that wonder and openness are the natural gifts of our humanity, not something we should rush to put aside in our maturity, but something to be nourished and claimed throughout life. And they teach us that the holy and the ineffable are matters of personal and cultural interpretation, to be measured and respected in personal experience.

“They teach us,” says Coles, “that whatever divinity can be conceived in the human imagination takes many forms, lives in the wind perhaps, or shines in the rainbow, or covers us like the sky – children dismiss our mature theological gropings with a wave.”

You see, we need Sunday school, as it turns out – we need the children in our midst – for what they teach us, every bit as much as we teach them. They teach us to touch the joy of life, to heal the wounds of life, to make safe the hard places, to make claim on life’s amazing blessings all around us. In this, our children may be prophets and messengers. In this they may be our teachers.

If by chance you see one of our volunteer Sunday school teachers in coffee hour this morning, give them a hug. They deserve it.

The Promise of Voice

The Promise of a Questing Spirit

We must be honest with the tensions inherent in the holidays. The season is neither pure nor simple for any of us. On one level, the season is a perennial call to our hearts to find reason to celebrate here in the darkest time of year; to sing a carol, to give a gift or two, to put a light in the front window, to try seeing the world – for a few days at least – through the eyes of a child again. And on another level, all this celebration, we know, can carry a fair emotional price tag.

There is – let us be honest – a hint of cultural anxiety not far below the surface, a little persistent voice in the back of the brain that can’t help wondering what all the forced gaiety and relentless Muzak assaulting the senses is really all about.

I hope I don’t sound too heretical to suggest that the answer, in my opinion, is probably not to be found in too literal a reading of the holy days. The birth of a great prophet like Jesus is a worthy cause for celebration, a worthy call to all humanity to consider matters of the soul. But my own theology sees something more at work here in the spirit of the season.

A holy day is a marker in the calendar of our lives; a way of telling what time it is in our journey. It is a point of reference joining us – by memory, by story, and by experience – to our past, and inviting us – by faith – to imagine our future. In the words of Antoine d’St. Exupery, “in a house which becomes a home, one hands down and another takes up the heritage of mind and heart, laughter and tears, musings and deeds… it is needful to transmit the passwords from generation to generation.”

That’s why it is hard to experience the holidays without being drawn back into the holidays of your own childhood, your own formative years. And that, of course, can be both a blessing and a bane for many among us. As the products of imperfect families and imperfect communities, (which all of us are), we carry within us not only the joys and happiness of childhood, but also its sadness, its fears, and disappointments.

This time of year, especially, invokes within us not only the memory and nostalgia of good times past, but also the ache and emptiness of missing loved ones now gone.

I think what all holy days and holy seasons are about is a fundamental, inescapable recognition of the profound mystery of our connectedness, one to another, and each to the whole of creation. We don’t really understand the depth of our connectedness, or how it works, or why it has such a binding claim on the human soul.

But if anything is becoming clearer to us as human knowledge advances into the twenty-first century, it is that we participate in the mystery and glory of the interdependent web of all existence. This is a bedrock principle of our Unitarian Universalist faith. We are responsible to and for one another; we are joined in ways that we are only now beginning to fathom in every area and discipline of our learning.

Dr. Barbara Merritt at our church in Worcester, MA says that the image of the interdependent web of existence is more than a poetic metaphor of philosophy. It is increasingly the working model of both our physical sciences and our social sciences, from physics and socio-biology to history to organizational management and dynamics. She offers as example the interdependent web at work on a sub-atomic level.

“From Bell’s Theorem in Quantum Physics,” she writes, “we know that if we take two paired photons, one charged positive, one negative, and we alter the polarization of one from negative to positive, instantaneously the other photon changes its charge. Separate the two photons with 8,000 miles, and six feet of lead, and again the moment that one charge is changed, its bonded pair responds in kind. The connection between the paired particles is so profound, that the change occurs no matter what the distance, or the obstacles that seemingly separate them. Put them far enough apart, and the change occurs faster than the speed of light.

As physicist Brian Hines writes, “nothing material links the two photons. The connection cannot be shielded by any type of matter or energy, and the strength of their linkage does not diminish with distance.” (Quoted in God’s Whisper, Creation’s Thunder: Echoes of Ultimate Reality in the New Physics.)

This extraordinary connection between two particles in the subatomic level offers a glimpse of just how interconnected our existence really is.” (Barbara Merritt, essay in With Purpose and Principle: Essays About the Seven Principles of Unitarian Universalism, edited by Edward A. Frost, Skinner House Books, Boston, 1998. P. 91-92)

And how does it play out on a human level, this interdependent connection? In some extraordinary and sometimes inexplicable ways.

Joseph Campbell, the anthropologist, in his lectures used to tell a dramatic true story of two policemen who were driving up a road in Hawaii when they saw, on a bridge, on the other side of the guardrail, a young man preparing to jump. The police car stopped, and the policeman on the right jumped out to grab the man. But he caught him just as the man jumped. As he himself was being pulled over, the second policeman arrived and pulled the two of them back in time. Campbell wrote of this:

Do you realize what had suddenly happened to that policeman who had given himself to death with that unknown youth? Everything else in his life dropped off – his duty to his family, his duty to his job, his duty to his own life – all of his wishes and hopes for his lifetime had just disappeared. He was about to die.

Later a newspaper reporter asked him, “Why didn’t you let him go? You would have been killed.” And his reported answer was, “I couldn’t let him go. If I had let that young man go, I couldn’t have lived another day of my life.”

“Why?” asked Campbell. Why should any human being suddenly defy the law of self-preservation, supposedly the first law of nature? Perhaps, he argues, it is because there are deeper laws at work within us. There is a deep mutuality that resonates within us, an inner knowing that we share the same life, the same breath, the same spirit, and the suffering of any single being somehow diminishes us all. “Our true reality,” said Campbell, “is in our identity and unity with all life.” (Quoted in Wayne Mueller, Legacy of the Heart.)

The poet philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset wrote: “Tell me to what you pay attention, and I will tell you who you are. What we choose to pay attention to determines to a large extent what we become. We are not only a part of the grand design of natural selection and evolution; by the decisions we make, by the way we take care of, ignore, or increase the brokenness of the world, we ourselves are profoundly changed.”

Journalist Alice Lesak tells a story about what happened at the Seattle Special Olympics a few years ago. Nine young contestants, all physically or mentally challenged, assembled at the starting line for the 100-yard dash. At the gun they all started out, not exactly in a dash, but with a relish to run the race and cross the finish line. All, that is, except one boy who, early on, stumbled onto the track, tumbled over a couple of times, and began to cry.

The other eight kids heard the boy. They slowed down and paused. Then they all turned around and went back. Every one of them went back. They pulled him up on his feet, dusted him off. And then all nine linked arms and walked together across the finish line, while everyone in the stadium stood and cheered.

“Tell me to what you pay attention, and I will tell you who you are.”

Someone once asked G.K. Chesterton once why he was such a convinced monotheist. He wrote back,

“…. I believe that all good things are one thing. That is what I’m feeling now every hour of the day. All good things are one thing. Sunsets, schools of philosophy, babies, constellations, cathedrals, operas, mountains, horses, poems. One thing is always walking among us in fancy-dress, in the gray cloak of the church or the green cloak of a meadow….The Greeks and Norsemen and Romans saw the superficial wars of nature and made the sun one god, the sea another, the wind a third…. They were not thrilled, as some ancient Israelite was, one night in the wastes, by the sudden blazing idea of all being the same God….”

“Our true reality is in our identity and our unity with all life.” I don’t know if it’s good physics. Or good socio-biology. Or good management technique. But I can tell you I’m a Unitarian Universalist because I believe it’s good theology.

May each of you find good reason to sing and childish cause to dance this season. I wish you all a Happy Hanukkah, and a Joyous Solstice, and a Merry Christmas.

Amen.

It’s the story of the minister of a small congregation in an old New England mill town who once every year treated the worshippers at his church to a long-winded sermon on astronomy, detailing everything that had been discovered about the stars and planets during the preceding twelve months. His parishioners –cotton brokers, bankers, weavers and other down-to-earth sorts – sat through this annual ordeal with patient resignation. Finally someone asked him, “What is the use of knowing so much about the far reaches of empty space?” To which the minister replied, “No use at all maybe, but it greatly enlarges my idea of God.”

Of course, this way of thinking about God – as an external Power somewhere “out there,” larger and more mysterious even than the Universe, is fairly traditional in the Western world. The God image that comes down to us through Judeo-Christian tradition is indeed a “sky” divinity, who rules “the heavens,” the Creator/Overseer who set the cosmos in motion, who “looks down” upon our world, and within whose benevolent celestial consciousness all Creation finds its place, its order, its purpose, and reason for being.

This is the God most of us grew up with, and the God the rest of us rebelled against, and this is the image of God that most people in America understand the word, “God,” to mean.

Oh, of course there are lots of people, even in traditional churches, but more outside them, whose thinking about the notion of God has actually gone beyond such narrow definition. And many such folks eventually find their way into churches like ours, looking for alternative spiritual understandings, broader more inclusive understandings of the human spirit.

And in most other parts of the world, of course, in non-Judeo-Christian cultures past and present, the notion of God, of the Divine, of Sacred Source, takes wildly different shapes, different conceptions, different experiences altogether.

But it is interesting to note that in every major poll taken every few years in America, somewhere between 97% and 99% of the population insist that they believe in this particular Western kind of God. That is to say, a personal God who is a Being, all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving, and at the same time, all-judging: a kind and loving Father-God who is apparently more than capable of severely punishing his own children who fail to obey his commands. A merciful God, we were assured, who is paradoxically capable of visiting floods and catastrophes of every description upon his Creation, selecting his favored and faithful for eternal reward with his right hand, while casting his wayward children, Scripture tells us, into eternal damnation with his left hand.

We hear about the growth and noise of fundamentalist and extreme conservative churches that are booming in this country, and where that old-time religion-kind of God is still passionately preached. You can watch five channels full of that preaching tonight if you get cable tv. And sometimes I do. But in fact, currently only about 40% of Americans attend any kind of worship on a weekly basis. That is down some 20% in the last 40 years.

Mainline churches in America are almost all increasingly vacant on Sundays: Methodists, Episcopalians, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Lutherans have all experienced downturns in membership, in contributions, and in their own clergy recruitment over the last two decades in particular.

But should it really surprise anyone, given the state of the world today, given our advances in scientific and cultural knowledge, that we are conflicted about this traditional God whom so many of us were raised to believe in?

Is it really surprising that so many people have abandoned the pews of traditional churches to go looking for another kind of God, wherever such a God may be found? Is it so surprising that so many people today feel they have become strangers in the spiritual homes of their parents; to a point where they feel like exiles in the houses of worship where they grew up; feel like spiritual orphans in the traditions of their own families?

Does it surprise anyone that so many young families today have actually become pilgrims of a sort, taken to the spiritual road, and have actually gone “church-shopping,” in search of…. what? something that was missing in the churches and temples of their upbringing by the time they themselves became adults, by the time they themselves became parents; looking for some kind of “sacred center” –call it God, call it “Ground of Being,” call it what you will – to make sense of their lives in a very complex and confusing time; looking for something to teach their own children, to give their own children a foundation for distinguishing right and wrong, giving their own children a sense of ethical obligation for building a better world, more fair, more just, more caring for those in need.

They become pilgrims, so many young families today, searching to fill what Sartre called “the God-sized hole in the human heart.”

Maybe you’re among them, a whole generation of young families today, of young single people, young working professionals, well educated, many living great distances from their family roots, many looking for a spiritual community to be at home in, to call their own.

Perhaps you are among the large number of people today who are looking for a reasonable religion, with an image of God that does not insult their intelligence or make a mockery of their learning; a God image – or a pathway, or a discipline, or a spiritual community – that invites reverence rather than fear; that offers ways of thinking about God which evoke unity rather than division between people and across cultures; a sense of what shall we call it, sacredness? – holiness? Wholeness? Soulfulness? Wholeheartedness? – that we feel at the center of our humanity and which we sense other people feel too: something we could share with each other if we were braver and more honest with other, if we weren’t somewhat embarrassed to admit it to one another – a profound notion that sees in every other human being a brother or a sister who is just as lost and confused as we are in this world; just as deserving of the same rights and dignity and respect as we are; just as frightened for and protective of their children as we are; carrying inside them the same passions for peace, the same dreams for their children’s children, the same humanity, the same hopeful and tragic stories, the same hurts and wounds.

We are all of us, every person you will meet today, every person you are privileged to touch in this life, we are all of us the same, alive and dying at the same time, every minute. And it is the knowledge of this miraculous and terrible truth that makes all of us homeless in this world, all of us searchers for the meaning of our lives, all of us pilgrims, needing to praise and give thanks for our blessings, needing to weep and mourn our mortality.

Religion is nothing more or less than the manner in which we acknowledge the gift of our lives, the rituals wherein we sing the privilege of our place in Creation. We imagine God as the Creator Image. We call upon Allah. We bow before Yahweh. We revere Gaia. We travel to mountaintops. We wander in deserts. We immerse ourselves in holy rivers and sacred streams. We pray and we fast and we remove our shoes on sacred ground. We meditate and retreat from the busyness of our lives, from our calendars of commitment. We paint and dance and sing and give words to the inexpressible.

God, we say, resides here in this Book. Or is it this Book? We travel to holy places, build shrines and temples, light flames and sound bells and burn incense before all the altars of the centuries.

And here is the great secret of human spirituality and the religions we have created for ourselves: the God we think we see and understand is finally not found “out there.” We look for God in all the wrong places, because we have never grasped the metaphorical puzzle of God. “Out there” is only a metaphor for what is ultimately “In Here,” in the human heart and “In Here” in the human mind.

God is the metaphor that includes the ultimate mystery, beauty, and value in life. God the Father, Mother, Spirit. God as Being Itself, the Ground of Being, Pure Immanence, Ultimate Concern. God as Omega Point, the God of Process. The God of vengeance, the God of Mercy, the God of Love. The God who died in the Twentieth Century. And the God who is eternal, the God of the human heart.

“In Here.”

It occurs to me that virtually all my life I have been one searching after the God “In Here.” At this point in my life, to be honest, I’m more interested in how a theology lives than in how it reads. I think I may even have encountered something of the divine on a few fleeting occasions, and in a very few special persons I have been privileged to know. And I think Sophia Fahs has it right when she intimates that the Holy only becomes manifest when we educate ourselves to view the ordinary world in a religious way.

Those of you who are familiar with my sermons over the years know that I do have a favorite quote that I’m particularly fond of. It appears in many of my sermons because I love it so. It is this wonderful passage from The Color Purple, where one of Alice Walker’s characters is berating another for thinking that God can only be found in church. Her character says:

“Tell the truth, have you ever found God in church? I never did. I just found a bunch of folks hoping for him to show up. Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me. And I think all the other folks did too. They come to church to share God, not find God….God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it. And sometimes it just manifests itself, even if you are not looking, or don’t know what you’re looking for.”

…. Or what you call it when you find it.

We are living a lifestyle that has sentenced many of our elderly to separation between themselves and their children and grandchildren; it isolates single people from family units; it removes any sense of neighborhood in the sprawling geography of what we euphemistically called “bedroom communities.”

This need was brought home to me most vivdly almost twenty years ago now when I was minister in suburban Framingham, Massachusetts, when in a Sunday sermon I mentioned that I was interested in the notion of Community: what it is and what it means, and I wondered aloud if it struck a chord with anyone else. I invited anyone who might be interested in discussing community to join me at the church that night in the fireplace room to talk about it.

I figured maybe ten or twelve folks would show up (you know how these little discussion groups go – we’d sit in a circle and read something together. That night when I got to church, there were 120 people waiting for me!

What I learned that night, and what I have come to appreciate the more I talk to people just about everywhere, is that the word community goes to the heart of something very rare and very much coveted by most people.

It is actually one of the oldest words associated with churches. Community. The Latin root word is “communio,” as in Communio Sanctorum – the Communion of Saints, the blessed community. It was one of the first descriptions the early church gave itself.

In fact, these days the word seems in danger of becoming distorted beyond all recognition. This happens to words over time, usually when they become the favorite words of some academic discipline or buzzwords of the media. Of late it seems sociologists and the media have started using the wonderful word community as a general synonym for the word “group.”

We now hear reference to groups called “the intelligence community,” or “the insurance community,” or “the baseball community.” What we really mean by “the intelligence community” is people in the spy business. Only a sociologist could call a group which has spying as its common activity a community. I heard the ultimate absurd use of this word when a news anchorperson referred to “the weapons community.” That’s when I knew a good word was in serious trouble.

I grant there are weapons users and weapons makers and weapons traders, but with all due respect to Charlton Heston, I seriously question whether there is any such thing as a weapons community!

I would suggest it is time for us to reclaim the first meaning of the word “community” – with its inherent assumption of caring relationship – which the word once carried for us.

When I use the phrase “church community,” let me be clear that I don’t just mean “a group of people who meet in a church building.” Communio means a whole lot more than just a grouping. It means a people bonded together in a relationship of ethical love and mutual responsibility.

A church community is a group of people who share a certain bonding of caring feeling for one another and a common commitment of ethical response to one another and to the world around them based on that bonding.

I submit that if we allow that word to be diluted, we risk forgetting its implications and the reason the church originally used the word to describe itself in the first place, and why neighbors and villagers originally used the word “community” to describe their interdependent relationship in the common challenges of daily life and survival together.

The fact is, however, we Unitarian Universalists have historically had what can only be called a rather persistent ambivalence about community, a kind of approach-and-avoidance syndrome. Robert Bellah, the prominent sociologist who was hired by the UUA a decade ago to analyze our institutional style as it was revealed in a nationwide survey of UU’s, told us in so many words that he thinks most of us in the Unitarian Universalist fold are more than a little afraid of true community, and we’ve done a good job of rationalizing this fear and wrapping it in some high-sounding liberal theological rationale.

Traditionally, we like to describe a “tension” within UU theology between individualism and institutionalism. It’s almost the first thing newcomers to our movement learn about us. We’ve been caught in this liberal tension now for three hundred years, and you’d think we would have figured it out by now, gotten bored with it, and put it away on the same dusty shelf with the old debates about faith versus reason. You’d think by now Unitarian Universalists would be comfortable proclaiming the simple words, “Both/And.”

To hear many UU’s launch into their anti-institutional diatribes, you would think the very concept of religious community was an affront to their personal autonomy. I suggest that it is time to move beyond this kind of narrow vision. It is time to broaden the vocabulary by which the liberal religious communio understands itself and its mission.

Here is what I know: People are coming to our churches today looking for, hungry for, a sense of community that is missing elsewhere in their lives. That is the primary reason they come into a UU church in the first place. They don’t come looking for our permission to be islands in the stream. People arrive here as experienced experts in individualism ( and often in loneliness and exile) already. They arrive here as religious exiles from the churches and temples of their youth. And what exiles desperately need is the hospitality of a welcoming community.

Here is what I suspect: It is no coincidence that churches which have no ambivalence about the primacy and value of emphasizing community are growing rapidly. The nineteenth-century Emersonian brand of rugged individualism that so many of our churches today love to cling to and hold up for constant admiration is a dead message in this time and place. It has little attraction, and it offers no sustenance to hearts longing for connection when they walk through our doors of a Sunday morning.

Conrad Wright, our Unitarian professor emeritus of church history at Harvard, stated in a paper to our General Assembly thirty years ago that,

“the infinity of the private individual was plausible enough on the shores of Walden Pond, when there was no one closer than Concord Village a mile away; it is hollow rhetoric on the streets of Calcutta or in the barrios of Caracas.” (See, “Individualism in Historical Perspective” by Conrad C. Wright. Unitarian Universalist Advance Study Paper no.9, 1979.)

He might have added that it begins to sound equally hollow in the emotional distance now common between us in our own society.

However our churches may have operated or been organized in the past (First Unitarian was founded in 1833) today churches must be very intentional about creating the atmosphere and the structures within which community can be made manifest.

In the most romantic and nostalgic images of church community (say, the image of church portrayed in Lake Woebegone or on Walton’s Mountain) church people always seem to have a way of pulling together in tough times or in crises. Hot dishes and casseroles magically appear on the doorstep of a grieving household; eccentric personalities are always accommodated and tolerated; individual vulnerabilities are always respected and protected. The Sunday school always has enough teachers, and the community service project always has ample volunteers.

But we all know that real life doesn’t quite match that. We all know it’s harder to be a real community than an ideal one.

We are not alone in this challenge; it is the same challenge being faced by every mainstream parish church in America today. Church life is changing, just as rapidly and just as radically as community life is changing around every major city in America. We aren’t inventing this experience, and it is by no means peculiar to UU churches alone. But given that this is the way things are, we must be intentional now about keeping the sense of community that has always been the heart of church life.

So the question I’m inviting all of us to ponder this morning is, “does our church evidence a true sense of community among its members?”

And before you rush to answer that question in your mind, let me share with you a couple of provocative thoughts from psychologist Scott Peck, in his book, A Different Drum: Community-Making and Peace (Simon and Schuster, NY, 1987).

Peck begins by claiming that the experience of “true community” is so rare in this country in our time that most of us can count on one hand the moments and groups when we have felt it in our lives.

Peck defines a community as “any group of more than two people who feel bonded to each other in such a way that they fully encourage each other’s struggles and growth, and whose commitment in love and respect allows for genuine communication.”

Although the words are simple enough, it’s a very big order indeed. Peck, who has been a consultant to more churches than I will probably ever visit in a lifetime, says that the sad truth is that most churches, no matter what denomination, never begin to approach being true communities. Most churches are what Peck calls “pseudo-communities,” which is to say, churches are cordial places, nice places, polite places, where conflict tends to be suppressed, where people tend to smile a lot and where the caring is sincere, but where the personal conversation rarely goes to a deep level of honesty. There’s certainly nothing wrong with “cordial” and “nice” and “polite” as far as it goes! And some of us really don’t want or need much more than that from our church. But the point is, should we not expect something more when we need it from a religious community?

Think about it for a moment. If I asked you right now to name three times in your life when you experienced a feeling of true community – three groups you were part of at some time or other, where that kind of love and respect and mutual openness and true communication existed – my guess is that church would probably not be on the list for very many of us.

You might remember an idyllic summer camp experience, or a youth group you once belonged to, perhaps. Or maybe a woman’s group you belonged to once, or a softball team you played with, or a veteran’s club you attended. Or maybe you found it once in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting (12-Step Programs are among the most effective true community groups in America, by the way.) Veterans talk about the units they once went into war with. Old athletes remember the bonds they once felt with teammates. Alumni may remember with great nostalgia the deep friendships of classmates from school days.

I’d like to hope that some of you might be able to say you found that kind of experience in a church, at least once, but I don’t assume you have. I’d invite you to think of three times in your life when you were part of a group that was not afraid to talk to each other – I mean talk from the heart to each other, talk candidly of fears and concerns, of hopes and dreams, of deep hurts and vulnerabilities. The kind of group where you were not afraid to appear foolish, or stupid, or less than perfect, or scared.

When was the last time you felt that kind of connection with any group of people? That’s the last time you experienced community in the full power of that word, you see.

So when I ask a simple question like, “does our congregation evidence a true sense of community among its members?” I’m holding us to a pretty tough standard of measurement. This is no rhetorical question, and there is an awful lot riding on the answer we give.

Because if the answer for you is, “No, I don’t feel much sense of community in my church – No, I don’t feel very comfortable talking from my heart here – No, I don’t feel much encouragement to grow or to connect with the people I find here – No, I don’t feel free to express my hurts and vulnerabilities here and still be well received” – if that’s your answer to the question, then we have some work to do here. Because a church without a very deep sense of community has to examine its real reason for being. Without that, I don’t care how long a church has been in existence, it threatens to become but a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.

I will never forget a longtime member of one of my churches past who came to see me with a terrible sadness in his eyes, telling me how his life had completely fallen apart over the last couple of months — trouble in business, family problems, healthy problems, you name it. And when I suggested that coming to worship on Sunday was probably even more important during hard times in one’s life, he admitted to me that he found it very difficult to come to church.

And when I asked him why, this proud man said it was just too hard for him to have to tell folks in his congregation how it really was with him these days, how he was afraid that his church people, who knew him primarily as a very successful and competent man, might think less of him now that he was on hard times.

Now, we can say this is a man who struggles with pride, but we also have to look at how our church communities might be presenting a message that says only successful, healthy, got-it-all-together people attend church here. Because you and I know that’s just not true. Because you and I know the real truth of the matter.

My dream for our church here in Brooklyn is that we can create an atmosphere where such a person would know that he is valued here, and cherished here, for the person he is, and when hard times come, whatever they may be, he would find here an embrace , not a judgment; friendship, and not avoidance.

When I ask, “does our congregation evidence a true sense of community among its members?” I know that for many of you over the years the answer has been a resounding and joyous Yes! And I also know that for some others, the answer, for a variety of reasons, has been more disappointing. From my privileged position as minister of the church, I know that there are people in our church who ache for the kind of community we can become if we keep working at it. And I know there are people in our congregation whom we will be failing unless we do work at community building.

Harold Kushner is right: you don’t come to church or temple to find God – you can find God all by yourself on a mountaintop or in your bedroom. You come to church or temple to find a congregation, to find others who need the same things from life that you need. Together, we create the moment where God is present. That moment is called communio – community – it is our reason for being, the purpose for which all this exists. Every now and again we must call ourselves back to this high purpose and this most primary of missions.

In the year 1630 as the good ship Arabella was about to land off Cape Cod, Gov. John Winthrop reminded the small company on board of the responsibilities each carried, one for another, in their great venture into a new world:

“We must delight in each other,” he said. “We must make each other’s conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our community as members of the same body.”

Good words still today for any community worthy of the name.

First Unitarian, in conjunction with the Unitarian Universalist UN Office (UU-UNO), will be hosting 6 justice forums this congregational year. The topics of these forums will focus on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) and sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) issues, which is in keeping with the spirit of this year’s church-wide social justice project, “Our Bodies, Our Spirits, Our Lives”.

This Sunday, October 4th Diana Sands, LGBT Program Associate at UU-UNO(www.uu-uno.org), will discuss their Action of Immediate Witness at the 2009 UUA General Assembly in response to the “emergency faced by people in Iraq: Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI)-Targeted Violence.”  In addition, Scott Long, Director of the LGBT unit at The Human Rights Watch will be on hand to discuss HRW’s report on this very issue, of which he was a principle author.  Copies of the report will be made available during the forum.  We will be discussing this topic in the first forum with many other issues to follow in subsequent months.

The forum will run from 10 am until 10:45 am in the Chapel and will be preceded by a pancake breakfast starting at 9:30 am

First Unitarian, in conjunction with the Unitarian Universalist UN Office (UU-UNO), will be hosting justice forums each month October through May. The topics of these forums will focus on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) & sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) issues, which is in keeping with the spirit of this year’s church-wide social justice project, “Our Bodies, Our Spirits, Our Lives”.

This Sunday, Margaret Wolff, the Social Work Intern at the UU-UNO LGBT Program (www.uu-uno.org), will discuss Gender Identity and Expression, with a particular focus on Caster Semenya, whose gender was questioned after she won the World Championship in the 800m run in 2009 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8213581.stm).  Continental breakfast provided at 9:30am, forum begins at 10:00 am. If you have any questions, please contact Julie Bero at jnbero@gmail.com

Learn about the Unitarian Universalist United Nations Office (UU-UNO) program initiatives on:
* Actions for Darfur
* LGBT Human Rights
* Climate Change
* AND MORE!

Envoys will also have the opportunity to learn from each other and share stories about best practices in their congregations. Food will be provided!

If you have any questions please contact Holly Sarkissian, UU-UNO Envoy Coordinator, atenvoycoordinator@uu-uno.org.

Riddle and Mystery

A curriculum about “the big questions” must begin with an inquiry: How often do you find yourself asking big questions? Write your answer lightly, with pencil, so you can change it with ease. The frequency of your changes may increase as you move through Riddle and Mystery.

Even without the stimulus of reading this curriculum, it may be every day that you ask what to do with your life. Maybe even more often you wonder whether life is fair—though you already know the answer is “no.” Perhaps every hour, in some way or other, you ponder whether something is right or wrong.

If even adults are uncertain about such matters, how must our youth feel? Sure of themselves sometimes, we may guess, and sometimes totally lost. Yet, speaking for youth is not our purpose with Riddle and Mystery. Assisting them in their search for understanding is.