Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Rev. Eliza Galaher
Minister of Wildflower UU Church
January 25th, 2009
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.
Good morning everyone. As one of your Unitarian Universalist neighbors from a stone’s throw across the Colorado River, I want to thank you for allowing me to speak here today, and I’d like to extend good wishes from the people of Wildflower Church, in south Austin. We all are well aware of the struggles you have been through in the past weeks, and hope for your community that good healing and reconciliation is happening among you as you begin to move through the wilderness of having let go of your minister, willingly or not, or from a place somewhere in between.
I also hope that at least something of what I have to say this morning will contribute to that healing. For while it’s true that several years ago, you all very generously and freely sacrificed some of your membership when Wildflower originally was born out from your congregation, and while it’s true that some others of your community have since wandered down our way or elsewhere for one reason or another, the most important thing I believe I can do this morning as the minister of Wildflower Church is to encourage you to work and stay together, to nourish this community of faith back into compassion, joy, love, and mutual respect.
Of course, that’s not to say those things do not already exist here. Obviously, I haven’t lived and worked and prayed and conversed here as you have, and I don’t want you to think that I think I know better than you how things have been in your hearts and souls and relationships. I simply hope to add something more of the good by being here this morning and sharing this time of worship with you.
Now, in my mentioning worship, if your congregation is like some other Unitarian Universalist congregations, the very word worship may raise a few sets of hackles here. And if so, that’s OK. I remember a new membership class I once attended, where the question was asked of prospective church members, “What do you seek in a worship service?” Well, many people couldn’t answer, because they couldn’t get beyond the language of the question; they were stuck on the very notion of worship, especially as it implies worshipping – bowing down to – the authority of someone or something that’s in a position of greater power. So if that’s brewing in your minds, I’d like you to take with me a short – very short – etymological journey, because, in my understanding, looking at the break down of the word, worship – worth + scipe or ship – simply means, “To hold as worthy.”
And we all, for better or worse, hold something, many things, as worthy. Among us, we hold as worthy, or we worship, for instance, democracy, money, peace and quiet, our cell phones, clean water, a double espresso, and so on and so forth.
Whatever it is we worship, it’s true, as our religious ancestor Ralph Waldo Emerson states, that “a person will worship something – have no doubt about that.” Sometimes, we can very proudly proclaim that we worship all that is good – love, compassion, equity, justice. And sometimes we need to own up that we are worshipping much that is a bit more ambiguous in its goodness – the perfect body (ours we wish for; someone else’s we long for), the nicest car, the need to be right. That’s why Emerson warns, “that which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and character.” That’s why he warns, “it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.”
With this Emersonian word of caution in our minds as we worship here together, let me ask then, what is it that we as Unitarian Universalists worship? What is it that we hold as worthy? We have no creed to tell us from on high. We don’t have any Unitarian Universalist equivalents of Popes or Bishops, Presbyteries or Deacons to lay it all out for us. What we have is each other: we can talk to one another, and listen to one another, and struggle together. And, sufficient enough, poetic enough, demanding enough or not, we also have our seven religious principles.
It’s three of those principles I would like to bring forward now, to help us further explore the question, “What do we as Unitarian Universalists worship?” Actually, that question itself invites us to enter into one of the principles I want to hold up; it invites us into the fourth principle, the free and responsible search for truth and meaning. But, as I said to members of my own congregation last Saturday as we began a day of shared leadership training, that juxtaposition of free and responsible is crucial to highlight here. For while the free search speaks largely to the first principle, the inherent worth and dignity of every person, and while the responsible search speaks to our seventh principle, respect for the interdependent web of all existence, it is the and of “the free and responsible search” that brings the two together, and it is that free-and-responsible search for truth and meaning that I believe we need to hold as worthy as if it were the very fulcrum of our faith. For freedom without responsibility is a kind of tyranny and responsibility without freedom is a kind of slavery. Only a collaborative, collective struggle for freedom and responsibility can lead us to a truly free and responsible community of faith.
Unitarian theologian James Luther Adams, in his 1953 essay we heard Margaret read from, referred to such a community as the “free Christian Church,” and, harkening back to earlier days, as “the radical left wing of the Reformation,” and back even further, as the “primitive Christian Church.” As we are descendents of all of these manifestations of the liberal, or free church, and as we are exploring what it is we worship, we would do well to heed Adams’ words when he says, “In our day [whether that be 1953 or 2009], we confront the impersonal forces of a mass society…” According to Adams, those impersonal forces, generated by what he calls “opinion industries,” and disseminated with increasing rapidity with our ever multiplying technological advances, create only a pseudo community – one which, in Adams’ words, serves as “an instrument manipulated and exploited by central power groups.”
Community as an instrument manipulated and exploited by central power groups: Go back for a moment to Emerson’s warning: “That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, our character.” And so think for a moment of what our society – our national community, so to speak – so often calls us to worship, to hold as worthy, and look at where it has led us: failed banks, scandals on Wall Street, home foreclosures, roller coastering gas prices, global warming, rising unemployment, and on and on and on. Think of Adams’ statement that such so-called “communities,” generated by “opinion industries” are there primarily for “support of special interests – nationalism, racism, and business as usual.” I would add to Adams’ list, global corporatism, media conglomerationism, and reckless individualism But that’s just me.
Now, I’m believing, with the inauguration of our first African American president this past week, and with such civil rights leaders as Georgia congressman John Lewis and the Rev. Dr. Joseph Lowery there to witness, I’m believing that a shift from “business as usual” is among us.
But not only is it a shift into our future. Such a historical event and the words stated by the newly inaugurated president himself – words like hope, virtue, responsibility, unity of purpose, and mutual respect – such a moment and such words reflect back to us our own historical efforts as a religious people to confront those who would call or demand of us, to worship the false community – they reflect back to us our own efforts to confront those powers, as Adams says, “in the name of a more intimate, personal community dependent on individual dignity and responsibility.”
In our free and responsible search for truth and meaning, might that not be what we are striving for, what we wish to worship? “A more intimate, personal community dependent on individual dignity and responsibility”? If so, how do we work together toward that aim? How do we leave behind the “opinion industry” mode of being that’s so easy to get caught up in, for a more relational, more inclusive community of faith?
In his essay, Adams makes the central argument that, quote, “the free Christian’s [read our ancestors’] sense of responsibility in society issues from concern for something more reliable than the desire for personal success. It issues,” he continues, “from the experience of and demand for community. [such] responsibility is a response to the Deed that was ‘in the beginning,’ to the Deed of Agape It is the response to that divine, self-giving sacrificial love that creates and continually transforms a community of persons.”
Agape, love; what Adams himself calls “the love that will not let us go.” This must be the means by which we strive to create the community of faith we long for, and it is the end to which we will arrive, again and again, should we choose to act from a place of love – not that conditional kind of love that “opinion industries” like to sell and promote – that say you’ve got to be this way or think that way or look this way or associate only with these kinds of people. No, the love of Agape is the love of beloved community. It is the love of listening, it is the love of speaking, it is the love of caring. It is the love of reaching out, and it is the love of reaching inward, and asking ourselves, freely and responsibly, “What have I been worshipping? How is it determining my life, my character? What shall I worship, what shall I hold as worthy, to deepen my part in this community of faith?”
My hope for all of you, as you move through this time of unknowing, is that you can ask yourselves these questions not as a means of indicting yourselves or anyone else, but as a means of working and staying together, as a means of remembering our faith’s historical efforts always to freely and responsibly search for truth and meaning.
The task of the religious community is not an easy one, under any circumstances. Yours is and will continue to be for some time a particularly trying one. But try you will, and so will you journey to and reach the other side of this particular wilderness. May it be that you do so in the spirit of compassion, joy, love, and mutual respect. And speaking of love, may it be that all along the way you experience, and hold as worthy, that love will not let you go. For it is love, guiding you on your free and responsible search for truth and meaning, that will see you through.
Amen.
