As a vaccine becomes available, we might go back to normal, or “normal” might be something new. The experience of the last year gives us an opportunity to rearrange our lives: how we work, how we socialize, and how we worship. This is a good time for congregations to re-connect with their core purpose:  meeting the dual human needs of community and meaning.  

Watch the video of the worship service where I preached this sermon. My sermon begins at the 28 minute mark

            I want to begin by sharing a little reading with you.  Excuse me if this sounds a little off topic to you, I promise I’ll make sense of it later.

            This is from an article published in the New York Times on January 17, that is, just before Joe Biden’s inauguration, and it’s titled, “A QAnon ‘Digital Soldier’ Marches On, Undeterred by Theory’s Unraveling” This is by Kevin Roose 

“Like any movement its size — which is almost certainly in the millions, though it is impossible to quantify — QAnon contains a wide range of beliefs and tactics. Some “anons” are veteran conspiracists who have spent years exploring the theory’s many tributaries. Others are newer converts who have only a vague idea how it all connects. There are law-abiding keyboard warriors as well as violent, unhinged radicals.

… [QAnon] is now a big-tent conspiracy theory community that includes left-wing yoga moms, anti-lockdown libertarians and “Stop the Steal” Trumpists. QAnon believers are young and old, male and female, educated and not. Every community in America has its fair share of them — dentists and firefighters and real estate agents who disappeared down a social media rabbit hole one day and never came back.

“This is not just young, male incels who live in their parents’ basements and can’t get a real job,” said Mike Rothschild, a conspiracy theory researcher who is writing a book about QAnon. “QAnon gives you a target to point your anger at, and it gives you something to do about it. That’s something that can appeal to anyone who is disaffected in any way.”

…

What attracts Ms. Gilbert and many other people to QAnon isn’t just the content of the conspiracy theory itself. It’s the community and sense of mission it provides. New QAnon believers are invited to chat rooms and group texts, and their posts are showered with likes and retweets. They make friends, and are told that they are not lonely Facebook addicts squinting at zoomed-in paparazzi photos, but patriots gathering “intel” for a righteous revolution.”

            QAnon, and the inauguration seem long ago now, don’t they?  And I’m sorry to make you have to think about that craziness again for a moment.  Maybe today will be the last time, and won’t that be a blessing?  And QAnon isn’t really what I want to preach about either.

            What I want to think about this morning with you is where your church might go from here as we all look forward to easing out of the COVID-19 pandemic.  With folks getting vaccinations and with California counties moving from purple to red to maybe orange soon, we can start now to lift our heads up from the panic of the pandemic, and start to reflect on our experience and what we learned.  

            As Jane Rzepka said in our opening words, “We have wintered enough, mourned enough, oppressed ourselves enough.  Our souls are too long cold and buried, our dreams all but forgotten, our hopes unheard.  We are waiting to rise form the dead.”

            We sure are.  And this spring brought this year by Pfizer and Moderna, as well as the changing of the season, has arrived just in time.

Notice with me, that the challenge that your congregation met last year in adapting creatively to the social distancing requirements of the pandemic are much the same kinds of challenges that a congregation has to face when first getting organized.  You had to ask a year ago, just as if you were a start up congregation:  Where do we meet?  How do we let people know we’re here?  How do we welcome new members?  How do we care for each other?  How do we raise the money to pay for it all?

And those are precisely the questions that you’ll need to ask again now, now that meeting in person again might soon be a possibility:  Where do we meet?  How do we let people know we’re here?  How do we welcome new members?  How do we care for each other?  How do we raise the money to pay for it all?  Those are the questions every religious community needs to ask and answer, although now you might not answer them exactly as you would have a year ago, or two years ago either.

I’m sure you’ll work that all out.  But beyond those practical questions of where and when and how, this profound experience we’ve all been through, now coming to an end, invites us to ask the even deeper question of why?  Not just where will we meet and when, but why?  Not merely how do we do church, in the world the way it looks today?, but why do church in the world it looks today?  What are people needing, now?  And how do we fill that need, for their spiritual health, and for our institutional success?

            That’s why I wanted to share that article about QAnon with you.  Because throughout that whole phenomenon I kept being amazed that QAnon followers were joining a group whose beliefs were so manifestly strange and then staying with a group when those beliefs were being proved wrong again and again.  Why would QAnon followers be willing even to sever relationships with long-time friends and family members in order to cling to the QAnon mirage?  Why?

The answer is two words that I think apply to QAnon members and also to members of Unitarian Universalist congregations.  In fact, these two words are important to all human beings.  We seek them everywhere.  Our lives depend on them.  To achieve them we are willing to make enormous sacrifices.

The two words are:  community and meaning.

As social animals we are always looking for community.  And as thinking animals we are always looking for meaning that explains the world around us. 

The world is chaotic and confusing.  We’re naturally social creatures but making connections can be difficult.  We’re afraid of being alone.  We’re afraid of dying.  Our hearts break with compassion when we see the suffering of others.  We need comforting ourselves for our own pains in the world.

We need to “Gather the spirit, harvest the power” as we sang in Jim Scott’s words.  “Our separate fires will kindle one flame…Gather the spirit of heart and mind.  Gather the spirit growing in all.”  And then, once gathered in community we will, in the words of Jane Rzepka again, “love, and believe, and give and wonder, and feel again the eternal powers.

So we seek, all of us, a place to belong.  And a community where we will hear a message that helps us makes sense of the world.  Many find that community and meaning in religion, some in a political party, or in critical race theory, or in a book club, or philosophy seminar, or through online conspiracy theories.  We want answers to our questions, comfort for our confusion.  We want it explained.  And we want to be with people who will support our worldview, so we can ease off some of the doubting and defensiveness we feel when we interact with people outside our circle.  

Listen to some of the ways Kevin Roose describes QAnon believers and see if this doesn’t somehow sound a little like a cracked mirror version of Unitarian Universalism.  You have to change a few words, but UUs are good at that.

“QAnon [like Unitarian Universalism] contains a wide range of beliefs and tactics. Some “anons” are veteran conspiracists who have spent years exploring the theory’s many tributaries. Others are newer converts who have only a vague idea how it all connects.”

That sounds like us, doesn’t it?

What about this…

“It is now a big-tent conspiracy theory community that includes left-wing yoga moms, anti-lockdown libertarians and “Stop the Steal” Trumpists.  QAnon believers are young and old, male and female, educated and not.  Every community in America has its fair share of them — dentists and firefighters and real estate agents who disappeared down a social media rabbit hole one day and never came back.”

Doesn’t that sound like the kind of diverse community we strive for?  Maybe we draw from a different pool, and I hope our congregations aren’t “social media rabbit holes” but don’t we believe that Unitarian Universalism has something to offer both yoga-moms, and firefighters, young, old, male, female, educated or not?

So Unitarian Universalist congregations, like QAnon, is about community, for one thing.  And then, what binds all those diverse people together?

“[Says] Mike Rothschild, a conspiracy theory researcher who is writing a book about QAnon. “QAnon gives you a target to point your anger at, and it gives you something to do about it. That’s something that can appeal to anyone who is disaffected in any way.”

A target to point your anger at.  And something to do about it.  Here’s where we need to employ our UU skill of changing a word to make sense of other people’s religious doctrine.  What if we said our UU faith gives us a target to point your “love” at?

A target to point your love at.  And something to do about it.

That sounds like a mission statement.  That’s where the meaning is, in community

Listen again to what Kevin Roose’s says about Valerie Gilbert the woman he profiles in his article.

“What attracts Ms. Gilbert and many other people to QAnon isn’t just the content of the conspiracy theory itself. It’s the community and sense of mission it provides. New QAnon believers are invited to chat rooms and group texts, and their posts are showered with likes and retweets. They make friends, and are told that they are not lonely Facebook addicts squinting at zoomed-in paparazzi photos, but patriots gathering “intel” for a righteous revolution.”

During this pandemic year a lot of us have felt like “lonely Facebook addicts.”  Like it or not, we’ve all been spending more time online.  More time at home, many of us alone, or with just a few close contacts.  Maybe you’re on facebook or Twitter.  Or maybe it’s just Netflix and CNN.  But more and more this last year our human contact has been mediated through screens.  We’ve traded handshakes for log-ons.  We’ve traded hugs for “You’re on mute.”  We’ve traded actual chatting for the chat function.

And our congregation became this, too:  Zoom rooms not physical rooms.

Granted, how lucky we are that this pandemic came this year, not twenty years ago when the technology to meet virtually didn’t exist.  This year we’re feeling desperate for physical human contact, but every year, always, we’re seeking community, however we can find it, or make it.

And, I’m sure you’ve discovered, as you’ve created a Zoom church community, that the challenge and aggravation and loss, also enabled some positives.  At the Long Beach church where I served a year ago, we discovered our weekly attendance actually went up when we went online.  We had former members who had moved away join us again from around the country.  We had homebound members who couldn’t physically come to church able to join programs for the first time because they could attend virtually.  For some people, Zoom church isn’t a substitute for church, it is church.

That reality is one take-away from the COVID-19 pandemic that our congregations will need to wrestle with as we go forward from here.  Now that those folks have found us we can’t just cut them off again.  So what technology will we need to include them:  cameras, high-speed internet, video and sound editing.  How do we create hybrid spaces where some people will be in person, but others will join from their home computer?

We’ve learned lessons this last year might actually lead to a different way of ordering our lives, changes that move us closer to our social goals.  Folks working from home could mean less time commuting, less traffic, less fossil fuel being burned.  Remote work would allow folks to live wherever they like.  Folks could choose cheaper housing, or housing locations that satisfy other needs, besides just being close to the job site.  If folks are spending more time at home, they might be more likely to make friends with their neighbors.  That might result in more diverse friendships and relieve some of the current urban/suburban/rural divisions that control our political affiliations.  Now that COVID has taught us which jobs are really essential, we might pay those workers better.  And the great toilet paper shortage of 2020 taught us lessons about manufacturing flexibility and global supply chains that will be valuable going forward.

But the most important lesson for our churches, I believe, is this reminder of the core, existential, longing among human beings for community and meaning.  Even if we had to go online to get it, we still did it.

And we learned, as we saw with the rise of QAnon during the pandemic, that if we can’t find a welcome home in healthy communities that offer reality-based and postive responses to our need for meaning, we will accept unhealthy communities preying on emotions, serving up falsehoods, resulting in destruction both of our personal spiritual health and willing destruction of the social institutions we’re taught to distrust.

We will go that far, in order to achieve the community and meaning necessary for human life.  We will accept a target for our anger, if we can’t find a target for our love.

As we remake our UU congregations, post-COVID, I hope that we will remember that community and meaning are the core functions of what congregations can offer and what people are seeking.

Christine Robinson put it succinctly in the words we used for our Chalice Lighting this morning, “We gather this hour as people of faith with joys and sorrows, gifts and needs.  

We light this beacon of hope, sign of our quest for truth and meaning, in celebration of the life we share together.”

Community and Meaning.  Everything else is secondary.  Everything we do in church:  worship, social justice, education, the choir, the book club, pastoral care, flows from those core human needs:  community and meaning.  Churches get into trouble when we start to let any of those products of the church take over the core of the church.  Attend to the basics.

Ask always:  How can our congregation help fulfill the human need as social animals to be with each other?  How can our congregation fulfill the human need as thinking animals to make sense of the world?

In the words we used as we rang the bowl to open our worship this morning, Catherine called this congregation “Beloved Community”

That’s a community of meaning.

Here’s how Beloved Community is defined by the King Center, based on Martin Luther King’s use of that phrase:

“Dr. King’s Beloved Community is a global vision in which all people can share in the wealth of the earth. In the Beloved Community, poverty, hunger and homelessness will not be tolerated because international standards of human decency will not allow it. Racism and all forms of discrimination, bigotry and prejudice will be replaced by an all-inclusive spirit of sisterhood and brotherhood.”

Beloved Community.  “An all-inclusive spirit of sisterhood and brotherhood.”

Or to put it even more simply, one word:  love

A church of love.

A target to point your love at.  And something to do about it.

            If people don’t have healthy places to form community and find meaning, they will seek community and make meaning in unhealthy ways.  Instead of sending them down the conspiracy theory, social media, rabbit hole, let’s make welcoming them here the mission of our faith, 

With Love we make the bonds the hold us in community.  With Love we learn the meaning that makes sense of the world.