This morning I’ll say, “Hello” for the first time to most of you. But we already know each other in an important way. We’re all UUs. We share deep values that guide our lives, such as those named in the Affirmation statement we recite in worship: love, truth, service, peace, knowledge, freedom. As we begin a new year together with our Ingathering, we all say hello again, to each other, and to the core of who we are.
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We started worship this morning by singing together, “Gathered Here.”
“Gathered here, in one strong body.”
But can we be, “one strong body” when I, a stranger to this fellowship, have joined you for the first time?
Isn’t it really that you are “one strong body” and, at least for today, I’m one lonely, isolated individual, here by myself, in my apartment, 100 miles away from Bakersfield? I’m wanting to join the body, hesitant and shy, but I haven’t joined yet. I’m just showing up for the first time. And you, welcoming and open, are still the body that I would join, but haven’t really, yet.
So are we gathered here, in one strong body? Or are we two separate bodies, one small, one large, revolving around each other like wary planets, judging, deciding?
And whenever we sing that line, “Gathered here in one strong body,” and there’s a stranger or a newcomer, or a visitor, joining us for the first time, is the line really true?
As your new minister, I have a reason to be here, and a contract that says I am, at least officially, part of this body. But what of a person who found us online, was made curious, and was made bold enough to ask for the link and join the Zoom room, or hopefully soon, look up our address, and choose a Sunday, and decide what to wear, and show up nervously at the door of Huber Chapel.
For a fellowship that wants to grow, and growth means welcoming strangers into our “one strong body” again and again, does proclaiming ourselves “one strong body” sound welcoming, or does it sound off-putting?
Maybe it’s better to use the language of the other hymn we sang at the beginning of worship this morning, “We would be one.”
We would be one, as now we join in singing.
We recognize that we aren’t actually, one, right today. But we hope to be. Just as we can quickly come together to open our hymnals and join our voices in singing, creating a musical body of one out of the many, we hope to do that act of coming together in a more meaningful, deeper, way. Not merely singing together, but being together. We would be one, strong, body, and we invite you, stranger, to be part of that hope and goal. We aren’t there, yet, either. But we can get there together, if you’ll come with us.
And listen, again, at what that hymn says we are coming together to do.
We would be one
as now we join in singing our hymn of love,
to pledge ourselves anew
to that high cause of greater understanding of who we are, and what in us is true.
We would be one in living for each other to show to all a new community.
The poetry makes the meaning a little hard to grasp. But the hymn is saying, that what we want, is for all of us (meaning everybody singing this song together), to make a pledge, a pledge we’ve made before but have to keep re-affirming, a pledge to remember who we are, who we truly are, which is not isolated individuals, but interdependent parts of a whole, who live for each other, and to make among ourselves a model of healthy community for the rest of the world.
The hymn is invitational because it says, even if you’ve never been here before, if you’re ready to make that pledge, than you are one of us. We are pledging to make a community. Not, we are a community that you can join. We are a community means, you might like it here, but we’re also already OK without you. Pledging to make a community means, we need you, stranger.
I wanted to preach about community for my first sermon with you, because I have come to know, over my ministry career with several congregations, that community is really the core of what we do here. The bonds of friendship, love, support, and caring, between members is the core and the sustaining energy of a congregation. It is that community more than anything else that we offer to the folks who might join us, and it is that community, primarily, that they are seeking when they first come to visit.
And you’ll hear me preach more about this as the year goes on, so I won’t spend too much time today talking about it. But I wanted to introduce this idea, that for me, community, or fellowship, the bonds that unite us, is the most important task of a religious community, and the most unique gift that a religious community can offer. Everything else that we do, our programs of social justice, and education, and worship, and so on, come out of, and depend on, that core task of building strong community. Our other programs will flourish if our community is strong and healthy. But those other programs will not last for long, if our community isn’t sufficiently strong to support them.
So what makes community so special?
What makes, religious community, so special?
When I was in my late 20s, I was 28, actually, I visited a Unitarian Universalist church for the first time. This was 1991.
The church I visited was the Unitarian Universalist Community Church of Santa Monica.
I had grown up in Santa Monica, and although I was living at the time elsewhere in Los Angeles, I had a boyfriend who had an apartment in Santa Monica. And this boyfriend had heard about a church that was open to gays and lesbians, and also open to a wide-range of religious beliefs, including atheism, and he wanted to check it out.
I didn’t really care about church one way or the other. I had grown up going to a Methodist church with my family. I liked the experience well enough, but I never identified with Christian beliefs. And I stopped going to church as a teenager, as soon as I was old enough to convince my parents to let me stop.
My boyfriend, though, had grown up in a very fundamentalist Christian denomination, the Worldwide Church of God. And although his church experience was more negative than mine, and his rebellion against it more passionate, he also retained from his childhood this sense of the importance of the church community. It wasn’t the church that he rebelled against, it was the bigoted and ignorant content of that particular church. So, into adulthood he continued to crave the church community, if only he could find a church with the right content.
Well, like many Unitarian Universalists who find the church as adults, I had the experience of walking into a UU church for the first time and feeling immediately that I had found the place for me. I hadn’t even been looking for a church. I was just there because my boyfriend wanted to check it out. I was just there to give moral support to him. Instead, I found a community for me.
That was 1991 and only four years later, in 1995, I quit my job and enrolled in seminary to persue a new career as a UU minister. A career which I have enjoyed now, for 23 years.
So that’s a different kind of experience. I walked into a new community, and although they were “one strong body” I felt immediately that I was one of them. Maybe it wasn’t immediate. But it was pretty close.
My boyfriend and I walked up to the door of the church. And remember, this is 1991, the height of the AIDS crisis, churches were the places where gay men were called disgusting sinners, properly shunned in this life and destined for Hell in the next. My boyfriend and I had done enough research on Unitarian Universalism that we didn’t expect that kind of response, but still, churches were not places where gay people went for comfort and hope.
So we approached the door cautiously, but at the door, we were sincerely welcomed by a woman whose name I still remember. Her name was Elizabeth Adler. Elizabeth recognized that my boyfriend and I were a couple, and without even asking to confirm whether we were gay she said, “Our church has a couple’s club that’s meeting at my house tonight for dinner. Would you like to come?”
So yes, I felt right away this was the community for me.
Then, we walked into the sanctuary and we noticed running down the walls on both sides of the hall were banners carrying the symbols of all the world’s major religions: Christianity equal to Buddhism and all the others. This was the community for me.
And then, that this was the community for me, was finally confirmed for me, when the minister began to preach, and his sermon was thoughtful, questioning, philosophical, provocative, open to a multitude of perspectives, and gently encouraging that each of us listening in the congregation could be trusted to come up with our own answers to life’s big questions. This was the community for me.
So what is it, about that kind of community, that made entering into it for the first time, like I’m entering into your community for the first time this morning, so welcoming, so powerful, and so, eventually for me, life-changing?
What was it, that gave for me the feeling when I walked into that church that I wasn’t saying, “Hello” for the first time, but “Hello, again” to a community that I was already a part of?
This speaks to another religious principle I have come to depend on over my career with Unitarian Universalism.
Community is the foundation of all that we do together and the best gift that we can offer to others seeking to be with us.
And the core of our faith community, in the way that Unitarian Universalists do religion, the foundation of our foundation, is our set of Seven Principles, the values that define our faith, the values that bind us together.
When I walked into that church in Santa Monica, I didn’t recognize any of the people, although I would come to know and love many of them eventually, but I recognized immediately the values that the church upheld. I held those same values. I walked in with them. And I recognized my values in their community.
Values such as those we affirmed together this morning in our Affirmation statement:
Love, a quest for truth, service, peace, respect for knowledge, freedom to follow our own path, and a vision that all humanity is connected.
And so, although I had never stepped through those doors before, it felt like home. It felt like I belonged. It felt like I had for a long time already been a member of that community. Because I walked in already holding dear exactly the same values that the church held dear.
So when Elizabeth Adler welcomed me and my boyfriend at the door with love and acceptance. When I saw the openness to religious pluralism in the banners on the wall. When I heard a sermon that was intellectual, grounded in science, and respectful of the good minds in the room. I realized before the end of the hour that not only would I be very comfortable in this, “one strong body” but that I already was a part of this one strong body centered around these shared values. I wasn’t saying, “Hello” to them or they to me, as strangers. We were saying, “Hello, again” to people we were already connected to, already in community with.
The church didn’t look to convert me to a their faith, instead they welcomed me the same way the welcomed the most long-standing members, with an invitation and an expectation that we were all there, “to pledge ourselves anew to that high cause of greater understanding of who we are, and what in us is true.” The invited me not to come in to where they already were, but to walk with them to the place where we were all going together.
And so, I join you all this morning for the first time, with that same sense that we are already united in this faith, in this quest for greater understanding, and the search for what is true, and in this far-reaching community of Unitarian Universalism.
I step in to this Zoom room feeling I’m already at home.
(Well actually I am in my home).
And although I will need to get to know you personally over the next several weeks, I feel I already know you, because I know you’re Unitarian Universalists.
And you can trust that you already know me, too, in that way.
Today, in the Unitarian Universalist church year, we celebrate the holiday of Ingathering. Today is the first Sunday of the church year. We begin a new year on the Sunday after Labor Day.
The spiritual purpose of Ingathering is to allow the church to take a pause over the summer months. We encourage our members to take a Sabbath of rest and rejuvenation. Whether you’ve taken a literal vacation over the summer or whether you’ve been attending every Sunday just as always, the spiritual work of Ingathering, is to bring us back together, rested and ready, and focused now on the work of the new church year ahead.
And so we all arrive today, in a sense, as for the first time: fresh and new, hesitant and curious.
We say, “Hello” and “Hello, again” to a community we may not have seen for a time. And we say, “Hello” to a church year that none of us have yet seen.
But we also say, “Hello, again” to this new church year. Because this church year will be grounded in the same faith values that form our religious journey every year.
We will be:
Questing for truth
Serving human need
Seeking knowledge in freedom
Dwelling in peace
Guided by love.