The American character wrestles (very visibly, lately) between the poles of individualism and community. These poles are present, too, in our UU faith: a Unitarian side that lifts up the human power of each person; a Universalist side that reminds us we’re all in this together.

Click here to watch a video of this sermon

“Come, Come, Whoever you are.”

That phrase, from the poet Rumi, is an invitation to come together.

So it works well as a gathering hymn for our worship.

An invitation for you, an individual, whoever you are, to join with others.  To join a community.

The poem says come, whoever you are, whether you’re a wanderer, or a worshipper, or a lover of leaving.  The poem says, it’s OK.  Even if you’re not perfect.  You can be here.  Come.

And then the poem says, reassuringly, don’t worry that this community will be a burden to your spirit.  This community, this caravan of travelers, is no caravan of despair.  This community is life-giving.  It’s worthwhile.  We know it takes courage to join a community.  But a healthy community is worth the sacrifices that we know you will have to make, any individual has to make, in order to join with others.

Rumi’s words say, on one hand, yes, you, you are worthy and welcome.  You’re invited, come.

And the poem says, on the other hand, we, this community, are good, and helpful.  Don’t hold yourself back.  Come.

So, the poem recognizes that individuals resist community for two reasons.

One:  we think that we’re not worthy of community.

Two:  we think that the community isn’t worthy of us.

In our Call to Worship, George E. Odell writes about the many times in our lives when we need one another.  When we’re in mourning and need comforting, when we’re in trouble and afraid.  And in good times, too, we need one another.  When we want to do some big project and cannot do it alone.  Or when we accomplish some great success and want someone to notice.

Then, after listing several of these kinds of moments when we need one another, Odell concludes by simply saying, “All of our lives we are in need, and others are in need of us.”

We certainly can’t get ourselves born on our own.  And on the other end of life, Odell reminds us, “We need one another when we come to die, and would have gentle hands prepare us for the journey.”

“All of our lives we are in need, and others are in need of us.”

These last two years, as our community, our nation, and our world, has suffered through the COVID-19 pandemic, we have endured a stark example of our need for others.

We need, doctors.  Nurses.  Scientists.  Researchers.  Epidemiologists, certainly.  But this is a communal crisis.  We need everyone.  Front-line workers and everyone else, too.

In the first days of the pandemic, we might have re-written George Odell’s call to worship to say:

We need one another, to wash your hands frequently

We need one another, to stay home if you’re feeling sick.

We need one another, to wear a mask when you’re in public

We need one another to buy only the amount of toilet paper you really need.

We need one another to voluntarily skip the big family gathering this year.

We need one another to do everything you can do to avoid getting sick so that we don’t overwhelm our hospitals so those who need a hospital bed, whether for COVID or some other reason, will have a bed available.

And then this year, once the vaccines became available, we might have added

We need one another to get vaccinated.

We need all of us, or at least nearly all of us, to choose to get a simple, safe, and effective vaccine so that we can put this pandemic behind us, take off our masks, get back to work, open up the stores and the restaurants and our churches, and go back to having the kind of full, satisfying lives we had before without fear of a deadly virus.

We need one another.  This isn’t a job a person can do alone.

Those of us who chose to get the shot as soon as we could can’t get us out of this pandemic alone.  Herd immunity doesn’t happen if half the herd is looking the other way.

Instead of seeing what “we” need to do, on behalf of all of us.  Too many of us saw the decision as only what I want to do for me.

The irony being, of course, that in this case, what an individual ought to do to benefit themselves is the same action an individual ought to do to benefit everyone.  Even if you don’t care about others, the vaccine protects you, too.

But the argument is simply, “you can’t make me”

“You,” the community, can’t make “me,” the individual.

“You” the government officials responsible for the public health of the community at large, can’t make me.

I’m free.  Free to make good decisions, or bad decisions.  I don’t owe the community anything.  I’m an individual.  I alone.  Me.  For me.  And only for me.

Now the people who most loudly proclaim their individual freedom are also the ones most likely to justify their position by saying, “I’m an American.”  Or “I’m a citizen.”  Or “I have rights.”

But, of course, an “American” is not an individual but part of a community.

And a “citizen” is a member of a community.

And “I have rights” is true for individuals only because there’s a community of people, and laws, and a constitution, and judges, who are willing to recognize and protect your individual rights.

So the conflict between individual and community, even in those who are most loudly proclaiming their God-given autonomy, is not nearly so stark as they would make it.

We’re all members of communities.  We all are members of churches of one sort or another, hearing one kind of sermon or another.  We all are members of facebook groups, and email chains, and the guys who get together at the diner.  We follow Nascar, or the Giants, or our favorite “influencers” on Tik Tok.  We vote a straight party ticket.  We get our information from a cable news channel we trust and we can’t understand how anybody can watch the fake news on that other cable news channel.

We need one another.

And we find one another, in one community or another.

So it isn’t that some are community-minded and others are individuals looking out only for themselves.  There are, of course, a few extreme narcissists out there who truly care about no one but themselves.  I can think of one notable example.  And there may be a few noble saints willing to sacrifice themselves for the slightest benefit to the herd.  But most of us, non-pathological and not that committed, are somewhere in the middle.  A little of both.

I care about others.  But I look out for myself.  I’ll bear a personal inconvenience if it helps someone else.  That’s OK.  I don’t mind paying my taxes.  But I expect something in return.  I like to sing in a choir, and sit in a crowd, and feel that I’m not alone.  But I like being alone,too, sometimes.

When we’re born, we’re alone.  Or at least we think we are.

Not being aware, yet, of mothers and fathers, and everyone else necessary to get us born and keep us alive, babies think they are the center of the universe, while actually being totally dependent on others.

We are born as individuals.

And then we spend the rest of our lives recognizing our interdependence with others and coming into community.

I like to characterize the spiritual journey as one of ever-expanding community.  The spiritual journey is to ever keep moving outward from that initial individual ego we are born with, to keep naming more and more of what we call “others” as “us”.  Until, perhaps, when we are enlightened, we see that there is no such thing as an “other”.  Everything is us.

At that point, we arrive, ironically, back to what sounds like the extreme ego of a baby, but transformed, now.  A baby thinks, “I am all that is.”  A spiritually mature person knows, “All that is, is me, too.”

But until we get there, we wrestle in life between these two poles:  individual and community.  We’re alone and lonely and longing for others.  But we find communities too full of conflict and disagreeable people and demands on our time and resources.  We want someone to share our life.  But the ways that other people are different continually annoy us.  We move back and forth between joining and leaving:  “wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving”.  We enjoy our “me time.”  But we enjoy even more being wanted, being of use, being of service.  We want to nurture our individual gifts.  We want to bring our gifts to others to be recognized and cherished by the community.

The trick is finding the healthy balance between the poles, while recognizing that the direction of the journey is always toward as much community connection as we can healthfully manage.

In managing this trick, I’m grateful for the wisdom of Unitarian Universalism.  Because in our one faith, in our very name, we have both poles, and the wisdom of each.

You know, that for this season, I’m talking about the beliefs portion of a complete faith:  beliefs, values, and actions.

Beliefs are our description of reality.  Beliefs are everything that we see and know or think we know, when we look at the world – material and immaterial things.  Beliefs are our worldview.

Values are principles we hold to be important.  I’ll get to those in the winter months.  And actions are what we dowith our faith.  I’ll get to that in the spring.

Unitarian, and Universalist, are words that describe beliefs.

Unitarian is the belief that God is a unity, as opposed to those Christians who believe that God is a trinity.

The Christian tradition that we broke away from believed that God was three separate persons:  Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who were also, somehow, one unified being.

Unitarians considered that doctrine to be logically ridiculous and also entirely unnecessary for the Christian faith.  The Christian bishops at Nicea, in 325 CE, felt that Jesus had to be God in order to save sinful humanity.  The Unitarians saw that humanity could save itself, following Jesus’ human example.  Jesus lived a perfected human life, and we could, too, say the Unitarians, by following Jesus’ teachings and living as he did.

So the Unitarian belief, at its core, is not so much a belief about God, as it is a belief about the wisdom, the goodness, and the power, of the human person.  You are good enough, smart enough, and strong enough, to make a healthy, joyful life for yourself.  Jesus is proof of that.  And so are other human heroes and heroines we follow.

Universalism is the belief (again, we’re talking about beliefs this season) that God so loves all the world that every particle of creation is destined for salvation.  Universally, we will be saved.

The Christian tradition that we broke away from believed that many folks, or even most, or in some formulations, nearly all, human souls are destined for damnation.  In this theology, human beings are infected with original sin from our parents Adam and Eve.  God is offended by us and turns away.  We deserve to be punished because God is just.  And only the extraordinary gift of Jesus on the cross allows any of us, by God’s grace, to be saved.

The Universalists said that this theology puts God’s justice above God’s love.  A loving God wouldn’t abandon a person to suffer eternally.  A loving God would stay with us, work with us, coax us along until eventually we, and everyone, finds the right path.  We are saved together, because love doesn’t leave anyone behind.  The future for Universalists is that eventually we will all, universally, be together in bliss.

So the Universalist belief, at its core, is that humanity is a single community with a single destiny.  

Universalism is about the communal aspect of human life, just as Unitarianism is about the individual aspect of life.

As I look at the problems of the world today, I see that our failure to think and act and live communally is the more serious threat.

We need the truth of Unitarianism.  You are strong enough, smart enough, good enough, to make a joyful and healthy life for yourself.  Many people suffer because they don’t believe that.

But maybe we need the truth of Universalism even a little more.  We’re all in this together.  We truly are, one humanity, with one destiny.

I grumble every day at the flouting of this basic truth of our communal life.  The bicyclist ignoring the red light.  The motorcyclist disturbing the peace with their roaring engine.  The cigarette thrown casually into the gutter.  The graffiti on the buildings.  

The social consequences of “every man for himself” individualism are far more grave.  The excessive greed of some and poverty of others.  The lack of support for our public institutions.  Ignoring the threat of climate change because fossil fuels are so convenient now and the suffering won’t come until later.  And on and on.

But even more than that, I’m most troubled by the crumbling of our clubs, and service organizations, and churches.  We seem to be missing the value of community, and forgetting how to do community.  And people are suffering.  We’re isolated and alone and feeling it.  But instead of making robust connections, we’re reaching out through screens and connecting thinly, only with people who are already like us and share our interests and opinions.  We’re creating false communities that are really just extensions of our own selves, rather than true communities that include others, embrace difference, and that challenge us to expand ourselves.

We’ve decided that those kinds of communities don’t exist, are too hard to maintain, and not worth the effort.

Of those two barriers to community I mentioned at the beginning of this sermon, it is the second that is more deadly to us now.

Some of us, “wanderers,” think we’re not worthy of a community.  The truth of Unitarianism tells us that everyone is strong enough, smart enough, good enough.

More of us, though, imagine that communities are caravans of despair, not worthy of us.  We’re too good for them, too smart for other people, too strong individually to need community.  The truth of Universalism tells us that we are in this together.  Resist as you might, you lover of leaving.  Turn away as you might, the great Lover won’t turn away from you.  Our destiny is one.  Salvation comes for all, when all come to community.

So come.  Yet again.  Come.