The most important value for a religious community is the community. As a faith community, our fellowship is at the ground of all we receive for ourselves and offer to the larger world. When we begin to move other programs to the center of our shared mission we begin to lose our unique purpose and strength.

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Last week, talking about our shared values as the center of our Unitarian Universalist faith, rather than shared beliefs or shared action, I ended my sermon with these words:

“We need not think alike, to love alike.  Nor does our common love demand a single expression.  We are the people who hold these principles to be important.  If our values are your values than we invite you to join us.  Unitarian Universalists are not gathered to believe together, or to do together, but simply to be together.”

I want to start my sermon this week from that place.

“Unitarian Universalists are not gathered to believe together, or to do together, but simply to be together.”

Many Christian churches are gathered around statements of beliefs, or creeds.  One of the reasons there are so many different Christian denominations is because there are so many different Christian creeds that divide and separate them.

And many non-profit organizations, and for-profit corporations, are gathered around statements of what they intend to do together:  mission statements.

Unitarian Universalists are gathered around principles that we value together.  Whatever your worldview, whatever your metaphysics, whatever it is in your childhood, or public school education, or words of whatever prophet, or personal hero, or the books you read, or the episodes of Star Trek you watch: whatever it is that gets you to value what you value (the source could be anything), all that matters is that you value what we value, and if you do, once you’re here, whatever brought you here, you’re welcome here.

On the other end of the faith line, comes actions.  After all, what you say you value doesn’t matter much unless you actually behave in the world in line with those values.  We all know people who say they value justice, but act unjustly.  We know people who say they value love and tolerance, but conspicuously exclude certain kinds of folks from their actually narrow conception of love.  We know folks who say they are kind and generous, but don’t tip the waitress.  We know folks who in the name of truth spread the most outrageous and obvious lies.  We know folks who say that their highest value is to defend the autonomy of each person to make personal decisions concerning their own bodies but who don’t connect that value to pregnant women wanting to make decisions for themselves about their own pregnancies.

Oftentimes, it’s a lot easier to be clear about a person’s values by noticing what they do, rather than what they say.

Values are abstract.  Actions are concrete.  Values are general.  Actions are very specific.

So to see what values are in play, one can look to actions.

Values lead to actions.

But general values don’t lead directly to discrete actions.  So you can’t say that if you value this one particular value that you must then always do this one particular action.  Usually, there are many different actions that could plausibly stem from a single value.

For instance, if I named the value of love, and then I asked you to show me an example of love in the world, every one of you could do something different, and all be correct.

Or if I asked you to draw me a picture of kindness.  We could fill the Louvre with our drawings, each painting on the theme of kindness, and every painting illustrating a different scene.

I happened to be reading in the bathtub on Thursday night, the night before I wrote this sermon, and I came across a passage that makes this point.  The book is a novel from a few years ago called, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by a Vietnamese American author named Ocean Vuong.

He writes about a memory when he was a small boy, growing up in poverty in Connecticut with his mother and his grandmother.  One day, they had gone grocery shopping.  His mother had wanted to make a particular Vietnamese dish as a special treat.  But owing to cultural differences and language limitations, they were unable to buy what they needed, and came home embarrassed, disappointed, and feeling defeated.

The boy’s mother lies face down on the carpeted floor, exhausted.  Her mother, named, “Lan”, the boy’s grandmother, straddles her and begins to give her a massage.  Ocean Vuong, whose nickname is “Little Dog” in this story, writes this:

“It’s true that, in Vietnamese, we rarely say I love you, and when we do, it is almost always in English.  Care and love, for us, are pronounced clearest through service:  plucking white hairs, pressing yourself on your son to absorb a plane’s turbulence and, therefore, his fear.  Or now—as Lan called to me, ‘Little Dog, get over here and help me help your mother.’  And we knelt on each side of you, rolling out the hardened cords in your upper arms, then down to your wrists, your fingers.  For a moment almost too brief to matter, this made sense—that three people on the floor, connected to each other by touch, made something like the word family.”

William Ellery Channing says, “I call that church free which brings individuals into a caring, trusting fellowship.”

Ocean Vuong says, “Three people on the floor, connected to each other by touch, made something like the word family.”

We say, in our Affirmation Statement every Sunday that “Love is the doctrine of this church” and “service is its prayer.”

Ocean Vuong says that in the Vietnamese culture it’s not saying “I love you” that matters, “Care and love, for us, are pronounced clearest through service.”  And then he goes on to name the tiny acts of service that express the value of love.  Helping his grandmother pluck the white hairs at the back of her head because she wants to feel younger.  Or his mother comforting him on a bumpy plane ride by letting him feel the solid weight of her body next to his own small body.  Or, “Three people on the floor, connected to each other by touch, [making] something like the word family.”

We understand, as Unitarian Universalists, that faith, to matter, must be a lived faith, that what we do, for our own lives, and for the world we share, matters.

We understand that our lofty values have no meaning unless they actually serve to guide our actions and reveal themselves in how we act in the world.

We understand that it’s possible to work backward from observing someone’s actions in the world to discern pretty accurately what they actually value, even if they say they value something different.

But we also need to recognize that there are diverse ways to act that stem from the same shared values.

A museum full of pictures of kindness, for instance.  A myriad of ways that one person can show love to another, in ways large and small.

The word “justice,” for instance, appears twice in our UUA Seven Principles.  Once as “justice, equity, and compassion in human relationships” where justice might describe, for instance, giving a waitress a generous tip.  And also as, “World community with peace, liberty, and justice for all” where justice might mean freedom for the Uighurs in China, or equal treatment for women in Afghanistan, or access to medical treatment in India or Nigeria, or welcoming immigrants in Europe or the United States, or compensating the people of island nations for the devastation of a rising ocean caused by climate change.

All of those actions we could take, from small to large, from the local to the global, from the personal, to the political, could be labeled, “justice-work” and would be seen as inspired by our shared value of justice.  But the value of justice doesn’t call us to any particular one of those actions.

So Unitarian Universalists realize that being united in values doesn’t mean that we must be united in how we choose to act in the world.

We can summarize our way of faith as shared values but diversity of beliefs in the phrase attributed to the early Transylvanian Unitarian Frances David, as “We need not think alike to love alike.”

But we should also add that our common love doesn’t mandate a single mode of action.

“Unitarian Universalists are not gathered to believe together, or to do together, but simply to be together.”

We are a community that recognizes we might profitably be diverse in our actions, and diverse in our beliefs, so long as we strongly and steadfastly unite in our values.

And thus, for a Unitarian Universalist, even more than kindness, or love, or justice, or any other value that we name and embrace, more basic to our faith than any of those values is the value that holds all the others:  the value of community.

“How rare it is, how lovely, this fellowship of those who meet together.”  A line from Psalm 133 that we used as our Chalice Lighting this morning.

We are a gentle angry people, a justice seeking people, young and old together, gay and straight together.  We are, in the words of this Fellowship’s Mission Statement, “a welcoming, diverse, spiritual community where love inspires us to work for a peaceful, sustainable and socially just world. 

Notice how beautifully that statement says in four words who we are and what we value.  We are a welcoming, diverse, spiritual, community.  Even for a statement that purports to be a mission statement it is not the doing but the being, that defines who we are.

And then, in the second half of the statement, “where love inspires us to work for a peaceful, sustainable and socially just world” we see again not the particular work but the general values placed at the center of our identity.  The value of love inspires us to work in service of the values of peace, sustainability, and justice.

We know that faith is meaningless unless it is expressed in action.  Service is our prayer.  But our Mission Statement is appropriately vague in directing you toward some specific action you must take.  What does peace, sustainability, and socially just mean?  That’s a question we explore together in our worship and fellowship programs.  What you then do in service of those faith values is up to you.

I don’t know when this Fellowship wrote our Mission Statement, or what your process was for coming up with it, but I have worked on many Mission Statements for many congregations over the years, and it’s always been a frustrating process for me and for the congregation.  Perhaps it was for you, too.

Writing a congregational mission statement is a tedious exercise.  It’s never satisfying.  And almost always we craft a statement that says too much to be helpful and too little to be accurate.  A statement that’s awkward to recite, impossible to remember, and quickly put aside or posted on the website meant to be read but easy to ignore.   Sometimes we think the problem is that we argue too much about the commas and miss the meaning.  But I think the problem is actually deeper than that.

We keep being told by organizational experts that a Mission Statement is essential to the health of a congregation. That we can’t work as a community and we can’t expect new members to join our community unless we’re clear and explicit about what it is that we are gathered to do.

And then I finally realized why that’s a problem, and why writing mission statements for congregations must necessarily be a frustrating and unhelpful exercise.

It’s because Unitarian Universalist congregations aren’t gathered to do.  We’re gathered to be.

Mission statements want us to define ourselves by what we do together.  But Unitarian Universalist congregations are defined by our values, not by our actions.

A for profit corporation needs a mission statement.  “We make widgets!”  A non-profit organization needs a mission statement, “We serve free meals to hungry people!”  People need meals, and people need widgets, so it’s great that those organizations exist to serve those human needs.  But people need community, too.  People need a place to be together.  People need fellowship.  And there are a lot of lonely, needful, disconnected, or insufficiently connected people out there seeking community.  That’s why we’re here.  Not to do, but to be.

“How rare it is, how lovely, this fellowship of those who meet together.”

That’s our niche.  That’s our purpose.  Provide a community of shared values for people who need the rare and lovely gift of fellowship.

Once gathered into spiritual community, some of us might decide that we’d like to live out our values by getting together once a month to cook and serve a meal down at the homeless shelter.  That’s fantastic.  And some people in the larger community might see us doing that and say to themselves, “Wow, that’s the kind of people I want to be with.  I think I’ll join that church.”

But to be clear, what is attracting them to us is not our work at the homeless shelter, but the values of our community that they see expressed in our volunteering at the homeless shelter.  No one needs to join us because they want to volunteer at the homeless shelter.  They join us because they want to join our fellowship.

They join us because they want what we offer:  a community of shared values.  And then they find that one way they can deepen their connection to our community is by doing things with us: things like cooking and serving a meal once-a-month at the homeless shelter.

Lately, I get the feeling that many of our congregations have started to think that simply being together in community isn’t enough.  This emphasis on Mission Statements over the last couple of decades has confused us into thinking that the purpose of a spiritual community has to be something like the purpose of a non-profit charity or a political organization.

I remember back in the 90s when I joined Unitarian Universalism for the first time being told that our churches were too much like social clubs (as though social clubs were a bad thing!) and that we needed to get out and change the world.

That message attracted me.  Certainly, the world could use some changing.  Our congregations could be powerful forces for good.  And our congregations have done great work around justice issues like same-sex marriage and immigrant rights and so on.

But the world needs fellowships, too.  And there’s far too little fellowship available for most people.  How rare, how lovely, is a simple thing like fellowship.  There are lots of organizations dedicated to changing the world in specific and important ways.  Good for them.  You should support them in whatever way calls to you.

But specific social justice work doesn’t need to be our mission.  We should resist the idea that we must put doing at the center of our faith instead of being.  Instead of shunning the social club we should honor the spiritual gift and necessity of community.

The work of fellowship is good work.  Having fun together.  Sharing a potluck meal together.  Holding each other in compassion as we walk through our lives together.  Laughing together.  Making music and art together.  Reading a book together for the pleasure of a good story and sharing appreciation of the author’s beautiful writing and not always to be stirred up by the author’s political message.

Love is the doctrine of this church and love takes many forms.  

Sometimes it looks like “a gentle angry people singing together.”

Sometimes it looks like, “Three people on the floor, connected to each other by touch, [making] something like the word family.”

Sometimes love looks like, “I call that church free which brings individuals into a caring, trusting fellowship.”