The spiritual question of identity, refers both to the personal question, “Who am I?” and the broader question of humanity, “Who are We?” We are self-defined as individuals, with gifts and characters of our own, and we are defined by belonging within networks of relationships. For our service of Ingathering we recognize that one answer to the question of Identity is that we are the particular group of people who choose to be with us on this day.
Thinking about Ellen Anderson this morning, it feels as though we’re one short, aren’t we?
There’s a hole in our community.
There’s a place where Ellen ought to be.
She ought to be here.
This isn’t the community that gathered last week.
Something’s off. Someone is missing.
In one sense, Ellen feels very much among us still. Spiritually, she’s all around us. In our hearts and minds. Her presence fills this room: in our memories, of course, but in this time, too: she’s here not just in the way we remember here fro, last week, she’s here today.
Without seeing her physically, it’s undeniable, her presence is everywhere you look.
But, physically she’s gone. She was here with us in person, just last week, and now, we know, she isn’t, and can no longer be.
We’ve suffered a loss. The fabric of our community has been torn. Leaving a tear with ragged edges. The wound we suffer, feels raw and real.
We share the pain of her family and friends. We sorrow with them. And we sorrow for ourselves as well. She was our friend, too. She was our family, too. She was a member of this church, a member of our community. She congregated with us for decades. Our congregation is different, now, and will be forever different as we go on.
For now, we must be tender about the wound her absence makes. The wound stings if we touch it. The hurt is present and sharp. We step gingerly around the hole in our community. We look with bewilderment at the ragged edges of the tear and wonder if we’ll ever be able to tightly sew our brokenness together again.
Today, is the holy day in the Unitarian Universalist liturgical calendar called Ingathering.
The Sunday after Labor Day marks the first day of our church year.
The old year ended, last Sunday. A new year begins today.
We celebrate today with a service that welcomes back far-flung folks who may have been traveling over the summer. “[Blown] about with the winds of Summer” as Patricia Shutee writes.
Whether we went away on holiday or not, the church year has a different feel over the summer. We close our church year in June, typically with some celebratory services that honor the work we’ve done together. We approve a budget and elect new leaders at a congregational meeting. And then we give ourselves a couple of months of rest and some time to prepare, before the new church year begins in September.
Well that’s the plan, anyway.
This church had an unusual year last year. Last church year, you began in turmoil, is that the right word? Conflict? Mishagosh? You suffered the sudden resignation of your minister in October. You welcomed a new Music Director. You lost your Office Administrator in January. Your lay leadership changed when your Board President resigned and left the church, in April. Lay leaders stepped up to take over the job of arranging worship. You put together a Search Committee for an Interim Minister. You continued the work of reckoning with the past through your Healthy Congregations work.
All of that amid the context of a global pandemic that completely disrupted society and was especially hard on institutions like churches whose mission is defined by bringing people together for programs that include physical touch, communal meals, public speaking, and congregational singing.
It’s been a tough year.
I don’t need to tell you all the details, you know them better than I.
But it is important to say the facts aloud. And to say them from the pulpit.
You cannot heal from a wound you don’t acknowledge. The broken leg won’t mend itself, unless you admit it’s broken and accept the help you need to set it right.
There’s a phrase I often use in pastoral care, when I’m listening to someone’s story of suffering through bad news. I say, and I hope I don’t offend anyone, “that sucks.”
When something sucks, I think it’s helpful to say so.
I think it’s helpful for the person I’m consoling to know that their minister isn’t going to try to spiritualize their pain with some empty theology about God’s mysterious ways, and how everything happens for a reason, and we’re never given more than we can bear, and so on.
When we’re in the midst of our pain, if we’re feeling the hurt, or the injustice, if we’re angry, or afraid, it’s OK to just have that feeling. Own up to where we really are. I like to say that one of the spiritual gifts of Unitarian Universalism is that we are a reality-based religion. So if you feel hurt, or mad, or sad, embrace the bad feeling for now, knowing the time will be right eventually to let it go. But only after we’ve really felt what we need to feel. That’s the pastoral thing to do.
You all had a sucky year. As Queen Elizabeth once said, when she had a particularly bad year, one year, you had an “annus horribulus”. Which sounds better than a sucky year, because it’s in Latin, but it means the same thing.
So today, then, the first day of a new church year, might be met with some relief. The annus horribulus is over. We won’t have to go through that again. Here’s a chance for a fresh start.
And yet we know, the past lingers. We will need to do some deliberate work over the Interim period to make sure our feelings are felt, and expressed not merely dismissed. We need to make sure that all we need to say gets said. That we apologize and forgive. That we analyze what happened and together create the systems and structures that will help us prevent it happening again.
But the old year is done. The past is not over, but it is receding. We’re not in the midst of it, in the way we were. There is space opening up. And today, especially, on the first day of a new year, we can look forward to a calendar that is clear, practically, and spiritually.
And so, at this year’s Ingathering service, we have the opportunity to think not only how we regather as a community for this new year, but how we will re-make ourselves as a church, this year.
Who will we be? What will we do? And why does it matter?
Those, of course, are the three spiritual questions that we will be looking at together all this year. Identity, Purpose, and Meaning.
Who am I? and who are we?
What should we do with our lives, and what should we do together as a spiritual community?
And why does it matter? What or who are we accountable to in the choices we make? Why be good? Why be kind, or fair, or just? Who cares what we do in our lives? Does it matter if our church is here, or not, healthy, or not, for ourselves alone, or for others?
One way to answer the question of identity, “who are we?” is to say, we are the people who are the members of this church.
When we welcomed new members two weeks ago, I spoke a little about the meaning of membership, and why being a member of a church is spiritually distinct from being a friend of the church.
Members of a church have invested themselves in the life of the community in a way that makes them responsible and accountable. Their greater commitment comes with greater rewards, and greater risks, too. Members step fully into the church. They make themselves vulnerable to the challenges of being in community, and anyone who has been a member of this community for awhile, or even for just last year, knows the challenges. Members might get hurt, in ways that folks who hang out at the edge of the community don’t. And the further you get toward the center of the community, such as by stepping in to a leadership position, the more you make yourself vulnerable to carrying the pain of the community.
That’s enough for some people to decide it’s better to hang out by the church door and not come in any further, or to scurry away from the nominating committee when they come calling. But by accepting the risk of membership, by opening oneself to the fulness of the community, a member is also able to reap the full rewards of the church. Deep relationships. Real intimacy. Those experiences of collective joy you can really share, because you’re really a part of the community. Those moments of shared suffering that break one’s heart but can also lead to new strength and joy beyond your own power.
Isn’t the spiritual task to embrace life fully: to “grow a soul” in the words of the Unitarian minister A. Powell Davies? You can’t enter life from just the joyful side. You have to dive in to the middle of life. And as far as you want to reach toward beauty, and truth, and joy on one side, necessarily you must touch the darker realities of life on the other. You needn’t dwell there, but you can’t truly live life while denying half of it.
Members do that. They don’t retreat from it. They work through it. And they own the liberation when we reach it.
So one could say our identity as the Unitarian Universalist Church of Studio City, is the membership list. Here we are. This is us. This is who we are.
But that falls a little short of who I think we really are.
Membership lists are notoriously problematic. Is this person who signed the book but never came again really a member? Should this couple that moved to Illinois three years ago but still subscribes to the newsletter and maybe sends a check once a year still be classified as members? What about that person fully invested in the community who has some personal reason for not wanting to sign the membership book?
When I was the minister of the Los Angeles church, we used to tell the story that in the 1950s during the McCarthy era the church was widely suspected of being communist sympathizers. And frankly they probably were. We did invite members of the black-listed writers, the Hollywood Ten, to preach from the pulpit. The minister of the church was investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Plain-clothed FBI agents attended Sunday services just to keep tabs on what was being said. Imagine if you were staffing the greeters table on a day one of those guys showed up! “Can I make a nametag for you, Agent so-and-so?”
So for many years the church didn’t keep a membership list just so Joe McCarthy couldn’t get a hold of the list and accuse someone of being a member of a communist organization.
So who’s a member of a church and who’s a member on the membership list, isn’t always the same thing.
And even when there is a list, and it’s accurate, the membership is always changing.
New members joined us just two weeks ago, who weren’t with us at last year’s Ingathering.
Ellen Anderson was with us last year, but isn’t here today.
In our Call to Worship, Patricia Shuttee assured us, “Today, we are together in gladness, once more the special community that we call our church.”
But we aren’t the community that we were last year, or even last week.
If we are a special community, today, that community can only be defined by the people who have chosen to be here today, in this room, and joining us online. This community. Today.
Maybe you’ve been here a thousand times before. Maybe today is your first time in this community. Maybe today is the only time you’ll be here. Maybe you’re a member, or a friend, or a guest, here for the music, or here for the quiet, or here for the sermon, or here just because you heard there was free coffee available after the service.
Who we are, is the community gathered here today.
This is us. There is no past, no future. There is no Herb Schneider founding the church nearly 80 years ago. There is no Channing, Emerson, or Thoreau. There is no Job Dober, Sue Spencer, Jay Atkinson, Darrell Richey, or Hannah Petrie. There are no beloved ones from long ago: those we cherished, those we relied on, those who passed in and out so quickly we hardly knew them. And there is no one here today of that number who have yet to find us, whose first day with our faith is yet to come, maybe next week, or the week after, or 80 years from today.
In this one day, in this one morning, in this one moment, we are the special community of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Studio City. We are the people charged with representing this Unitarian Universalist faith. It’s only us. We’re all we got.
Anything we need to do at our church today: speak and sing, teach and learn, inspire, respond, comfort, heal, and challenge, and work to lead and prepare for our future, we are it. These people around you and with us online, are the tools we have. This is the community that will accomplish all the church does today.
We will move this community forward by one more Sunday
We will set the spirit of this church for the church year ahead of us.
We will welcome the stranger.
We will bind up the broken.
We will celebrate life and acknowledge death.
We will connect with the principles of our faith, and re-affirm them in our hearts and in this community once again, for today.
We will confront the reality of this day.
In a church community it isn’t any one of us who “goes the distance” in the words of the anthem John Bergquist sang for us this morning.
None of us were here at the beginning of the community. I daresay none of us will be here at the end either.
Any person who joins, in the words of Patricia Shutee, “A community of ages that sings its songs, tells its thoughts, asks its questions, and searches together with courage and with love,” must learn to travel two pathways at once: the path of “Who am I?” and the path of “Who are we?”
One is the hero’s journey where we grow a soul, and come to the glory, hopefully of knowing ourselves truly and being the gift to creation we were born to be.
The other journey is the journey of community. Our collective work depends on people who got something started before we showed up. It depends on the people around you, and all of us willing to put the institutional goals before our personal preferences. It depends on meeting the challenge of blending all our voices into one mighty chorus and making a beautiful sound together. If you think that’s easy you should be here for choir rehearsal on Tuesday evenings.
The work of community is not easy. But friends, it is so rewarding to try. It is, in fact, everything. It is our purpose as social animals. It is our goal as Unitarian Universalists striving toward “world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all.” “We would be one” as our choir sang for us earlier today. “We would be one in living for each other to show to all a new community.”
And friends, there are no other people I would rather do this work with than you. You, each blessed individual who showed up today, and you, all of you, who have gathered yourselves in to be this special community, on this special day.