Life is tough. Life is challenging. The world around us feels uncertain. Our church asks much of us. In the midst of this anxiety, to experience spiritual qualities such as peace, serenity, or joy, is not to wait for a change in our outward circumstances but to claim them now within ourselves. The world will be what it will always be, but it can be a world of joy, if we let it. Our Stewardship Campaign begins today
We’re talking about Mission in the church for the past few weeks and for a few weeks more.
“What is the church for?” is the mission question. What are we here to do?
My answer is that a church is here to do many things, all arising from the primary, core, mission of a church, which is to build and sustain a community. What we choose to do with our community is a secondary mission. We aren’t here to do any one thing; we are simply here to be.
Those secondary missions of a church are our church programs. These are particular things that a church is well equipped to do, and to do well, and that meet perennial human needs.
We started with a look at worship, the perennial human need of regular connection with the transcendent. Our worship service facilitates that connection to the transcendent quality of life, suggests spiritual practices you might incorporate in your life that would allow you to have more regular transcendent experiences, and through sermons and other worship elements helps you make sense of the transcendent experiences you do have, and apply the insights from those experiences to the rest of your life.
Last week we looked at religious education, the perennial human need for growth and change in order to adapt to the evolving realities of our lives as we age from childhood through our adult and senior years, and to keep up with the ever-changing context of the world around us which demands ever-new responses to ever-new circumstances.
Today, I want to look at a third of our church program areas: fun.
Church should be fun.
People need fun.
We should give them fun.
The Funitarian Funiversalist Church of Studio City.
We sprinkle fun throughout all of our church life. Hopefully the worship service is fun, now and then. It’s fun to sing in the choir. It’s fun to play in the playground. I don’t know if anyone would guarantee that next week’s Congregational Meeting would promise a good time. But it might be fun.
Or maybe, we could make it fun.
And that’s the spiritual point I want to make about the perennial human need for fun.
Nobody can guarantee that life will be fun. Nobody can promise a good time in life. And the truth is, that very often, for very many people, life can be pretty awful. And for some people, at least some time, life is truly terrible.
Tragedy abounds. Disasters of all kind. Unbearable cruelty and suffering of many kinds. Whatever you have to say spiritually needs to recognize the real hardship and pain of life.
So I will sell you no pollyannish delusion that life is fun. No specious promises that everything will work out for the best, or God has a plan, or that everything conspires for the good.
That’s just not true. And it’s just not helpful when people are in the midst of suffering to tell them so.
People do suffer, which is why the church has another program response, pastoral care, that we will get to next week.
But setting aside that kind of intense, acute, pain. Not dismissing it, but acknowledging that those kinds of experiences in life are special and require a special response. What if we look at the more chronic, but very much less intense experiences of anxiety, worry, frustration, exasperation, aggravation and boredom of life?
You know, like a congregational meeting.
What do we do with that wispy cloud of darkness that we’re constantly walking around with?
I catch myself now and again, moving through my life, and just feeling angry all the time. I’m just angry. I’m angry at Donald Trump. I’m angry at Fani Willis. I’m angry at endless wars. I’m angry at our slow response to climate change. I’m angry at the guy on the electric scooter barreling down the sidewalk at me. I’m angry at the guy who broke the windows at my corner grocery store, or who tagged the wall with graffiti. I’m angry at people who don’t pay the subway fare.
And on and on, endlessly angry about everything. Tucker Carlson. Rats in the church kitchen. One more thing to deal with. One more problem to solve. One more barrier between me and my happiness.
And all of that anger, of course, completely useless. My dark cloud of negativity does no good for the world’s problems. And it does me no good, either.
If only we could solve the world’s problems by worrying about them! How happy we would all be.
But as my dark mood persists so do the world’s problems persist. I’m powerless to change the world. But you know, I do have the power to change me.
The barrier between me and my happiness isn’t the guy cheating the subway of $1.75, or the guy who leaves his wet clothes in the washing machine in my apartment’s laundry room for hours after the machine is done: the barrier is me.
I’m the one standing between me and my happiness. It’s me.
I could, you know, untether that dark cloud that I’m dragging around with me, and let it float off and dissipate in the sunshine. It’s tied to me. I could undo the knot.
I don’t have the power to change the world. Or not much power, anyway, although we shouldn’t discount the power we have, or fail to do what we can. But my anxiety does nothing to lower the cost of housing in Los Angeles, so why not give it up?
Well, you might say, ignoring the world’s problems won’t solve them either.
And you’re right. Which is to say neither my worrying nor my not worrying will solve the world’s problem. I lose either way. And when you’re invited to play a game where you lose either way the best option is not to play.
So I choose not to play. Or rather, I choose to play instead of worry. Not to ignore the world’s problems but not to worry about them. Not to be angry about them. I choose to let the dark cloud lift. I choose to untwist the scowl from my lips. I choose to unclench the tightness in my chest.
My dad sent me a text last week. Using my dad’s personal nickname for Trump he texted, “Think about the first 10 days of fatso in office.”
Nope, dad. Not going to go there. Not going to think about that. Not going to imagine a Trump Presidency. I’m going to relax. I’m going to vote in the primary. I’m going to enjoy my day.
The world’s problems continue of course. But in the geography of pain, I set the problems of the world over there, and I clear the path between myself and happiness.
We sang this morning, “Let it be a dance.”
The hymn doesn’t say life is a dance. That would be a betrayal of the truth-telling that’s required of an healthy spirituality. The hymn says, “Let it be a dance.”
Life could be a dance. Maybe even life wants to be a dance. If we let it. We should let it.
“Through the good times and the bad times, too, let it be a dance.”
Jim and I went to see a couple of dance concerts this last week.
Sunday afternoon we went to see a dance group at the Music Center made up of 30 dancers from 14 different African countries. Wonderful dancers. They performed two works. The first was a dance for just two older women, each in their 70s. One was a Senegalese woman considered to be “the mother of contemporary African dance.” The other was a woman who had performed many of the leading roles as a founding member, 50 years ago, of the Tanztheater Wuppertal company of Pina Bausch.
The piece they danced, which they choreographed themselves, was called, “Common Ground(s)”. The women ritually moved about the stage engaging and assisting each other, and at one point spoke outloud to each other recalling the ways their personal histories had intersected, one African, one European, both dancers. It was touching and beautiful: a piece about turning the good times and the bad times, too, of life, into dance.
The second piece on the program was The Rite of Spring, music by Igor Stravinsky from a hundred years ago, with choreography by Pina Bausch from 1975.
The Rite of Spring is a blazing classic of modern music. Originally composed for the Ballet Russes of Diaghalev and choreographed by Nijinsky, the ballet depicts a primitive Russian springtime ritual in which a tribe commands a young woman to force the season to change from winter to spring by dancing herself to death.
The work is incredibly powerful, both the music and the dance. It’s fierce. And it’s frightening. This is no jitterbug or waltz. It’s dance that stomps, and falls, and crawls. It’s flat feet, not point shoes. There are extravagant, risky leaps and catches. And the dance is emotionally astute. The pressure of the crowd. The demands of tradition. The helplessness of an individual against the power of the tribe, and the helplessness of the human tribe against the power of nature.
And yet it is dance.
The response is to dance. The response is to fling oneself against the fear and the danger and the cold of a Russian winter, and to dance.
The program note for the ballet asked, “How would you dance, if you knew you were going to die?”
That is the question for the young woman chosen to be the sacrifice. That is the question that Pina Bausch asked herself when she choreographed the dance in 1975.
But isn’t that also a question that all of us, who are going to die someday, might ask ourselves? As we choreograph the movement of our lives, “How would you dance, if you knew you were going to die?” How should we dance?
Life isn’t always fun.
But people need fun.
Life isn’t always fun.
But in the good times and the bad times, too, we can choose to respond with gladness. We can make our fun, whatever the conditions outside. Our joy belongs to us; the world’s problems cannot dim our inner light. Let it be a dance.
The other dance program Jim and I saw this week was Thursday evening at Cal State LA. The Compania Nacional de Danza, from Madrid did a program of three works.
The first, to music by Phillip Glass, told a story through ballet of the homogenization of modern society and the courage of individuals to declare their own way. The second piece was riotous modern dance set to several pieces of Mambo music. That was fun. The third was a sad story of relationships disintegrating accompanied by beautiful music.
Isn’t this life, this dance of sorrows and joy? Ballet followed by Mambo. Heartbreak, followed by success. Next week we’re going to see a ballet based on Romeo and Juliet, where both the young woman and the young man die in the end. Drama and ignorance and warring families. New love, the struggle of the individual, and then a company of young people dancing a Mambo, and then two grandmothers moving about an empty stage searching for common ground.
The mission of the church is to be a company of dancers.
We dance together through life, the good times and the bad times, too.
“May I have this dance with you?”
And when it’s winter outside, we make fun inside. We make a pot of coffee. Someone brings a cake. We throw a party. We learn some songs and have a cabaret. We decide to read a book together because it’s fun to gather as a group of friends and hear each other talk. We have lunch together. We playfully joke, and tease. We sing together. We laugh while we work together in the kitchen, or in the garden.
Here’s a mission statement for a church, read by Joyce Fidler as our Call to Worship this morning:
“May we be reminded here of our highest aspirations, and inspired to bring our gifts of love and service to the altar of humanity. May we know once again that we are not isolated beings but connected, in mystery and miracle, to the universe, to this community and to each other.”
One leaps, another catches.
One reaches, another turns back.
One bends, another responds.
Not isolated beings but connected, a company of dancers.
Dancing because we cannot change the world but we can choose our steps. It’s fun to dance. Even when the music is sad. Even when the story is hard and you know how it ends. “Everybody turn and spin, Let your body learn to bend.”
Let it be a dance.