Churches measure time differently: not in years, or fads, or decades, or generations. We’re here for the long haul, longer even than human lifetimes. When the church says, “We will get through this” that’s a promise.
OPENING WORDS, #435 Kathleen McTigue
We come together this morning to remind one another
To rest for a moment on the forming edge of our lives,
To resist the headlong tumble into the next moment,
Until we claim for ourselves awareness and gratitude,
Taking the time to look into one another’s faces
and see there communion: the reflection of our own eyes.
This house of laughter and silence, memory and hope,
is hallowed by our presence together.
HOMILY “Church Time” By Rev. Hoyt-McDaniels
- Two kinds of church time
Church Spiritual Time
Be in the moment
The first part of our Opening Words:
“We come together this morning to remind one another
To rest for a moment on the forming edge of our lives,
To resist the headlong tumble into the next moment,
Until we claim for ourselves awareness and gratitude,
Taking the time to look into one another’s faces
and see there communion: the reflection of our own eyes.”
Church Institutional Time
The church as a body that exists through decades
Beyond generations or human lifetimes
Eventually even through centuries.
The second part of our Opening Words:
“This house of laughter and silence, memory and hope,
is hallowed by our presence together.”
Memory and hope connecting to past and future.
- Both kinds of church time are helpful for our current situation.
Be here now.
To rest for a moment
Claim awareness
Claim gratitude.
The blessing of this day.
The gift of life
not forever but for now.
Not what belongs to the past: (Regret, Shame, fantasies of what might have been)
Nor what belongs to the future: (Fear, Anxiety)
the pressure we feel to control what cannot be controlled.
The spiritual time we learn at church is just
To be here,
Just this hour
Breathing
Pausing
And although that is always good spiritual advice
It can sometimes be hard to remember
But now, it’s as though the whole world is telling us to
Pause
Live in this moment
Love what’s right in front of you (not across town)
Love what’s right now (not what we had a month ago and had to give up)
(not what might be a month from more, and we cannot know)
To “claim awareness and gratitude”
So church spiritual time is a precious gift of healing for our frantic lives
“to resist the headlong tumble into the next moment”
- And church institutional time.
The church exists through long expanses of time.
It’s another way for us to connect to “the something larger than ourselves”
Which is the basis of all spirituality.
It’s another way for us to expand our community
In the vertical, rather than horizontal dimension
I feel connected to the great men and women of our past
Channing, Emerson, Parker, Margaret Fuller, Clara Barton
Harvest the Power: Francis David, Giorgio Biandrata.
Longer ago: Arius and Origen
Christian roots – Jewish Roots connecting us to past centuries.
All of that is ours.
We are connected to a vast movement of people
Each asking the same questions we ask,
“Who are We? What should we do? And Why Does it Matter?”
And asking those questions and finding new answers through an incredible variety of circumstances. Some very difficult.
And always learning and passing on what they learned.
The Board meeting last week we asked
Who should be a UU Saint?
Waitstill Sharp
Unitarian Service Committee
1939 – Checkoslovakia
Eventually Portugal
Kathleen McTigue, currently working with the UUSC
- And in our own closer in but still long history of UUCLB
We’ve been through:
World War I
The influenza epidemic of 1918
The Depression
The Long Beach Earthquake of 1933
World War II
Civil Rights
And Vietnam
The AIDS Crisis of the 80s
September 11, 2001
And at every challenge we learned
And sometimes we had to change how we did church
And we got through it
And here we are
Every generation at church is responsible for taking the hand off from the previous generation
Nurturing and growing the church for the time we are the active members
And then handing off the church to those who come after.
Now is our time.
This is our challenge
I feel up to the challenge
I have faith in our church today to adapt as we need to
To learn what we need to.
To get us through this.
And not only to get each of us as individuals, through this
But to get the church as an institution through this.
This is a house of memory and hope
Hallowed by our presence together
CLOSING WORDS, #693 V. Emil Gudmundson
And now, may we have faith in life to do wise planting that the generations to come may reap even more abundantly than we. May we be bold in bringing to fruition the golden dreams of human kinship and justice. This we ask: that the fields of promise become fields of reality.