The events of Pride month honor the inherent worth and dignity of every person. So too, does the UU ritual of flower communion, which we will celebrate today. Bring a flower to church that represents the colorful, wonderful, unique blossom you are, and, as we parade our individuality down the center aisle to our shared altar be prepared to lose yourself in a bouquet of beautiful community

            De Colores. All the colors.
            The colors of springtime flowers.
            The colors of people with darker and lighter skins.
            The colors of banners, pennants, streamers, plumes, and bandanas.
            The colors of the natural world around us.  The blue of sky.  The white or grey of clouds.  The spectrum of the rainbow.
            The different colors of our moods. The colors of the thoughts and opinions inside us. Our personalities.  Our talents.  Our interests.  Our passions.  As varied and as exciting as a color wheel.
“All the colors abound for the whole world around and for everyone under the sun.”

            Flower Communion is the Unitarian, now Unitarian Universalist holiday, created by the Unitarian minister Norbert F. Capek in 1923 for his congregation in Prague, that speaks to the glorious diversity of colors among the people of his church, and how, coming together, each individual flower swells the beauty of a fabulous bouquet.

            The individual flowers aren’t lost.  They stand separate and tall on their own stems drinking their own water.

            But together, side by side.  The blue beside the yellow next to the white near the red.  The long, the short, the narrow, the wide.  The bursting and boastful, the shy and closed.  The drooping the proud, the subtle, the showy.

            Together each individual flower shines in a way it cannot alone.  It stands out, because it’s unlike its neighbors.  But because all are flower, the individuals are not entirely foreign to each other.  And together they make a single bouquet.

We are a bouquet.  Each individual contributing to a collective show we couldn’t do alone, but which, also, couldn’t be completed without us.

            We’ve been talking for the last two months about the Seven Principles of our Unitarian Universalist faith.  A sermon for each principle.  I’ve preached on all seven, now, except for the last, which is the first in the series.  Our first principle:

            The inherent worth and dignity of every person.

            Officially, the Seven Principles exist as part of Article II of the bylaws of the Unitarian Universalist Association.

            Delegates to this year’s UUA General Assembly will be voting on an amendment to the bylaws that would replace the current Article II with new language.  If the vote passes, the Seven Principles would no longer have official status within Unitarian Universalism.  Of course, no one can prevent you from reciting them, but they will no longer show up in UU religious education curriculum, or publications from the UUA, or be understood any more to be the way that we define our faith.

            I think that would be a loss.

            And so, in advance of the vote later this June, I thought I’d take what may be one last look at the Seven Principles.  If you’re unfamiliar with our UU Seven Principles, they are printed in the front of the hymnal.

            I also wanted to tie each principle to some organization or initiative in the world beyond this congregation, as fulfillment of the fifth of the five tasks of interim ministry that we’ve been looking at this year.  We already looked together at history, leadership, mission and vision.  The fifth task is connections, which is the ways that a congregation is connected to systems and organizations of support beyond itself:  other UU congregations, interfaith congregations, community organizations and the Unitarian Universalist Association nationally.

            Taking the first principle last, allowed me to preach on the principle of inherent worth and dignity of all people in the month of June, Pride Month, when LGBTQ persons, and folks of all kinds, name and celebrate the enormous variety of ways that each of us has discovered to be fabulous.

            Watching you come down the aisle this morning with your flowers looked like a little gay pride parade of our own.

            There’s the yellow one.  And the pink one.  There’s the serious activist.  There’s the party girl.  There’s the reluctant one who came with their friends but would rather be having brunch.  The silly flowers.  The dancing flowers.  The jaded flowers.  The amazed flowers.  There are the flowers with something to celebrate.  There are the flowers with something still to prove.

            There’s the delicate flower overwhelmed and a little frightened by the crowd.  There’s the social flower loving the crowd.

            At every gay pride parade I’ve ever been to there’s always a handful of angry folks condemning the participants.  They call us sinners.  They shake their fists and clutch their Bibles.  The yell through megaphones, and shout through their hand-painted signs.  But they can’t drown out our fun.  They’re not powerful.  They’re sad.

            And, I’ve come to realize, that they’re part of gay pride, too.  Unwittingly, and a little awkwardly, they’ve become part of the event they’re protesting.  They are part of the crowd, with the drag queens, and the leather men, and the dykes on bikes, and the disco dancers on the back of the flatbed truck, and the corporate sponsors, and the PFLAG moms and dads.

            The rainbow is big enough to include all.  Somewhere in the spectrum there’s a color for them, too.  Another letter in the alphabet acronym.  

            We wave our rainbow flags for them, too, because the inherent worth and dignity of every person, means everyperson.  Because “De Colores” means, All the colors abound for the whole world around and for everyone under the sun.

            Because, in the words of the vision of Black Elk:

“I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that make one circle, wide as daylight and starlight”

The first time I went to a gay pride parade I was thrilled to be part of a crowd because for too long I thought I was the only one.  Thrilled to be with people who weren’t shy about proclaiming their affection for each other, and displaying their sexual orientation without shame.

This was the 1970s when the first gay pride parade had only been a few years back, when discrimination against gays and lesbians in employment and housing and so on was still the norm and still legal nearly everywhere.  This was the era of Anita Bryant and John Briggs.  Gays and lesbians were only at the beginning of visibility and working for our rights.  Harvey Milk had been elected San Francisco Supervisor in 1977 and assassinated in 1978.  I was 16 years old that year.  Marriage rights were unimagined.  Soldiers who were discovered to be gay or lesbian were quickly discharged.

As a teenager I felt isolated and I worried about my future.  I went to that gay pride parade eager to find people like me.  And the parade was thrilling, and very healing.

But here’s the thing.  When I got to my first gay pride parade, I didn’t find a crowd of people just like me.  I found a crowd of glorious diversity.  I found wonderful, fabulous people who, mostly, were nothing like me.  Big fantastic, personalities.  And quiet and shy types.  And folks I was intrigued by, and folks I wanted to stay away from.  Friendly folks.  Kind folks.  Self-involved folks.  Folks who looked like they had wandered in accidently.

The gay community wasn’t a mono-culture.  It included all types.  In fact, though there was no mistaking this was a gay event, if you looked behind the glitter and the sexy shorts and the flamboyant behavior and the dance music, you didn’t have to squint very hard to just see:  people.  Normal, diverse, people.

Many of them like me in some ways.  But nobody like me in every way.  And there were many who were very different from me, as different as anybody else would be.  In fact, except for the parade and the party, a crowd of people like any other crowd of people.

And I realized that, maybe not at that first parade, but over the next several years as I grew into myself, that a community of normally different people was actually what I wanted.  I didn’t want to be a special flower my entire life.  I wanted to be normal.  I wanted for my sexuality to be no more or less interesting, or defining of my person, than is my job, or my hobbies, or my taste in clothes, or my dance moves, or the books I like to read.

Isn’t that what we all want?  To be recognized as the special person we are, but not defined by our specialness.  To be defined by the inherent worth and dignity we all can claim, and which unites us all.

It came to me that the success of the gay rights movement would be achieved when being gay was boring.  Just like everyone else is boring.  And fabulous.  In just the way that everyone else is fabulous.

I didn’t want to be a fabulous flower standing alone in an isolated vase.  I didn’t want folks to talk about my difference as though I was something to fear, or praise for my unmatched beauty, or to protect because they think I’m so delicate.  I just wanted to be thrown into the bouquet with all the other flowers. 

And although it’s nice, now and then, to gather with other flowers of the same kind as myself, because that sort of arrangement also makes a beautiful bouquet, the kind of bouquets I really like, and really want to be a part of, are the eclectic mixes of a whole bunch of different flowers.  I’ll still be me, forever, as different and unique as I always am, inherently am, but surrounded by lovely flowers of every kind.

Each flower, whatever its color or shape, a flower of precious worth and admirable dignity.  Each one proclaiming its pride in being exactly what it is.  Perfect in being itself.  Unique and unrepeatable.  A gift to the world.  A gift to the vase.  A necessary fulfillment of the bouquet of all people.

“One circle, wide as daylight and starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree too shelter all the children of one mother and one father.  And I saw that it was holy.”

I’m going to ask you all, in just a moment, to complete our Flower Communion ritual by coming forward once again.

This time you’ll come forward without a flower, and you’ll approach an altar filled with beautiful flowers waiting for you.

When you come forward, in just a moment, I encourage you to feel not that you are empty-handed approaching abundance.  But that you are filled with the glory of the unique individual you are.  Display with pride your specialness.  Show off your inherent worth and dignity.

And when you come to the vases, select a flower, and lifting the flower from the vase, consider it to be a gift given to you by your congregation.  The flower contains the worth and dignity of someone else in this room.  Someone chose that flower, brought it to the church, and left it for you to find.  Their intention was to please you.  To give you beauty.  To brighten your day.

Before you leave the chancel and return to your seat, say a prayer of gratitude, gratitude for all these individuals, and all their individual gifts, and gratitude for this gathered community, that binds us as one, with strength and possibilities none of us have alone, and that gives to us the honor of recognizing our individual worth and dignity, and the blessing of belonging with others.