Our identity as individuals stands in tension with our identity as members of communities. Likewise, our membership in a single community, like a church, stands in tension with our aspiration to be connected to all others. The American Philosopher Josiah Royce gave the name “Beloved Community” to this ideal community of all persons of good will. Martin Luther King later borrowed the phrase. Jesus might have called it, “The Kingdom of God.”
Welcome back, everyone. Welcome home.
Whether you have “traveled sea and mountain” or spent your summer close to home; whether you took the summer Sundays off from church, or were here, faithfully, every Sunday…
Welcome back.
Welcome home.
Welcome back to another year in the life of our spiritual community.
Welcome back, choir! We missed you!
Welcome back kitchen volunteers, and ushers, and volunteers in the tech booth.
Welcome back children. Welcome back old folks.
Welcome back, new members. Welcome back, members who joined so long ago you can’t ever exactly remember which year it was that you first stepped through our doors.
Welcome back, even you visitors today, who are here with us in person for the first time. Yes, welcome back. This is your home, too. In the sense that this sanctuary represents the human ideals of love, kindness, compassion, acceptance, freedom, justice, equality, and interconnectedness; the ideals we all seek for ourselves and others and feel intuitively are the birthright of every human person, I say welcome back: to the holy place you were born from, to the place you have longed for and been homesick for, welcome back, to the place you belong.
If you were here a few weeks ago, you heard me describe my intention for worship for this church year. The year that starts today.
My intention is to spend this year, which is my final year as your minister and also my final year in ministry, as I plan to retire after this year, to spend these final Sundays over the next ten months, contemplating the basic themes of spirituality that I’ve been addressing throughout my career.
For me, this year will be a year of looking back, and summing up. I’ve preached nearly a thousand sermons and homilies. What did I learn? And what will I take with me as I leave professional ministry and begin a new chapter of my life?
For you all, my goal is that this year would be an invitation and a challenge to you, to construct for yourself a spiritual foundation from the basic building blocks we’ll be exploring each Sunday.
Most of these topics won’t be new to you. But the nature of spiritual growth is not to proceed in a straight line, but to keep circling back and picking up, as we simultaneously go far, and go deep in our religious exploration.
These aren’t the kinds of topics where one comes to a final conclusion and then, satisfied, moves on to the next. Spiritual answers are always provisional. We say, “This is what I know now”. But we know, later, when I’m a little older, when I know a little more of the world, when I’ve had a new experience, when I’ve grown less attached to my ego. When being right seems less important than being curious. When the responsibilities of life loose some of their hold on me and I can be silly and playful and value humor and beauty for its own sake.
And when science discovers something we didn’t know before. And when a truth of human psychology is revealed to us. And when the world changes around us, as it does…
Well. we might need to go back to our spiritual foundations and check if any cracks have appeared.
Hopefully this will be that year for you: construction of a personal spiritual creed, or diligent maintenance and repair of your old one.
We begin, where I think we should, with the ultimate goal and gift of church: community.
This is the great and difficult lesson we learn when we become members of a church: how to live in community. Community building is the skill we need to navigate through relationships in every part of our life. Communities like ours are the antidote to the loneliness and isolation that so infect our contemporary society.
To be successful in community. To risk joining. To give yourself to something larger than yourself. To stick with it, when it gets uncomfortable. To keep reaching out. To keep inviting in. To have the courage to make ourelves vulnerable to others; and then, when we have found a group that we can trust and love, to allow our group to change by inviting still others to join us, so that our community can continue to grow and be an ever greater, ever challenging, blessing to ourselves and others.
Community is the first stone, the cornerstone of the foundation of a spiritual life.
So, I would place a sermon on community first in a series of spiritual basics just because it ought to go first, but the theme of community also fits well with the church calendar today as we celebrate our service of Ingathering.
In the Hebrew scripture, celebrating a festival of Ingathering is a commandment. Did you know that? Not one of the ten, but one of the 613 commandments in the Torah.
In the Book of Exodus, Chapter 23, Moses gives this word of God:
“Three times a year you are to celebrate a festival to me” (Ex. 23:14).
The first is the festival of Unleavened Bread, the Passover, which comes in March or April.
The second is the festival of the harvest of first fruits, which is the holiday of Shavuot, which comes in May or June.
And the third, in verse 16, is to “celebrate the Festival of Ingathering at the end of the year, when you gather in your crops from the field.” So Ingathering, in the Jewish tradition is a harvest festival. It is observed as part of the Sukkot holiday, usually in October.
But Ingathering is not just a harvest festival. The next line in Exodus is this, referring to the three commanded festivals: “Three times a year all the men are to appear before the Sovereign LORD” (Ex. 23:17).
So it is an ingathering of people, as well as a harvest of things. And it is a gathering together not just of the people to be with one another, but an assembly before God. A solemn occassion to reckon with our persons, our lives, our values, our goals. Ingathering brings us back to relationship with the highest parts of ourselves, to face again our ideals, to remind ourselves of the holy dimension of life. It’s a festival, but it’s not just a party.
I want us to think of our Ingathering Sunday as more than simply reconvening after our summer break. It’s more than coming together as friends. It is gathering as a spiritual community.
We gather in our church history. We gather in our UU tradition. We gather in our resources. We gather in our sacred texts and music and ritual. Like a harvest festival, we share what we have earned and achieved throughout the year, and remind each other how much we depend on others for our success. We gather in everything that can be helpful. We pour our individual waters into one bowl, from which we form the holy water we will use in ritual throughout the rest of the year.
When I speak of community. I don’t mean just a group of friends who casually agree to show up occasionally at the same place at the same time. I speak of a deeper meaning of community, which in Unitarian Universalism in recent years we have started to name as Beloved Community.
But we use the elevated name of Beloved Community in a casual sense that I think is misleading and misses the real power of what Beloved Community actually means.
We have a vague idea that Beloved Community just means that community where people remember to be especially nice to each other, and welcoming to strangers, and generous in their donations to the basket next to the coffee pot.
That’s nice. We should be that. But Beloved Community asks for something more.
If we’re familiar with the phrase Beloved Community from the works of Martin Luther King, we might be thinking of Beloved Community in the sense that he used it: the community of justice and equality that is achieved through the use of nonviolent tactics.
Dr. King used the phrase Beloved Community so often that you might think the term originated with him. But in just the way his phrase, “The arc of the universe is long but it bends toward justice” is actually taken from a nineteenth century Unitarian minister, Theodore Parker, Dr. King borrowed the phrase, “Beloved Community” from an earlier theologian.
In this case, the author was a man named Josiah Royce.
Royce was born in 1855 in Grass Valley, California. He graduated from UC Berkeley in 1875 and then studied philosophy at John Hopkins. He then came back to California and taught philosophy at Berkeley for a few years. That’s why there’s a Royce Hall at UCLA.
But California was far away from the intellectual centers of culture, so when Harvard had an opening to teach for a year while William James was on sabbatical, Royce took the job. He ended up staying at Harvard for nearly three decades. He died in 1916.
Royce began his philosophical work by thinking about the question, “how do we know that something is true?” How do we know that our mental impressions of the world around us actually correspond to the way things are really?
Royce saw that human minds, being finite, are prone to error. We can’t actually see everything we must see in order to know the truth, and what we do see, we are liable to misinterpret because of our individual or cultural biases. But when we are in error, we also, at the same time, have consciousness of the true thing. Such as, “I’m wrong about where I left my keys. But I know my keys exist. I just have imperfect knowledge of one aspect of them, their location.”
But to hold both an imperfect human knowledge and to hold a separate perfect knowledge simultaneously, implies, for Royce anyway, an Absolute Knower that we can connect with: a source of true knowledge, that overcomes the limitations of finite human perceptions.
I agree with Royce on this. And I believe the same thinking applies to any universal ideal. Justice, for instance. When I judge something as just or unjust, I feel I’m referencing a larger, universal justice. I may, actually, be misperceiving the true justice because of my individual or cultural biases, but at the same time I sense there is a true justice I want to apply.
What we mean by Justice, with a capital J, must be an absolute, ideal category, that applies to universally to all people in all situations.
At first, Royce imagined this universal consciousness as embodied in a single mind, like a God. But later, he came to the idea that universal consciousness didn’t require a mind separate from the rest of creation, rather, the universal consciousness could simply be built up from the collective perceptions of all existing conscious beings. A Universal Consciousness that we all form together and participate in.
This step in his thinking got Royce thinking about communities.
He observed that we usually think about individuals coming together to create a community. That is, we start from individuals, who then form communities. Royce thought that strong individualists of the nineteenth century like Emerson, or Whtiman had it backward. Royce saw that communities exist prior to individuals. When you’re born, you’re born into several communities: family, nation, language, religion. Adopting or rejecting those communities, is how you define you as an individual. Communities form individuals, not the other way around.
So communities are primary, for Royce, as they are for me. But not all communities are the same. It’s important that we join the right kinds of communities.
The common kind of community, though not very beneficial, is the kind of community that forms when people just randomly come together. Royce called these, “Natural Communities.” The people who happen to be in the same park on the same afternoon. Or the people who independently rent apartments in the same building.
The better sort of community is the kind of community where people come together around a common purpose, like a family, or a cause-based non-profit organizatio. Better than that, is a community where the common purpose is the intention to align our lives with the universal ideals: Truth, Justice, Liberation, Beauty, Love, and so on. Royce called these communities, “Communities of Grace.”
But a Community of Grace, like a church, like the Unitarian Universalist Church of Studio City, for instance, still has a limitation. Although we focus here on understanding and embracing the universal ideals, our church is actually quite small. Our community, including members and friends and visitors, barely includes a few hundred persons. To reach to the universal we need a larger community: the largest community.
So Royce imagined the final form of community as a spiritual community of communities, gathering not in person, but in the ideal realm, a community of all of the Communities of Grace, religious communities and other communities focused on communion with the Universal ideals. And to that community, Royce gave the name Beloved Community.
To be a member of the Beloved Community, requires more than simply being extra nice to each other, or enthusiastically welcoming to visitors, although we should do those things. Beloved Community isn’t really about our church and our culture; it’s about our community belonging to greater community.
The Beloved Community as Royce imagined it, requires more also than the social justice project that Dr. King described, which is the way the UUA uses that term. The tell is that the UUA talks about “building” the Beloved Community: a project that we achieve through our justice work. Royce would say you don’t build the Beloved Community, you join the Beloved Community: a pre-existing ideal community to which we align ourselves.
The aspiration is not to be a Beloved Community, but to join the Beloved Community. There’s only one. It’s a universal community. To join the Beloved Community, we focus our hearts and minds on the universal ideals, we feel ourselves a part of a community of all conscious beings willing ourselves toward the True, the Good, and the Beautiful.
And so I can say, Welcome back, even to those folks who have never been here before. Because here, meaning this location and these particular people, is not the point. We’re not here for this congregation alone, or for this church alone. As a member of the Beloved Community, we are here for the greatest, the highest, the best, the most, that has always included every one of us.
We celebrate the festival of Ingathering to remind ourselves of the eternal dimension of life that never lets us go. We have always been here. We have never stepped away. You have always been with us. You have always been a member of the Beloved Community.