Our church community keeps growing! We’ll enjoy a look back at this past church year, the kids will share some of what they’ve learned, parents will share some of their own learnings, and we’ll thank all the folks who have come together to help our youngest UUs grow in faith and community. Rev Rick anchors this service with his inspiration.
We begin this morning, and for the rest of June, a series of Sundays looking back at the year we’ve had together, raising up our accomplishments, celebrating the people that made it possible, putting a good end to this year, so we can have a good beginning of the next.
It makes sense, then, at this first Sunday of the last Sundays of the church year to look back to where we began. Back at the beginning of the church year in September. Back to the first Sunday after Labor Day, when the program year begins, which we mark in our Unitarian Universalist liturgical calendar as a holiday called, “Ingathering” and which we honor with a ritual called water communion.
At Ingathering, as we bring our bodies back to church, maybe after taking some time off over the summer, as we reform our church community, as we reaffirm our religious values, and set our intentions for the coming year, we also take individual cups of water and pour them together into a common bowl.
We name water as a symbol of how that which can become separated can be re-combined, that which is sent out, comes back together: changing shape, now here, now there. That which is formed can be reformed, circulating through diverse disguises: ice and cloud, and rain and river, lake and ocean, sweat and tears. And through every transformation, eternally retaining its essential nature, and universally connecting all the earth.
Here is some of that ceremonial water we poured and prayed over, collected and saved to be used in ritual throughout the year.
The physical nature of water, and the physical places it travels: sky and snow and stream and sea, makes it easy to think of the connection water represents in the horizontal direction, touching all existence everywhere, in the here and now.
Harder to remember is that water also connects all times in the vertical dimension. Ancient waters, primitive waters. In last weeks worship service, the words of Langston Hughes, reminded us that the rivers of time move through us still: “I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans.”
Think of Ullysses sailing the Mediterranean. John the Baptist standing in the Jordan. The South Seas peoples launching canoes into the vast Pacific and finding new islands. Crocodiles in the Nile. Lotus flowers in the Ganges. The ancient sea that covered the U.S. from Texas to Montana in the Cetaceous period and allows us to find seashells in Utah to this day.
Our human connection is everywhere and every when.
Water reminds us of that.
Church should remind us of that, too.
In the words of Jules Jaramillo that Norman Goss read for us as our Call to Worship this morning: “This morning, we gather together to worship as a community of all ages.”
That probably made you think of the different ages of human life: kids and adults, young adults, seniors. A community of all ages. We are that. The age diversity in our congregation is something to celebrate as we show off our success in re-creating a children’s religious education program after having lost it during the pandemic.
But as water reminds us, a church is not just a community of this time, a church is a community of all time. Not just a community of this age, but, in the words of Jules Jaramillo, “a community of all ages.”
When we look back at a year just passed, we are looking at merely the uppermost layer of community that reaches far, far back. The three years of this interim. The several decades that some of us have been members. The nearly eighty-two years since our church’s founding in 1943. The founding of the American Unitarian Association, exactly two hundred years and six days ago on May 26, 1825. The Universalist Church of America founded a few years before that. The Unitarians in England, and Transylvania, and Poland, and Italy. The Unitarians and Universalists in early Christianity. All people of every age, who created community around a spirit of love, a quest for truth, a call to service, an ethic of fellowship. The peace-makers. The knowledge-seekers. They are our community, too.
Religious education is the task of hefting that glorious legacy from our past onto our own shoulders, and then gently gifting it to our children, piece by precious piece. It is their inheritance from the wisdom of the ages. It is their headstart in this world, that allows them to explore further because we’ve already traveled this far down the path.
Education is an essential religious function, both for children and adults. We want our children to explore on their own: this is a new world, and they are new people. But we also want them to know the part of their community that belongs to the ages. Instead of re-discovering what the community already knows, let this truth we share with you allow you to ask the next set of questions. Here is the gift of a community of all ages: a recent past that is ours, and a longer ago past that we also had to be taught. Here’s the past you won’t know, unless we teach it to you. A history of ideas, and institutions, and people. The Unitarian Universalist community your life emerges from. The Unitarian Universalist community your life will expand.
The love and care of one generation for the next, means setting them up on a secure base, a tower of the ages that already stood tall before we added the newest floors, and allows our children to build even higher on our foundation. Let us celebrate the lives these children will make beyond ours, and let us teach them to revere the community of all ages that brought us to today.
“Oh, we give thanks for this precious day, for all gathered here, and those far away.” Thank you, we say to those far away in every distant corner of the earth. Thank you, we say to those far away in every distant age of our history. For this day, and every day that was precious in its time and is precious to us now, oh, we give thanks, for all are gathered here.