Past Services

by Rev. David Usher

Invocation

Robbie Walsh writes:

Some say we get what we deserve in life, but I don’t believe it.  We certainly don’t deserve J S Bach for example.  What have I done to deserve the Second Brandenburg Concerto?  I have not been kind enough; I have not done enough justice; I have not loved my neighbor, or myself, sufficiently; I have not praised God enough to have earned a gift like this.

Life is a gift we have not earned and for which we cannot pay.  There is no necessity for there to be a universe, no inevitability about a world moving towards life and then self-awareness.  There might have been – nothing at all.

Since we have not earned J S Bach – or friends, or crocuses – the best we can do is express our gratitude for the undeserved gifts, and do our share of the work of creation.

Good morning and welcome to this service at the Unitarian Universalist Community of the Mountains, a time for us to express our gratitude for all of life’s undeserved gifts,  and to do our share of the continuing work of creation, the continuing work of building a society and a world in which all may enjoy Bach or the Beatles or the Boomtown Rats, in which all are free to be who they are.  I am the Rev. David Usher, Interim Minister until the summer when, we all hope, your next settled ministry will begin.

We strive to be a community of open minds, loving hearts and helping hands.  We welcome you regardless of your race, your gender, your economic or educational status or whom you love and how you express that love.  I trust you all have the sheet of paper which lists the activities and programs of this coming week.  If you have any questions about any of them, please don’t be shy about asking.  Join us for refreshments and conversation in the Alcott Room, at the end of the corridor, after the service.

As has become the custom in Unitarian Universalist communities around the world, we light a chalice, and as I do so, I invite you to say the words of affirmation printed on the screen in front of you.

Sermon

That speech of Dr King’s, standing before the Lincoln Memorial on that hot August day more than half a century ago, must surely rate as one of the greatest speeches in American history.  To this day, one needs only say the four words, “I have a dream” and instantly, the world identifies the reference.  It was a speech, full of hope and vision and determination, given at a time of great fear and uncertainty, in which King could not have known what the future would bring.

Fifty plus years on, in many ways the racial landscape in this country has changed.  And in many ways, frustratingly, it has remained stubbornly the same.  African Americans do have the right to vote though, outrageously, many States are actively trying to make it as difficult as possible for them to do so.  African Americans are no longer pummeled by water hoses as they gather in the street or savaged by police attack dogs though they continue to be the the disproportionate victims of unchecked and unpunished police brutality and violence.  Do you know that more African Americans were killed by police in 2015 than ever were lynched?  It was only now that Black Lives Matter had to become a rallying cry.

African Americans are no more likely to commit criminal acts, yet are much more likely to be incarcerated as a way of feeding the lucrative prison industrial complex that makes white businessmen rich.  This might be a country whose President had a black father, but it still is not a country in which discrimination against blacks is not rife.  Regardless of whether you agree with his politics, he has been subjected to more personal abuse than any President before him.  Do you remember, ten or so years ago, when the music group, The Dixie Chicks, made a disparaging throwaway comment about George W Bush?  They were pilloried as traitors for their disrespect for the Presidency by the indignant hard right, the very hard right which now is unreserved in what it says about the Presidency because the President is black.  The country about which King dreamed remains largely a dream, an elusive distant vision, something for which there is, still, much much waking work to do.

How much more tempting it is to venerate King as a great man, back then, than to think that we are called to our own greatness now.  How much easier to think that praising heroes of the past excuses us from heroism in the present.  As Carl Wendell Hines writes:

Now that he is safely dead

Let us praise him

Build monuments to his glory

Sing hosannas to his name

Dead men make

Such convenient heroes: They

Cannot rise

To challenge the images

We would fashion from their lives

And besides,

It is easier to build monuments

Than to make a better world.

So, now that he is safely dead

We, with eased consciences

Will teach our children

That he was a great man…knowing

That the cause for which he lived

Is still a cause

And the dream for which he died

Is still a dream

A dead man’s dream…

Dr Martin Luther King Jr had a dream.  Do you?  Do you have a dream of what might yet be?  Do you have a dream, or perhaps it is more a haunting vision, of what you might yet be.  Do you have a dream of what it would look like for us, truly, to be color blind?

I invite you to think about what your dream might be.  You might not be as eloquent as Dr King, who of us ever could be, and you don’t have forty five minutes to express your dream even if you were, but if you do have a dream, then please come forward and write it on a 3×5 card and place it in the bowl.  What might that dream look like?  Would it be about the release from prison of so many African American men deliberately profiled and targeted?  Would it be about an education system which was not so divided in quality along racial and economic lines?  Would it be about housing or employment, access to welfare or voting rights?

You might also add something you think needs to be done, something you personally could do, to help make that dream real.  It might be something political, to be worked towards in the public sphere, or it might be some work you need to do on yourself.  What lingering prejudices hinder your true openness to equality?  What fears, what reluctances, what shames do you harbour?

Don’t put your name to your card.  While you are contemplating what your dream of racial equality and justice might look like, and how to move towards its fulfillment, there will be a time of music, and when it seems that everyone has come forward who wants to, I will read out what is written on some of the cards.

Reading the cards

Let us join in a time of shared prayer and meditation

Spirit of Love and Justice, infuse us with a vision of who and how we might be together in community that honors all people, that respects all people, that includes all people, that refuses to relegate some to the margins of opportunity or dignity.  And with that vision, infuse us also with the passion which will sustain us through the sometimes dark, disconsoling nights as we work towards such community.  May we not grow discouraged or complacent, may our comfort not weaken our resolve to ease the pain of others; may the fact that we have a place at the table of abundance not blind our eyes or block our ears or harden our hearts to the cries of those who are excluded.

May we all have a dream; may it be our inspiration and our consolation, that which goads us to action and comforts us in our rest, may our hearts be filled with the dream; and in our waking hours, our hands work steadfastly for its fulfillment.

Dreams written by congregants

That all people be treated equally regardless of race or all of those other things we judge.

I have a dream that the people in this country of African American descent would attend our UU community and find the acceptance and love that is here for them.

love my enemies.

All people will express loving kindness to all in their daily lives.

Remove barriers to job training and employment for people with prison or arrest records.

I dream that our country will one day invest more money in education than in war.

My dream is to be active in curtailing police surveillance locally, especially in regard to the new edict against medical marijuana.

Education for everyone who wants it – free.

That we will know what racism really looks like.

An end to wars that target people of color.

Education for all that is free.

I have a dream of the education of all children in American be based in the principle of citizenship – where laws and rules are made to ensure the fair treatment of all.

We have a woman President in my lifetime now that we have had a black President.

I dream of an end to global warming, all of the “isms”, economic inequality, violence, hunger and disease.  I dream of peace, justice and music for all.

I dream that al children will be encouraged to think for themselves and to ask questions.

I dream of a world of people so blended that no-one can place them in categories.

Peace and justice for all on this earth – and that my own heart be fully opene to all.

I dream that my nieces, nephews and future grandchildren will know the joy of friendship with children of all colors and nations; black, brown, purple, near and far.

That rising above isn’t relative to another.

That we greet one another with a smile and an open heart of love.

Shape justice at UUCM.

The dream that I might grow into the person who stands in courage and raises a voice to injustice rather than falls in the safety of passivity.

We and they become one together.

I will find a form of advocacy that feels productive and possible for me to help others.

Environmental justice: a clean world where some are not forced to live in unhealthy areas.

I have a dream that our politics can be based on facts and rationality so that we can work together on solutions to our many problems.

Unfortunately, nothing we do will be effecting long term – unless we control global warming.

That people will learn to listen to others’ opinions without prejudice and pre-conceived opinions.  To find compromise to problems and issues.

I have a dream to rest from strife and striving and to let myself and those around me experience the goodness and truth that there is.  Only that way can we share good things and the truth of that which is right.  I have the dream of seeing what is good.

American society evolves to one showing compassion to all.

I dream that all children will have opportunities for loving homes, empowering education and the chance to give back more than they take as adults.

That imminent catastrophic climate collapse would so galvanise all nations and peoples that human discrimination would fall away in a grand human coalition to save life on this planet.

I dream of a day when everyone can have plenty of food, water, health and a comfortable home filled with love.

I have a dream that people would live out their religions or take it upon themselves to establish a just line.

I dream that the people of this country will someday mature to get over the divisiveness and prejudices of the past.

I dream that I will speak out my feelings to others.

Express love for all without shaming those who are affected with prejudices that linger deep within.

Medical care, single payer for all.

by Rev. David Usher

January 10, 2016

In his novel, Barchester Towers, the English Victorian Anthony Trollope wrote “There is, perhaps, no greater hardship at present inflicted on mankind in civilized and free countries, than the necessity of listening to sermons.”  So prepare yourself for a great hardship to be inflicted upon you for the next 15 – 20 minutes.

But what is a sermon?  Be advised, I do insist on calling it a Sermon.  Not an address, not a presentation, certainly not a lecture, but a sermon, and unapologetically so.  Because the sermon is within the context of an act of worship.  Its purpose is not to edify or instruct, not to inform you about the book I have read most recently or offer commentary on the state of the world, though all of those things might be elements within the sermon.  Put simply, the purpose of a sermon is, in some way, to leave you in the presence of your God, or if that language is problematic for you, to help you reacquaint yourselves with that which to you is most holy, in whatever way you might need to interpret that.

When it is most effective, though only the preacher might be speaking, a sermon is in fact a dialogue.  A dialogue between me in the pulpit and you in the pew, but also a dialogue conducted within your own hearts and minds.  Henri Nouwen, in his book, Creative Ministry, wrote this about the dialogue which happens between pulpit and pew.

“When this dialogue takes place, those who listen will come to the recognition of who they really are since the words of the preacher will find a sounding board in their own hearts and find anchor places in their personal life-experiences.  And when they allow his words to come so close as to become their flesh and blood, they can say “What you say loudly, I whispered in the dark; what you pronounce so clearly, I had felt some suspicion about; what you put in the foreground, I felt in the back of my mind; what you hold so firmly in your hand always slipped away through my finger.  I find myself in your words because your words come from the depths of human experiences and therefore are not just yours but also mine, and your insights do not just belong to you, but are mine as well.”

Theodore Parker, generally recognised as one of the three greats in the history of early American Unitarianism, centered in Boston in the first half of the nineteenth century, the other two being Ralph Waldo Emerson and William Ellery Channing, reputedly wrote his sermons with a loaded pistol on his desk.  There have been times when I have been writing a sermon when I have thought this a very desirable precaution against the indignation of my long-suffering congregation.  But Parker did so not as protection against his outraged parishioners, but against the slavery lobby, against whom he was a passionate adversary at a highly charged time.

But it must be said that Parker also managed to alienate his fellow Unitarians.  Though we sing his praises now, he was deeply unpopular with and actively ostracized by his ministerial colleagues.  But more of that in a moment.

How many of you have been to England?  And how many to the north of that fair isle?  Those of you who have been to the north of England, to Yorkshire and Cumbria, Northumbria and Lancashire and Derbyshire, will know that a stunning feature of the rugged countryside is the dry stone walls.  They are amazing testaments to the skill, patience and hard work of those who built them, at a time when stone was cheap and labour cheaper.  The have no mortar to hold them together, but are stone placed upon stone in a intricate lattice work, and they have stood for centuries, often even going up the sides of near vertical hills.  They are monuments to permanence, still serving their purpose hundreds of years after being built, still carving out the land in a patchwork of lines.

I spent nine years in New Hampshire, the Granite State, and there they also have stone walls.  But there are two main differences from the stone walls of England.  The first is the size of stones.  In England, they are manageable blocks, of various shapes and sizes but none bigger than a man can carry.  In New Hampshire, they didn’t both splitting the rocks up, they just used them as they were.  Great heaving boulders which somehow they prised and grunted into place.

The second and more significant way in which the stone walls in New Hampshire are different is that you can’t see them.  They are all hidden by trees.  If you have ever been to that state, you will know there is no shortage of trees – maple and beech and sumac and sycamore, never more beautiful than in the Fall.  Something in excess of 80% of New Hampshire’s land mass is covered in forest.  But the truly amazing this is that virtually of it is secondary forest.  But 150 years ago, more than 80% of the land mass was cleared farm land.

What happened?  In short, the American Civil War happened.  The farmers of New Hampshire dutifully answered the Union call and went south to fight.  That bloody war, in which more Americans died than in all wars before and since combined, meant that many of those who went to fight did not return.  Many killed, of course, but not all.  Many others survived, but they had seen the rich farmland of Virginia and Pennsylvania and Maryland and they thought to themselves, why are we breaking our backs fighting the bitter cold of winter to farm rocks when we could stay here and do so much better.  So thousands of New Hampshire farms were abandoned.  The fields, so painstakingly cleared, were soon over-run by trees.  And the stone walls, built with such effort and toil, disappeared fro view.  So now, today, you can be hiking along a trail through dense woods and come across a stone wall, comprised of huge boulders which some poor sod had grunted into being, no doubt consoling himself with the thought that, oh well, at least I am building something of permanent use and value.

Which, of course, brings me right back to Theodore Parker.  If there is one sermon for which Parker is remembered and revered to this day, it is his sermon entitled The Transient and Permanent in Christianity.  His essential thesis was this.  In Christianity, he argued, there are those things which appertained to the particular time and place in which Jesus lived, but there is no reason for us to suppose that we have to do the same today.  We don’t have to trudge barefoot from village to village, begging for hospitality while we preach the gospel.  Something for which, I have to say, I personally am quite grateful.  Similarly, said Parker, there are things we do today which are comforting and inspiring and appropriate for us today.  But these are transient things, the incidental trappings of this particular time and place and culture.

But then there are those things about Christianity which are permanent, eternal, and universal.  Things which Jesus taught, which remain as true today as the day they were spoken.  They are the bedrock, the core of the Christian faith.  But, said Parker, too often we confuse the transient with the permanent.  Too often we get invested in the silly little things of faith and the passing parade of fashion and we think that they are what is important.  And they aren’t.  While we must steadfastly cling to the permanent, said Parker, we must be willing to let go of the transient.

Now, you can probably understand why this sermon was not a big hit with the Unitarian establishment of the time, who interpreted it as a direct assault on their petty fussings.  But Parker hit the nail right on the head.  Some things we do have the mark the eternal, and some are strictly ephemeral.   The tricky thing is, we don’t always know which is which.  We cannot necessarily know, in our own time, that will be of lasting value and what is the work merely of the moment.  We are never qualified to be the judge of our own time.  Winston Churchill once said of a political opponent that history would judge that person harshly.  Churchill was confident of that, he said, because he planned to write that history.

Clara Barton, herself not one to be idle, not one to be deterred by the drag anchor of the past, once said “I have an almost complete disregard of precedent and a faith in the possibility of something better.  It irritates me to be told how things always have been done.  I defy the tyranny of precedent!  I cannot afford the luxury of a closed mind.  I go for anything new that might improve the past.”

But how are we to know, as we labour on our own stone walls, as we do the work of our own time and place and circumstance, whether our stone wall will be like the stone walls of northern England, monuments of permanent beauty and utility, or the stone walls of New Hampshire, invisible and irrelevant because of forces beyond our ability to foresee?  How are we to know?  The answer is, of course, we are not to know.  Our task is not necessarily to build for the future; it is to be faithful in the present.  Because faithfulness itself does abide, whether or not its fruit does.  Future generations might or might not have use for what we do today.  But future generations will always have use of the example of us being true to our own time.

Howard Thurman tells the story of watching an old man planting a grove of pecan trees.  The little treeless were not more than two or three feet high, and Thurman, then a brash young man, asked the old man, “Why do you not select larger trees so as to increase the possibility of your living to see them bear at least once crop of nuts.”

The old man looked at Thurman and replied “These small trees are cheaper and I have very little money.”

“So you do not expect to see the trees reach maturity to bear fruit?” insisted Thurman.

“No,” replied the old man, “but is that important?  Al my life I have eaten fruit from trees I did not plant.  Why should I not plant trees to bear fruit for those who may enjoy them long after I am gone?  Besides, the man who plants because he will reap in harvest has no faith in life.”

There is much of life which is the reaping of what we have not sown, and the planting of what we shall not reap.  But we plant and we reap in the context of our own time.

There is nothing more fleeting that the beauty of a single flower.  Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote:

Flower in a crannied wall, I pluck you out of the crannies, I hold you there, root and all, in my hand, little flower – but if I could understand what you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what God and man is.”

The blossom os a single short season, a flower starts to die the moment we pluck it for our delight.  Yet, with it lie the secrets of life, the wonders and miracles of the universe.  Speaking of the roses beneath his window, Emerson wrote  “These roses make no reference to former roses or to better ones.  They are for what they are; they exist with God today.  There is no time to them.  There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence.”

Though each beautiful flower in the creation of impermanence, beauty is eternal.  Likewise, each of us in transient, inhabiting the permanence of this place.  We bring our gifts for others to share, we take what gifts others offer in return.  Fleeting, time bound creatures that we are, yet here we are, called up to be perfect in the full beauty of our fleeting existence.

by Rev. David Usher

Sunday, January 3, 2016

A man and a woman had been married for more than sixty years.  They had shared everything.  They had talked about everything, they had kept no secrets from each other except the old woman had a shoe box in the top of her closet that she had cautioned her husband never to open or to ask about.  For all those years he had honored her caution, he had never thought about the box or been tempted to pry, but one day the old woman got very sick and the doctor said she would not recover.  In trying to sort out their affairs, the old man took down the shoebox and took it to his wife’s bedside.  She agreed that it was time he should know what was in the box.  When he opened it, he found two knitted dolls and a stack of money.  $94,450!

He asked her about the contents.

“When we were to be married” she said, “my grandmother told me the secret of a happy marriage was never to argue.  She told me that if I ever got angry with you, I should just keep quiet and knit a doll.”

The old man was overcome with emotion.  He tried to fight back the tears.  After all these years together, only two precious dolls were in the box.  She had been angry with him only two times in all those years of living and loving.  He almost burst with happiness.

“My darling,” he said, “that explains the dolls, but what about all this money?  Where did that come from?”

“Oh,” she replied, “that’s the money I made selling the dolls.”

I hope this is a happy congregation.  I hope it is a congregation that people are pleased to be come to because they are confident that here, they will find others with the warmth of welcome in their hearts.  I hope it is a place where love dwells.  But, even with that love, even with the commitment to treat each other with loving kindness and charity, there will always be times when each and every one of us will have to get out our knitting needles.  Those of you who have been here a while, look around you.  How many of you can honestly say, honestly say, that there is no-one you prefer to avoid at coffee hour?

That is one of the points of a properly loving religious community.  Not that you love everyone, but that it is a conscious experiment in being in loving relationship even with those who make you want to start knitting. A congregation is a laboratory in which we get to practise the virtues of faithful living we would otherwise only be extolling in theory.  You think forgiveness and forbearance are religious virtues?  Excellent, come on in, we promise you lots of opportunities to practise them here.  You like the idea of being kind and patient and assuming another’s good intentions?  Perfect.  We promise to test that to the max.  Because, you see, here we do espouse those virtues we would like there to be more of in this wounded world, and where better to learn how to incarnate those virtues that right here, where we can not only get to talk the talk, we can learn together how to walk the walk.

Being religious is not just about being spiritual.  As James Luther Adams says elsewhere in his essay, “A Faith for the free”:

Freedom requires a body as well as a spirit.  We live not by spirit alone.    A purely spiritual religion is a purely spurious religion; it is one that exempts its believer from surrender to the sustaining, transforming reality that demands the community of justice and love.  This sham spirituality, far more than materialism, is the great enemy of religion.

But, here’s the thing.  We do not come here only for our own self-improvement.  As important as the health of our own spirits is, we come here for a larger purpose.  We come not to serve only those already here, but to serve those who are not already here, but who might want to be.  The doors must ever be as open as our hearts to the newcomer.  And, we come here to learn how to serve those who will never come here, but who have their own faith or are content to say they have no faith, but who equally are part of the world we all share.  And if that world out there is not a better place for our having been in here, in here in communion with each other as fellow travelers on the journey of life, and in communion with that which transcends us, which cannot be seen and which we hardly know how to talk about, but whose presence we feel and which infuses who we are and what we do; if the world out there is not a better place for our having been in here, then our being in here will have been of little purpose indeed.

Today marks the start of a new year in the life of the congregation, a year in which you hope to make the significant decision of choosing your next settled minister.  You are at a cross-roads, a time of transition, and such moments can be times of both excitement and anxiety.  Two different names for much the same thing.

I want you to think about a snail and a hermit crab.  Something I am sure you often do anyway.  The snail, like the tortoise and terrapin, takes his home with him, the carapace of permanent shelter into which it withdraws in time of danger or when in need of repose.  The hermit crab enjoys no such luxury.  The hermit crab makes its home in an empty shell, but as it grows and becomes too big for that shell, it must abandon it an go looking for a new home.  That is the time of the greatest danger and vulnerability for the hermit crab, when it has left one home but has not yet established itself in a new one.  But to stay where it was would mean the slow death of not being able to grow.  It would mean not being true to its own nature.

Which is the better metaphor for this congregation – the snail or the hermit crab?  Does this congregation prefer always to remain within its own protective shield of familiarity and comfort, or is it willing to risk the excitements as well as the vulnerabilities of leaving behind what has served well in the past but has become too constricting, in the faith that there is something bigger and better and more accommodating awaiting its discovery?  Do we look forward with anticipation to the new dawn, or back longingly to the fading sunset behind us?

The British physician, psychologist and social reformer, born in 1859, Havelock Ellis, wrote,

The present is in every age merely the shifting point at which past and future meet, and we can have no quarrel with either.  There can be no world without traditions, neither can there be any life without movement.  There is never a moment when the new dawn is not breaking over the earth, and never a moment when the sunset ceases to die.  It is well to greet serenely even the first glimmer of the dawn when we see it, not hastening towards it with undue speed, nor leaving the sunset without gratitude, for the dying light was once dawn.

They say that an optimist is someone who, then the preacher says, “… and finally”, believes the sermon really is about the end.  Well,  “… and finally”.  I want to conclude with some words by Ann Tyndall, which I will adapt slightly at the end.

This morning I walked the dog up the street.  It was a perfect winter’s morning.  An icy breeze was blowing.  Clouds were gathered in the sky.  As the sun rose the grey white sky turned to rosy smoke.  The sun finally appeared in the east.  Nothing extraordinary, but the moment offered a blessing on the new day.

Such blessings have been given daily for more millions of years than we can ever imagine.  I am reminded that what will get us through times of rapid change, hard times, times of uncertainty, dangerous times, will be our ability to be blessed and fed by abiding things:

The manifold blessings of the sun rising in the morning.

The song of a bird heard as if for the first time.

The stillness of night.

The smile of a baby offered to you as if she had been waiting for you.

The faithfulness of lovers and friends.

The hand outstretched in reconciliation,

Trembling, touching through the barriers of estrangement,

Healing again and again.

The persistence of love,

The persistence of love,

The persistence of love.

 

In this place, in this new time,

May we know more blessings than curses.

May our hands reach out more than clench.

May we be claimed more by love than indifference, more by hope than by fear or cynicism.

May the restive power rise up in us, grounding us and guiding us to the border of what is yet possible for us, those close to us, and the world.

by Rev. David Usher

So, here we are, just five days before Christmas.  You are all ready to observe the holiday I’m sure, to make it the best yet.  You have done all of your Christmas shopping – right? – the tree is up and decorated with sparkly baubles, the lights are twinkling around every window, the inflatable Santa and sleigh are on your roof, the menu for Christmas dinner is planned, the pudding has been marinating in brandy for weeks, and everything is set for you to celebrate Christmas in the way that tradition demands.  If only religion would keep out of it.  Don’t you hate it when the church keeps sticking its nose in where it does to belong.  Why, the church even tries to interfere with Christmas, when of course we know that what Christmas is really about is gluttony and consumerist excess.

I certainly don’t want to be a Bah Humbug and spoil your enjoyment of Christmas, because I certainly plan to eat too much on Friday as well.  I plan to indulge the Christmas spirit, whisky being my spirit of choice.  I’m reminded of the old joke about the preacher who one Christmas was given a bottle of cherry brandy by a parishioner.  He wanted to acknowledge the gift from the pulpit, but did not know how to do so discreetly, given that many of his flock were strictly and censoriously teetotal.  So, the following Sunday he announced “I want to thank the anonymous donor for their kind gift of fruit, and most especially for the spirit in which it was given.”

When we gather on Thursday for our Christmas Eve Carol Service – 5.00pm, I hope to see you there – we will re-tell the stories of the birth of Jesus as recounted in the gospels of Matthew and Luke and we will sing some much loved carols.  We will park to one side whatever theological reservations we might have about those stories and we will surrender ourselves to the mythic beauty of the season because Christmas is a time for the wisdom of wonder, it is a time for the magic of myth.  After all, we supposedly rationalist Unitarians are responsible for half of the Christmas traditions we enjoy today.  From the Christmas tree itself, introduced to this country by Charles Follen, to Jingle Bells to T’was the Night Before Christmas, to several favorite carols, to Charles Dickens’ novella Christmas Carol.  It was Unitarians who made it legal even to celebrate Christmas in Puritanical New England. If anyone has a right to Christmas, it is us!

But this morning, I want us to ponder a little on Christian history and theology and how they have affected the evolution of Christmas as we know it.  And in doing so, I acknowledge my intellectual debt to Giles Fraser, an Anglican vicar and perhaps the most powerful and persuasive voice of progressive christianity in the United Kingdom today, and an essay he wrote eight years ago.  And who, by the way, resigned as Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, no less, in protest at the cathedral’s siding with the financial institutions rather than with those who were camping on its front steps during the Occupy Movement of a few years ago.

Consider this.  Sunday by Sunday for centuries, the Christian faithful have recited the Nicene Creed which states, in part, “Who for us and for our salvation came down from heaven.  And was incarnate of the Holy Ghost and of the Virgin Mary and was made man; was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate, suffered and was buried; and the third day rose again according to the Scriptures.”

The Nicene Creed is the official summary of the Christian faith, but did you notice something?  Astonishingly, it leaps straight from the birth of Jesus to his death.  It has absolutely nothing to say about who Jesus was as an adult, nothing about what he did or preached or stood for.  Nicene Christianity is all about Christmas and Easter, it is the celebration of a Jesus who is either a helpless infant or being killed, in either case, a Jesus who is not a threat to the political status quo.  It ignores entirely Jesus’ revolutionary rhetoric.  The adult Jesus who required of his followers that they renounce wealth, renounce power, renounce violence, renounce nationalism, that Jesus who was so problematic is passed over entirely.  Instead we get the innocent baby or the dying victim.

As such, Nicene Christianity has been easily co-opted into the religion of corporate complacency and political convenience.  We are invited to worship a supposed savior who has nothing to say about how we spend our money or whether we go to war, how we treat the stranger or how we organize our political priorities.

It was Emperor Constantine who made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire in the year 312.  According to the story, he was converted to Christianity by a vision on the eve of the battle of Milvian Bridge.  The story says he saw “up in the sky and resting over the sun, a cross-shaped trophy formed from light, and a text attached to it which said “By this sign, conquer”.  It was after his conversion, in 325 and wanting to bring his often unruly empire under tighter control, that he ordered all the bishops to gather at Nicaea to come up with a unifying creed, a creed which would back pedal on the revolutionary words of Jesus, a creed which would be about belief in a supernatural being rather than a political revolutionary.  It was Constantine who decided that December 25 should be the date on which Jesus’ birth would be celebrated, co-opting the pagan solstice festivals, it was Constantine who ordered the building of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.  The early Christians knew nothing of Christmas.  It was a festival invented by Roman Emperor Constantine, and from him on to the present day, the radical Christ has been neutered by the church, has been pushed to the margins, to be replaced by the much more accommodating religion of the mewling baby and a man dying.

But really, how can you read the Gospel accounts of the birth of Jesus, accounts written perhaps some eighty or ninety years after the events they portray and long before Constantine came along, and not find a revolutionary message?  The pregnant Mary anticipates the birth of her child with some fiery political rhetoric of her own.  God, she storms “hath brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly, he has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty”.

Jesus is born among uneducated laborers, yet worshipped by kings.  This is a remarkable reversal of political and economic authority.  No wonder when he gets wind of it, the imperial stooge, Herod, orders his soldiers into Bethlehem to find the child and kill him.  He knew that to claim Jesus is Lord means that Caesar isn’t.  The birth of Jesus is not some sweet little kindergarten tableau, it is the start of the revolution threatening to undermine or overthrow the whole Roman Empire.  What better way for Constantine to defeat that threat than by infantilising it?

Less than a century after Constantine, Augustine articulated the doctrine of the Just War.  Thus the original uncompromising pacifist message of Jesus was further co-opted in the imperial war machine.

That infantilizing and co-opting of Jesus the adult, the revolutionary, the critic of power and privilege, the pacifist, continues to this day.  Mainstream conservative Christian theologians and preachers, and their political puppets, continue the Constantine corruption, they are the new Rome, concerned only for the safeguarding of their imperial power.  They offer a carefully edited version of the Bible.  They emasculate the Jesus which does not suit their imperialist ambitions.  The religion that said, unequivocally, to turn the other cheek is pressed into military service.  The religion that said, love your enemies, welcome the stranger, be generous to and care for the widow, the orphan, the poor, the outcast and the sick, is now the religion whose loudest voices exhort, Let’s bomb our enemies, let’s turn back the stranger from our shores, build walls to keep them out, let’s cut welfare, abandon those who are sick but can’t afford health insurance, imprison and demonize any who do not conform to our image, who are not narrowly us.

And so it is that across this nation and others, without a trace of irony, at this season shall be sung carols celebrating the birth of the Prince of Peace while all the while war is waged in the battle-fields of political and commercial self-interest.

As the words of the carol we sang two weeks ago remind us:  “And we who fight the wars hear not the love song which they bring.  O hush the noise of battle strife, and hear the angels sing.”

by Rev. David Usher

“The thing about being a Unitarian Universalist that I like is that I can believe anything I want.”  I wonder how many times I have heard that, or a variant.  I wonder how many times, in explaining to an enquirer what Unitarian Universalism is, I have said something which might have been interpreted as us being the church where you can believe anything you want.  Because we are non-dogmatic, non-creedal, because we do not gather around a shared and enforced statement of belief, because we gladly include in our number theists and non-theists, humanists and Christians, Buddhists and Jews and Pagans and Pantheists and Panentheists and just about any other theological category and sub-division you might care to think of, because we affirm that in matters of faith, it is the individual and his or her own reason, conscience and experience which are the final arbiters and not The Church, not the Magisterium, because of all of that, all of which I celebrate, it is tempting to conclude that each and every one of us can believe anything we want.

But no we can’t.  That is not who we are.  If that is how we understand ourselves, then we have abandoned our long-held heritage of intellectual and ethical rigor.  If that is how we understand ourselves, we have become weak-minded and self-indulgent, and that is not, I think, how we want to be.

This morning my sermon is about the third in the occasional series of sermons about the seven Unitarian Universalist principles, which is “Acceptance of one another, and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations.”

Let’s look at that, phrase by phrase.  Acceptance of one another.  Here’s what that means to me.  It means that when someone comes through that front door for the first time, we seek to honor the authenticity of their spiritual journey so far.  We want to say, “Here is a person whose worth and dignity we honor and respect, whose spiritual and religious needs are as valuable as our own.  We do not demand that they renounce those things of their past which remain dear to them, that they conform themselves to our pre-determined theological mold.

And not only to newcomers, but to each of us who have been around a while as well.  If your way of experiencing and interpreting the world is through a Christian lens, you are entitled to expect that others here who see the world differently will honor you and accept you warmly into the circle.  Equally, if your way of experiencing and interpreting the world is through a humanist lens, you are entitled to expect that others here who see the world differently will honor you and accept you warmly into the circle.  Whatever your personal theological lens, it is the third Unitarian Universalist principle that you will be accepted for who you are and what you believe.  But, and this is the catch, as you are accepted, so must you accept.  As others make room for you, so you must make room for others.

It is fine to disagree.  It is not fine to disparage.

Let’s consider the word which is often the single most controversial word in a Unitarian Universalist context.  God.  For some of us, the word is deeply problematic, and we would be perfectly happy never to hear it again.  It conjures up images of a Being which we find intellectually untenable, particularly in the way it is often portrayed in the bible – punitive, partisan, judgmental, cruel.  We find such a God morally questionable as well.  Perhaps we grew up with that God and now we have discarded it, as we have discarded much of our childlike way of understanding the world, and we don’t like to be reminded of what we have left behind.

And for some of us, the word God is deeply evocative of all that is most precious to them in our spiritual life.  It speaks to us of mystery and reverence, it speaks of the need for humility in the face of transcendence, of a deep connection with all that is that goes beyond the rational, the scientific, the immediate.  For some of us, the word God is an emotion, not a thought, not about what we believe with our minds but what we feel in our hearts.

And here’s the thing.  Wherever you stand on that God spectrum, there are others here in this room with you, right now, who stand somewhere else along the line.  None of us has the right to say, Because this is where I stand, you must stand here also.  That is what, for me, is so wonderful and exhilarating about being a Unitarian Universalist, when we are at our best, which, let’s face it, we aren’t always.

Because it is the most stimulating of conversations.  A conversation, not a debate, because a conversation is about listening as much as it is about talking, a conversation is about wanting to learn from the other, it is not about trying to convert the other.  I have no interest in talking about religion, or politics for that matter, with someone else who is not open to what I have to say, whose mind is already made up and closed for business.  You know, that boorish uncle or brother-in-law we all seem to have whom we dread seeing at christmas because of his rants.  But I love talking about religion, or politics, with people with whom I might disagree but who allow me to challenge their thinking as I allow them to challenge mine.  I’m usually not learning much when I am talking.  I do tend to learn much more when I am listening.

So we accept each other as we are.  And.  And!  We expect each other to change.  What does “encouragement to spiritual growth “ mean if not that wherever you are now in your journey, whatever you believe now, we expect you to be open to doing the challenging work of deepening your spirit, of changing your mind, and, perhaps, if necessary, of getting over yourself.  When he stood on the dockside of Delft Harbour in Holland in the year 1620, bidding farewell to most of his pilgrim congregation as they were about to set sail for England and thence to the New World of America on their two boats, the Speedwell and the Mayflower, the Rev John Robinson famously said the words which today we still sing, “The Lord hath yet more light and truth to break forth from his Word.”

Revelation is not sealed, it is ongoing.  But what use new revelation if our minds, our eyes, our hearts are closed?  Closed to thought, closed to science, closed to experience, closed to wonder?

Being here means we are also willing to be shaken and stirred from our complacency, from our preconceived notions.  I remember well the interview I had with four worthies all those years ago who were considering whether I should be admitted to study for the ministry.  One of them asked what I believed.  I have no idea now what I said in reply, I would probably cringe if I knew, but I do remember what he said after I had stumbled through whatever I did say. “Well, David,” he said, “I hope you don’t still believe that when you are done here.”  He did not mean that I was wrong.  He meant that the point of my education would be to make me grow intellectually, even if, as T S Eliot wrote, “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”  Maybe so, but we will be richer for having made the journey.

We all might say that we want to grow spiritually, but am I right in saying that none of us really likes being made to change.  We want to grow, as long as we can stay as we are.  The only person who likes change is a set baby.  Sadly, it does not seem to work that way.  That is not an option.

There is a story, I believe a true story, which goes to the heart of this.

In 1947 the hour of eleven on Sunday morning was called the most segregated hour in America.  Sadly, it still is.  Leslie Pennington who was the minister of First Unitarian Society of Chicago wanted to integrate his church.  He didn’t feel justified in going out and recruiting black friends as John Haynes Holmes had done in New York; so, in his Chicago congregation it was voted upon whether or not they agreed to open their doors and welcome people of color.  This vote caused a tremendous ruckus in the church.  One board member, adamantly opposed to integrating the church, objected loudly giving many reasons the church should not be integrated.  In the midst of the heated discussion, another board turned to him and asked, “What is this church for?”  The upset man answered with more arguments against integrating the church.  Again, the man asked the question, “What is this church for?”  In his frustration and anger, the objecting member blurted out, “To change people like me!”

That’s why this church exists.  To change people like you.  To change people like me.  We are challenged to change, to grow, within our congregations, because it is within our congregations that we encounter each other.  Not alone.  Not being spiritual but not religious.  But doing the not always easy work of being vulnerable and safe at the same time.  If not that, what is the point?  The end of that story from Chicago is that the board member chose to leave the church, he was not willing to be changed, but had spoken the truth.  The church exists to change people.  To transform them.  To help them grow.  To make them better than they would otherwise be.  They are you and me.  That’s why we’re here.

We change each other, we help each other to grow, when we are honest with each other; when we say You are welcome, but that behavior is not; when we show compassion and care for each other; when we work together to make the world a better place by feeding the hungry, welcoming the stranger, speaking out against injustice.  We change each other and help each other to grow when we break bread together, when we do the work of creating and sustaining community, when we hold each other tenderly, and allow ourselves to be held, through life’s hard moments.

by Rev. David Usher

It’s 39 years ago that I finally decided I wanted to a Unitarian minister. It was something I had been toying with for several years, but I had always managed to find an excuse not to do it. But I spent 1976 doing what seems almost an obligatory rite of passage for young Australians, I travelled the world. I did it solo, first to New Zealand, then the Pacific islands, then all over North America and Mexico, and finally to Europe. I had lots of time to think – about life in general and my own in particular, and I knew that as much as I had loved my previous four years as a jackaroo in the |Outback, I was probably not going to spend the rest of my life doing unspeakable things to sheep, particularly if they were other people’s sheep. Especially during my travels around North America, whenever a Sunday came around I would look for a church, UU if possible but if not, whatever looked the friendliest. I had two motives. The first was I was genuinely in search for meaning. The second was, it was nearly always a guaranteed way to be invited back to someone’s house for lunch, maybe even be given a tour of the local area.

Anyway, it was in Montreal on a Monday morning in October 1976 that I finally surrendered and decided I would become a Unitarian minister. There was no loud voice from the sky, no road to Damascus experience, it really was a surrender to the inevitable. I once heard that becoming a minister was a bit like throwing up. You could try to ignore it, you could put it off for a while, but sooner or later, if you really had to do it, you would. That’s how it was for me. When I arrived in the UK I made contact with British Unitarians, and before I knew it I was a student at Oxford, studying for the ministry, and my fate was sealed.

I tell this tale to illustrate that although I was raised in a Unitarian congregation, and it has always been a central part of my self-identity, I have been a professional UU, as it were, for almost four decades. I have spent the bulk of my career in the religion business. It would be reasonable for you to conclude, therefore, that I am pro religion. And you would be right. I think religion is a good thing. I know it has been a good thing in my life; I see it being a good thing in other people’s lives; I believe that the world would be a better place if more people were living genuinely religious lives.

And yet, and yet. There are times when I am deeply embarrassed and ashamed by religion. There are times when I want to disown having anything to do with religion. When I see some of the abuses, some of the distortions, some of the violence, some of the hate, done in the name of religion, I recoil. The history of religion is not always pretty. And religion has been getting a particularly bad press lately.

There are those, the militant atheists in the vanguard, who look at the often ugly history of religion and who therefore denounce all religion as, at best, the fanciful nonsense of the simple-minded or, at worst, the deliberate instrument of human wickedness. But to denounce all religion because of its acknowledged and very regrettable abuses is, I suggest, as misguided as it is misinformed, for at least two reasons. First, religion might be a handy hook on which to hang things, but it usually is not the real cause of its perceived transgressions. The conflict in Northern Ireland, for example, was certainly between Protestants and Catholics, but I assure you they were not fighting each other because of their disagreements about the doctrine of transubstantiation at the Eucharist. The war in Bosnia in the early 1990s pitted Christians against Muslims (the Christians were the brutal aggressors, let us remind ourselves) but the war was essentially about political tribalism. The second reason is that the history of non-religion is not much better. Science continues to invent weapons of terrible destruction. Do we condemn all science? How many millions were slaughtered under Stalin’s militantly atheist regime of terror? Was Maoist China a beacon of civilised enlightenment? Do we condemn all government? This past week I saw the excellent movie, Spotlight, which tells the story of the Catholic church’s cover-up of the sexual abuses of its priests in Boston. A telling indictment, to be sure, but the world of corporate capitalism has frequently been guilty of its own egregious cover-ups. To condemn all religion because of its excesses makes no more sense than to condemn all government or all science or all business because of their excesses.

The demagogues of the land, so unattractively to the forefront during this pre-Presidential season, are falling over themselves and each other in their invective against Islam, demonising it as a religion of hate and violence, totally oblivious to the bitter irony that their invective, spewed in the full ugliness of their Christian self-righteousness, is as hateful and violent as the very thing they are condemning. You would think they might be just a tad shy of displaying their total ignorance of Islam so publicly. Islam is not in itself a hateful or violent religion, though some hateful and violent things are done by a few in its name. Christianity is not in itself a hateful or violent religion, though some hateful and violent things are done by a few in its name. Buddhism is not a hateful or violent religion, though some hateful and violent things are done by a few in its name. It is not religion itself which is hateful or violent (though I did recently re-read the book of Genesis. You want to know about violence done in God’s name? Start right there with Genesis), but hateful and violent things are done in religion’s name.

It seems to me that there are profound differences between good religion and bad religion, differences which are more universalisable – a new word I just invented – than the unreflective bigotry of a simplistic “My religion good, your religion bad”. It is too easy to make artificial distinctions based on nothing more than one’s own particular allegiances, to demonise anyone who marches to the beat of a drum different from our own.

I was walking across a bridge one day, and I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump. I ran over and said “Stop, don’t do it.”

“Why shouldn’t I?” he said.

“Well, there’s so much to live for.”

“Like what?” he demanded.

“Are you religious?” I asked.

He said, “Yes”.

I said, “Me, too. Are you Christian or Buddhist?”

“Christian”

“Me too. Are you Catholic or Protestant?”

“Protestant.”

“Me too! Are you Episcopalian or Baptist?”

“Baptist,” he replied.

“That’s amazing,” I said, “So am I. Are you Baptist Church of God or Baptist Church of the Lord?”

“Baptist Church of God.”

“Extraordinary! Me too. Are you original Baptist Church of God or are you Reformed Baptist Church of God?

“Reformed Baptist Church of God.”

“I don’t believe it,” I said, “So am I. Are you Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1879, or Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1915?”

He said “Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1915.”

I said, “Die, heretic scum”, and pushed him off the bridge.

Yes, the story of the Christian Church, particularly from the Reformation on, has been a story of division and schism, often over the most trivial of theological, liturgical, ecclesiological or interpersonal disagreements. Have you ever marvelled that all except one denomination are named either after their founder – Luther, Swedenborg, Calvin – or because of a form of church governance – Episcopalian, Congregational – or because of a style or feature of their – Baptist, Methodist, Quaker. The one denomination with a theological name is us – Unitarian Universalists – and we are the only ones not gathered around our common theology!

I want to suggest there are some identifiable characteristics which differentiate between good religion and bad religion. Those characteristics have nothing at all to do with which religious tradition they identify with. They are not about being Christian or not, being Muslim or not, being humanist or not. They transcend all such artificial demarcations.

I offer you five such characteristics. I’m happy to wait a few minutes if you want to get out a pen and paper so that you can write them down. This list is not necessarily exhaustive. Perhaps you will think of others that you would like to add to the list.

The first characteristic of good religion is that your religion is meant to be about how you live your life, not how you demand that others must live theirs. You may legitimately express why abortion is against your religious beliefs, for example, but in that case, don’t have one. You may legitimately express why homosexuality is against your religious beliefs, for another example, but in that case, don’t do it. It has become decriminalised. As far as I am aware, it has not been made compulsory. Most especially, men, do not tell women what they must do with their bodies, how they must contort and deny themselves so that they do not threaten your fear of losing your longstanding patriarchal power and privileges. Good religion is how you develop an intelligent and thoughtful set of beliefs and morals and practices that you then apply to your life, not that you try to impose on others.

The second characteristic of good religion, not unrelated to the first, is that is has a strong dose of humility. Let’s face it, folks, when it comes to religious belief, none of us really knows what we are talking about. Is there a God? Who knows! It is not a question for objective verification but personal conviction. What kind of God might it be, if there be one? Who knows! Not me. I know what attributes and qualities I would want a deity to have to warrant my devotion, but I’m not sure God can be designed by my own method of mix-and-match. What happens after we die, and why is there life on this obscure little planet anyway? Good questions. I wish I knew. Actually, I’m kinda glad not to know. I want to dwell in a world infused with mystery and wonder, not just of hard fact. So, given we know so little, would not a little humility in our proclamations be as wise as welcome?

The third characteristic is that good religion should lead you to peace, not war; to forgiveness, not lingering resentment; to generosity of heart and spirit, not to meanness, cruelty or spite. If ever you find yourself using your religion to justify an act of violence against another, your religion is bad religion. Spurn the pulpit peddlers of enmity, whose posturing piety would lead a crusade against difference; whose stocks-in-trade are fear, greed and mistrust, who base their own power on the denial of power to others.

The fourth characteristic? Good religion is a life of action, not passivity. Good religion finds its fruit in the street as much as in the sanctuary, the marketplace as much as in the mosque, the humdrum as much as in the hermitage. Good religion is how you live, not what you profess. It is whom you embrace as your neighbour in the largeness of your heart and the generosity of your actions and the consideration of your words. Good religion is about living this life for its own sake, not the anticipation of a possible next life. Perhaps there is a life after this. Perhaps there isn’t. Whatever you might believe about that, use it to be actively kind in this life.

And the fifth thing about good religion? Do please have a sense of humour about it. Let’s face it, as smart as we think we are, as sophisticated and informed and evolved, we are also, every single one of us, just a little bit ridiculous as well. Take life seriously, by all means, but laugh at yourself as well. As Alexander Pope wrote in his Essay on Man, we are the glory, jest and riddle of the world. Enjoy the joke. Good religion is not po-faced, dour, severe. Good religion knows the joy of life, for all its sufferings and pain. Good religion takes time to admire the sunset, to linger with a loved one in a moment of tenderness, to rejoice in the miracle of being alive. Here. Now. With others.

So, they are my five defining characteristics of good religion.

It is about how you live, not how you demand others must live.

It is humble, it recognises its human limitations of knowledge, insight and experience.

It leads to a life of peace, not violence; love, not hate; inclusiveness, not division.

It leads to a life in which the sacred and the secular are intimately interfused.

It can laugh at itself, it rejoices in the gift of life.

If a religious person has those five characteristics, I care not one fig what name they go by, what festivals they observe, what scriptures they read or in what building they worship. I care not one fig about the clothes they wear, the food they eat, the language the speak or the country they call home. I want to call them my brother and my sister, because I want to be part of that universal family of faith.

by Rev. David Usher

I need to issue a full disclaimer right at the beginning of this sermon. I need to acknowledge my debt to a colleague, Rev. Sue Phillips, who is Regional Lead for the UU congregations in northern New England, and whose article, also called A Declaration of Interdependence, I read this past week and from which I have borrowed heavily, particularly for the first part of this sermon.

In her role as Regional Lead, Sue Phillips comes into contact with numerous congregations, but she writes of the congregation which is her absolute favourite. It is comprised of people all of whom are deeply committed to making Love manifest in their time and place. They understand that how they are says everything about who they are. They have learned that people of all ages need help to live faithful, growthful lives, and that it is the congregation’s collective job to be that help. In answer to the “spiritual-but-not-religious” thing which is so common, they say “One person alone is not a church”. They come together so that they can help each other increase the sum of Love in the world.

This congregation doesn’t talk about “membership”, they talk about “covenant,” and they all take it very seriously. They all accept responsibility for reaching out in Love to those who stray from the covenant, not in a spirit of punishment but because they want no-one ever to be cut off from the benefits of the covenant.

They have a process for being with each other in times of conflict, encouraging people to talk first directly to the person they’re having trouble with, and if that doesn’t work asking another person to help them reconcile. If the conflict becomes intractable, this community recognizes that someone might need to leave, since the peace and well being of the whole is more important than that of any single individual. But they also promise one another that they won’t just leave – they promise not to remove themselves unilaterally from fellowship, and they specifically say that being mad at another person in the congregation is not reason enough to leave. Because folks join the community by entering into covenant, folks can leave only by being released from that covenant.  They have promised themselves and each other that none of them will just take their bat and go home because something has happened which they don’t personally like. They know that the health of the whole is more important than the sensibilities of a single person.

Although this congregation governs itself, they celebrate that there are other congregations like them which also govern themselves but with which they feel connected with them. This congregation knows the importance of showing up for their neighbouring congregations, they promise to look out for their welfare, they promise to worship and celebrate together, to share resources, and to work together to expand their faith in the world.

This, says Sue Phillips, is a community that understands what it means to be Unitarian Universalist, where independence and covenant alchemize into precious religious life. I mentioned at the beginning that Sue Phillips is Regional Lead for Northern New England, and it would be reasonable for you to conclude that that is where this congregation can be found. And you would be right. It is Cambridge, Massachusetts. You might be surprised to learn, however, that the time of this congregation was 1648.

But it is not only there, then, it is here, now. It is in our collective DNA as Unitarian Universalists. That congregation about which Sue Phillips speaks, convened in 1648 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, articulated what is known as the Cambridge Platform, and it has been the basis of our congregational polity ever since. Those good folk of 350 years ago are our ecclesiastical ancestors. They were smart enough to realise that although each congregation of the time gathered independently, they each had responsibilities to others. The Cambridge Platform was a Declaration of Interdependence: a declaration of interdependence between persons within a particular congregation, and a declaration of interdependence between congregations. It was a Covenant to which each and all willingly gave themselves because they knew that however independent they might be in their individual thinking, they could not survive without each other, they could not be strong alone, they could not grasp all truth with only their own small minds.

When the UUA, the Unitarian Universalist Association, our national denomination, was formed in 1961, the result of the amalgamation of two previously separate but friendly groups – the American Unitarian Association and the Universalist Church of America – the architects of that union echoed the Cambridge Platform, using the language of covenant. When a congregation joins the UUA, it promises to be part of the inter-connecting network of mutual and reciprocal support. When it formed 21 years ago, this congregation made that promise. The money it gives each year to the UUA is not to pay some centralised bureaucracy, it goes to make programs possible which benefit us all.

When you join this congregation, it is not the same as joining the Golf Club, to which you pay an agreed uniform subscription in return for certain privileges and benefits. Yes, the payment of some money is part of the deal, but it is not an act of transaction, it aspires to be an act of transformation. The amount is for you to decide, depending on your personal circumstances and the extent to which you want your pledge to be a reflection of your personal values, an expression in real terms of how important your spiritual well-being is to you and how much you want to contribute to the community which will nurture your spiritual well-being. You join for the opportunity to give of yourself as much as what you expect to get for yourself. You join to be part of something organic of which you become an integral part, and like an integral part of any body, the health of the whole is possible only when each part is contributing to that health. Cancer is what happens when individual cells within the host body are concerned only with themselves, regardless of their impact on the host body.

Six or so years ago, this congregation adopted a Covenant of Right Relations. In a few moments, I am going to ask you all to say it out loud together. I was not here then, of course, so I can’t relate that history from first hand experience, but I am told this Covenant was adopted in response to a conflict which had been going on within the congregation, and the shared recognition that the conflict could have been handled better if there had been some ground rules for people to abide by. I was shocked when I was told this. I had thought that there had never been any tension or conflict, ever, until I arrived a year ago as your Interim Minister and upset everything and everybody. Or, the adoption of the Covenant might have been the recognition that it is the law of the natural world that when two bodies meet, there is conflict. There needs to be mutual accommodation. The thing is not to avoid conflict but to deal with it creatively and constructively, increasing the strength of each body rather than leading to their destruction.

So, becoming and being part of this congregation is not so much about membership, paying dues in return for prescribed benefits and privileges; it is about covenant. It is about entering into a relationship with the others already here, and entering into a deeper relationship with oneself. Everyone is welcome here as they are. But, having arrived and been welcomed as they are, everyone is also expected to change, expected to grow, expected to be affected by their involvement with the process.

So, what is this Covenant of Right Relations? I invite you to say it with me, whether or not you are formally a member of the congregation. I invite you to say it with me, taking in the meaning of the words and what they are eliciting from you.

Covenant of Right Relations

Recognizing that conflict is normal in human relations and wishing to relate to others as harmoniously as possible, I sincerely intend to:

Treat others with kindness, empathy and respect.
Communicate with patience, flexibility, and a willingness to negotiate in the spirit of meeting as many needs as possible.
Be aware of my own thoughts, feelings, and needs, and share them directly and honestly with others, without judgment or blame.
Invite and listen to all points of view, respecting others’ feelings and needs and encouraging minority opinions.
Take responsibility for my own mental, emotional, and spiritual balance, asking for support when I need it.
Be mindful of the needs of the group as a whole, mourning together when individual needs cannot be met.

Is that easy work? You bet it isn’t. Is it worthwhile work? You bet it is.

So may it be for us all. Amen

by Rev. David Usher

November 22, 2015

After becoming a member of UUCM, it took me 2 years, before I started to understand what membership really meant. When I was a Lutheran all I had to do was say I believed what the church said and I could be a member. The UUCM bylaws say all I have to do is make a pledge and sign the membership book. I have finally learned it is so much more than that. Being a Member gave me a vote and a voice in decision making. But I made a serious commitment that is not addressed in the bylaws.

I never understood why people remained visitors or UUCM Friends for so long. I understand now. It should take time to decide what responsibilities I wanted and seriously consider making the commitment that I took so lightly 5 years ago. I have also learned that I don’t always remember the promise I made and that I continually need to be reminded of the importance of our covenant and what it means to live it.

The term ‘covenant’ is Latin for coming together. It is when two parties agree on what they promise each other. A covenant has stipulations, privileges, and responsibilities. Marriage is a covenant that 2 people make with each other. It is a pledge, a promise and a bond….and hard work.

UUCM is not a club or just another non-profit organization. What sets us apart is our promise – not to an organization, but to one another. We pledge ourselves and our financial support not just for the wellbeing of our Community, but for our own personal health and growth. We pledge to promote and live the principles that guide our lives. We promise to each other that we will live by the Covenant of Right Relations. This is what binds us together.

What does being in covenant with you mean to me?

It means:

I will search for shared purposes and values as we work together
It requires that I have a willingness to dialog with those with whom I disagree

It means:

I will not criticize or belittle a person or group because I do not agree with their opinions or actions, and that
I agree to participate in meaningful conversations about those things

It means:

I must do the hard work of ‘being community’ and that
I promise not to walk away physically or financially when things get rocky or they don’t go the way I want them to go

It means:

I work together with you to make this Community a safe, loving, and respectful place. And it means

I lift up and care for you as we do our work together.

I am still an individual with my own opinions and preferences but our covenant calls me to respect people. It does not require that I agree with them or that I like the same things they do. It requires that I speak with love.

Is everything here done the way I like it to be done? No. But I am not the center of the universe, and I am not the center of UUCM. Not everyone likes the same songs I do, or the same speakers, or the same elements in a Sunday Service. I prefer not hearing the word ‘God’, but others want and need to hear this. I prefer not struggling with a new hymn, but others enjoy the complexity and challenge. I don’t just allow others to have their needs met but our covenant calls me to encourage meeting the needs of others as much as possible.

At UUCM , it is my hope that all people’s needs may be met here, but that’s unrealistic. Not every visitor who comes through our doors finds what they seek. And sadly, sometimes I have to say goodbye to a member who needs to leave and move on to another stage in their life. At those times, I wish them well and grieve the loss.

While writing this, I realized what big promises I have made. The truth of my covenant stares back at me from the page. Suddenly these are not just words that we have all heard before, but actions I need to take each day inside and outside our Community. It is hard work that carries the reward of learning about myself and those with whom I live. It’s about feeling vulnerable and safe at the same time.

Have I always lived up to the covenant I have with you? No. Have I faltered? Yes. But I have found forgiveness and healing here. And for that, I thank you deeply.

by Rev. David Usher

My first ministry was in Atherton, a small town on the western periphery of the Greater Manchester conurbation in north west England.  It was a very nondescript working class town, caught in the grip of Thatcherism so that its only two industries of cotton and coal had been ruthlessly closed down, a town of small red brick terrace houses, in the middle of which improbably was the Unitarian Chapel, a building of truly stunning beauty.

I want to tell you a story of something that happened during my ministry there.  A year or two in, I conducted a wedding.  She had been married before, had two young children, and was about four months pregnant.  He was several years younger.  Anyway, I got to know them some, as you do, and the wedding had been a happy day.  I had not seen either of them again for several months until one sunny afternoon I was walking down the main street and I saw Jimmy standing on a street corner.  So I sauntered up to him, full of the joys of Spring, and greeted him cheerily.

“Hey, Jimmy, how are you doing?”

“Not so great,” he replied.  “The baby died an hour ago.  I’m waiting to meet the kids from school to tell them before they get home.”

Oh no, I thought.  I told him I would go straight to their house.  On the way I was thinking to myself, why could I not have been walking on the other side of the street?  Why did I have to bump into him?  I wish I hadn’t greeted him, and then I wouldn’t have to face this horror.  I had a knot in my stomach as I knocked on the front door.  What could I say?  What could I do?  I had no idea.  Remember, I had been a minister for all of a year or so.  I had never faced a situation like this before.

The woman answered the door.  She was ashen.  She was surprised to see me – how did I know? – but her brain was processing the fact that the minister was standing on her door step just an hour or so after this terrible thing had happened, her baby had died of sudden infant death syndrome.  She held up her hand at me and said “Don’t say anything!”  I was kind of relieved.  She had saved me from my embarrassment at having nothing to say.

I spent the next couple of hours standing mute and helpless in the corner.  I watched as the two older children came home and burst into tears as they flung themselves into their mother’s arms.  I had no idea what to say, what to do.  I felt so utterly useless, like I was little better than a voyeur to this family’s grief.  Finally I made my pathetic excuses and left, with the promise to return the next day for more hours of feeling completely impotent.  A few days later I conducted the funeral, the coffin not much bigger than a shoe box.  As difficult as that was, at least I knew what my role was.

Here is the point of the story.  There is nothing I could immediately do or say which could fix this family’s grief.  There was nothing for me to do except be with them in their pain, their rage, their confusion.  And, more than that, to try to “fix” it would have been deeply offensive.  To have tried to justify this terrible event, to tell them that all of this was part of God’s plan, that Jesus wanted their baby for a sunbeam, that everything happens for a reason, whatever platitudinous bromide I might have come up with that might in any way have been interpreted as telling them what they must do, or how they must understand their grief to make themselves feel better, would not only have been inappropriate, it would have been deeply offensive.  The mother instinctively knew this.  “Don’t say anything” she had said.  She wanted no facile sermonising from the likes of me.  As time passed, I was able to help them some to come to terms with their loss, but first I had to be with them in their pain.  The work of compassion was first and foremost simply to be with them, and with my own discomfort because of my impotence.

This sermon is about the second Unitarian Universalist principle – Justice, Equity and Compassion in Human Relations, and how we make that principle real in the world.  And what I want to say is that those three words roll well off the tongue in that order – justice, equity and compassion – but the truth is they are should be the other way around.  First must come compassion.  First must come the experience of truly being with another in their pain and rage and grief and suffering without trying to fix it, to feel in your bones that this other person is not a statistic, not a number, not an item on a social justice or political agenda, but a person.  Not to immediately start offering our solutions to their problems.

We, who have power, must sit awhile with powerlessness. We, who think we know  so much, must wrestle with the discomfort of our not knowing.  We must be present whatever our own discomfort and confusion.  Without that compassion, a word which means feeling with, that willingness to be truly present with another’s pain, we are little better than technicians, administering technical solutions to what we perceive as technical problems.

Young Susie was late home from school.

“Where have you been?” asked her mother.

“I met Mary on my way home.  Her bicycle had broken, so I stayed to help.”

“But you don’t know anything about fixing a bike” said her mother.

“I know,” replied Susie.  “I stayed to help her cry.”

And what of equity?  I have just finished reading a remarkable book, The Spirit Level, by two British academics, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, and its sub-title is Why Equality is Better for Everyone.  This book is not some Marxist rant, but a very well researched and reasoned argument that the greater the income inequality in a society, the greater are all sorts of undesirable consequences.  The research focuses on the major developed nations in the world, but also contrasts income inequalities between the fifty states of the United States.  And here are their findings.  As you increase income inequality, you increase the rates of crime and incarceration, you increase the infant mortality rate, you increase the rates of teenage pregnancy, you increase the rates of homicide, suicide, mental and physical illness, you increase the lack of social cohesion.  You decrease the willingness of neighbour to help neighbour, you decrease levels of community involvement, you decrease standards of literacy and further education, you decrease concern for the environment and the common weal.

The American dream is that upward mobility is available to anyone who works hard, that anyone who really wants it can become a millionaire.  As if being a millionaire in itself is a laudable aim.  But the stark reality is that social mobility is far greater in those societies with higher income equality.  The American dream is a sham.  It does not work.  It is a lie sold to the poor to blame them for their state of chronic poverty.  The United States, a country now with greater income inequality than any other developed country, has less social mobility than any other developed country.  If you are born poor, with very few exceptions, you will remain poor, and you will suffer all the indignities of your poverty until you die, younger than you might have done.

Imagine you are playing Monopoly against one other person.  The other player has been given all of the properties around the board, and $100,000.  You have been given Baltic Avenue and $100.  And of course you lose.  And the reason you lose, obviously, is that you are a lousy Monopoly player.

In other words, as income inequality increases, all of the benefits and advantages of society decrease.  And the reverse is true.  And curiously, it does not matter how you attain income equality.  In some countries with a high level of income equality, such as the Scandinavian countries, the equality is achieved through taxation after income.  In other countries, such as Japan, it is achieved before income.  The means are irrelevant.

But here is the really interesting thing.  You might think that creating a more equal society could be achieved only to the detriment of those who would otherwise be at the top of an unequal society.  That the gains of those coming up from the bottom could come about only through the losses of those being brought down from the top.  But such is not the case.  All of the measures show that those at the top live longer, are healthier in body and mind, are happier in more equal societies.  The delusion is exploded that having lots of money for oneself does not lead to a happier or better life when you are part of a society in which others have so much less.

And justice?  Is there anyone who is against justice?  But what do we mean by justice.  I had a fascinating experience thirty years ago.  I was asked to be part of a four person delegation of the British Unitarian Peace Fellowship that went to Northern Ireland.  This was in 1985, when The Troubles were at their height, when the Irish Republican Army was planting bombs in Ireland and mainland Britain (bombs largely bought with money from the United States, by the way.  Do you want to talk about the evils of financing international terrorism?).  Belfast was a city under siege.  The mood of the city was oppressive with fear and mutual hostility.  We spent a good deal of time with our denominational cousins – the Non Subscribing Presbyterian Church of Ireland – but we also visited some Catholic institutions, met with Catholics working for peace and understanding and reconciliation between the warring factions.

Both sides spoke of justice.  Both sides wanted justice.  But their definitions of justice were markedly different.  When the Catholics spoke of justice, they meant they wanted an end to the centuries of political, social and economic discrimination to which they had been subjected by the Scottish Presbyterian immigrants who had settled their land, sponsored by the British Government as part of its deliberate policy of suppression.  Whereas when the Protestants spoke of justice, they meant that they wanted punishment and retribution for those murderous terrorists.

What do you mean when you say justice?  Do you mean, just us?  That the law should be only for our benefit, protecting our property, safeguarding our rights and privileges, even if at the expense of others?  In this country’s dark chapter of slavery, “justice” was meted out to slaves who were not sufficiently obedient, subservient.  Justice came in the form of the lash, and worse.  The injustice of anyone being subjected to the lash because of the colour of their skin, because of the inferiority of their social class, the gross injustice of being enslaved, recognition of such injustice did not register on the radar.  What is your definition of justice in the case of someone who breaks the law by jaywalking, and is beaten to a pulp by police officers for doing so.  Oh, did I mention that the person was black?  What is your definition of justice when the law itself is an outrage?

Justice, equity and compassion in human relations.  There is the fourth element in this principle, the element of human relations.  We all live in community.  Unless we have chosen to live the life of a hermit we all are dependent upon each other.  It always amuses me when some self-satisfied dolt informs the world that he is a self-made man.  For starters, I am thankful that the rest of us are spared any blame for this conceited cockerel, but what delusional nonsense.  None of us could survive if it were not for others.  We are all dependent upon the labour and industry of others for our physical survival, we are equally dependent upon others for our emotional survival.  We cannot choose not to be in relationship with others.  What we can choose is the nature of that relationship.  We can treat each other with respect, or with indifference.  With kindness or with cruelty.  We can seek to build each other up, or break them down.  Which is it to be?  Which do you want?

It is our collective Unitarian Universalist ambition that we might live up to our own second principle of justice, equity and compassion in human relations, and to invite and encourage others, whatever their religious beliefs or lack of, to do the same. I want there to be more Unitarian Universalists in the world not because I want to boast about our market share, or because I want fancier church buildings or other trappings of commercial success.  I want there to be more Unitarian Universalists, and I want you to want there to be more Unitarian Universalists, because I have no doubt that this world would be a better place if more people genuinely embraced justice, equity and compassion in human relations.  That is a part of our work.  That is what we are here to do.  And every day, we get a chance to do it.

by Rev. David Usher

Given that it can be such a contentious issue, particularly in our Unitarian Universalist context, I thought it would be useful if this morning I preached about religious language.  Words are our primary medium for communication, but often they also lead us down the path to misunderstanding each other.  I am frequently made very aware of that as I reacquaint myself with American idioms, and am reminded of George Bernard Shaw’s famous epigram that the United States and England are two countries divided by a common language.  If, for example, I were to tell you that I was mad about my flat, would I be very cross about my puncture, or enthusiastic about my apartment?  And let’s not mention my promise to knock you up in the morning.

The use of correct language is important in our Unitarian Universalist context.  We are a people of the word, we tend to like words and plenty of them, but because we have a broad diversity of theological beliefs, and lack of, it can be difficult to find the right words for all situations.  And as if our diverse theologies were not challenge enough, we are also uber sensitive to language which might be is sexist, ageist, able-bodyist; nationalist, racist, or pretty much anything else-ist.

But particularly this morning, when we are about to welcome people into membership of the congregation, I want to be very aware of my Australian tendency occasionally to say things rather too bluntly for your delicate American sensibilities.  Especially this morning, I don’t want to use any language in talking about religious language which might in any way offend, exclude, confuse or alienate a single one of you.  I hope to say only that which will meet with universal approval.

Silence

Oh, forget it, let’s pray.  I mean, meditate.  I mean, have a time of quiet contemplation.  Oh, do whatever you want, call it whatever you want to call it, but while you are doing it, I will share with you some famous and ancient words.

A second try

You know, maybe it isn’t good enough for me not to say anything for fear of causing offence.  Maybe settling for the lowest common denominator, resorting to the innocuous and inoffensive, is a negation of what can be most exciting in religious dialogue.  Maybe the real challenge in using religious language is to learn ways not only to speak one’s own truth, clearly and unapologetically, but to listen with genuine openness to another’s truth.  Maybe the real challenge in communication is to see beyond the words, to understand that as all theology is actually autobiography, so words are no more, or less, than our best tools for telling the story of our journey to whatever beliefs, principles or values have come to form the foundation for our faith.

I am sure many of you have travelled to countries where English is not the native tongue, and perhaps even to countries where English has not become the default second language.  I know, isn’t it ignorant of people not to know how to speak to us so that we understand them!  So, there you are, trying to tell this other person what you want, and they are not understanding you, they are looking blankly at you and perhaps replying in their unintelligible gibberish.  So what do you do?  You raise your voice, of course.  You shout louder.  As if an increase in volume will penetrate the other person’s obtuseness.

A lot of conversations about religion and theology are like conversations with someone who does not speak English.  You just shout louder, thinking that somehow that will get the other person to understand you and be persuaded by you.  And once they hear you, well of course they will know what you are talking about, they will understand you, they will agree with you.  And if they refuse to agree with you, if they persist in interpreting the world differently from you even after you have very clearly explained it to them, and loudly at that, well the only reason is that they must be stupid.

One of the things I find most intriguing about so many religious conversations is that, with regard to God, for example, they start with the humble assertion that God’s ways are beyond our knowing, that God is inscrutable and mysterious, and then almost immediately come the categorical statements about exactly what God is like.  Insisting that only our language is the right language to describe God, only our experience is the true experience, and to use other language is wrong, and other experiences are invalid.

God, of course, is the most contentious of all religious words.  What do we mean by God?  Is God a noun, or a verb?  Is God real, or imagined?  Is God poetry or prose?  Is God to be dissected, delineated, described, defined to fit neatly into our comprehension?

The other day I was having a conversation with my partner, Vail Weller.  She is also a Unitarian Universalist minister, and we were talking about the difficulties and challenges of preaching in our context so that we were being faithful to our own truth, but doing so in language which you, the patient people in the pews, could hear and translate into your own truths.

(Phone rings)

Hello.  That’s extraordinary, I was just mentioning you.  I can’t talk now.  You of all people should know that.  It’s Sunday morning.  You know where I am and what I am doing right now.I’m in the middle of my sermon.

What?  Really?

Um, okay.  Wait, let me get a pen so I can write it down.

Uh uh.  Uh uh.  Yes, I got it.  Uh uh.  Yes, I will.  What?

Yes, I know you do.  I can’t, people are listening.  I don’t want to.  It’s embarrassing.  OK.  I love you too.

Um, that was God.  And she has asked me to tell you a few things.

First, she loves that you want to think for yourselves when it comes to religion.  She loves that you don’t believe things simply because somebody else has told you.  She understands that many of you can’t believe some of the things people say about her.  She can’t believe some of the things people say about her either.  She wants you to keep using your intelligence.  She loves that you like to think about things, to be rational.  Keep thinking, learning, growing in your knowledge.

But, she also wants you to know that she wants to be not only in your head, she wants to be in your heart.  She wants to be in the smile with which you greet others; she wants to be in the impulse you feel to reach out to help your neighbour; she wants to be in your indignation at injustice; she wants to be in the tenderness of your love.

She is very happy that you worry about using respectful language when discussing religion, especially when discussing her.  She thinks you are smart, and she likes that.  But she wants to remind you that she is found not only in words but in silence; not only in speaking but more so in listening.

That’s pretty much all she said.  I figure that there is not much I can add.

St Francis of Assisi told his followers “Never cease from preaching.  Use words if you have to.”  Seems like pretty good advice to me.  “Never cease from the conversation.  Use words if you have to.”