by Rev. Rob Eller-Isaacs, Guest Minister

 A sermon given October 22, 2000

Celebration Sunday

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

It is indeed an honor to be here with you this morning as you once again consider the significance of the church in your life and in the life of the community. My wife and partner in ministry, Janne, and I have watched from afar with great admiration as you have worked these past few years to extend and strengthen your mission here at the heart of this great city. Our sense of friendship and connection with Marilyn goes back for many years, as well to when she was a student at Starr King and spent a summer at our old ramshackle house up in the Oakland hills. Our church in Oakland has been a home away from home for Mike and Wendy Ross, who grew up in your embrace. More recently our lives have been touched by Rob Hardies, who served as our intern. Cecilia Kingman Miller, another of your people called to ministry, is also a dear friend and colleague. So, last winter, when Marilyn called to invite me to be with you this morning, I didn’t hesitate.

That invitation came some months before Janne and I decided to leave our beloved congregation down the coast in Oakland to accept the call to become co-ministers of the Unity Church-Unitarian in St. Paul, Minnesota. I am not the first minister from the Oakland church to be invited to talk about money with you. Charles Wendte served both as minister in Oakland and as Secretary of the Western Conference of the American Unitarian Association at the end of the 19^th century. His duties as Secretary included both the planting of new churches and the providing of advice to churches in the midst of difficulty. Earl Morse Wilbur’s excellent history of your early years describes a number of visits in which the Secretary encouraged your efforts in supporting fledgling congregations and tried to help you rise above your own financial difficulties.

Given that I now serve Unity Church, I read with particular interest that in 1899, with this church in the midst of a depression, you brought in the Rev. William Rogers Lord, a former minister of the Unity Church, to serve as Acting Minister until the church could be returned to some stability. The Rev. Lord departed when the church declared bankruptcy in 1901. This fact should in no way discredit my own appearance here this morning. My tenure here extends only through this morning and in spite of the deficit, you are by no means on the verge of bankruptcy.

I feel deeply connected to you, both institutionally and personally. That sense of connection enables me to stand before you and summon the audacity to talk with you about a thing so intimate as how you spend your money.

"Why should we love the church? Why should we love her laws? She tells us of Life and Death, and of all we would like to forget." A worthy church is always asking us to pay attention to those aspects of our lives and of our shared life with which we are least comfortable. This is a place where we talk about gender, race and even, dare I say it, economic class. This is a place where we talk about relationships and sexuality and all the challenges and gifts of life. We ought to be able to talk about money.

Let me guess what you’re thinking. "Here we go again. They want me to give them more money. I’m already over-extended and so is the church. Shouldn’t the church be the one place that isn’t being driven by the ‘root of all evil?’"

Well, first of all, there is no "them" asking for money. There’s no "them" making you feel guilty. There’s only "we." And secondly, the scripture is quite clear. Money is not "the root of all evil." 1 Timothy 4:10 says it clearly. "The love of money is the root of all evil." What matters most is not the money, though money may sometimes provide a false sense of fulfillment. What matters most is what we love. When how we spend our money reflects our values, when we invest our money and ourselves in the people and the places we love, then we will come to recognize as Emerson did before us that "Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses."

I want to serve a church that, with great respect and sensitivity, encourages us to speak of those things "which are hardly spoken of in parlors." Your canvass theme this year is telling: "For All We Are." On the surface, it refers to the strength of the church, to the quality of its ministries, to the effectiveness of its programs, to its capacity to help and to heal the world. As I read its double entendre, "For All We Are" refers as well to who we are religiously. We are whole human beings. We bring our whole selves here. All true religion teaches that the quality of what we do is determined by the depth of who we are. Compassionate action requires compassionate people. And compassion grows in direct relationship with our willingness to know and to accept ourselves just as we are. A community that respectfully encourages self-awareness and then yokes that self-awareness to the common good is a true blessing in the world. The church, at its best, invites us into a covenant for intimacy.

Having rejected the neo-platonic, Calvinist assertion that we must deny the flesh in order to cultivate the spirit, we have come to the conclusion that the spirit and the flesh are one. The Apostle Paul, though guilty himself of the sin of denying the sanctity of the flesh, was surely one of history’s greatest church builders. He spoke of "the body of the church," by which he meant the organic reality of committed religious communities. He knew, and we know as well, how much more useful we can be when we unite in service to a higher good. Your public ministry is evidence of a legendary generosity. But I tell you, if you don’t stretch, if you don’t invest in strengthening your church so that your values will be brought to bear, I promise you that others, whose convictions don’t reflect the inclusive love that is our common speech, will stretch. The forces of constriction and prejudice have not faded. "Do you need to be told that what has been can still be?" But those people think that they’re buying salvation. We have no such powerful enticement for giving.

Some years ago, Bill Schulz, who had been elected president of the Unitarian Universalist Association having had but scant experience in the parish, declared the following: "Unitarian Universalism," he wrote in his president’s column, "will never be a mature religion until it has something to say to the dying." In the next issue, a letter from a minister of long and distinguished tenure appeared. He spoke of going door-to-door in a neighborhood that had been hit the day before by a devastating tornado. He knew he had to be there. As he made his way through the rubble going door-to-door, he recalled: "I could not offer them the promise of eternal life, but I could tell them I was from the church. And when I did they knew I cared, they knew why I was there." The church at its best is the place where the life of the spirit meets the body of the world.

Our capacity to help and heal the world is a direct reflection of our own inner work. Is it any wonder then that we have moved in careful, steady ways toward ever greater interpersonal intimacy? The revolution in self-awareness ushered in by Freud and Jung, by Virginia Satir and Alice Miller and so many others who have helped provide us with a language for our feelings, has helped begin to heal the breach between our bodies and our spirits. Respectful of each other’s privacy, aware of our own reluctance, we still move into tender territory. We know how secrets fester. We know how liberating it can be to confess our fears and shortcomings and to discover we are not alone. That’s why we should love the church.

Knowing self-deception taps our energies and undermines our best intentions, there are two delusions I would like to put to rest today. The first is that the church is barely scraping by and that the reason you should make a generous pledge is to lift the church up out of poverty. It’s a delusion sprung full-blown from some depression-era nightmare. Truth is, we live in unbelievable abundance. Our fears do sometimes make it hard to see. Our own sense of inadequacy, our own reluctance to be generous, our refusal to recognize how powerful we truly are and to embrace the obligations of that power can make us petty, stingy, poor in spirit. But there’s no wolf at the door. You and I are called to generosity not by our fears of impending poverty, but by the loving power which inevitably rises when the church is at its best.

You and I know what transforming power rises up when worship works. The rhythm of silence and music and words; the nourishment of grounded and inspired preaching; the expanding appreciation of beauty which exquisite music inspires; the depth of connection we find in the place beyond words; these things combine and blossom, worship which inspires compassion. Our lives have been touched and transformed by the gospel of freedom and conscience, by the good news, which the First Unitarian Church of Portland was planted to proclaim. I want you to support this church because, like me, you just won’t rest until that glad and generous gospel has been heard in every corner of the land. I want you to support this church because, like me, you love it. I love its people. I love what it stands for. And you and I both know what matters most is what we love.

The second delusion I wish to confront is the notion that we, having left the safe harbor of dogmatic religion, have lost religious depth as well. The fact that no one here, not even those you’ve called to occupy this pulpit, can claim to know the truth does not mean that you and I are spiritually impoverished. The old divides would have us set aside the spirit in the interest of the flesh. The old disintegrated worldview would claim that those of us for whom this life is far more important that any speculation on the next are less than faithful. But we are those whose task it is to reunite a world too long divided.

The women who founded this church first met as volunteers for the United States Sanitary Commission. Founded at Lincoln’s behest by Henry Whitney Bellows, minister of the Unitarian Church of All Souls in New York and Universalist nurse and organizer, Clara Barton, the Commission was established to provide battlefield nursing and general relief to the troops. All across the North, the women of the churches went to work. They helped collect blankets and warm clothing. They knitted socks and rolled bandages for Union soldiers. It was 1863, the year of Gettysburg, the winter of the war. At first they called themselves the "Ladies Sewing Society." Starr King had come through in 1862 and rallied the Unitarians in support of the Union. Inspired by his visit and by the work they shared, the women who founded this church, ex-patriot New Englanders all, convinced their husbands of the need to build. By 1865, they had incorporated the Sewing Society. Two years later the Society had built a building and called its first minister, the Rev. Thomas Lamb Eliot of St. Louis.

A member of the Unitarian Royal Family, Thomas was the son of William Greenleaf Eliot, the founder of the First Unitarian Church of St. Louis, as well as of Washington University. Thomas Eliot’s nephew, Frederick May Eliot, served our congregation in St. Paul for twenty years, from 1917 until 1937, when he was called to Boston to be President of the American Unitarian Association.

And so we come full circle back to that alchemy of connection, which gives me the audacity to tell you how I think you ought to spend your money. The women who founded this church and the men who helped them do it were both deep and generous people. They knew, and we still know, the difference we can make both for ourselves and for the world when we invest our lives in the life of the church. It is where the values and the people we love most meet to seek the highest. It is holy ground. Let us be grateful. Let us be generous. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.

So be it. Amen, and Blessed Be.

Copyright 2000, by Rev. Rob Eller-Isaacs.  All rights reserved.