by Jennifer Schnayer, Summer Minister

A sermon given July 15, 2001

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

Good morning.  We are a people committed to the idea that there are a multitude of ways to engage the spirit and enliven the soul.  We gather today to celebrate that hopeful message, grateful to have companions on the journey.  Come, let us worship together.

Do you remember the first time you came to a Unitarian Universalist church?  What was it like?  Were you single or partnered?  Were you recently widowed, or a small child?  Celebrating a joy or grieving a broken world?  Where were you the first moment you came to be among us?

I remember my first moment among you.  Not you right here in this room, but among you nonetheless.  It was the time I came to be among you as my religious family.  That first moment was 24 years ago.  I was six years old.  I walked into a big, round building, went with my mom to the RE classroom, met a cheerful woman with short white hair and a red cardigan—sort of like the one Mr. Rogers wears—and was "left off" to paint and sing and talk with the white-haired lady and the other kids while my parents went to the service.

I remember feeling terrified of all the new kids.  I was a stranger to them and they were all strangers to me.  They all knew each other and ran around and laughed and played.  This was tormenting for me, a painfully shy, awkward-looking girl who was all arms and legs.  I was terribly unsure of myself.  But I knew the lady in the red cardigan was special.  She HAD to be younger than MY grandparents.  She ran around and talked to us like grown-ups, asked questions and laughed with us while we painted.  She also spent extra time talking to me, helping me through the uncomfortable stages with the other kids and helping the other kids reach out to the shy new girl.

After the service, my mom was subtle but thorough when she asked me how my morning was.  She said:

“Did you have fun?”

“Yep!”—evidently,  I was bounding around enthusiastically.

Then she asked, “What did you learn today?”

“Oh mom, it was wonderful, we didn't learn anything!!”

Ok, this wasn't going to be easy for Mom . . . but she kept after me.

She asked me what we talked about, what we did for that hour.  I told her about the games we had played, the painting we had done and the talk we all had together with “the lady.”

[She had asked us what we thought about the game we played and evidently that had launched us kids into a big talk about what it meant to be fair and why it was important that we listen to each other.]

I didn’t say a word about guilt, sin or doctrine.  Mom said she thought to herself, “Maybe it is true what they say about this place.”

Maybe it's true what they say about this place.  But if newcomers or old timers are to discover and rediscover the truth about our churches, we have to bring it to life, to embody our faith each and every day.  It is when we manifest what we value that we bring our faith to bear on the world.

I did not become a UU the first moment I came to be among you.  It took me some time to learn about Unitarian Universalism, to learn that a religious life can be sought and uncovered through my own life experience, to learn that my theological beliefs could spring from my reasoned understanding of the world and of the Divine.

I had been raised to believe that leading a good life was what asked of me—not a confession of faith or a particular belief about God.

One of the stories I heard growing up was one my grandfather told about my great-grandmother.  She'd had to go to work cleaning houses after her husband fell ill during the Depression.  Even so, sometimes her meager income wasn't enough for her family and she had to ask for credit to buy groceries.  “But,” Grandpa said, “the shopkeepers helped my mother because she always paid her debts in full.  She was a woman of her word.”  It was important that we always kept our word—that was the way of our family—and a way we could pay respect to the memory of this great woman that my grandfather loved so dearly.

I got another dose of how to live out my values from my mom.  She fought tirelessly for the ERA and I spent hours with women in NOW meetings as they planned their strategy to build support for this important amendment.  Most all of those women went to the UU church, and that is how we discovered Unitarian Universalism.

Finally, Laverne, my RE teacher in the bright red sweater, came along.  She taught me about tolerance.  She believed that respect for others, their bodies, spirit and ideas were of utmost importance.  It was something that she talked about every time we were together.

My family taught me about honesty, my mother taught me about equality and justice and Laverne taught me about tolerance.  These are what drew me into this faith and began to shape the way I lived and the way I manifested my faith in the world.

But it didn't happen overnight.  It took some time to think through all these things—what God meant to me, what humanism meant to me and what I thought living a good life meant.  Somewhere deep inside me, I believed that honesty, commitment to equality, working for justice and being tolerant of a variety of beliefs were more a sign of a soul saved than any creed someone could offer up to God.

Is living your values what it means to have a living faith?  I wondered and I watched.  And the woman I watched was Laverne.  I came to understand what Unitarian Universalism can mean in someone's life because I came to understand Laverne's steadfast commitment to her faith.  She had a wonderful ability to bring it to life for us children, both by example and description.  We understood what she believed and what our UU heritage meant to her.  What I remember most about her was her fierce personal commitment to social justice, to learning and to pacifism.  That commitment created an energy around her, a sense of mission.  Her UU faith and atheist theology drove her understanding about life as well as her daily activities.  She lived her faith.

I think Laverne let her experience of being wholeheartedly UU energize her life.  And I think that is one example of what conversion experiences can do for us.

But we don't like to talk about conversion experiences.  They remind us of places we have been, or places we do not want to go.  We don't want to abandon ourselves to our faith, to lose control.  But I ask you, how can we lose ourselves by letting the experience of this religious movement wash over our lives?  After all, our primary religious way is the free and responsible search for truth and meaning.  With this as the foundation of your religious way of life, it would be hard to lose yourself!  I think the fundamentalist tradition has identified an important element of religious life: the need for re-energizing and renewal.  I think a constant reminder of what it was like to enter our religion would serve to ground us in our own journey: remembering and honoring the place we started as we continue to build our religious life.  I think it has the potential to both energize us and also to show us how our faith has grown and waned.

Do you remember when you realized you were a UU?  Was it a particular moment, or a process?  For me it was a process, yet, there is one moment I can look back at and say, that is the moment this faith became mine.

I wasn't much more than eight.  I remember sitting down with Laverne—that same lady in the red cardigan—and talking with her about God.  To believe or not to believe.  I was getting mercilessly hounded at school by the other kids:  “You're going to hell!”  Or “You'll be in trouble with God for not believing in Jesus.”  I needed to talk about it.  What was I supposed to say to these kids about being a UU?  She told me that I could believe in God, or not.  I could decide I didn't know, or that it didn't matter to me.  What mattered was that I thought about it myself and decided for myself.  She told me that I might change my mind as I grew up, but no one could tell me what to believe.  She couldn't tell me what to believe.  She also said I could go to whatever church I wanted to when I grew up, that this was the church my parents chose for us now . . . I'd be able to decide for myself later.  “But,” she said, “no matter what, you will always be welcome here.  This will always be a home for you.”  That's it, I thought.  I can be myself here.  This is what I am, I am a Unitarian Universalist.

I had a conversion experience at that moment.  Something shifted in me.

We may not throw ourselves at someone's feet at the altar, but I believe that our UU faith does carry with it an experience of conversion—and it is as varied as the number of people in this room.  There is a moment when we move from tentative leanings to firm conviction.  There is a moment when we claim this faith as our own.

D.H. Lawrence was not a Unitarian or a Universalist, but I think his words capture what is at the heart of our conversion experiences.  He said, “I believe that one is converted when one first hears the low, vast murmur of life . . . troubling one's hitherto unconscious self . . . then we are born again to humanity, to a consciousness of all the laughing, and the never ceasing murmur of pain and sorrow that comes from the terrible multitude of brothers and sisters.”  It is when we open our compassionate heart to the experience of life beyond us that we become converted.

But it doesn't end there.  Our conversion experiences continue.  One of the driving forces of our Unitarian Universalist faith is its Movement.  We are a growing faith, one that evolves and moves through history and throughout our lives.  I may have come to claim this faith as my own when I was eight, but that was by no means the end of it!  Time and again I have had to reclaim my faith, to renew my convictions and even to change some of my beliefs.

One of the most challenging moments for my faith actually occurred during my first year of seminary.  All of the warts and blemishes of this Movement seemed to be glaring at me, daring me to continue.  I longed for the unifying effect the Jesus story had for my Lutheran, Presbyterian and Methodist colleagues.  I wanted the robust rituals they had that supported the theological and spiritual challenge of seminary.  I felt our Movement was barren of ritual, and I even began to feel that my UU upbringing had robbed me of something.  Besides all this, I really started to wonder about the humanist-theist scuffling that goes on—and I struggled with how that represented anything of the toleration I had been raised to value so highly.

But my faith grew instead of shriveling, though it took some time and caused me some pain in the process.

More than anything, I believe that every person has the right to engage the wisdom of the world and their own experience of creation to shape their religious faith in response to what they have come to believe, and then use that faith to direct their moral life.

It's good that I think that, because this is a faith that demands that we engage the world of ideas and lived experience and then build a faith of our own, a faith that also celebrates the religious journey of others and challenges the believer to confess their faith through their actions, through their living.

As I learned more about our history, I came to understand that we do have a story, and it is tied to the same idea that I am so passionate about—the freedom to believe.  Since we have no single faith path, no single message to direct our religious journey, the story of our faith is found in the history of the people who lived it.  It is a history and your story and my story.  Another thing I try to remember is that our principles are ideals that we aspire to—they are not necessarily principles we embody.

I respect our effort to shape our faith and transform our Movement again and again.  Warts and all, this is my religious home.  So, I was born again to this faith my first year of seminary, and like any relationship that endures, it is a deeper and sadder and sweeter faith.  It is also more honest.

Being a Unitarian Universalist means being immersed in a religious awakening that never ceases.  We remain open to new insights, new revelations, further transformations of our soul, our lives, our spirit.  This is the part of our good news: we are born again and again and again to humanity and to the miracle of life.

We can use this power to energize our lives, to instruct our action.  To heal and renew our spirits.  We can bring our faith to life in the world—it is not what we aren't, but what we are that drives us forward.

Let us capitalize on our religious life, and let the deep knowing, the growing awareness of humanity's suffering and joy be at work in our lives.  We shouldn't fear having a ferocious faith, we should dare to use it to transform our world.

Spirit of Life and Love, keep before us the vision of our faith, and keep alive in us the flame of our commitment to the Mystery of Creation.  May our lives be ones that honor the great blessing of life.  And may our being together here this morning serve to remind us of our commitment to that which lies beyond us.  Amen.

BENEDICTION

May you discover and rediscover a passion for this faith.  Go in love and go in peace.  Amen.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Copyright 2001, Jennifer Schnayer.  All rights reserved.