by Rev. Peter Morales, Guest Minister

A sermon given February 9, 2003

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

It is such a treat to be with you here in Portland this morning. Although I have never been to First Church before, today is something of a homecoming. It is a homecoming both geographically and religiously. I lived a couple of hours south of here in Cottage Grove before going to seminary. It was there that I first encountered Unitarian Universalism, at the church in Eugene.

I can still remember the first day my wife Phyllis and our daughter Marcela, then 12, drove to Eugene to visit the church. Marcela had never been to church and Phyllis and I had not darkened the door of a church in nearly 30 years. Our good friends Joy and Martin Overstreet would often talk about activities and friends at their church, Michael Servetus, in Vancouver. Joy and Martin kept telling us we should try out the church in Eugene, that it was not all the things we hated about church, that we would find people like us there. I rolled my eyes. Finally, visiting the church seemed like the path of least resistance. Then we could say we had visited and that it just wasn’t for us, thank you very much.

It seemed like the path of least resistance until we drove into the parking lot. Then it got a bit scary. Believe me, it was an act of courage to get out of the car and walk through those doors. Was this going to be totally weird? Would we be smothered by overeager greeters? Or, worse yet, completely ignored and made to feel unwelcome and unwanted? We were surprised that the people were nice, friendly but not pushy, that the service had a good, warm feel to it, that the sermon was thoughtful and challenging. Marcela even enjoyed the youth group.

We had been longing for a community of faith for years without really knowing it. While our lives were fine, we felt isolated. We longed to be part of a community that shared our values and our hopes, a community where we could grow and where we could serve. We wanted to belong to a religious home where we cared for each other and where together we could be a moral beacon in the community.

I bet most of you here this morning can remember your first day. For a few of you, today is your first day. If so, I hope you find here a religious home. And I hope you are less frightened this morning than I was that drizzly Sunday in Eugene. If you can remember your first time, recall how you felt walking in. It is so easy to forget the vulnerability, the need, the apprehension a visitor brings.

And now, eight years after that fateful morning in Eugene, here I am: a minister, working at the Unitarian Universalist headquarters in Boston, preaching today at one of our flagship churches. It’s a UU miracle (improbable but not supernatural). The doors of that small church in Eugene opened unto a new world and a new life.

When we joined the Eugene church, I often wondered why it did not have twice the members it had. I knew that the number of potential UUs in Eugene, Springfield and the surrounding areas was many times greater than our membership. (I am happy to say that the Eugene church has grown wonderfully since then.)

As I learned more about our movement, the question of why we are so small persisted. Now that I work at our headquarters in Boston, I think about this a lot. A huge number of people long for and need a religious community founded on compassion, founded on an openness to all of human experience from deep spiritual awareness to the discipline of empirical science, founded on respect for the religious dimension in all cultures, on reverence for the interconnected web of existence, on celebration, and on connecting personal spirituality with working for justice. The gap between what we are and what we could become is truly staggering. Hundreds of thousands of people are looking for a religious home like ours. Nationally, for the last ten years we have grown at the level of one person per congregation per year. I find that unbelievable and tragic. And it is even a bit mysterious.

At first I thought our small size and lack of growth were a classic failure of public relations. It seemed that half the people I met in church told some version of "Boy, I wish I had found this church years earlier." I reasoned that if we only got our message out there, many more people would find the spiritual home they are seeking. There is much truth to this, but something deeper is going on.

Then I thought that much of our problem as a movement was our culture of aloofness and coolness. It is not for nothing we have been called "God’s frozen people." I too often see churches that, while filled with good and compassionate people, come across as cold, exclusive, and unwelcoming. There is much truth here, as well. Too often we ignore newcomers. I especially see this in some of our historic churches in New England, but the problem is nation wide. I also know how important the experience of that first Sunday is. A research project studying current church members asked them when they first felt at home and like they could truly belong. The options ran from the very first day, during the first couple of months, the first six months, and on out to one year or two years. Forty-two percent of current members said they felt at home on the first day. When we make a bad impression on the first day, we very often will never get another chance. And yet, on further reflection, the mystery of our smallness remained. Something deeper is going on.

And I have heard other reasons, all of which are a piece of the truth. Some of the reasons are institutional. As an association we have not been very effective at helping new congregations start and grow. We have never attempted systematically to recruit evangelistic, enterprising, energetic leaders to our ministry. Our educated middle class culture has looked down upon anything so uncouth as outreach. The very word "evangelism" strikes terror into many of our hearts.

And yet, there is something deeper going on. The mystery of why a movement that has so much to offer is less than one tenth of one percent of the population persists. Hundreds of thousands, even millions, deeply need a religious home like ours. We have a little over 150,000 adult members. I estimate that we get a quarter of a million visitors a year. In scores of our churches, Portland First being one of our movement’s leading examples, rapid growth has occurred. I was privileged to serve an exciting and growing church in Colorado. We have lots of examples of vibrant congregations that are healthy and growing rapidly, so we know it can be done. Indeed, here at First Church you are a beacon of hope and an example for our movement. I urge you to take an even more active leadership role on the regional and national levels.

And while I would love to see our little religious movement prosper and grow, this really isn’t about growth and it certainly isn’t about "market share." The real issue is why we progressive, educated, urbane, caring and idealistic people have such a hard time creating and sustaining committed relationships. This is about how you and I relate to each other and how we relate to the wider world.

What is it that holds us back? As the years have passed, I have come to believe that what holds us back is not so much our institutional shortcomings, but rather the deep fear we carry in our hearts.

I believe you and I are afraid. I believe that millions of people who are like us are also afraid. Our fears imprison us and shrivel our spirits. Our fears express themselves in a religious culture that is too often tentative, exclusive, wary and self-absorbed.

What are we afraid of? Well, to start off, I think we are afraid of people, afraid of commitment and afraid of power. At some deep level, we are afraid of what we most desire in life.

I think we are afraid of people. We are afraid of intimacy and the vulnerability that it brings. There is a painful irony here. We live in a lonely, impersonal world, a world that isolates us from the traditional ways of human connection: village, clan, extended family. We need to belong, to connect. We need a place where we can bring our whole selves and be accepted. And yet we are afraid of what we seek. We are strangers to each other and we are afraid to trust strangers. And once we are in a group, we feel safer if it is stable and closed. So, whether in church or in our other relationships, we unconsciously create barriers to newcomers. We especially create barriers to people who are not a lot like us. It looks like aloofness, exclusiveness and smugness, but I believe it is fear.

We are also profoundly afraid of commitment. We have made something of a religious idol of personal freedom. We want to keep our options open; we don’t want to be tied down. We don’t want to be hurt. We hold back in our intimate relationships. We hold back in our commitments to a community. We hoard our financial resources. We are afraid of the demands committed relationships might make upon us. Ironically, our holding back, our reluctance to give ourselves fully, cuts us off from what we most desire. It is only when we give ourselves wholeheartedly, when we commit ourselves fully, that our relationships can flower. It is only when we give up our independence that we find freedom.

As if our fears of other people and of commitment were not enough, I think we are afraid of power. We are privileged, sophisticated and well connected. Yet collectively we are not powerful and we even avoid power. Oh, we are happy to pass resolutions at our national meetings about things we cannot affect — like globalization and our national policy on drug abuse. However, our resolutions remind me of tiny yippy dogs in the back seat of a car barking angrily at the big dog outside. It is pretty safe from the back seat with the windows rolled up. I think we progressive people need to face the fact that there is a quality of prolonged adolescence about us. I think that deep down we are afraid of power because power brings responsibility. It is safe to be a tiny minority yipping about huge issues. What will make a difference, but what is scary, is joining hands with people who care about the same things we do to become large enough to make a difference.

What is truly sad is that our fears are baseless; they are irrational. Our fears are the equivalent of being paralyzed by the monsters under the bed. There’s nothing under the bed but dust bunnies. We may feel safe when we cut ourselves off from people, when we hesitate to give ourselves fully to others and to our ideals, when we shy away from the power that is ours to take, but it is the safety of a prison. And it is a prison of our own creation.

A spiritually healthy person, a spiritually vital and enlightened person, is not paralyzed by fear. A spiritually alive person knows the truth in this morning’s responsive reading: we were never meant to survive. Ultimately, there is no personal safety. Each of us can, however, become part of that which transcends us. When we fully absorb the truth that we are not meant to survive, we are not paralyzed — we are liberated. The truth will make us free. A deeply spiritual person with a profound awareness of life’s transience and suffering experiences a compassionate connection with all of life. That person has room in her heart for others and naturally reaches out to others. That is what love is, after all — love is that quality of reaching out, of embracing life the way a child hugs her mother. There is joy, harmony, peace and fulfillment in that reaching.

If we could overcome our debilitating fears, our lives and our churches would be transformed. If we were not afraid we would see the plain truth before our eyes: there are people all around who love the same things we do. If we join hands with them we enrich our lives and we transform our communities. It is all there, ripe, low-hanging fruit ready to be picked if we will but reach for it.

We were never meant to survive, you and I. But we were meant to live. We were meant to love. We are called to nurture one another. We are called to let our compassion lead us to be generous and to work for peace, healing and justice.

Be not afraid. Together, we can do all of this and have the time of our lives. It is a little scary at first. But it feels a lot safer if we join hands. Come, take my hand and I’ll take yours. Together we’ll walk through that door to a new day. Amen.

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Copyright 2003, Rev. Peter Morales.  All rights reserved.