A sermon given September 16, 2007

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

When I bought my house several years ago one of the first things that I learned was that Mr. And Mrs. Sinner lived across the street—Carl and Dee Sinner to be precise.  Carl, in his 90s, had been around for as long as most of the houses on the block.  He was still living in the house he was born in and had seen many people and a great deal of change come and go in the neighborhood.  It is no wonder that he was the self-proclaimed mayor of my block.

And he was delighted to now have a young minister buy the house across the street.  When I went over to meet him he had already learned of my profession.  With a twinkle in his eye he asked me how I felt about two sinners living across the street.  I knew right then that I was in the right place.

For me, Mr. Sinner was a living history book, a kind of bridge to understanding this place I had moved to.  My house was built in 1908, now almost 100 years ago.  And I have come to appreciate in my time there all the changes, all those who have come and gone, all those people I will never meet.  My neighborhood was originally a Russian and German neighborhood.  During the World War II years, many African Americans came to the neighborhood when they were red-lined into certain parts of north and northeast Portland.  The last few years have brought young professionals and more and more gentrification. 

Mr. Sinner gave me a gift of history that I probably would not otherwise have known.  He told me about the woman who lived in my house in the years after World War II, how she survived the war in Germany to come to Portland, how she would go in into the backyard and cry out in the night, living out what I imagine to be the trauma she experienced in war.

Mr. Sinner has been dead now for a number of years.  But I think of him when I look at his house or when someone new moves into the neighborhood.  I am thankful to have that bridge from the past to the present.

History is a living thing.  It certainly is when we have people to remember.  There is nothing static about it—as our lives change, as our perspectives change, as our sense of the future changes—all of that affects how it is we look at our history.  There is so much we bring from the past without really thinking about it.  We may not really know how something came to be—it just is.  The family stories, the way we are in the world.  It helps us put our lives and our world in context.

And sometimes we come to know just how complex our histories can be.

A friend and colleague of mine, David Pettee, has, for many years, had a passion for genealogy.  Tracing his heritage back through his mother’s side he has been able to go back and discover seven generations of Unitarians—and now Unitarian Universalists.

Well, several months ago he upgraded his subscription to an on-line genealogy source.  When he typed in the name of an ancestor into a searchable version of the 1774 Rhode Island Census he was stunned to learn that four enslaved Africans lived in his ancestor’s home.  This opened a door to research that eventually pointed to another ancestor being a slave trader.

That news came from court records.  It was a case where the great, great grandfather of William Ellery Channing—as in the Channing Room in our building next door and as in the father of Unitarianism in this country—sued John Robinson, Dave’s ancestor, over a dispute involving nonpayment of wages to his crew on a voyage from Africa to Jamaica.  And if it was a voyage from Africa to Jamaica in the 1800s, it was very likely that it was a slave ship.

That did prove to be the case.

This put Dave on what he calls a pilgrimage to find out as much as he could about this part of his heritage.  This past winter Dave and his wife, Mindy, made the journey to Africa, to Ghana, where his ancestor had been in the 18^th century.  His faith, he said, had taught him that only an encounter with the truth might point the way forward.  To one day make a fuller reckoning, he said, he would need to return to the scene of the crime.  He writes of how sterile and bureaucratic the room was where the bartering for human beings took place.  He writes of how that changed going into the cramped dungeons where thousands of captured Africans were held before they would be put on ships to cross the Atlantic.

This trip, as you might expect, has been a life changing experience. He still talks of the sights and sounds of that place and the images they conjure in the imagination.  He says that going there has only prompted more questions.

He sought out advice and came to understand that the journey could not just end with the family he knew.  Using that same expanded search engine subscription he next began investigating the descendents of the slaves held by his family.  Through tracing a piece of land that was in a family for many years he managed to find the spouse of a descendant of one of the slaves.  He wrote a letter and received no response.  After a couple weeks he decided to call.  He talked about the fear in picking up the phone and dialing the number.  He did make contact with a daughter of that woman.  This summer he met this family and shared stories and shared histories.  He writes of the great hospitality and warmth with which he was received.  This fall they will meet again.

The stories of that family are now becoming part of a shared history that in the past was full of brokenness and separation.

The story continues.

History is a living thing.  And history is a complex thing.  We are constantly understanding our past—our personal past and our larger communal past—through the perspective of time and memory and story.  What we choose to remember—what we choose to forget.  The sins of the past that we carry with us and seek to forgive, the wrongs we try to right, the wrongs that lie buried somewhere.  All of this is in the mix.  All of this is what we carry forward with us.

As our lives change, that history, too, is changed, and the meaning of the lives of those who have gone before are changed.  This is the hope of remembering—of giving new meaning to the lives of those who have gone before.  Whether they are remembered or half-remembered or forgotten, their lives are what we make them to be.

In reclaiming the past we have a way bringing it into the future too. If we can be present with the evils and the triumphs of the past we are able to see them in a new and different light.

I think this is a tricky one for us Unitarian Universalists.  Sometimes we just want to remember the heroic part, the good part, and not include the other parts.  We want to remember the abolitionists but not the slaveholders.  We may not want to take responsibility when responsibility needs to be taken.  Sometimes we just want to start fresh and not claim any history at all.  For years it seemed like when I would go to our General Assembly I kept seeing those t-shirts with all the famous Unitarians from the 19^th Century.  It was a very limited perspective on our history.

But history is so much more than that.  In our lives, as we tell stories and learn stories, we reclaim them in ways that we may not have claimed them before.  With time and memory those stories enter the realm of the imagination, they enter the realm of creativity.  We see the past through our lens of the present and hoped-for future.  As we can wrestle with the complexity of the past and all its brokenness we might be better able to wrestle with the complexity and brokenness of our present world.  This is how we find meaning.  This is how we find redemption.  This is how we connect our lives to the future.  It is a gift that time and perspective offer.

This afternoon, we as a community will dedicate our new Buchan Building, a project that has been many years in the visioning, building, and funding.  This building has been described as a 100-year building, meaning we hope it will be around for at least 100 years and hopefully longer.  One hundred years.  That is a little humbling just to think about.

That has made me think of late about the last 100 years in our church and where we were at the turn of the last century.  It is a story that is important for us to remember.  Looking back it was not always clear the church would be around in 2007.  In fact, reading our history, the church came close to closing its doors.

The story begins in 1893.  There was a great depression in our country. The church in those years was doing well in terms of membership, but in the years after the depression the subscriptions as they were called in those days—the money people paid to support the church—declined sharply.  The church had gotten by over time but now the church was in a bad place.  By 1901 the trustees passed a motion recommending to the congregation that the “church be closed for some time to come, so as to give it an opportunity to catch up with its obligations.”

As our church history reads… “The 1901 annual meeting of the society must have been dramatic.  The Trustees had voted beforehand to recommend that the church be closed as part of a move to put the expenses of the Society with all convenient speed upon the lowest possible footing, until such time as may find the Society freed from its indebtedness, and the prospect for the future such as to warrant it in taking up again its ordinary work.”

The meeting came and a statement was made about the financial conditions, which, the history says, were then discussed.  There must always be a discussion.

But something happened at that meeting.  Ralph Wilbur, brother of Earl Morse Wilbur, (the first associate minister of this church who went on to write the most respected history of Unitarianism) rose and read a preamble and resolutions including one that read… “That the society… recommends retrenchment in every direction possible, consistent with maintaining services, and the life of the society.”

Consistent with maintaining services and the life of the society.

I don’t know exactly what happened back at that meeting in 1901. I’m not sure exactly what role Ralph Wilbur played or anyone else for that matter.  The history talks about the mysterious role that a man named George W. Stone, the field secretary of the American Unitarian Association, played.  But it was clear that Wilbur and others stepped forward and said that the church must continue.  It was just too important.  Closing the doors was not an option.[1]

The church did make it through.  Within a few years it had recovered.  I take from the story a reverence for where we have been, a reverence for where we are and where we are going.

It is easy, I think, to take institutions like this church for granted. We talk about how long we have been around but we don’t always include as part of the story that there were times when we came close to no longer being around.  We can’t take such things for granted.

We bear witness to the past through our lives.  We bear witness in staying with the many dimensions of the past and what it asks of us in the future.  We bear witness to the violence and separation of the past that is also so prevalent in our times.  We bear witness when we march.  We bear witness when we write letters.  We bear witness when we shed tears of sorrow.  We bear witness when we tell the stories to our children and grandchildren.  We bear witness knowing that we can’t know it all.  Why those who have gone before us made the choices they did.  The circumstances that shaped the choices they made.

But still we bear witness.

Words from T.S. Eliot, from Choruses From The Rock:

Of all that was done in the past,
You eat the fruit, rotten or ripe.

For every ill deed in the past we suffer the consequence….
And of all that was done that was good, you have the inheritance….
And all that is ill you may repair
if you walk together in humble repentance,
expiating the sins of your parents;
And all that was good you must fight to keep
with hearts as devoted as those of your parents
who fought to gain it

On Nov. 16, 1924, when our church dedicated its new sanctuary on this site, what is now our Eliot Chapel, William Greenleaf Eliot, Jr., minister at the time, would recall the housewarming held in the parish rooms soon after the dedication.  He wrote: “It warms and rededicates my own heart to recall that our Mrs. Mary Teal, at the time the oldest of our members, being over 90, was seated in the Channing Room by the fireplace.  She handed lighted candles to the youngest girl and boy of the primary department,  Ruth Pease and Robert Goldman, dressed in white, who lighted the fire in the fireplace.  As Mrs. Teal handed the candles to the children, she said “Dear Children, may you here light a fire that shall give happiness to this house and all the world.”  As the flames roared up the chimney the gathered congregation in the Channing Room and out in the hallways sang, “Forward through the ages in unbroken line.”[2]

Our world, it seems, tumbles faster and faster into the future. There is so much to fear.  There is so much brokenness.  There is so much we don’t know. 

The world is full of terror and joy.  It is full of mystery and wonder. And we are left trying to make sense of it all.  In the lives of those we know and those we don’t know.

It is important to remember that we are not alone in our struggles.  We are all in this together.  It is important to know that nobody has ever had all the answers.  It is important to remember that even those people we have never known have given us all that they have given us—all of the brokenness, but also all of the blessings.

In our lives we bear witness over and over again to that legacy. We bear witness by how we are with others, with the young and with the old, with those on the margins and those within the margins, by how we are with the earth, in all its fragility.

May we always remember that our ancestors carried us, just as we carry them.  That they are with us as we become the people we are called to become.

PRAYER

God of the generations, be with us this day.  We give thanks for those who have gone before us.  May their stories guide us and also challenge us.  Give us courage to see their lives in their fullness, for all of their gifts and all of their limitations.  Help us to find meaning and hope in their stories.  May we see in their lives—their fears and struggles, their courage and wisdom—an image of what our lives might be.  Amen.

BENEDICTION

Remember you are part of a living tradition.  In all your days, let your light shine, good people.  Go this day in love and in peace. Amen.