There’s so much to be thankful for…
Gratitude is our spiritual theme this month and there is so much to be thankful for this morning.
I am looking out at some of your faces…here in our sanctuary…after more than 18thmonths.
Halleluiah. That itself is reason enough for gratitude!
The folks here had to make reservations and upload their vaccination certificates…that was a challenge for some…our ushers had to check names at the door…
And we thought we had issues about welcoming before covid…
But over 150 of us are here in person…halleluiah.
Now, let me hasten to add, that many more members of the community are with us virtually (points to camera). So there is reason to be thankful…those of us here in the sanctuary…and those of us who are present on-line…reason to be thankful that both ways to be present are part of the life of this church.
We are here together. That is real reason for gratitude.
This is a time to remember all that we have come through these last months…to look back…perhaps mostly with relief…relief that the worst of the pandemic just might be behind us.
With relief, yes, but also to remember the patience and the privilege and the resilience that got us through…to remember the legacy of survival…through difficult days…that we will leave…that we are leaving.
To remember the legacy that we have received…as complicated as it may be.
And to pay attention to the legacy we will leave…the legacy that we are leaving today as we begin to regather.
In the words of our Responsive Reading: “We create a web of life … from every part of our life…our success and the time we have been strong, yes, but also the stories of falling short….”
Genuine gratitude has to find a way, I think, to know them both and to hold the complexity of all that is our lives.
We just passed All Souls Sunday and Dios de los Muertos last week. The season of remembering and communing with our ancestors.
I found myself thinking a great deal about my own mother and father…feeling them somehow with me still…was it memory or something more…I’m not sure and I’m not sure it matters…
Did you think about your ancestors, too?
I thought about my father… fond memories of reading with him…of him teaching me to swim in the ocean and teaching me to stand up for myself on land. But I also had to hold stories told about him after he died, when I was young…stories that praised him as an almost perfect person…whom I would never equal.
My father…who would not allow my mother to work, though we needed the money, and though she wanted a professional career. I later saw how much professional recognition meant to her when she finally achieved it. My father held the woman that he loved, the mother of his only child, back from her dreams.
What a complicated legacy he left me.
And I remember my mother…whose unconditional love helps me to this day believe that love and Universalism might be real…
I remember when I listened to her, then late in her life…speak sharply to my young son…just a toddler then…
“Quit that. Scat. Go on now, Billy. Scat.”
My son ran away. He had never been spoken to that way.
I had to realize that in my own growing up I had learned to hear those sharp sounds as the sound of love. Because that is what they were. I heard in those words and their sharp tone, my grandmother’s voice as well…and realized how the legacy travels down through generations. How the strong women who helped shape me had to be hard enough to survive in world that offered more danger than welcome.
I even began to wonder how my own children, now grown, will remember me.
Will they remember me as the preacher, the successful public person…or as the father who disrupted their lives so he could go to seminary and pursue his calling?
Will they remember the support I have always tried to provide? And my love? Or will they remember the marriage that fell apart, that caused me to leave them for a time?
Thinking about your own legacy is not for the faint of heart.
How will my grandsons…who know me not as Rev. Bill but as Poppi Bill, who walks with a cane and teaches them chess. What will they remember of me and be thankful for?
And I know that many of you, have family stories, family legacies that are more complicated than my own. I’ve been privileged to have you share some of them with me.
I think gratitude calls us to be present to the ancestors who made our lives…Present to them in their fullness. Grateful not for their purity…because they were no more pure than are we… but for the way their full lives speak to our lives…as examples and sometimes as cautionary tales.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident. That all men (all persons) are created equal. That they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.”
We claim Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence, as one of our religious ancestors. We’re proud he described himself as a Unitarian, most of us…happy to embrace the vision of equality his words proclaimed, even as our very limited democracy comes under such threat today.
Do you know that Jefferson’s statue is being removed from the New York City Council chamber. It is a plaster copy of the bronze that stands in the Rotunda of the US Capital.
And the Council voted to remove it…just three weeks ago…because Jefferson was a slave owner and the Black and Brown and Asian City Counselors objected to having to pass under his gaze to do their work.
I doubt that any of us question the taking down of Confederate monuments, but Thomas Jefferson?
Is Thomas Jefferson not good enough to have his statue present where what passes for democracy is being practiced in New York…where democracy is far from pure?
You may remember that a statue of Jefferson was pulled down outside Jefferson High School here in Portland just last year.
Is the moral high ground here hard to discern for any of you? Is this “woke-ness” taken just too far?
Take the Jefferson name out of the equation for a moment.
If you were asked whether it was justified to erect a public statue of a man who enslaved 600 other human beings, who fathered 6 children with one of the women he enslaved, and who did not even free the mother of those children when he died…
What would you say to justify erecting a statue to his memory?
Is the fact that he wrote so well …is that sufficient justification?
There was an agreement to move that statue to the NY Historical Society which had promised to present it in a context that acknowledged the Jefferson legacy that we applaud, but also the truth of the enslavement that supported his life of privilege.
But apparently even that agreement is now being questioned.
That statue was commissioned by the first Jewish Commodore in the US Navy…to honor Jefferson’s defense of religious liberty…another value that as religious liberals we hold dear.
Is this complicated enough?
Let’s think not just about the reality of Monticello, Jefferson’s home, but about our religious home right here, where we are so glad to begin re-gathering.
Congregant Cindy Cumfer’s most recent work on the history of First Unitarian locates the founding of this church…and the first ministers…as strong supporters of Manifest Destiny that claimed to bring a superior civilization to a primitive land…and saw nothing wrong with taking that land from the indigenous peoples.
How do we hold that complicated legacy? Does the church re-name Eliot Chapel? Try to erase or at least de-emphasize that part of our history? Or find a way to bring the fullness of that story forward so that we can learn from it.
How much of what we take for granted as good today, will be looked back on by our religious descendants 100 years from now as a complicated legacy we passed on to them to redeem?
I’m just sayin’.
As we begin to re-gather in person and to re-new this church
community…
There are things to be learned from our past.
We have been out of our buildings for over 18 months. But this is not the first time this congregation has had to leave this physical home.
The first time was in 1965, another time of transition, at the end of Dr. Steiner’s long, successful ministry.
Cindy Cumfer describes what happened:
“In anticipation of Dr. Steiner’s retirement, the Pulpit Committee met at the church on the evening of July 28, 1965, to vote on a ministerial candidate to succeed him. Unknown to the Committee, a 19-year-old man was hiding in the building and started a fire after the building was deserted. The fire destroyed the sanctuary [which we now call Eliot Chapel] and gutted much of the church. The church found temporary quarters for the next ten months at a Seventh Day Adventist Church..”
After the fire the church was divided about whether to rebuild on this site…or move out of the downtown.
While they were out of the building: (I’m quoting again) “after heavy debate during which a number of congregants favored a location away from downtown, [they] voted 140 to 62 to [rebuild] on this site” and remain downtown.
The members who voted to [stay] believed the church’s location downtown…”allowed it to more easily carry out its mission.”
To carry out its mission.
In 1965, the intention was to remain downtown…what is our intention now as we regather? And what mission does this church claim today in the downtown than is different from the downtown we left 18 months ago. A downtown where the number of our houseless neighbors underlines the deep inequality of the world we took as normal.
It is not hard for most of us to get to gratitude for that decision in 1965.
We need to remember, though, that the vote was not unanimous…just a bit more than 2 to 1… almost 1/3 of the members wanted to leave. They wanted a church nearer where they lived…with parking and a playground and grass. They were not bad people.
Can we be grateful for the embodiment of this church that held that strong disagreement…a few left but the church held together…can we get to gratitude for all those First Unitarian folks who met their new day with intention and commitment?
“To be free, you must embrace
the breadth of your own existence
without apology.”
It is no simple challenge to embrace the fullness of our lives and the legacies we have received…
No simple challenge.
But it is possible…to hold a fuller knowing of who we are and the legacies that have shaped us…
Because out of that fuller knowing…” [we] can act. Out of that, power can be [ours]. Out of that [knowing] we can move forward.”
Rev. Barbara Pescan writes of legacy with these phrases:
“Because of those who came before, we are;
In spite of their failings, we believe;
Because of, and in spite of the horizons of their vision, we, too, dream.”
After all that we have lived through and survived…
May this time of re-gathering…which is just beginning…
Be a time to renew or vision and bring new commitment to our hopes
So that we can move toward love and the creation of community that is truly worthy of being called Beloved.
Prayer
Will you pray with me now?
Spirit of Life and of Love. Spirit that moved in the lives that shaped the legacy we have been given. And spirit that moves in our own lives and that shapes the legacy we will pass on.
Help us remember the courage and the wisdom of those who have gone before.
But help us also remember their failings. The way they had to compromise to survive. The way they left us so much to redeem…
Just as we will leave so much for those who follow us to redeem.
Help us resist the easy answers…in favor of greater truth.
Help us hold complexity…but still get to clarity.
May we bring intention to make this a time of renewal…
Not a return to the past that is gone…
May we treat this return as an entrance…an emergence…
A new chance to be guided and to guide our lives toward love.
May that be so.
Ashe and Amen
Topics: Gratitude