To begin again
Isn’t to go backwards,
But to decide to go.
Our story is…a spiral …
Shifting inward and outward…
We disembark both beside…and beyond
Who we were…
It is a return … and a departure.
It is almost exactly 2 years to the day since we closed this church for in-person worship.
March 8, 2020, I was in the pulpit. When Dana Buhl, who was assisting, invited those gathered to greet your neighbor…
Do you remember what that used to be like?
Hugs and handshakes, up close, no masks…remember?
Dana said that some of us might not want that close contact and suggested an elbow bump or Namaste and a bow. Do you remember?
News reports about the virus were coming fast and frequent.
There was a choir on the Chancel that morning, with some distance between them for the first time…the same choir that is with us today, btw…
The next week, when our Intern Minister, Mira, preached…there was also a choir but no congregants in the seats.
The previous Monday, March 16, San Francisco had shut down… California, Oregon, Washington…by the end of the month the whole west coast was closed.
And on March 22, we went virtual only here at the church.
We re-invented Sunday morning in just days.
DeReau created the wonderful Quartet that has blessed us ever since. Cassandra moved religious education to zoom…what a challenge that posed.
We all began to mask and distance from one another. Hand sanitizer everywhere.
Close contact with other human beings, even those we knew and loved, became the most dangerous activity we could engage in.
What a challenge for a church that is all about relationship and love.
We thought…I thought…this would be short term.
I believed we would be back in person…by Easter.
We agonized over the decision to remain virtual through that first summer. It was an even bigger decision when we decided it was not safe to regather the next year.
No one…certainly not any of us…imagined that it would take two years…with the exception of those few weeks last fall…two years before we could return.
There is a lot to mark on this anniversary…
A lot to mark as we begin to regather here at the church.
Our Board of Trustees met, in person, that first week of March two years ago. They have not met in person since.
And at that last in-person service, the Ministerial Search Committee was introduced. They met once in person, I think, but then went to zoom.
They met in-person again for the first time just last weekend.
Through it all our ministry continued. Through our witness as Portland became the epicenter of protest against police violence on black and brown bodies. Through the efforts to call every congregant to let you all know that your church was still here and that your church cared.
Through the virtual choirs that John Boelling led. Through the activity packets that Cassandra and her team mailed to every child. Through the creation of an on-line Family Worship service. On-line Vespers led by our lay ministers. Memorial services and weddings on zoom.
It was so hard…not seeing you all in person. It helped so much that many of you wrote kind notes of thanks.
Jan Fortier wrote, just last week: “…my church has really been important to me during these fraught times, not just with the virus, but also with [family challenges] …and all of the violence in the world [which she named]
“But I tune in every week “ she wrote, “to my steadfast church and have been more than comforted, blown away, by the strength and love I’ve found here…from the sermons, to the music, to the social justice leadership…
Lay people have voice-mailed me from the church during these months to see if I’m ok. I’ve never called them back, but I could have. I often think if I got stuck downtown during The Big One I would try to head for my church. It means to world to me.”
Jan, are you here? Did you make it?
There is a lot to mark as we return…hopefully for good.
There is all the loss. The loss of life first. Many more than a million of our neighbors. So many of them poor and people of color. So many houseless. So many in care facilities… So many that our society had already decided were expendable.
But also the losses among those who survived, even among those, like most of us, who survived well.
Almost two years of on-line school for our children. Two years in their lives is an eternity.
The friends who have not been able to meet in person. The singers who have not been able to sing together. And all of us who have not been able to worship together in person…
There is a grieving process ahead of us…a grieving process that we could not even really begin until our world started to emerge into its new…post-pandemic…into its new shape.
Two years ago, I preached a sermon titled “Mama’s Last Hug.” It was an auction sermon…you remember our auctions?
I talked about our primate heritage that includes both the chimpanzee and the bonobo. Both are close genetic cousins of ours.
The bonobos are called the empathetic apes. Sensitive and gentle, most of the time. The bonobos make it easier to believe in the power of love.
Chimps, on the other hand, are hierarchical, competitive, aggressive, often violent.
It was hard not to think about Ukraine when I reread that sermon. The senseless violence…not just the ability but the willingness to kill and destroy…the recreation of empire its only justification…and we know how empire…whether Russian or American…how empire has colonized all of our spirits and too many of our bodies…
The invasion of Ukraine raises questions about whether love has even a chance of prevailing in the end.
I concluded that sermon by saying:
“[The] process of creation embraces both the aggression of the chimpanzee and the sharing of the bonobo…and it embraces our questioning of what we have received in our DNA. That Spirit of Life, that process of love, also embraces our hopes and our commitment to be about the building of Beloved Community.”
Humility was our spiritual theme two years ago when I preached that sermon, just as it is this month.
Humility, as a spiritual discipline, is complicated, especially for those with identities that are still marginalized. Humility always needs to be paired with empowerment for those on the margins.
But humility does instruct to put behind us notions of our exceptionalism, our innocence, our purity…
If it was not clear to us before, we have within us the capacity for both great love…and great violence…
And the evidence of the world is that greed and violence and harm so often win out…too often win out.
Ukraine is just shining a light on that truth.
As Adrienne Maree Brown says: “Things are not getting worse, they are getting uncovered. We must hold each other tight and continue to pull back the veil.”
Hold each other tight and continue to pull back the veil…
As we begin to re-gather…begin to emerge…we hope for good this time…
We know that re-gathering will take some time. We are all not ready to come to this sanctuary. I understand that. This is going to take some time.
It is also true that we are all emerging tentative…there is much uncertainty for most of us…
We know that we do not emerge into the same world we left…
We have all gotten that message.
But the pull to return…to just go back… is there in us…the pull to return to what had become comfortable for us.
How do we navigate this return…this emergence…so that the love we struggle to have faith in…can thrive and liberate us all?
There are some things that I believe we can know.
First, we know that denial of the losses will keep us stuck, unable to move. The losses have been real for all of us…deeper losses for some by a mile it is true…but the losses have been real for us all.
We have some grieving to do…
But grieving is not all we need to do.
As Amanda Gorman writes in a poem titled The Shallows:
“All that is gorgeous&good&decent is no luxury, not when its void brings us to the wide wharf of war… what we have lived remains indecipherable. Yet we remain…shall this leave us bitter? Or better?
Grieve.
Then choose.”
Grieve, first. But then choose.
Isn’t it the choosing part where we want the church to have a voice?
Remember…before covid…that we knew…or we were coming to know just how flawed the system we lived in…the system many of us have benefitted from…just how flawed that system was.
We saw George Floyd’s murder. We saw the violence against trans folks and trans children. We saw the deepening climate crisis and we were seeing more and more clearly how the fossil fuel industry drives our policies and our politics. We saw the willingness of so many of our neighbors to embrace the Big Lie and the would be autocrats who promoted it.
We knew…back then… how much, how desperately we were in need of a new way.
Covid has not changed any of that.
So, we have grieving to do. And we have known we need a collective change of heart for a long time.
Hold on to both of those knowings.
The choir sang that familiar text from the prophet Micah: What does the Lord require? What does the Spirit of Life demand?
Only three things. That we love justice, act with mercy and move humbly through the world.
We’ve heard that before. We hear that now. But what does that mean…
There is a joke told about a die-hard Unitarian who resisted authority at every turn. This person proclaimed: “Don’t tell me what to do! Tell me exactly what to do.”
I am not going to offer you a program, a list of do’s or don’ts…
In fact, I want to affirm the tentativeness with which we are emerging.
I do want you to think about that tentativeness a little differently.
Think of it as openness. An openness that is a real resource as we emerge, because it opens the possibility of different choices…based on better understandings of what love is calling us to do…now.
We light our chalice each week in faith, in hope and in love.
These are words drawn from St. Paul in his letter to the Corinthians…
Faith, hope and love abide…abide…they remain…they are somehow always there…
Faith hope and love abide, these three…but the greatest of these is love.
The challenge of our faith remains…it abides…even as we emerge into a world that is changed…
The question remains whether the Beloved Community is a possible dream…
The question is whether we can manage to have enough faith…that love might win…despite the evidence to the contrary
Enough faith to justify a hope that can get us through these days and these weeks…
Enough faith and enough hope so that love has a chance to emerge stronger…
So that love has a chance to emerge in us and through us…
In different ways and in more liberating shapes…
The question remains…
Only the circumstances have changed…
The question abides…
What is love calling us to do…today. How is love calling to live?
This community is shaped by our faith and hope and love
And by the promises we make
The promises we make again as we begin to regather
And emerge into these new days
The promises we make to ourselves
And to one another
To build a community worthy of being called
Beloved
And to live the lives that we want to live.
From all of us,
To all of us:
And to those who will join us:
Welcome Back
Welcome home.
Prayer
Will you pray with me now?
Spirit of Life and of Love. God of our tentative and tender hearts.
Help us remember the simple instructions
To love justice, be merciful and move humbly
Help us remember as we stumble toward hope
Uncertain sometimes to the point of immobility
Yet not willing to close out the voice of love
As it calls to us
Not willing yet…not nearly willing
To accept the way the world has worked
As the best that we can do.
Help us remember that love abides
And that it is love’s insistence voice
We hear…
That voice telling us to keep pulling back the veil
And holding each other tight.
May that be so.
Ashe and Amen
Topics: Humility