Safe and secure from all alarms
Leaning on the everlasting arms
The Everlasting arms…safety, security…
That pastoral promise touches deep into hearts that yearn for comfort…oh, we want change too, at least we say we do…but we resist it too…
Our hearts wonder what can be relied on when we know that change will come…that change must come…when we are weary and worried…when we have a hard time trusting that those everlasting arms are really open in welcome…
But I wonder? Is it really comfort that we yearn for? Or is that simply our weariness speaking?
Elizabeth Nguyen, in the reading that Carter shared, wrote about “the
succor and the accountability” of being in community…of “doing that thing that we cannot do alone.”
The succor…the intentional giving and receiving of comfort and support…welcome embodied in a bowl of soup or a plate of fat dates on the table…
But not succor…not comfort alone.
Succor…and accountability…the living out of and into responsibility for ourselves in relationship with others… the grounding of our lives in the ties that bind…
The comfort and accountability of living our covenant.
Covenant is our spiritual theme this month. And we often think of covenant as words we say. As promises we speak.
But our covenant is more than words. Those promises are lived in our relationships and in the decisions we make every day. Our covenant is lived. Before it is spoken. The words of covenant, to quote Rebecca Parker, are the icing on the cake, not the cake itself.
As we re-gather, amid so much change, it feels like we need to at least revisit and renew our covenant, confirm that our dreams for Beloved Community still stir us, that our commitments to get free…all of us…still call us forward
….to make sure that those promises and commitments are permanent…not passing…
That the hope that is at the heart of this faith…abides.
Those everlasting arms are there…the love that has never broken faith with us is still ready to partner with us…
The question is whether we are ready to partner with that love…to make that love real in our world.
We need to get clear.
Welcome home to the beginning of a second church year that we begin in a virtual sanctuary.
Who knew how much we would come to miss those hard wooden seats where we sat shoulder to shoulder…
We thought we could gather in-person this morning…but the virus had other plans…so we have delayed that day…hopefully not for long.
We had planned to gather in-person, those of us who live in the Portland area…
But our community now includes so many of you who live at a distance…even our definition of who “we” are as a community has shifted…is shifting…
So perhaps there is some “rightness” in this virtual homecoming, some recognition that assumptions…many of them…about what the church is and who it is for…some recognition that our assumptions need to shift too.
It is a lot of change to live into.
What abides? What can we trust?
It is fundamentally a question of faith…as so much changes around us?
Congregant Cindy Cumfer, our resident historian, just presented a history of First Unitarian’s engagement with race. She began with the acknowledgement that the first ministers of this church…Thomas Lamb Eliot and his son William Eliot…were believers in Manifest Destiny, believers that European and especially New England culture was the apex of civilization, that indigenous folks were far lower in the hierarchy of development…The early leaders of this church believed that they were bringing the benefits of civilization to a savage land. They did not argue against the lash law…the punishment for being Black in Oregon…or the Chinese Exclusion Laws…
Today we cringe…all of us…
But they believed they were promoting truths that were permanent…ordained by God in fact…truths that could be relied on.
Theodore Parker is one of our most famous Unitarian religious ancestors. He wrote the famous phrase that “the arc of the universe bends toward justice,” that Dr. King borrowed.
Parker harbored fugitive slaves and was an ardent abolitionist.
The church he served, in the 1840’s, had over 7000 members, the largest church in Boston.
He was like a rock star…in his day.
Perhaps his most famous sermon was titled: “The Transient and the Permanent in Christianity.” Remember the early Unitarians believed they were perfecting not rejecting Christianity.
“The Transient and the Permanent.”
”What is falsehood in one province passes for truth in another. The heresy of one age is the orthodox belief and “only infallible rule” of the next…”
Predestination. The miracles stories of Jesus’s birth and resurrection…all transient for Parker, who had no patience with the arguments over these doctrines in his day.
But he was clear on what he believed was permanent…”Thou shall love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, all thy soul and all thy mind and thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself…”
Love God. Love self. Love neighbor.
It does not take much translation for those phrases to ring true for most of us.
Love God. Love the Spirit of Life that moves within us and among us.
Love self.
Love those around us…love neighbor.
We would, I think, add Love the Earth, as Julia Griffiths so beautifully put it in her testimony: The earth loves us…
Parker acknowledged that there were other religious traditions that spoke of those truths in different language. But those truths, for him, were permanent and real.
Parker was far from perfect. We can’t look to the heroes of our history for perfection. He was an ardent abolitionist but he did not believe that black folks were his equal. He was not perfect…any more than we are…but he got the impulse to love and the power of love…he got that right.
This summer in my Q&A sermon, I used the metaphor of the cathedral with many stained glass windows…each one representing a different religious tradition…the light streaming in looking slightly different depending on which window you looked through…
Many windows…one light…
Many religious points of view…one abiding truth…
UU Minister Forest Church created that metaphor. The Cathedral of the World he called it.
It is a powerful metaphor…suggesting that there is a common religious impulse…a single light…despite the superficial differences…
That there is something permanent we can rely on.
Despite our disappointment that the virus is not done with us yet…
And despite all the divisiveness in our world…
Despite all the greed and the self-serving…
Despite the anniversary of 911 and two decades of a failed “War on Terror”…
Despite the persistence of racism and the refusal to allow women to control their bodies…
Despite well healed public voices against vaccination when all of them are vaccinated…
Despite all of the evidence that we live in a broken world…
Despite it all…
Hope still burns in our hearts…
The vision of a world that can be…still inspires us…
We know what we need to do…or at least we know where we can begin…
We know…that hope has not betrayed us.
Now that is a faith statement, if I ever heard one.
Hope has not betrayed us.
And I need to confess that I wasn’t sure I could get there today.
I have been just as uncertain, just as fearful that the Beloved Community was, in fact, becoming just an idle dream…
I was not sure I would be able to get to hope today…
I wasn’t sure. When we had to make the decision to delay in-person worship…I wasn’t sure how we would show up…not sure who would be here for this homecoming and what shape our spirits would be in.
(There is an old saying that great ministers make great congregations but that it is great congregations that make ministers great.)
It was you who helped me out…not being with all of you has been the hardest part of the pandemic for me…but this last week it was you who helped me get to hope.
When our Board met last week, with covenant our spiritual theme, Rev. Tom and I asked the Board members what promises they felt called to make today. And how those promises have changed since they joined the church.
They said that their commitment has gotten stronger over time. Commitment to themselves and to this community and to the spirit… stronger over time they said. They talked about sticking with it even when it has been hard…even now.
They spoke of their own spiritual growth. Of first being held by this community but now doing more holding.
They spoke of how holding the big picture, holding the larger hope…helps their individual spiritual growth.
One member said when they joined this community they joined a thing that already existed…with no idea that it would change. But now, they feel in covenant with the community that is yet to become…a community that will develop and grow into the future.
Another spoke of nurturing the emerging church that will be…the church that will serve and thrive in the future.
Of holding leadership now for a short time but having faith that the church that needs to emerge will emerge.
Faith that what needs to emerge will emerge.
And that the covenant, the promise to remain together…to keep bringing our full and most authentic selves…even when it gets hard…
That was the great gift.
I listened and I was so moved.
We belong to each other, as Julia Griffiths said so simply and so beautifully.
But I also heard a covenant that was a statement of faith, an embodied statement of faith…as we promise to stick it out, to stay with each other and to stay open to the church that is always emerging…
I heard a promise to keep faith and to hold hope.
Keeping faith with the radical notion that, all evidence to the contrary, love might just be real.
And so we are in covenant, not just with each other, but with the spirit of life and of love…
Our promise is not to be perfect…
Elizabeth Nguyen discovered the depth of covenant when she let herself show up hungry…when she showed her not so shiny side…
The promise is not about perfection. The promise is about aspiration. The promise is about creating hope out of the process of our promising.
Because it is in living as if love were real…that we find ourselves joyous, giving thanks and praise.
The Beloved Community is not an outcome…it is an attitude of possibility that underlines the urgent need for joy.
The miracle is that if we are faithful to that covenant, if we act as if love were real…we make it true.
The reflection in that board meeting helped me get my theology in order. What a blessing that was. But there was another place I needed to find in my spirit.
I was meeting with another group of congregants just this week, and they were reflecting on these covid times…their experience and how they were doing now…the state of their souls, if you will.
What I heard them say was how much they had learned.
What I heard them say was that they’d figured some things out.
Figured out what was important and what was not…
And they told me that after all these months…they still believed in love and the power of love to liberate and transform…
They still believed in love.
They told me that they knew what mattered even more deeply.
That is what took my theology down to where it needs to live.
Because the question is whether it is worth it to care. Whether it matters.
They still believed in love. And so do I. And so do you…or you wouldn’t be here.
You may have real questions in your heart. Many of us do.
You may need reassurance and support for your hope from this community.
We all do.
But you wouldn’t be here if you’ve given up on love.
We wouldn’t be gathering again if we had given up.
Now it is so true that we need to ask more of ourselves, be more demanding of ourselves…we need to face systemic racism and climate change, reproductive justice and gender liberation…and we need to do that work together.
We must dismantle those systems accountably….we don’t yet have even an intuitive sense of what that word means…but we glimpse enough of its meaning to know that it requires us to stay open and to keep widening the circle of our concern.
Covenant is a system of caring. Think of covenant as a vessel that holds our caring.
We’ve learned.
As we live through the current wave of the pandemic…we are impatient…yes,
We are concerned for safety for ourselves, for our children …of course,
We know that building toward beloved community will be a huge task…
We know all of those things…
But we are not overwhelmed,
Not depressed by current reverses…which are real…
We are enraged, not depressed.
We will emerge, we are emerging from this pandemic…impatient to get on with it.
Because, we’ve got this. We’ve gotten clearer. And we’ve gotten stronger in our faith…not faith in outcomes…though we want outcomes…but stronger in our faith that we can live into the Beloved Community with each small act we make, each decision we take…each time we act out of love…we make love more real.
What is permanent… What abides… What we can trust… Is the power of love that resides within us and is magnified among us as we expand the circle of our care.
And because that love has never broken faith with us…We ‘ve got this.
On this Homecoming Sunday…
Bring it on.
I believe we are ready.
We’ve got this.
Topics: Covenant