Today is the 50th Anniversary of the first service ever held by this congregation. Fifty years: that’s almost as long as I’ve been a Unitarian Universalist. In fact, it’s almost as long as there have been Unitarian Universalists. In 1959 our predecessor denominations had just begun the formal process that moved them toward merger in 1961. JUC’s founding just snuck in while there was still an American Unitarian Association in join. Hence our name hasn’t been complicated by the double Us, as some of us hope it will be one of these days.
History has always fascinated me. I like having a feeling of roots, both personally and in terms of the religious movement to which I’ve devoted almost all of working life. I’m curious about where things, like this church and our religious movement, have come from, because, as William Cronon put it in the article from which we took this morning’s reading: “To understand how and why we live as we do, we cannot avoid appealing to the past to explain how and why we got to be this way.”
That’s certainly true for our church. We began because Dick Henry, who was then the minister of the First Unitarian Church in Denver, asked a couple of denominational loyalists, who were members of his church but lived out here to the west of the city. if they would host a meeting of other members of First Church who lived in this area. Henry thought they should have a church of their own instead of having to come downtown and many of the people at the meeting agreed. They wanted a church near where they lived that would affirm the liberal religious values in which they believed.
The whole history of our movement is like that, especially here in the United States. As people moved west they brought their liberal faith with them and then wanted to create churches near their new homes in which their values would be affirmed. In 1871, when Denver was still little more than a town, Rev. L.E. Beckworth come out from Boston to organize Colorado’s first Unitarian society. A Universalist church was organized in 1891. Neither our Unitarian nor our Universalist forbears in Colorado were comfortable with the status quo, so they did something about it, such as establishing churches in which they could feel at home – like we feel at home here at JUC.
But they weren’t the only people who came west. People of all faiths made the trek, from Mormons and Catholics to Greek Orthodox and Conservative Jews. Among them was the family of the family of the rabbi whose synagogue was across the street from the church I served in California. One day the rabbi and I got into a conversation about the differences of our two congregations. The rabbi said his congregation had grown – and it had grown a lot – because it provided a religious home for those who wanted to maintain their Jewish cultural and religious identity. He said: “Our people want the security of knowing they're are a part of a long-standing tradition, one established by those who heard the word of God in the time of Moses.”
The rabbi went on to say:
I don’t know how you UUs manage to survive without our kind of history. You don’t have a special language. You hardly ever mention God. You’ve got Pagans and Buddhists and atheists, along with Christians in your congregation, and when you talk about it, your General Assembly sounds more like a circus than a religious occasion. You’ve got no Cross or Torah. You think you can drink fire from a chalice. And you even teach your kids about sex – real sex, that is.
My conversation with the rabbi got me thinking. Even though we like to think of ourselves as modern and progressive, most UUs have as deep a need for roots as do the members if the rabbi’s congregation. It’s why we take such pride in having famous people associated with us, people like Priestly, Jefferson, Emerson and Thoreau, Susan B. Anthony and Florence Nightingale. It’s one of the reasons we take pride in having one of our ministers, Forest Church, rate big obituary in the New York Times. It’s important that our church here in Golden has a history, too.
And, though my rabbinical colleague may have had a hard time understanding it, we UUs take our faith as seriously as do the members of his congregation – in fact, some of us take it even more seriously. After all, many of the members of his congregation are in his synagogue only come a couple of times year during the High Holy Days. Also, our General Assemblies aren’t circuses, even though they are pretty lively. And while we may draw our inspiration from a variety of sources, rather than just one, we think that’s an advantage since it gives us more to draw on than just a single source. We are a people who have chosen to walk together, as Conrad Wright puts it, not so much to revere the past, as to learn from it so we can move toward the future.
We do this in a spirit that has been a part of our tradition from the beginning, though the language we’ve used to describe it has changed over time. In a sermon he gave at the ordination of Jared Sparks, in Baltimore, in 1819 – 190 years ago – William Ellery Channing said that since God has given us minds to use, the Divine expects us to use them. A few years later, Theodore Parker said a reasonable mind would conclude that everything about religion, even our views about God and Jesus, should be open to question. Ralph Waldo Emerson went further, suggesting that the next great prophetic inspiration would come from the East, meaning the Orient, not New England – and that he found himself closest to Whatever It Is That’s Most Sacred and Holy in nature rather than in church.
By the beginning of the 20th century Unitarians and Universalists, particular out here in the West, were even beginning to wonder if there even was something Sacred and Holy, other than human endeavor. So, they began to call themselves Religious Humanists, believing they were just as religious as those who believed in God. Their female colleagues, called the Iowa Sisterhood, began to see church as a source of community, rather than as a place to hear preachers preach. As you can see, looking at our past, we’ve never been static. We’ve always been a movement that’s open to the future.
It was in this spirit that the founders of this church began to hold services in a rented Presbyterian Church in downtown Golden – the building that’s now the Foothills Art Center, where we’ll hold our anniversary reception this afternoon. In his account of what JUC was like in its early years, Dick Prouty quotes the statement of purpose adopted by our founders. It says:
Basing our membership on no creedal test, but wishing to stimulate honest, reverent thought; encourage the spirit of love, promote social progress; and strengthen our allegiance to truth, morality and religion, as exemplified by the purest lives of humanity and interpreted by the advancing thought of our age; we unite in support of the good, the true and the beautiful, and for service to [hu]mankind.
This sentiment has remained at the heart of our congregation’s life ever since our founding – and living out these values has given us our reason to exist. Not all of the ministries here have been successful, not all of the programs we’ve created have lived up to expectations, and not all of our hopes and dreams have been realized, but this congregation has grown to become one of the largest in our denomination – and one of the most respected. In part, that’s because we’ve been able to learn from our mistakes and build from our successes. And the same will be true as we move on from this anniversary.
One of the things that will add to our strength as we do this is the fact that this congregation knows how to do church. We didn’t begin with the kind of facilities we have, we didn’t begin with the kind of staff we have, we didn’t begin with the richness of the music that now fills this building or the variety of programming that helps people of all ages in this church learn and grow. But there was something about the spirit in this congregation, even in the beginning, that helped people see what this church could become and then to do what needed to be done to achieve it.
The other day I drove back from a meeting at the Boulder Valley Fellowship in Lafayette. I got mixed up with my directions and found myself on Sheridan Blvd. driving south. Along one stretch of that road, where Broomfield borders Westminster, there must have been half dozen huge non-denominational churches – all brand new. Thousands of people could fit into those churches on Sunday morning, and I suspect thousands of them do. I can’t believe that if there are that many people who want to go to those churches there aren’t lots of people who would want to come to our church if they knew about us. I think we’ve got an obligation to let them know we exist and that our liberal faith has to offer them – that it might, in fact, mean as much to them as it means to us. Doing something about this is, I believe, one of the challenges of the next years of this church’s life.
I’ve been a minister, now, of five very different UU congregations, six, if you count the one I served as a student. I began my ordained ministry in Rochester N.Y., as an associate minister, doing social justice and program work, especially with young families – and there were a lot of them in Rochester in those days, just as there are a lot of them now in our congregation now. In Rochester we had to bus our Sunday school kids to rented classrooms in public schools because we had so many of them. Then I move to Ohio and served a very old church in a very new building and soon it, too, was bursting at the seams, though this time it was not just with young families, but with college students who were looking for a religious home in a time of turmoil. Then I moved to Evanston, Illinois, to a much larger church that was growing because of its commitment to being involved with the social issues that were disturbing our world. The church I served in California needed to build new facilities to serve the people seeking it out as a church home, so it raised the money to build them, creating a campus much larger than the one we have here in Golden. Now I’m here in a church that’s reached a size where it has to think, again, about how it might change – and change we will, not only with the calling of someone to take the place of Peter Morales, but with whatever new vision of the future will evolve. It’s going to be an exciting time.
Our movement has a long history, much longer than our 50 years here in Jefferson County, our 138 years in Colorado, longer, even, than the end of the 18th century, when, in this country, the names Unitarian and Universalist first began to be used. Our roots in Europe go back to the very beginning of the Protestant Reformation, meaning that we’re actually older than Baptists or Presbyterians, let alone Mormons or Seventh Day Adventists.
What’s held us together through all these years, including our years out here in Colorado, is we’ve always been open to the future, a future we believe will be even better than the past – a future in which we will be able to live out our values as a deeply religious people. And don’t let anyone ever tell you that we’re not. The reason I accepted the invitation of a guy at work to come to his church one Sunday, almost fifty years ago, is because he promised me it would be different from any of the other churches I’d ever attended. He said it was different because it was made up of people who believed they were religious even though they didn’t believe in the rituals, creeds and stories of more traditional approaches to religion. The members of the church I joined, like the people who founded this church, were people who wanted to be life-long learners. They were people who wanted to think about they were learning and to then do something about it. They were people who were unafraid of looking honestly at the issues of their lives and the issues of the world. They were people who were willing to face up to the problems they knew they would have to face with hope instead of fear – with open hearts, instead of closed ones. They were people willing to look for meaning wherever they could find it, and to be with each other in ways that would bring meaning into their lives, along with some of the joy they might otherwise miss. If that isn’t a description of the people of this church, I don’t know what is.
Ours is a faith worth having. It is a faith people have and lived and died for over 400 years, fifty of them here in Jefferson County. Ours is faith that provides a religious home for people who could that home in no other place. Not only this, but the world needs churches like ours every bit as much as we need it, because our values matter, just as does our belief that if we human beings don’t do something to turn our world around and make it the kind of just, beautiful and sustainable place it should it, no one else is going to do it.
Such is the challenge of our approach to religion, the approach that brought our founders together all those years ago and has brought us together ever since. So, on this our 50th Anniversary, let us celebrate who we’ve been, who we are, and what we yet shall be, so it will be with good memories that the people of the future remember us, just as we celebrate with good memories the people who brought us the Jefferson Unitarian Church.
Comments for Jefferson Unitarian Church
On Its 50th Anniversary, October 18, 2009
By Rev. Dr. David Sammons
Reading Taken from “Why the Past Matters” by William Cronon
Wisconsin Magazine of History, August, 2000
Although most people usually take it for granted and devote little time to studying or thinking about it, in fact the past is responsible for everything we are. It is the core of humanity. The past is the world out of which we’ve come, the multitude of events and experiences that have shaped our conscious selves and the social worlds we inhabit. To understand how and why we live as we do, we cannot avoid appealing to the past to explain how and why we got to be this way.
But it is not the past alone that plays this crucial role in shaping our identities. No less important is the act of remembering the past, the backward reflective gaze in which we self-consciously seek to recall the world we have lost, the vanished landscape of our former selves and lives, in order to gather the signposts by which we find our way and keep ourselves from becoming lost. If the past is the place from which we have come, then memory and history are the tools we use for recollecting that place so we can know who and where we are. Memory and history turn space into place, investing what would otherwise be [an] abstraction with a wealth of human meanings, and thereby turning it into the kind of place we choose to call home.