One of the first things I did after my wife and I arrived in Colorado was accompany Fran Thorpe on a visit to Til Taguchi in the nursing home to which she had just been moved. Til was recovering from having a pacemaker put in to regulate her heartbeat. It’s not easy being in Tillie’s spot. with her beloved husband having recently passed away and no children to keep her company. But Tillie is a part of a community: the community of this church, and people like Fran have become her family, loving her like all of us should be loved. If you remember Peter Morales’ words last week, he said that at the heart of church life should be caring – caring for the world and caring for each other.
At first Tillie thought I was Peter, probably because of my beard. People used to mistake me for another UU President, John Buehrens. It wasn’t because of the quality of my work. It was because of the similarity of our beards. This facial hair, which I acquired over 40 years ago, has become so much a part of myself I sometimes have nightmares about it being shaved off. So, beard you get. But behind the beard is a person different from Peter Morales or John Buehrens. And one of the reasons I’m here this year is to help you get used to the idea of a minister who is different from the Senior Ministers you’ve had in the past – not better or worse, but different.
One of the things that is different about me is that when I preach I don‘t always wear stoles, like all our ministers did in the service last week – and I’d like to tell you why. When I was serving the first church in which I was actually the Senior Minister, the only saint-something UU church in this country: St. John’s Unitarian Church in Cincinnati, the congregation decided it needed a logo – something distinctive to put on the sign out by the street, on the cover of orders of service and on things we sent out, like our newsletter. The church’s leadership wanted something more unique than a flaming chalice. So, a graphic artist designed a logo that was made up of two red quarter circles on a field of white – the colors of lightness and life.
The quarter circles symbolize a J, for St. John’s. They also represented two U’s, for Unitarian Universalism. And they represented the yet incomplete community of the church and the world outside of it. I thought the design was brilliant, so brilliant I asked if I could have a robe made with the same design on it. And, lo and behold, a robe appeared, designed and sewn by members of the church.
When I left St. John’s, after eleven years of growing up with the congregation through the era of urban riots, Vietnam, Black Power, Women’s Rights and the beginning of the coming out of our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters – along with the Beatles, Mick Jagger and Rock N’ Roll – I decided I would leave the robe behind, believing it was the church’s, or the minister of that church’s, not mine. But thanks to friends, a new robe was given to me as I left. Actually, it's not a robe. It’s a chasuble, a garment usually worn in a church more liturgical than ours. But like most liturgical garments, chasubles were originally pieces of clothing. In the case of a chasuble, it was a kind of poncho. Stoles were also originally pieces of clothing, as well. They were scarves. And the long black robes many ministers and those at graduation ceremonies wear were originally coats, worn to keep out the cold and rain.
I wear stoles, sometimes. They’re easy to carry around. I’ll wear them here, sometimes, when I’m taking part in worship, especially when it’s what the person who is going to preach is wearing. But I’d like to wear my chasubles here when I preach because, like my beard, they’ve become a part of who I am.
Most of them have stories behind them. For instance, one of them – it’s hanging in my office – has on it the image of a phoenix rising out of the ashes. Actually, it’s rising out a chalice, the symbol of our faith. It was made by members of the church I served in California. The reason for the phoenix is because one day during the summer someone broke into my office and stole my computer and a group of my chasubles. The person took the garments, along with the computer, I suspect, because whoever it was didn’t like the religious values articulated by the person who wore them. One was the chasuble given me when I left Cincinnati. Another had a mandala of irises on it, copied from the center of a quilt my wife made for the first of my daughters to be married. She was married in the memorial garden of the church, a garden graced in the spring by such flowers. The other garment that was stolen had a rainbow over the sleeve with frogs dancing around a pot of gold where the rainbow ended on the back. It was given to me when I moved from a church I served in Illinois to the one I served in California. Frogs had become my totem after I wrote a story for my children called Freddy Frog.
The robe I’d like to put on this morning is the replica of the one that given me when I left Cincinnati. It seems particular appropriate to wear it as we approach the Fiftieth Anniversary of the founding of this church, since its founders moved to Colorado from that city. It’s where they met while going to the University of Cincinnati, which also happens to be my wife’s alma mater – and the alma mater of at least one of the rest of you, I think.
The design of this chasuble [hold up] was taken from a painting by Alexander Calder, the artist most known for his invention of the kind of moving sculptures called mobiles. Calder was the son of the chief architect of the Pan Pacific Exhibition that was being held in San Francisco in 1915. Calder had been sent East to go to college. He got the image for his painting after coming up on the deck of a ship on which he was earning his passage back to San Francisco as a fireman shoveling coal into the ship’s boilers. Sitting on a roll of canvas, sweating, appreciating the cool ocean breeze, Calder watched the sun come up, with what looked like “red fiery fingers rising up out of a yellow sea;” the moon on his left looking “like a silver half dollar” and the stars of the cosmos on his right, looking almost like the St. John’s logo. [Put on the chasuble.]
I hope you’ll be as gracious with me wearing garments like this in worship, as were the people of the churches I served in Ohio, Illinois and California, the last a congregation that wouldn’t let thieves get away with robbing them, as well as me, of garments they had come to value. By the end of the summer during which the robbery took place, chasubles matching those that were stolen appeared, as if by magic, sewn with love by the members of the Church.
But it’s not the church whose members did this that I’d like to talk about this morning. It’s our church, a church that makes real the radical hospitality about which it talks. This church was founded by a couple who decided they needed something like their church back East here in Colorado. Almost all of our Unitarian Universalist congregations outside of New England began something like this, whether it was a long time ago or in more recent history.
The church I served in California, for instance, began in 1951 when the minister of the UU church in Berkeley told a group of parents living farther out in suburbia it was ridiculous for them to spend an hour driving from across the hills to bring their children to his church so they could attend a Sunday school that wouldn’t teach them “the wrong kind of things.” So, they set up a Sunday school in Walnut Creek – an area affectionately called “the other side of the tunnel” – the tunnel that burrowed through the hills that separated Berkeley and Oakland from the newly emerging suburbs. After they set up the Sunday School the adults had to figure out what to do with themselves. So, they incorporated as a fellowship that then grew into a church, one with a rich and vital history, like this one.
It’s the vitality of congregational life in churches like this that attracted me to the ministry. I wasn’t on a spiritual journey when became a Unitarian Universalist. I wasn’t trying to find to God or Whatever It Is That’s Most Sacred and Holy. I was on a vocational journey. I was trying to find how to make use of my life in a way that was sacred and holy. The way I thought I could do this was by serving what to me was the most sacred and holy institution I’d ever found: a UU church.
UU churches are unique. They are unlike anything else there is. They are places where we gather not only for community and support but also for the inspiration to live in a way in which we can “make use of ourselves,” as Marge Piercy puts it in a poem that’s in our hymnal. Writes Piercy:
I want to be with people who submerge in the task,
Who go into the fields to harvest
And work in a row and pass the bags along….
Who are not parlor generals and field deserters
But move in a common rhythm
When the food must come in or the fire be put out.The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well
[The thing that] done has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
In a UU church we remind ourselves of the work that needs doing well in our personal lives and the work that needs doing well in the world outside of ourselves. Sometimes the work is joyful and we need to be reminded that it’s not sinful to do things that bring joy into our lives and happiness into the lives of others. But the Buddha reminds us that there is also much in life that doesn’t bring joy, from driving wind and hail that ruins roofs and gardens; to diseases with which we must cope; to the poverty, mistrust and violence that must be faced by those not as blessed as us. In church like this, we’re reminded of these realities, as well. But it isn’t done by bludgeoning us over the head. It’s done in a way that holds and supports us, showing us that there is always something we can do to give something back to the Life that has blessed us with the gift of being a part of it.
The UU church I joined when I began my journey was trying to hold on in what was becoming a dis-integrated neighborhood on the West Side of Chicago. The minister and the members of the congregation knew they might not be able to stop the flight of whites from neighborhoods like theirs. They knew they weren’t going to be able to solve all he problems of the world. But they were committed to not run away from them. In their minds being religious meant not only caring about each other, it meant engaging the world. It was about how “to bring the word of God” – or the quest for peace, equity and justice – to bear on the realities of life as best they could.
Their commitment was to “live memory into hope,” as Peter Morales put it last week. Religion exists, at least in its healthiest manifestations, because there will always be a need to be a counter to what is trying to tear our world apart. There will always be a need to our broken world and to put the pieces back together, what in Judaism is called Tikkun Olam. Articulating and acting on such a faith is what a person who puts on a garment like this must do if she or he is to be true to our Unitarian Universalist approach to religion.
The other thing we must do is to care about those in our midst, something this congregation does exceptionally well. The week my wife and I finished unpacking the things we’d brought with us from California, before our telephones, computers and television sets where plugged in, people brought us food, an air bed and instructions about how to find grocery stores, gas stations, a vet for our cats and directions to the nearest library, so we could get some DVDs to relax with as we were getting unpacked.
One of the movies I found at the library the shelf was one about which I’d never heard, but it had an intriguing title. It was called Duck. The film was about a man who, after losing his wife to cancer, his money trying to prolong her life, his son to an accident, and his apartment to a landlord who didn’t care about any of this, was latched on to by a baby duck whose mother had just been killed. Homeless though he was, the man became the duck’s new “mother” and the duck followed him around wherever he went. The duck gave him the connection he needed to carry on with his life – a connection that broke him out of his loneliness and kept him from swallowing the sleeping pills he had saved up to kill himself.
We need companionship on our journeys. We need to be in community to escape the loneliness that might otherwise engulf our lives. This, along with helping us engage the world, is central to what church life is be about, as was made real for me going with Fran to visit Til Taguchi. As we begin our journey together through the coming year I want us all to keep this in mind. Our church is about hospitality, as we’ll be remind our children in their classes this month. As an hospitable people, committed to living our memories into hope, we must live into being our Unitarian Universalist faith – the principles of which were called in the church I last served, ROY-G-BIV:
Respecting the worth and dignity of every person.
Observing justice, equity and compassion in our relationships with them.
Yearning to accept one another and encourage spiritual growth for everyone.
Gathering in a free and responsible search for truth and meaning.
Becknoing forth the right of conscience and respect for the democratic process.
Investing in work to build a world in which they is peace, liberty and justice for all.
Vitalizing a respect for the interdependent web of existence of which we are all a part.
ROY-G-BIV, living memory into hope, being hospitable with each other and the world, red fiery fingers rising up out of a yellow sea: let us think on these things as we begin our journey together this week.
Who Is a Unitarian Universalist Minister?
Adapted from Rev. Jack Mendelsohn
Who are Unitarian Universalist ministers? They are people never completely satisfied or satisfiable, never completely adjusted or adjustable, who walk in two worlds – one of things as they are, the other of things as they ought to be – and loves them both. They are people with pincushion souls and an elastic heart, who sit with the happy and the sad in a chaotic pattern of laugh, cry, laugh cry, and know that the first time their laughter is false or their tears make-believe their days as real ministers are over.
They are people with dreams they can never fully share, partly because they have some doubts about them themselves and partly because they are unable, adequately, to explain, describe or define what it is they think they see and understand.
Unitarian Universalist ministers are people who continually run out of time, out of wisdom, out of ability, out of courage and out of money. They are hurtable. Their tasks involve great responsibility and little power. They must learn to accept people where they are and go on from there. They must never try to exercise influence they do not possess. If they are worth their salt, they know all this and are still thankful every day of their lives for the privilege of being what they are.
The future of the liberal church is almost totally dependent on these two factors: great congregations (whether large or small) and skilled, effective, dedicated ministers. The strangest feature of their relationship is that they create each other.