Today is the second Sunday of what in Christianity is called Advent. That master on-line font of all information, Wikipedia, calls Advent “the period of expectant waiting and preparation for the celebration of the Nativity [that is the birth] of Jesus.” This morning, though, it’s not about Jesus I’d like to talk, I’d like to talk about waiting. For those who know me, waiting isn’t always easy for me to do, although there is a lot about church life that’s taught me to be patient.
Patience is also something I had to learn when I was teaching at our UU seminary in Berkeley. I’d often have to drive around for twenty or thirty minutes looking for a place to park. Berkeley is a college town, so it’s very congested and the parking game is something anyone who works or goes to school there has to learn how to play. Not only is Berkeley congested; Berkeley is a place where people want you to know what they believe. They like to wear their hearts, so to speak, not so much on their sleeves as on the bumpers of their cars. It’s as hard to find a car in Berkeley without bumper stickers as it is to find one that’s just pulled out to leave you an open space by a curb.
Though I’m not really a Berkeleyite, I’ve got a couple of bumper stickers on my car. I still have my Obama sticker, though his decision about Afghanistan makes me less sure of him than I was when he was elected. And I’ve got a bumper sticker that lets folks know they can find a liberal religions home at JUC. I’ve even got a vanity license plate that proclaims: “I’m a UU.” One of the reasons I want to keep my car registered in California for as long as I can is because I don’t want to give up my “I’m a UU” plate like I had to give up my “UUA” plate when I moved to California from Illinois. I’m all for letting people know what, to me, matters – especially my commitment to Unitarian Universalism.
I think people should be free to express their opinions on the bumpers of their cars, even if I disagree with what they say. But I’ve always had a hard time with a bumper sticker I used to see a lot in Berkeley. Interestingly, it wasn’t an “America Love It or Leave It” kind of sticker. It was one that, in big letters, proclaimed: GRACE HAPPENS!, as though all we have to do to get what we want – to be graced with it – is to wait for it. The problem is that there are a lot of things for which I’ve waited that have never appeared. Grace doesn’t just happen for those who are waiting. If we want things to happen we’ve often got to do more than just wait – and anyone who tells us otherwise is setting us up for a lot of disappoint.
Tony Morgan, the author of this morning’s ready, is someone who understands this. Morgan is a minister on the staff of a large Evangelical church who I stumbled on while reading about leadership. Among a lot of other things, Morgan talks about grace. While Morgan believes, with the owners of the bumper stickers, that grace happens, he’s as wary as I am about just waiting for it. According to Morgan, grace has more to do with making use of the gifts with which we’ve already been blessed than it does with waiting to be blessed with such gifts. He says that what our faith should be teaching us isn’t that grace happens for those who are willing to wait for it. Grace has already entered our lives. So, we need to make use of it.
This was one of the most important things I learned when I discovered Unitarian Universalism. It was in a church back East that, though it was a lot smaller than our church here in Golden, was filled with equally welcoming and accepting people. They didn’t care that I wasn’t as old as most of them, nor that I had far less life experience. I was only twenty-three years old and though I was married and the woman to whom I was then married pregnant, I was afraid I’d never be able to find a job I enjoyed in which I could earn enough money to buy a home and support my family. I’d done everything I could think of to try to prepare myself to be a responsible wage earner and parent, but like a lot of other people my age I really had no idea about what I wanted to do or how to prepare myself to do it. So, it meant a lot to me to find a community of people who weren’t put off by the turmoil in which I found myself. It also meant a lot to me that it was a community of people who were willing to share their enthusiasm about what they were doing – and they were doing an amazing variety of things, from being barbers to architects, from being artists to activists, from being scholars to house painters. No one put down on others for who they were or what they were doing. The emphasis of those folks, like the emphasis of folks here at JUC, was to encourage one another to make use of their talents and to not just wait for some, as yet unrealized, opportunity.
Something else I discovered when I joined that church was that the thing I liked best each week was going to it. So, I began to wonder what it might be like to be able to work in a church. It was a kind of odd thought, since I’d never even taken a course in religion. But, I was living near Chicago and in Chicago there was a Unitarian Universalist seminary. So, I took the Graduate Record Exam, applied to the school and, both to my amazement and the amazement of lot of my old friends, I was accepted. The trouble is, when I got there, I found the cold, gray, gothic environment of the campus depressing and the curriculum the school required it students to navigate during their first two years seemed to have almost nothing to do with church life or Unitarian Universalism. So, after a few months, I dropped out.
But I still loved the church where I went on Sunday. I liked what it was able to do for people, like my family and me. So, when I found out there was a Unitarian Universalist seminary with a more flexible curriculum in a more lively setting, I set off for Berkeley with all its cars with the bumper stickers about grace. It turned out to be a good choice. I’d been graced with a love of Unitarian Universalism, of UU churches and the ministry. And, it turned out, I’d been graced with much of what I needed to know about such things. So, after fulfilling all of the school’s requirements, the faculty decided I was ready to have a go at the ministry and they turned me loose to look for a job, one of which came my way even before I graduated – before I needed to do any waiting.
I was ready not so much because the faculty at Starr King said I was or because I had a successful interview with the Ministerial Fellowship Committee, but because I believed I had been graced with whatever it was I needed to succeed in the career I wanted to pursue – and it was time to see whether or not I was right. As it turned out, I was. I’d been graced with a good speaking voice, a talent for putting people and ideas together, a compassion for those who were in need of help, a conscience that wouldn’t let me ignore the cry for justice, a love of Unitarian Universalism and its values, and a vision for what it is churches can be. These are things that were a part of me when I entered the ministry and they are still a part of me.
All of us have been graced with qualities that go into making us who we are. We’ve been graced with things we can give back to the life of which we’re a part – something I believe we owe it, it having blessed with having life ourselves. To be true to a faith that’s grounded in such a belief we can’t just sit back and wait. And this isn’t so much a theological statement, is it a personal one. If being alive for as long as I have has taught me anything, it’s taught me that a person can never be truly happy without finding a way to share whatever knowledge, skill, enthusiasm, compassion, imagination and other abilities with which they’ve been graced – and we can’t do this by just waiting.
Most of us understand this. We know we’ve been graced with a lot of things in our lives. We even have a sense of what we can do with some of the bad things with which we’ve been graced, whether they’re the result of genes passed on to us by our ancestors or painful life experience. We’ve been graced with courage, wisdom and strength through both positive and negative examples of our parents, teachers, family members and others. We’ve been graced through what we’ve been able to learn in school and from the multiple kinds of situations in which we’ve found ourselves. We’ve gained things from both the achievements and failures in our lives.
Those of us here in this UU church have also been graced by a liberal religious faith that encourages us to approach life in a wholistic and life-affirming manner. It’s a demanding faith, rather than one that says just believing in something is all that matters. Our Unitarian Universalist faith is demanding not in the judgmental way of fundamentalism, nor in a simplistic way of so much of today’s religions of positive thinking. As Jesus and prophets both before and after him put, all of us, no matter who we are and no matter where we were born or what the circumstances of our lives, what we are called on to do by whatever it is that’s most sacred and holy, is to love God, that is Life, with all our hearts, souls and minds, that is with the whole of us, and to love our neighbors as ourselves, understanding that none of us live alone. Our very beings, who we are, depends on our interaction with others.
As I’ve said, this is a demanding and straightforward faith all at the same time. And there are a lot of people outside the walls of this church with whom we should share it, just as those Unitarian Universalists back in Chicago shared their faith with me when I desperately needed it. I wish we weren’t as reluctant as we sometimes are in doing this. I wish we weren’t so willing to just wait for people to come to us. I wish we were like Tony Morgan who found delight talking about his faith – and his church – with his friends and neighbors, believing that if it meant so much to him, it might mean as much to others.
I believe this about our faith and our church. That’s why I’ve got that “I’m a UU” license plate and a sticker stuck on my bumper that says: “Jefferson Unitarian Church – A Religious Home for the Liberal Spirit.” This lets people know that JUC and Unitarian Universalism not only provide a religious faith and home for me and my wife, they can provide a religious faith and home for anyone else who shares our beliefs – a belief in doing and being, rather than waiting.
The other day I found a poem about this, written by someone at a stage in her life much like the one I was in when I discovered Unitarian Universalism. Putting the poet‘s thoughts in my words, the poem would go like this:
Someday will I win?
Someday will I go?
Days go by waiting so.
Everybody lives the hope:
Someday will come.
But time goes flying silently.
And finally we realize terribly,
Someday hasn’t come
So start doing what you plan.
Don’t wait, you can!
Lazy people say “someday”
But seldom do it anyday.
Stop doing all the same.
Get out of this “waiting” game.
Without any waiting, all of our lives have been graced and, even though none of us have or ever will be graced with everything we might want, there are still blessings to come and we don’t have to wait for them. So, in spite of what I’ve been said about the bumper sticker, it may not be so bad to say that “Grace Happens.” Grace does happen. And it sometimes happens when we least expect it or when it’s not that for which we’ve been waiting. For instance, when I was teaching at Starr King we admitted an eighty-three year old student. She already had a PhD in psychology and had successfully pursued several different careers in that field. But after she had encountered Unitarian Universalism, fifty years later in her life than I did, felt a similar impulse to become a minister. She decided she only had so many years yet to live and there was something she needed to do and she better go about it doing it or it may not happen.
Carolyn wasn’t willing to just wait for grace to happen. She’d already been graced with by finding Unitarian Universalism in a little fellowship in Northern California. And she knew it was up to her to do what she had to do to make use of what she’d found. So, whether it’s at twenty-three or eight-three or a hundred-and-three, we shouldn’t let our lives be just be waiting games. We should the grace that’s already entered them enliven us so we can fully engage with each other and be open to whatever more grace may enter our lives, in, as e.e.cummings puts it, this “great, happening, illimitable” life of which we are a part.
Benediction
At it comes time to take our leave, let us do so in the spirit of these words used in the chapel services of that seminary in Berkeley whose faculty, long ago, decided to let me have a go at the ministry:
With the extinguishing of the flame of our sacred chalice,
We reaffirm our commitment to accept life's gifts
With grace and gratitude,
And to use them to bless the world
In the spirit of love.
Adapted from a book by Tony Morgan
I love churches that aren’t in the business of helping people become churchy. Churches should be helping people to live out their faith in the world as it is rather than seducing them into believing that it’s what happens in church that matters. Challenging people to live their faith is a lot harder than getting them to be churchy. Churchiness is easy. You just follow the rules and show up when you told to.
Real faith isn’t churchy. It’s dynamic. It’s controversial. It’s dangerous. It’s constantly growing. It asks questions. It involves mystery. You can’t put it in a box. You can’t keep it quiet. You can’t outgrow it. You can’t out-dream it. It’s more focused on others than it is on itself. Real faith gives one a feeling of centeredness but it also makes us uneasy. It doesn’t want us to just let things stay the same.
It’s amazing to see what can be done in a church that embraces this kind of vision and doesn’t just wait around to see what comes. Church communities that have meaning for their members don’t offer grace that’s cheap, grace that’s unearned. They tell us to get moving, to stop waiting, to put ourselves in the path of the good things that can come. It’s the message of these kinds of churches that needs sharing.