Listen:
OPENING READING: "May we be reminded..."
May we be reminded here of our highest aspirations, and inspired to bring our gifs of love and service to the altar of humanity.
May we know once again that we are not isolated beings but connected, in mystery and miracle, to the universe, to this community and to each other.
-- Anonymous
MEDITATION READING: "Ten Reasons Why Your Minister Pledges to This Congregation"
1. Because my grandmother told me to. "It is more blessed to give than to receive," she told me. I suspect she knew that when you really WANT to give, the giving and the receiving are so intertwined you can't tell which is which.
2. Because it shows that even if I am the minister, I am as good as anyone else. In other words, pledging is the great leveler, humbling me to where I should be: with the people, not with the divinities.
3. Because tradition continues on through me as a pledging member of this congregation. I am a living symbol for generations of others that practiced their free faith around the world - with some dying in the process.
4. Because it makes me feel good to know I'm doing my part in providing a nurturing place for those who are emotionally shipwrecked, curiosity addicted, and ethically needy.
5. Because I care deeply about all the kids in our church and believe that they are not just in the process of becoming, but are already here, already real.
6. Because I don't fool myself that some utilities fairy somewhere puts gold coins under our church treasurer's pillow while he's sleeping, thereby allowing us to keep the air conditioner on and the spotlight over the pulpit lit.
7. Because I want to be part of a positive, hard-working, forward-looking organization, which, through education and action, is making the world a better place.
8. Because I am a non-stop talker who would go mad if there weren't some place on this planet where there are other nonstop talkers with whom I can discuss any-and-every-thing imaginable, and not be told to shut up!
9. Because I need a place to go in response to time as it weaves its ceaseless changes in my life as I move through the years and wonder at the birth and growth and death of us all.
10. Because without this church I know I would be lessened - without a foundation in those deeper needs in my life: to ask why I am here in the first place and how I can love more passionately.
-- Don Beaudreault
SERMON: "Your Money Or Your..."
When serving a church many years ago, there was only one reason I had the desk in my study looking out of the window that gave me a clear view of our church burial ground: I believed that although I had not always known where in life I had been, I knew where I was going!
Even today this visual message for me is one that "grounds" me in my call to the ministry. It is the "ground" of my being. It affirms the task that I took on three decades ago when I was ordained to the ministry: to humbly accept the role of spiritual leader, knowing that we are all wonderfully and only human.
Like every living thing, I, too, shall depart this earth one day. So I better stay humble!
Yes, I know where I am going - kind of! Or should I say I know where I will no longer be!
The view from that study proclaimed this wonder of life - from birth to death.
Truly, every time I am called to celebrate the life of a newborn, I am humbled. And, at the time of a person's death, I am humbled to celebrate that life, too.
I remember looking out that window in my office and wondering what others might say about me or others after we are gone and have become part of the memorial garden, there with those who had died before us - there with the trees and the flowers, there among the morning doves, with the gentle rain, and the nighttime stars.
And I would wonder if people would remember or even care what we said or did; or what we felt or believed. And would they continue supporting the causes that we supported? And would they know that once we as individuals within community lived our lives based on the free faith principles of the Unitarian Universalist movement?
Truly, I wondered if who I was, would be remembered when some future minister of that church would look out the window? Would that clergyperson think something like: Now, what was his name? Something oddly French! And what did he believe? And what did he do? Something about playing the piano???
Well, perhaps it is nature's way, for all of us eventually to be waved into the sea of forgetfulness - the view from my former study told me of the brevity of time and memory concerning our individual existence. But let us hope that our liberating religion we upheld during our lifetimes - will not be forgotten! That is why we today should support the church.
Think of it this way: if our forbears and some of you who are still around had NOT supported this congregation when you first began a little over a decade ago and since then, we as a congregation would not be here now! And what would you have done without a congregation like ours?
Played golf all the time? Croquet? Bridge? Ma Jong? Worked out at the YMCA? Would you have been saddled with less than significant conversations with those who think vastly different from yourself? Would you have had lack of emotional support from friends when you really needed it?
Had people in the past not supported our beloved church community, our congregation might have had an existence like the one Ben Hect talks about when he refers to time: Time is a circus always packing up and moving away.
Our congregation might have had such a transitory experience, indeed!
I have seen that happen in churches - notably in Great Britain with those exquisite but decaying Unitarian Cathedrals where, on a Sunday morning, if 15 people show up, it's a mob!
Why? Lack of financial support. Something else seemed more important to them. (Do you know what most Brits do on a Sunday morning, instead of going to church? They go shopping! It is, in fact, the #1 hobby over there. It used to be gardening!)
At any rate, I can hear the whispers of those stalwart British Unitarians of a century ago and of the departed Unitarian Universalists in our country who generously supported our liberating faith. Can't you hear them, too, in response to our congregation's "packing up and moving away"? Listen! They are saying:
Over my dead body! Over my dead body this congregation will be disbanded. I won't allow it! I worked too hard and long to see us lose our place in this community! We are needed in this city! There are countless more individuals and families who need to be told our good news! They need us - and we need them!
Yes, there is a sense of the continuity of existence - of this spiritual place, and of us as individuals within the community
But, it takes our financial support to creatively energize that possibility into the future
Certainly let us not be of the materialistic mindset held by the comedian Jack Benny as illustrated in the classic story where he is accosted by a thief and asked: "Your money or your life?" And when Mr. Benny does not give a ready answer, much to the mugger's frustration, he asks "Well?" to which Benny replies, "I'm thinking! I'm thinking!"
My hope is that when you give to support the work of this church and of the larger movement of Unitarian Universalism, you give out of a sense of compassion, not because you have felt threatened.
Would that we could have the simple, generous heart of the woman in the following story as told by the Rev. Gordon Crosby of the Church of the Savior in Washington, D.C.:
"I was a minister of a small congregation in a railroad town just outside of Lynchburg, Virginia. My deacon sent for me one day and said he wanted my help. (Said the deacon): `We have in our congregation a widow with six children. I have looked at the records and discovered that she is putting into the treasury of the church each month $40.00, a tithe of her income. Of course, she is unable to do this. We want you to go and talk with her and let her know that she needs to feel no obligation whatsoever, and free her from this responsibility.'"
Gordon continues: "I am not wise now; I was less wise then. I went and told her of the concern of the deacons. I told her as graciously and as supportively as possible as I knew how, that she was relieved of the responsibility of giving. As I talked with her, the tears came into her eyes, `I want to tell you,' she said, `that you are taking away the last thing that gives my life dignity and meaning.'"
Indeed, this woman gave from her heart. It was not a calculated, egotistical thing she did, but a natural outpouring of her love and concern.
In his book A Path with Heart Jack Kornfield tells us: "There is no formula for the practice of compassion. Like all of the great spiritual arts, it requires that we listen and attend, understand our motivation, and then ask ourselves what action can really be helpful."
I believe this should be true in all our acts, including the act of giving and receiving - and listening, really listening to those who are trying to tell us something about themselves by their giving; about their showing compassion toward others.
I learned this lesson from my own daughter years ago. Let me tell you the story exactly the way I wrote it back then.
When he told us "a little child shall lead them," Jesus was right. Mantra-like, the phrase repeats itself inside me as I participate in the pleasure and hard work of parenting.
For one thing, my daughters have led me toward a definition of the ethical. Their lesson is a basic one, but one, which I feel, is sometimes lost sight of in the General Assemblies of the United Nations and the Unitarian Universalist Association, and too, sometimes forgotten during political conventions and Olympic competitions.
That one girl child who lives with us is now three years old. And what I have noticed is that Claire is rather tractable now, compared to her so-called "terrible twos" - meaning that she is moving away from the "I gotta have everything I want, and NOW!" position (said position being belly-up on the kitchen floor, arms and legs thrashing), to the "I gotta have just some things I want, and SOON!" position (in which the crying jag is more vocal than tearful).
What she is learning, of course, is the fact that the world is not her particular oyster; that she might have to settle for a banana pudding pop rather than a vanilla one, that her younger sister ALSO likes to be cuddled.
Claire is beginning to understand that if she is to live in this world with a modicum of harmony, she must realize that we all need each other to make a go of it. Her queendom is slipping from her, and she is starting to recognize that she is a subject in a very wide realm.
What she is learning is what it means to be an ethical being. She is moving away from the solipsist's viewpoint - in which one's self is the only existing being (similar to believing one's self is a god) - to an ethical viewpoint - in which cooperation and love come into play.
Every time she picks a late-summer wildflower and gives it to her sister, rather than putting it into her own pocket, she is showing just how ethical a being she can be.
Yes, Jesus was right!
You see, my friends, I would like all of us to be like my then three-year-old as we support our church: giving because we really want to! Not because somebody is forcing us to do so - trying to give us guilt. Not because we think we will feel inferior if we don't give much or anything, or superior if we give more than others and more than we can really afford. Not because it is an obligatory thing - like paying a bill. But we will give with compassionate generosity - because we really, really want to. Because we really, really appreciate the chance to be here in this safe place - in this place of sanctuary where we can be free and can love and can be loved.
Well, at the start of this sermon I spoke of a church's burial ground. And thinking about this reminds me that "church" in some fashion or another is in my blood. It is a genetic predisposition!
For example, my maternal ancestral burial ground is in a rural part of Pennsylvania that was settled by the Scotch-Irish. One of these was John Lowery, my great-great grandfather who was born in Ireland in 1780 What he did, probably even before he started planting potatoes in the rich soil of Pennsylvania, was to "plant" the first place of worship in that local village, the Evangelical United Brethren Church.
And who is buried about one foot from the foundation of that still existing church, but John himself! And if that little congregation were ever to "pack up and move away" I dare say the old man would come back to haunt anyone who attempted to remove a single brick from that particular church's "one foundation." Indeed, his legacy lives on in that church and in his family members. I think of him when I recall looking out my study window and seeing the church's burial ground.
And I feel the same way about this place, this congregation, this "family" the way John Lowery did - even though I am not dead yet! And I know that many of you do, too. You love this place. This is your spiritual home where your life force meets that of others. You can be free here. There is love here.
But like any home, it needs your support to keep it going.
And in supporting this family, you strengthen the larger movement that connects Unitarian Universalists in this country and throughout the world.
So, I think of those Unitarian Universalists who are gone - all spiritual beings who traveled the way of life and trusted the process of our Free and Liberating Faith, hoping that by supporting it, their legacy would be passed down to our generation and to the generations to come.
And my wish is that we today and those who come after us will continue to have that commitment!
CLOSING WORDS: "Go out into the highways and by-ways..."
Go out into the highways and by-ways.
Give the people something of your new vision. You may possess a small light, but uncover it, let it shine...
Give them not hell, but hope and courage...
-- John Murray, Founder of Universalism in America