"How Can the World Be Saved? Taking Church Seriously" (Part 3 of 3)

            In her book A House for Hope, the Unitarian Universalist minister Rebecca Parker tells a story about her cousin Megan.

A few years ago, Megan was in a period of personal despair after an unexpected and painful breakup. Her family and friends were worried for her. Then one day, Megan invited me to lunch, bursting with good news. “I have been born again!” she announced, beaming. My heart sank. Meg had always been a sensible person, but she was in a vulnerable time in her life. Who had gotten to her, I wondered. She saw my frown. “Don’t worry!” she said. “It’s a good thing. Here’s what happened. I was driving in my car and listening to a radio preacher—but it wasn’t the usual kind. The preacher didn’t say that if I would just believe Jesus was the one and only Son of God, my personal savior, who died for my sins, I would be saved. He said everybody is a child of God—everyone can be like Christ. I was so excited I talked back to the radio, ‘That’s what I believe! I believe everyone can be a savior and that we can save the world by loving it and each other.’ “He validated the thoughts I had come to privately. It mattered to hear him say it publicly. Then it came over me in a rush that if I believed everyone was a child of God, it meant that I was a child of God. If anyone could be a savior of the world, then I could be a savior of the world. I felt a great sense of love surrounding me, surrounding everything, and I felt like the whole purpose of my life had suddenly become clear. “When I woke up the next morning, I still felt great love all around me. I decided to try to bring this love into every encounter during the day. To help myself, I started each morning by sitting quietly to meditate and concentrate my awareness on love. I created an altar to help me remember my sense of purpose. I put up a picture of earth from outer space. I arranged a vase of fresh flowers. I lit candles. I’d become peaceful and focused. But the minute I’d get into my daily routine, it would all fall apart. I’d go to the grocery store, the checkout person would annoy me, and I would forget that she was a child of God and that I was a savior of the world. How was I going to stay focused on love and put it into practice? “I realized I just couldn’t do this alone. I needed to find some other people who were trying to put love into practice. Then it hit me, church! That is what church is for!”

            My words with you this morning are the third part in a three-part sermon series. Two weeks ago, my title was “Taking Spirituality Seriously,” and I suggested that spiritual experiences are a natural part of the human condition. There’s a vertical dimension, or depth dimension, to these experiences. They make us feel more connected to the source of all being, however we understand that, and they fill us with compassion, gratitude, joy, acceptance, peace, hope, and strength. More than anything else, they make us feel more alive than we’ve ever felt before. There’s also a horizontal dimension to these experiences. They make us feel more connected with everyone else and everything else.

            One week ago, my title was “Taking Religion Seriously,” and I suggested that religion is less about believing specific things, and it’s more about intentionally nurturing and cultivating those spiritual experiences that happen to most of us naturally but irregularly. Thinking about this way, you might say religion is like Metamucil for the soul. More seriously, religion is about intentionally doing things that change us, that change how we think, feel, and act about ourselves and the world.

            My title this morning is “Taking Church Seriously,” and I started with Rebecca Parker’s story about her cousin Megan because it’s a wonderful example of how I understand the purpose of religious community.

            Megan had a spiritual experience, feeling a great sense of love surrounding her and surrounding everything and feeling like the whole purpose of her life had become clear. But like most spiritual experiences, it was somewhat transient.

            Then she created a ritual, an individual religious practice, to help remind herself of the original experience, to help herself further nurture and cultivate those feelings of love in her life. But then she discovered what a lot of people discover.

            It’s possible to be a spiritual person by yourself. It’s even possible to be a religious person by yourself. But, like most things in life, it’s a whole lot easier when you’re not trying to do it all by yourself.

            I love Megan’s understanding of religious community - - people coming together to put love into practice. It’s what I like to think we’re doing here - - coming together to help each other put love into practice - - a love of life, a love of ourselves, a love of another, and a love of the world.

            Why is it so much easier when we don’t try to do everything by ourselves?

            You don’t need me to tell you this, but I will.

            By ourselves, it so easy to get discouraged, to lose perspective, and to lose hope. In religious community, it’s less so. As Albert Schweitzer says in a reading in our hymnal, “At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us.”

            But there’s something more than this...Will Rogers once said there are three kinds of men. There are “the ones that learn by reading,” “the few who learn by observation,” and all the rest who “have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.”

            Being a part of a religious community means we don’t have to always pee on the electric fence for ourselves. One of the things I love about being a member of this community is the variety of ages we have. The children, youth, and younger adults in this community energize the rest of us with their enthusiasm, and those who are older and willingly share their life experiences and hard-won wisdom teach so much to the rest of us. I know that I lead my own life in a different way, I hope a better way, because of what I have learned from the older members of this community.

            But not only do we support each other and learn from one another, but together we are more powerful than any of us could possibly be alone.

            Bill Hybels is the senior pastor of Willow Creek Church, an evangelical Christian megachurch in the Chicago suburbs. I’ve been there. It’s the only church I’ve ever been to that has escalators and a food court. Hybels’s theology is as different from mine as day is from night, but he once said something that I believe with all my heart. He once said, “The local church is the hope of the world.”

            It’s because of this belief, in fact, that I went into ministry. I suspect some of you think I went into ministry for the money, but going into ministry for the money is like going into dentistry for the fashion.

            The truth is I didn’t go into ministry only to help individual people lead deeper, fuller, richer, more abundant, more satisfying lives, though if and when that happens in my own ministry, I take satisfaction in that. I went into ministry because at the time I made the decision to do so I truly believed that people working together in Unitarian Universalist congregations not only could make a difference in the world, but could actually save the world.

            That’s what I believed 15 years ago when I entered seminary, and though I certainly have a more seasoned perspective 15 years later, that’s what I still believe today.

            Let me share with you three quotations.

            Megan, the young woman I quoted at the beginning of my words, said church is about people coming together to “put love into practice.”

            The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther, Jr. once said, “Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic.”

            Saul Alinsky, a community organizer in the 1960s, once said that there are only two kinds of power in this world, organized money and organized people.

            Let me now try to tie these together with everything else I’ve been saying during the past few weeks.

            As a religious community we come together to nurture and cultivate those kinds of spiritual experiences that make us feel most alive. These kinds of experiences, if we’re doing everything right, also fill us with great love. Motivated by this love, we use our shared power to make the world a better place.

            Though working for justice is sometimes discouraging and heartbreaking, my experience is that using this shared power to make the world a better place brings us full circle and, more often than not, makes us feel even more alive.

            One of my favorite passages in Hebrew scripture is from Isaiah…

Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin?

            It is a passage that reminds us that many of the social problems that existed more than 2,000 years ago still exist today, but then the passage continues in a remarkable way, saying if we do these things, “Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly.” Later it says, “If you remove the yoke from among you…you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water whose waters never fail.”

            In my understanding of this passage, this passage does more than speak to a particular religious community at a particular time. It speaks to a universal wisdom, an existential truth of the human condition.

            The passage in Isaiah speaks to a counter-cultural wisdom and tell us it is only when we act against oppression and exploitation and act for compassion and justice that we feel most alive, that our light will “break forth like the dawn,” that our healing will “spring up quickly, that we will be “like a watered garden, like a spring of water whose waters never fail.”

            These verses tell us that in acting to repair the brokenness of the world that our own inner brokenness will be healed. Or in simpler language, when we act for others, we benefit. These verses remind us that to be religious, it is never enough to be a navel-gazing bliss ninny - - or whatever the equivalent of that is in any religious tradition - - but that that the path toward inward satisfaction ultimately requires outward action, specifically a willingness to roll up our sleeves and get to work in making the world a better place.

            It’s my experience that when I do this, I feel more alive, especially when I do it with other people.

            During my sabbatical, I had a lot of time to reflect on why I went into the ministry in the first place. I had a lot of time to reflect on what spirituality is all about, what religious should be all about, and what church should be all about, and I’ve been sharing my thoughts with you on this during the past three weeks.

            When I came back to church in August, I came back with a renewed commitment to making social justice an integral part of this congregation.

            I don’t want to discount what we’ve already been doing. In fact, I want to applaud Nancy Corr for coordinating our Share-the-Plate program. I want to hold up Nancy and Sherry Edwards for coordinating our work with Hospitality House. I want to acknowledge Joan Tornow for her work in coordinating a mentor program at Mark Twain Elementary School and thank Judy Featherstone for her willingness to coordinate the Giving Tree this year for that school. I especially want to thank Diana King and Keith Clay for their ongoing leadership with our Microbank Team.

            Yet I want to find a way to make social justice, as I said, more integral to the life of this congregation, finding ways in which each person can participate in some way, including our children and youth, as he or she is willing and able.

            Let me tell you some of the things I’ve been doing.

            Most importantly, I’ve begun meeting with a newly formed Social Justice Team to discuss how we can do this because I know I cannot and should not do this alone. As your minister, I have a role to play, but we have to do this in partnership.

            I’ve started meeting with some other liberal clergy in the area with the hopes of our congregations partnering on social justice work some day.

            Two Saturdays ago, I spent a day with Bob Loeliger attending a Unitarian Universalist Voices for Justice meeting. This is the organization that lobbies our state legislature on issues important to Unitarian Universalists. By the way, our guest speaker next week is going to be my colleague the Rev. Carol McKinley - - that organization’s coordinator. She’s going to speak to us more about that organization’s efforts. One of its primary goals in coming months will most likely be urging our state legislature to approve full marriage equality legislation for same-sex couples, but I know this won’t happen unless liberal religious communities across the state stand up and speak out for this.

            Last month, I spent some time down with the Occupy Seattle folks, in part because I wanted to personally support their efforts but in part to see if there is any role for our congregation to play in this movement.

            Last month, I also invited Linda McKim-Bell, our regional Unitarian Universalist Service Committee coordinator, to speak to us about UUSC’s efforts in Haiti, and I’m excited that Carol Mohler and Barbara Nelson are considering going to Haiti to participate in those efforts this March. I’m considering going as well. Talk to Carol or Barbara if you’d like to find out more.

            During the rest of this church year - - from now until next June - - I invite you to be in a conversation with me and our Social Justice Team about how our congregation should be involved in making our world a more compassionate and just place. We’re  meeting every month, by the way, on the second Thursday of the month at 7 p.m. but I also hope to widen our conversation beyond ourselves in the coming months.

            I know some people in this congregation are already involved in social justice activities outside this congregation. I know that all of us lead terribly busy lives and the details, duties, and distractions of our own lives often, but I believe that together, as a congregation, there is more we can do, for the sake of our own souls as well as for the sake of the world.

            Let me finish this morning with more words from our hymnal, words by the Unitarian minister Edward Everett Hale that I have hanging in my office…

I am only one.

But still I am one.

I cannot do everything.

But still I can do something.

Because I cannot do everything,

I will not refuse to do the something I can do.

            My friends, let us not refuse to do the something we can do. Together, let us work together to put love into practice.

            So may it be. Amen.