by Rev. Thomas Disrud

A sermon given September 26, 1999

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

Opening words

We come here as the chill of a new season surrounds us;

from the east side and west side,

from the city and suburbs,

from our homes and from the streets.

We bring our whole selves here to this community of hope and remembrance,

to join our voices in song.

Come, let us worship together.

There’s something that has always struck me about Portland: How much people seem to like living here. I’ve lived in several places my life, and there’s usually a fair amount of pride in the place. But I’ve never sensed as much contentment as I have here.

This is usually a quiet pride. People don’t shout it from the rooftops. In fact, many would prefer that others don’t know about Portland. This can, at times, border on the smug.

Each city is different. When I first moved to the San Francisco Bay area to attend seminary I was struck by how San Franciscans would use the term The City. In the newspaper both “The” and “City” were capitalized. In other words, it was the one and only. And that does reflect some of the attitude there.

Each city has its own sense and many factors contribute to this: the history, the influential people, location, the industries and the cultural groups. Places seem to attract certain people and those people in turn at influenced by the place.

Here in Portland that is certainly true. When our foremothers and forefathers from back east were trying to decide if we would be named Portland or Boston, they brought some of that New England properness with them. All of this is part of the history of this place and people join the mix, it changes and evolves. As people come seeking opportunity and community and the character of the city is shaped over and over again.

If we were to do a survey, I’m not sure how many people here would consider themselves city folks. Most of us live in the city, some come in from the suburbs and a few live in other towns. There may or may not be much space between us and our neighbors. 

Whether we think of ourselves as city folks or not, we’re tied to this place and this community. It may be that we are here because of the opportunities that are possible. Have job, will travel. But it may also be that we’re here not so much for the work but because we have found a community we like. At times, where we want to live and the jobs that are possible can be at odds.

Living in a city we find ourselves in a creative mix of opportunity and challenge. In cities we find a wide spectrum of wealth and poverty. Where we fall in this spectrum may say a lot about the quality of life we have. Cities are diverse on all kinds of levels, and this draws and challenges us.

I grew up in a small farming town and the early message that I got about that city was that you should be a little wary. There were lots of strangers in the city and they could potentially do you harm.

Cities, after all, had city slickers in them, and they were not to be trusted. You just couldn’t tell what you would get into. Of course this was precisely where the attraction was for me. Despite the messages I was getting, I knew from an early age that I would want to live in the city. I imagined that it might be New York. Everything seemed to be there. I had quite a shining image of what it might be like.

I started college in Milwaukee and this was the first time I lived in a city. I remember how big it felt. I remember looking at all the tall buildings and the pace at which people seemed to be moving on the sidewalks. I remember all the shops and restaurants. The place was very different from what I was used to.

And I remember seeing my first homeless person. There he was searching for food out of a garbage can. I wanted to stop and look but knew that it was best to move on. I learned that this, too, was part of the urban landscape.

One of my first jobs in college was to work at the lunch counter of the Greyhound Bus Depot. This would prove to be a formative experience for me. I met lots of people I will never forget.

I remember the mentally ill woman who would come and ask for milk for her imaginary baby.

I remember the young Mormon missionaries who would get off the bus every Thursday on their way to some training camp outside the city. Their white shirts looked as if they had been pressed just minutes before.

I remember the poor folks getting off the bus from Chicago. They could not afford to travel any other way.

If I came to the city with romantic notions, they were soon brought into a much clearer focus. I understood that cities were hard because they were so much more complex. It was a tremendous lesson in humanity. Greyhound was a good complement to my comfortable classes in philosophy a few blocks away at my private university.

For a long time in our country, most people lived off the land. The industrial revolution brought many more people to the cities looking for jobs and opportunities. Now people came together in neighborhoods that were different than the rural lifestyle. Making ends meet was not always easy. People found their niches in which they would specialize and made as much money as they could. But the norms of rural community did not necessarily translate to the city.

In this century, when people could afford to live outside the city, they often did. They moved to the suburbs in droves and over the course of a few years, many inner cities declined sharply. Today, some of those inner cities have recovered, but many have not.

Cities hold the extremes of rich and poor, and usually hold the greatest mix of races and classes. They often have more crime, and people are living closer together.

I’ve read a survey that says most people would like to live in a city of about 10,000 people. I read that to mean we want some of the amenities of city life but don’t want the hassles.

It is no wonder that we seem to have a love hate relationship with cities. In them we can see our fears about our safety and fears about what may happen to us. In cities, we see the unknown.

I’ve always been fascinated with urban myths. They seem to spring from something in our collective unconscious.

It is no wonder urban myths are called urban. Bad things, after all, seem to happen in big urban areas and we can’t control that. These sorts of thing happen in the city. Not somewhere where it is more safe.

These are those stories that usually come from the friend of a friend and they make us wary of what is out there. These days with the internet, they seem to move about even faster than before.

I remember one of the first ones I heard. It was reported by a college friend from Toledo. It was a tale that I think came from his cousin. It involved a well-known fast food establishment that sells chili. It happened that one day the young employee was serving up a bowl and there it was, a dead rat.

Now, I doubt there was any truth to that tale. But I have to say I still don’t go into this particular chain because I think of the story every time I drive by.

For years there have been the reports of alligators in the New York City sewer system. The story goes that a family was vacationing in Florida and the kids brought home some small alligators for pets. When the alligators got to be a certain size and the family no longer wanted them, they flushed them down the toilet and a legend was born.

Experts tell us that alligators could not survive in the New York sewer system, but that doesn’t seem to make the tales any less believable.

There’s the classic tale of the woman washing her dog and putting it into the microwave to dry.

Lately there have been quite a few urban myths around organ harvesting. It goes something like this: You meet a stranger, they do something to you. You wake up in a strange place and one of your kidneys has been stolen.

And one of the favorite ones I’ve come across involves the woman who wears her hair in a beehive. Seems she used shellac to keep it in place. Forms quite an outer crust. Well, it got so stiff that bees took to living in there. The bees sting the woman. She dies.

It is fun to tell these tales. Could these things happen? Sure they could. We’re always wondering just what is out there. We fear the unknown, particularly if we feel isolated from others. In this context, the stories seem only too plausible.

Isolation can happen more easily in the city. If we move there for work, and most of the people we socialize with are from work, we may not have contact with many others. It may be that we have moved somewhere to make it big. We’re spending our time doing that and not meeting others.

If we don’t know our neighbors we can start to lose sight of the larger community. Others fall off our radar screen.

In 1630, when John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts, landed there, he delivered a sermon describing the “city on a hill” that he and his fellow Puritans intended to found. He enjoined his people to “delight in each other, make others’ conditions our own, rejoyce together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our ... community ... as members of the same body.”

They certainly hoped to make some money as well, but the primary purpose was to create a community that would support an ethical and spiritual life.

Looking at much of our culture today, it seems as if that balance between making money and building community has shifted.

When articles are written about quality of life in cities, they often feature Portland. We have thriving neighborhoods, a vibrant downtown, good economy. With our land use policy, we are considered a model for the nation. Many visionary leaders have made this possible.

But living here I realize that things are not always so simple. Yes, I think the quality of life here is very good. I love. Portland. But I also find myself trying to figure out how I fit into all of this and just what my responsibility is to the community.

Let me try to explain.

I live in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood in Northeast Portland just north of Irvington. Since I bought my home three years ago, prices have risen dramatically. This all seems great. The neighborhood looks good. When I see a new business going in I immediately think about my house value. I feel glad that I got in when I did.

But I’ve come to see that it is not necessarily that simple.

When I moved in, I liked the fact that it was a mixed race and a mixed class neighborhood. I like walking down the street and talking to people who don’t necessarily look like me.

But when I see new folks moving into my neighborhood, more and more they seem to be a lot like me—young white professionals.

Now I love my neighborhood and the fact that I live so close to downtown. I love my house. I like my neighbors. But I also wonder what has happened to the two families on my block who have been force out in the past few months because their rents went up so much. They could no longer afford to live in the neighborhood.

I read that the urban poor are being pushed further out towards the suburbs where the public services including transportation are not as good as they are in the city. For them, life is a lot more difficult.

Every time I hear about how housing prices are rising, I first think of the value of my own home, and then need to remember that it is a much more complicated picture. With gains, there can also be losses.

These are complex issues and there are not simple answers. What seems like a success can actually be a mixture of success and perhaps more problems.

At times our opportunity to make money comes with a cost to the larger community. If we aren’t getting to know our neighbors, then what? It seems to too often, community is what is hurt.

In our consumer culture, we get the message that it is more important to buy things we may or may not need instead of building community ties.

Sociologists have pointed to the weakness in the connections we have with others. They call for stronger institutions that are there to connect people and build communities.

These may be churches, they may be community groups, anything that makes life possible in a crowded urban setting.  Institutions ground the many opportunities in a city and provide structures that enable people to live a meaningful lives in community.

If institutions are working, people feel connected and feel like their voices are heard.

Our church is in dialogue with a coalition of churches and other groups in town called the Metropolitan Broadbased Organization. We are considering membership. It works for change in the community, and starts by building the relational culture—it gets people telling their stories. The idea is that we move from isolation to connection and in doing this we claim our power and are better able to live out our beliefs. If I’m feeling like I’m powerless in some area of my life and that I am alone in that, hearing someone else’s story may change that. As we know other people and their stories, we are empowered, together, to act.

As we move from isolation to community, we make our city stronger. Our church is one such example. From its beginning this church and her leaders have played an important role in the life of the city. Our first minister, Thomas Lamb Eliot, was influential in starting many of the charitable organizations in the city. It is a great sense of pride to know that our church was so involved.

This is a tradition that has carried on through the generations. It has made this church stronger and also the city stronger.

This past week our church lost a valued member who was an example of this work. Elizabeth Hirsch died after a short illness a few days after she turned 88.

Elizabeth was a model in many ways, but I will always admire her sense of commitment to this community and the wider Portland community.

When Elizabeth was in her mid-80s, she decided it was time to slow down and not be on so many boards and other groups doing work in the community.

It was about this time that she joined the long range planning committee of our church and became one of our lay ministers. She brought her own style and experience to these endeavors. She moved with a certain clarity about what she believed in and how she would put those beliefs into action.

At a critical time in the life of the congregation, her support was invaluable to helping us move forward.

When I look at her life, and other people I see in this community, the answer, or at least the beginning, becomes a little more clear.

Pride in community needs to be connected to action, and to relationship with others. If we know we’re not doing it alone, it is a whole new ballgame.

If we build the bridges with others, we serve that purpose. We build that city on the hill. If we can do this, we can then be proud of what we’re leaving for the next generation. Our city will be a much better place.

Let us pray. Spirit of life, we give thanks for this community and the city we live in. May we each do our part to make this a place where all might prosper, and where we build strong communities. May we come more fully into our humanity as we grow in love and service. May our city be blessed. Amen.

Benediction

May all you do build the beloved community. Go forth in love and in peace. Amen.

Copyright 1999, Rev. Thomas Disrud. All rights reserved.