by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell 

A sermon given September 7, 2003

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

CALL TO WORSHIP

Good morning!  Before we begin our Homecoming service this morning, I’d just like to acknowledge that someone very dear to us has come home—at last—after being away for 8 months on sabbatical.  I’d like to welcome Tom Disrud, our Associate Minister and my true partner in ministry, back from his travels.  And now let us begin our service:

Come into this circle of love and justice.

Come into this community of mercy, holiness, and health.

Come and you shall know peace and joy.

Come now, and let us worship together.

Many of you will remember Robert Frost’s definition of home in his poem “The Death of the Hired Man”:  “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”  I’ve never liked that definition myself.  At its best, home should be a place, not where you are reluctantly allowed in, but rather a place where you are warmly welcomed, where you are celebrated for the unique person you are—a place where you will be enfolded and cared for when you are hurting, a place where people will rejoice with you when you succeed, a place where you can take refuge when you fail, and in fact a place where neither success nor failure determine how much you are loved.  You are loved because you are you.

I grew up in the home of my paternal grandparents. I was 9, and my little brother and sister 7 and 3, respectively, when we were thrust upon Granny and Big Papa—they were in their 70s.  They had to take us in because our mother had become mentally ill and was gone from our lives, and our father had to work long hours as a roughneck (or roustabout) in the oil field.  When I was growing up, I never really properly appreciated what Granny and Papa did for us.  They were old, I thought—though 70 doesn’t seem all that old to me now—and I thought they were way behind the times.  I wasn’t allowed to wear shorts, to play cards, or to go to the movies on Sundays.  Every evening we had to gather round the family radio, and through the crackling and popping, listen to J. Harold Smith’s Radio Gospel Bible Hour, out of Del Rio, Texas.  Even though I was a very good girl—was then, am now—my grandfather was always accusing me of doing things with boys.  I think that was because when he was my age, he was doing things with girls.  As for me, I was totally unsuccessful at doing anything with boys.  I resented my grandparents and their strict control.  But now that I’m grown, now that I have a grandchild—I can’t imagine what I would do if my son showed up one day on my doorstep, with three young children in tow and said, “Mom, we’re moving in.”  I can’t imagine raising three little children when I am in my 70s.  And so I have grown to feel thankful for the considerable personal sacrifice my grandparents made for us.

I grew up with a sense of place, with an identity, and with many people who cared about me.  Nobody in my neighborhood moved away, ever.  I knew all the neighbors, and furthermore, I knew all their dogs.  I knew all the sins in their families, and they knew all the sins in mine.  You can’t get away with anything in a small town.  The good people at the First Baptist Church loved me and guided me along.  I sang in the choir, I led youth groups.  My teachers at school saw that I was eager to learn, and they liked me.  When I was sick, one of the doctor brothers who cared for our family—Dr. Pat or Dr. James—came to our home and held my hand and asked me how I was and took my temperature.  I had a large extended family, and my aunts and uncles were always coming round our house, in particular on holidays. I had that village that it takes to raise a child.  Bless all those people who brought me up.

Today we installed Cathy and our teachers for our church school.  You know, we should never underestimate what a teacher—a school teacher or a Sunday school teacher—can give to a child.  It goes way beyond knowledge and skills.  Learning from a true teacher gives us self-confidence, faith, a belief that life itself is good.  I can imagine that every one of you can remember at least one teacher who changed your life.  My fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Crump, wrote on my final report card, “Marilyn, one day I hope to see some of your stories in print.”  That was the school year just after I lost my mother.  Mrs. Crump must be long dead by now, and I’m sure she never knew how important that statement was.  Well, Mrs. Crump, if you’re still listening, it took about 40 or 50 years but my stories are now coming into print.  Thank you for having faith in that sad little girl.

One of the most distressing things in our society is the growing number of people who have no place where they belong.  Not even a single room to call their own. The stereotypical homeless person is a man, perhaps an alcoholic, with a stubble of beard and dirty clothes.  But that stereotype is out of date these days.  Many of our homeless are mentally ill, and have no place to go, except the streets, or jail.  And many others are women and children, even whole families.  The median age of the homeless person is now eight.  That’s right—eight years of age—because children are the fastest growing population among the homeless.  Families sleep in cars, or on the floors of relatives’ homes, or they go to shelters, moving from place to place, with nowhere to settle and get a fresh start.  And the startling thing is that many of these are the “working poor,” people who are working, but are not making enough money for housing.

And we ask ourselves—I know I ask myself—what can I do?  Nothing makes me feel more helpless.  I just want to look away.  We can act politically, we can be advocates.  But you know there is something important that we can do right now, and that is simply to say hello to homeless people we see on the street, to look into their eyes, to acknowledge their existence.  They become invisible and their lives lose meaning when we, because of the pain of looking, avert our eyes and pass by as if they did not exist. 

Others of us find ourselves not literally homeless, but cut off from our roots.  Because of the fluid movement of our society, many of us lose the continuity in our lives, we lose a sense of place, and the long relationships that ultimately tell us who we are.  Some people are now beginning to write the stories of their lives, both as a way to understand themselves more fully, and to pass down the family stories to the younger generation.  I met with a group of young adults a while back, and I asked them what they wanted most from their parents and grandparents.  They said, “We want to know the family stories.  We learn who we are through those stories.”

You know, to some extent, I think we can choose from among our memories.  It’s good to acknowledge both the pain as well as the love and support that come from the families we grew up in—we don’t want to repress anything—but we can decide which memories we feed and which ones we let diminish in their power over us. 

My call has made me a vagabond—I’ve lived in New Orleans; Liverpool, England; Kentucky; Texas; Ohio; Berkeley, California; and now for 12 years I’ve made my home here in Portland, Oregon.  But in all my wanderings, I take with me sustaining images from my North Louisiana home:  the green apple tree under which I sat and crunched apples and dreamed; Christine, the black woman who was solid like a rock and who helped raise us three motherless children; the clucking of the hens and the nests of straw I would reach into and sometimes find a warm egg; my grandmother sitting in her big easy chair, reading the Bible out loud: “Bless the Lord, O my soul, all that is within me, bless His holy name;” the little town library with the incongruous heads of wild game animals—elephant, tiger, wildebeest—peering down on us readers, a place with books where new worlds were opened to me, where I was given both respite and hope.

It is home, place, experience in a context, that makes us largely what we are, that gives us the values we live by.  When we sing “Spirit of Life,” and we come to the part that goes “roots hold me close,” I think back on those images from home, from those early days.  And yet my place is not there.  I have come to see myself as part of a larger order of things.  I have needed to redefine “brother,” “sister,” to know that the man lying stinking drunk, curled next to a dumpster, that man is “brother.”  I’ve had to redefine “child.”  My own blood children, wanting more of me for themselves, do not always understand my larger commitments.  Madison, my younger son, said to me not too long ago, “I just want you to be my mom,” to which I replied, “Madison, you’re twenty-nine!”  I tell my own children that they will not be receiving all of my estate when I die, that a big chunk of it will be going to this church.  They are surprised, and then I ask them, “Who is going to look after those children that nobody cares about? You cannot be the only children I care about.”  They grouse a bit, just for the fun of it, I think, but they come to understand.  Our world has to become larger than “my children,” “my family.”  We really are all in this together.

The Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh tells the story of Vietnamese boat people setting off to sea in very dangerous circumstances.  In uncertain vessels, they headed for equally uncertain destinations.  Even if they survived the pirate attacks and the storms at sea, they might not be given refuge in the country where they landed.  As they left their families, their friends, their country, many of them took as their only touchstone on this perilous journey, a scrap of paper stuffed in a pocket.  On that paper was written the Heart Sutra.  It reassured them that they did not need to fear, because “each being is part of . . . the universe with no birth and no death, no beginning and no end.”  Our sense of home and relationship is enlarged as the horizontal plane on which we literally live and move intersects with the vertical plane of our relationship to the Divine.[1]

The church can help us enlarge our sense of home and family.  If you are new here today, I hope you will not feel alone; I hope you can feel the loving energy coming from this congregation.  I hope that you will be greeted after the service, and that people will reach out to you.  I know that I wouldn’t be here today, in this church, as your minister, if somebody hadn’t reached out to me years and years ago.  I want to share that story with you.

It happened in Lexington, Kentucky.  I was in my 30s and newly separated from my husband.  As often happens with separation and divorce, my whole social network was gone, in one fell swoop.  All our friends were at the Baptist Church, and they were all couples.  I didn’t have a place in their lives anymore.  And I was no longer allowed to teach the children, because I suppose I was considered some kind of fallen woman.  My therapist advised me to get a new social group.  She said to me, “Why don’t you go check out the Unitarian Universalist Church—there are a lot of divorced people over there.”

So I went.  I decided to attend the Friday night volley ball game, something low-key to start with.  Not knowing a soul there, I was anxious.  Would I be accepted?  Would anybody even notice that I was there?  More than enough people for two teams showed up, so some of us had to sit on the sidelines and wait for the game to be over, at which time, people rushed up to take their places in the next game.  I sat there through 2 or 3 games, and then finally someone approached me. He was a handsome black man from Africa who was studying at the University of Kentucky.  He said, “Don’t you want to play?” and I said, hesitantly, “Yes,” and he said “Well, come on then,” and he reached down his hand and pulled me to my feet, pulled me into the game.  That gesture was full of power for me, a white woman who had never been in a church with a black person, and here I was, pulled into place by the compassion of a black man.  After that evening, I was home in a way I had never been in a church before.  I became a regular.  And six years later I decided to go to seminary and become a UU minister.  And now I am here with you.  Because of one gesture by one man who cared.

It’s interesting to me that people often seem to know whether or not they are Unitarian Universalists the first time they visit one of our churches.  People say things like, “I feel as if I’ve come home,” and invariably they say they wish they had found us sooner.  I hope that all of you members and friends out there will maintain a true sense of hospitality to our visitors.  People generally come to church because they want spiritual growth for themselves and for their children, and people come in search of community.  Often people come because they feel lost, wandering, in one way or another, without a compass.  I hope that people who visit this congregation will find here a spiritual groundedness, a body of people who live out of the values we say we believe in.  I hope they find the warmth and companionship we all need as we make our way through troubling times.

No, home is not the place where they take you in because they have to.  Home is where they take you in because they are big enough and free enough to love you, to love you as you are.  I cannot begin to tell you this morning how big my heart is with the love of you.  I can hardly put into words the thankfulness I feel for the existence of this church in this community.  It is Homecoming Sunday, and we begin again.  We begin what I believe is sure to be a wonderful year together.  So be it.  Welcome home!

PRAYER

Spirit of Life, we give thanks for the lives of each of the people here today, for the good they do, for the spirit they bring.  We give thanks for the ones who have gone before, who have sustained this church community through the years.  Their presence is still with us, giving us courage to carry on for our children and children of the larger community.  Lead us, Spirit of Life, in the way that we should go.  Help us to enlarge our vision and to deepen our ability to love as we move through the days of our lives.  Amen.

BENEDICTION

As you go from this place today, may your hearts be filled with thankfulness and with hope.  Go in love and go in peace.  Amen.