by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

A sermon given May 2, 2004

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

CALL TO WORSHIP

Good morning!

Come into this place of peace

and let its silence heal your spirit;

Come into this place of memory

and let its history inspire you to greater living;

Come into this place of prophecy and power

and let its vision change your heart.

Come now, and let us worship together!

There are many warm moments in the life of a minister, special times when my heart seems full to overflowing.  And the most special time of all this year came on Wednesday, March 3, when the first four gay and lesbian couples in our church came to be married.  It was an extraordinary moment.  These couples never thought they would see the day when they could choose to marry, and all of a sudden, there it was, this amazing gift laid on their plate. 

Lisa Chickadonz and Chris Tanner were the first of the four couples to marry.  They had been waiting in line since early that morning to get their license.   Many of you know that Lisa and Chris have been in the church for many years; they have two children in the Learning Community; they have served the church in various capacities, including doing a bang-up job as canvass co-chairs several years ago.  The wedding was impromptu, the bride and bride in jeans and tennies.  The staff drifted down from the office to the Salmon Street Sanctuary, and began decorating.  Lynne and Ruth, our former R.E. directors, went around the church and found some plants here and there, and brought them in.  Someone else found an altar cloth, and a cascade of candles.  Still another person went out and bought a digital camera, to record this historic moment.

Well, Chris and Lisa are two of the most rational and together people I know, and on this day, their eyes were just brimming over with tears.  And I was crying.  And even Tom, our Associate Minister, was crying—and when Tom cries, you know something serious is going on, because Tom never, or almost never, cries.  Such joy was ours that day!  Lisa said to me yesterday, “You know, while other couples were getting married down at Keller Auditorium and out on the sidewalk, it was wonderful to have our church there for us, to have the staff come together to make a welcoming and meaningful place for us, to represent the family we would have invited, had we had time to plan.”

The following Sunday was the annual Youth service, a wonderful service—we had almost 900 people in church that day—and we asked all the couples who had been married that past week to stand, and they did, to exuberant applause.  A week or so after that, our banner went up on the side of the church:  “UNITARIAN UNIVERSALISTS SUPPORT THE FREEDOM TO MARRY.” 

It is times like this when we know why we exist as a liberal church.  No other church in this city, except the Metropolitan Community Church, an explicitly gay church, could unequivocally say—for the local church and for the national organization of their church—we support gay marriage, no ifs, ands or buts.  It was in 1984 that our General Assembly passed a resolution supporting ministers who were performing gay and lesbian weddings.  That long ago.  I myself performed my first gay wedding in 1986 in Boca Raton, Florida.  And so we as a religious people are able to witness as no other religious group in our community.  How many churches do you think could put a banner up saying “WE SUPPORT THE FREEDOM TO MARRY” without causing a huge uproar in the church, without splitting the church right down the middle?

And why is this witness important?  It is a bigger question than the question of gay rights—it is a question of human rights.  It is a question of justice.  What we’re talking about here is our first principle: we believe in the inherent worth and dignity of all persons.  All persons.  Gay, straight.  Black, white.  Christian, Muslim, Jew, atheist.  All persons.  This is our faith.  This is why we gather here today, to witness to that faith and to vow to live ever more closely out of those values. 

And we are special.  There is no other church just like us.  No other church that says you are welcome as you are; you are free to believe according to the dictates of your own conscience—no church dogma, no scripture, no priest or pastor is a higher authority than your own conscience.  We are a democratic institution—you make institutional decisions about resources, you vote to call your ministers.  And we are a justice-seeking institution—we don’t put our religion on, on Sunday like our Sunday dress-up clothes and then walk out of here and forget about our ethics the rest of the week.  No, we internalize spiritual truth that is ours, truth we have chosen freely, and then we try mightily to live out of that truth all week long. 

I’m really kind of puzzled when I hear someone say—and you have heard this—“You can believe anything you want to believe and be a Unitarian Universalist.” It is true that we believe that there is truth in all religious traditions, and we draw wisdom from many sources.  So some people characterize us as wishy-washy, without any serious theology. There are multiple jokes illustrating our penchant to be inclusive.  My favorite is the light bulb joke—it starts, “How many Presbyterians does it take to change a light bulb?”  Answer: “None.  God has predestined when the lights will be on and off.”  “How many Episcopalians?”  Answer: “Eight.  One to call the electrician, and seven to say how much they liked the old one better.”  “How many Lutherans?”  Answer: “None.  Lutherans don’t believe in change.”  “How many Unitarian Universalists?” Answer: “We choose not to make a statement either in favor of or against the need for a light bulb.  However, if in your own journey you have found that light bulbs work for you, that is fine.  You are invited to write a poem or compose a modern dance about your personal relationship with your light bulb, and present it next month at our annual light bulb Sunday service, in which we will explore a number of light bulb traditions, including incandescent, fluorescent, three-way, long-life, and tinted, all of which are equally valid paths to luminescence.”

In spite of the jokes, we’re not an “anything goes” faith.  We are not wishy-washy—just the opposite.  If it’s easy to be a Unitarian Universalist, then it’s easy to be curious, tenacious, courageous.  If our faith is easy, then it’s easy to ask the hard questions of life, to persist in asking them, even though our answers must ever be partial.  If our faith is easy, then it’s easy to confront injustice and systemic evil.  No, I would not say that our faith is an easy faith, but a faith that demands all that we have and all that we are.

Our faith is a faith for this century.  The world is changing—it’s much more sophisticated than the world most of us grew up in.  We have traveled to faraway places, either personally or through the media.  We have heard the Dalai Lama speak, right here in Portland.  We have studied about Gandhi and other religious leaders.  We know there is more than one path to enlightenment, to salvation.

Think what has happened to church since the 1950s.  Those were the days when people went to church because—well, because it was the thing to do.  We got Sunday School pins for perfect attendance.  In those days we went to the churches of our parents and grandparents.  We sang hymns that had been around for generations—lusty hymns full of blood and crosses and sacrifice.  I did all these things, and I expect that a good many of you did, too.  But then the world started to change.  Then came feminism and the pill and Civil Rights and Vietnam and the assassination of John Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., and Watergate.  We lost our innocence.  We lost the faith of our fathers. 

The 1970s focused on the individual.  We talked about “peak moments.”  Gestalt therapy guru Fritz Perls told us that we were responsible to ourselves, full stop.  We held encounter groups in our churches.  We talked about open marriage, and some tried it out.  Pretty soon, this focus on the self became untenable, as it always does.  Boring, really.

The 1980s found us in the Age of Greed.  Greed was in, greed was good, as Michael Millikin told us.  (That was just before he got hauled off to prison.)  “How can I get mine?” we asked.  The best and the brightest were not becoming servants of the good, but servants of the dollar.  Greed is still very much the order of the day.  At no time since the Gilded Age at the end of the 19^th century has there been so much disparity in wealth, so much economic inequity, as there is today.  There has been a vast shifting of wealth from public coffers to private hands, and our schools crumble and our roads and bridges are in disrepair and people go without food and housing and medical care in a rich, rich country, while resources are squandered and young men and women die in a far land in a war started for very dubious reasons.  No wonder there is a sense of meaninglessness, a feeling that there is something rotten at the core.

And so there is this spiritual vacuum at the heart of our brave new world of American empire.  And many people are searching for answers.  Note the amazing success of this film “What the <Bleep> Do We Know?” which has been drawing crowds locally for weeks—it is about quantum physics and human consciousness.  It posits that we actually may make enormous differences in our world by how we focus our attention, how we use our energies.  It is, ultimately, a film about spirit, narrated by scientists.

People do not go to church these days because it is the respectable thing to do, nor do they necessarily go to the church of their parents.  They may practice Buddhist meditation, they may have a Roman Catholic spiritual director, they may go on a trek in the Himalayas, or belong to a 12-step group.  People are searching because the void at the center is just too painful—and the set answers, the easy answers, just won’t do anymore.  They want to satisfy the spiritual hunger which our consumer culture fails so miserably to satisfy and which conventional religion has failed to address.

That’s where we come in.  Unitarian Universalism is grounded in a noble history of free faith—all the way back to the left wing of the Protestant Reformation.  We’re not an upstart faith.  We have martyrs who died for this faith.  There is depth here, and a long tradition.  We’re not Unity, and we’re not the Living Enrichment Center.  The fact that we honor many sources of truth is a great strength, for people understand that the paths to God are many.  We have never motivated anyone by fear, never pronounced hell and damnation on anyone—maybe that’s why our collection plates are so light compared to the Fundamentalists.  We believe in a God of love and mercy, who weeps even as we weep, who numbers the very hairs on our head, who knows when every sparrow falls.  We are a church that knows that we are stewards of this planet, not owners, and that the survival of one depends upon the relationship of each to the other.  We re-interpret theological language that has lost its meaning for a people who are thirsty for understanding, for direction.  We are, then, what I would call a truly contemporary church, the church of the age.  We need to take our place, just there.

As Unitarian Universalists, though, we undermine ourselves all too often.  As John Buehrens, our former President of the Unitarian Universalist Association, said to me once, “I’m not surprised that we shoot ourselves in the foot; I’m just surprised at how quickly we can reload.”  And how do we undermine ourselves?  Most of our churches are drastically underfunded, compared to churches of other denominations.  We have the highest socio-economic level of any religious group with the exception of the Reform Jews, and yet, our giving—where is our giving?  We give the least of any denomination. 

And then some of our churches forget that they are churches, with a spiritual mission.  Not social clubs.  Not ethical societies.  Churches exist so that people can grow spiritually, and then out of that growth, bless the larger world.  That is the reason for our being.  When we forget our mission, we fall into petty quarrels and fritter away our resources of time and energy.  We must keep mission ever before us, keeping us focused in the present, pulling us into the future.

Another way that Unitarian Universalists commonly undermine ourselves is the shadow side of our deep respect for the individual: in our desire to allow individual expression of all kinds, in our actual tolerance, we sometimes fail the community.  In every church of every denomination, there are going to be unhealthy people.  People who need excessive attention.  People who cause needless conflict.  People who are negative about most everything.  As I said, every church has these folks, but a healthy church does not allow them to dominate the life of the institution, or soak up institutional energy needed in service of the mission.  There is a Unitarian Universalist church in this district that argued for two years over whether or not the minister should be allowed to use religious language—words like “worship,” or “spiritual,” or for sure, “God” would be suspect.  All the while, the mission of the church was put on hold, and the minister was undergoing untold suffering, unable to give his energies to the good work of the church.

Our church is a healthy church.  Not a perfect church.  But as churches go, one of the very best.  We hold up Unitarian Universalist values in this community and in this state, and as the largest UU church in the country, we are very visible—we are looked to as a leader in the Unitarian Universalist movement.  But size in and of itself is worth little—we are called to largeness of spirit, as we attempt to lead.  Our strength is that we have kept our mission before us—we know we exist to grow spiritually, and to serve the larger world.  Through the many changes over the years, from the time this church was founded, on July 9, 1866, that mission has held steady. 

Now we have come to the time in our history when we need to take another giant step forward.  You already know about the proposed Eliot Center, the new building we will construct that will serve both religious education and the community.  If you haven’t seen the exciting plans, they are on the bulletin board downstairs in Fuller Hall, behind the coffee table, so please go and have a look after the service today.

The Eliot Center is a necessary step if we are to continue to grow and flourish.  There is no room for more children in our program—and space for adult education is severely limited as well.  And with the political climate being what it is, space for social services is scarce, and we want to provide that, too.

This building project will demand all we are and all we can give.  It will take volunteers on many different levels, and it will take truly generous giving—giving beyond the easy gift, giving beyond what each one of us at first thought we could give.  The all-church campaign will not be this next church year, but is planned for the fall of 2005. You will hear more about this important project as time goes on.

When the Eliot Center is completed, we will have taken that next step that history demands of us, and just as our forefathers and mothers built three earlier buildings to house their dreams of community and of service, so we, too, will take our place and do what is ours to do.  We have a heritage to uphold, and we surely have a call, considering the times in which we live. 

We live in a culture that fosters isolation and loneliness, that breeds values that are deadening to the human spirit.  We need a place where we will be welcome as we are, where we can be free to find our own spiritual truth within a community of caring and respect and support.  As Unitarian Universalists, we have a healing message to offer a hurting world, and values that this world sorely needs.  And as First Unitarian Church in Portland, Oregon, we need to stay grounded, to stay healthy, and to lead.  We have been given much, and much is required.  With God’s help, may we be equal to the task.  So be it.  Amen.

PRAYER

Spirit of Life, we pray this morning that we might embody the principles that bring us together: to honor all persons, to keep sacred the earth, to be ever open to the revelation of your spirit in our lives.  We are called upon to lead in these perilous times.  Humbly, we would ask that you give us clarity of mind, strength of purpose, and courage of heart.  Amen.

BENEDICTION

May we be worthy carriers of the flame of the free church tradition.  Go in love, and go in peace.  Amen.

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Copyright 2004, Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell.  All rights reserved.