“Come, Come, whoever you are:

Wanderer, wonderer, worshipper, infidel…come. …

Open your hands, if you want to be held. …

Open your soul if you want to be filled.

Ours is a portal of hope.”

The Sufi mystic Rumi calls out an invitation and a welcome…regardless of who you are or where you are on your journey…no matter how many times you have broken your vows…Come.

The invitation is radical in its hospitality. Whoever you are.

There is a portal, an opening into hope that is always available.

Come.

If you want to be held, Rumi says…open your hand.

The love…the love is always there…waiting for us…

For each of us and for all of us.

But Rumi suggests…no, Rumi insists that we must open our hands first in order to be held.

I know…It seems a contradiction. How can opening our own hands allow us to feel held?

But I believe there is wisdom there.

We, as liberal religious people, we have claimed all along that the separations in the human family and the family of life serve only to privilege some and punish others. Black and POC vs White. Trans vs Sis-gender. Immigrant vs Native Born…the male vs female binary has always privileged males.

Perhaps all these binaries just reflect our need to know who’s in and who’s out. Who is safe and who is dangerous. Who is to be welcomed in and who is to be held outside our circle of care. The Ins and the Outs.

It is like the farmer Nasruddin in the story Cassandra shared who found himself welcomed only when he put on his new coat… Like Nasruddin who decided that it must be the coat that was welcome at that table…and so it was the coat that he would feed…stuffing the food in his pockets…

Perhaps the only real question we have to ask and to answer is whether we are willing to open our hands…and our hearts…

The theology here could not be more Universalist…because that love is available to each and every one of us…that is the Universalist promise…no matter how many times we have broken our vows.

And the theology here could not be more Unitarian…because it is our opening ourselves…our ability…our agency that allows that love to live in us and in our world.

A Unitarian Universalist theology that locates us…not outside…not above…not separate from…a theology that locates us as a part of that Life Force…how you name it mtters so little…but as a part of the Spirit of Life.

A Unitarian Universalist theology that promises…not some future salvation…because we are all as saved as we are going to get…that’s the Universalist message…that we are all already lovable and already loved. We are all as saved as we are going to get.

It is not a question of who’s in and who’s out. The only question is whether we are willing to open our hands.

This is a theology that asks us to lead not from our strength…but from our heartbreak. Because it is when our hearts are broken, when we have failed ourselves or others have failed us…when life seems to have failed us…or when we have failed life…it is when our hearts are broken…when they are broken open…that we open our hands and can be held.

Being a religious person is not for the faint of heart.

Welcome to this church year. And whether you are here every week or just decided to come today…welcome home.

Throughout this year, the Beloved Community will be our overall theme. Each Sunday we say that our goal here in this church is to nurture the individual spirit and together build the Beloved Community.

We do not pretend that there is a blueprint to follow: place tab “A” in slot “B” and proceed to step “C”.

We don’t have a blueprint…but there are guides. Rev. Theresa Soto writes:

“We don’t always know just what to do, but that will not mean that we are lost in the wilderness. We rely on the certainty beneath, the foundation of our values and ethics. We are the people who return to love like a North Star and to the truth that we are greater together than we are alone.”

We return to love like a North Star.

We associate the Beloved Community most closely with Martin Luther King, Jr. Dr. King wrote …”the end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the Beloved Community. It is this …spirit and this …love that can transform opponents into friends…It is this love which will bring about miracles in [our] hearts.”

Dr. King did not provide a blueprint to follow either…but he pointed the way. Racism and all forms of oppression, bigotry and prejudice will be replaced by a spirit of siblinghood. Love and trust will triumph over fear, hatred and greed. A spirit of human decency will prevail.

It was a bold vision that grew over time, was still growing when he was killed.

Dr. King did not invent the language of Beloved Community, nor was he the first to hold this vision.

The Beloved Community language was first used by a philosopher named Josiah Royce, at the turn of the 20th century. Royce believed that there were many what he called “genuine communities” or “communities of grace”…like this congregation or your Learning community classes. “Genuine Communities.”

Loyalty…or faithfulness…being “true to” vision and values was central to Royce. Being true to our values…that is important to us too.

But Royce believed that beyond these many “genuine communities” we directly encounter, there is also a broader ideal “Beloved Community” of all those dedicated to loyalty, truth and reality. A great cloud of witnesses…that our religious language…suggesting connection to those who are not here, those who have gone before and those who will follow.

For Royce, the Beloved Community was almost mystical, suggesting a life that transcended our individual lives. Royce was pointing, I believe, to how many of us understand the Spirit of Life, that we call on every week.

Now Royce was a professor and one of his students was Dr. Howard Thurman, who preached the 100^th anniversary sermon here at this church. Thurman adopted the language of Beloved Community and began adapting it and teaching about it.

“…[a person] belongs to life and the whole kingdom of life that includes all that lives and perhaps, also, all that has ever lived. …[to be a person], then, is to be essentially alive in a living world.”

Alive in a living world. Or to use our language, alive in a world where the Spirit of Life moves within and among us. Where the Spirit of Life holds us close, if we will open our hands…and where the Spirit of Life sets us free.

Martin Luther King was a student of Thurman’s at Boston University. And he took the language of Beloved Community and made it central to his vision for justice and equity. A Beloved Community of the spirit…yes. But also a Beloved Community that could be created here…among us.

King used the language of Beloved Community in the same way the New Testament describes Jesus talking about the Kingdom of God. Both describe a kind of radical kindness and compassion…”living a love that transgresses boundaries…”(King Center, Atlanta)

The vision for a Beloved Community has been around a long time. We are not the only folks, or the first, to claim it as ours.

We will be looking at the Beloved Community through a different lens each month, trying to understand what it can mean for us and what it calls us to do.

And we begin, this month, by looking at welcome…the kind of welcome we want to find in the Beloved Community we are working to create. Its called hospitality or even radical hospitality.

Part of the question here is how welcome we feel in this community. How welcome you…each of you…feels in this community. Where you feel welcome and where there is a part of you that you are not so sure you can bring.

This is our religious home. Who do we welcome at the door? And who do we make pass some test before they can come in?

I asked our Board of Trustees, at their meeting this week, to describe a time when they had felt truly welcomed, when they had experienced that kind of radical hospitality.

Everyone had a story. Several Board members talked about travelling in places where the people were very poor, where the people had very little money…and of being invited into homes and offered food, even when the family did not have much food. They talked about being so moved by that generosity of spirit.

But they also talked about understanding that the families who welcomed them by sharing what little they had, did not experience that welcome as anything radical…as anything out of the ordinary…it was just what they did.

It was how they lived. That was what was radical about it. How ordinary that welcome was.

I remember the first Unitarian Universalist Church I walked into when I was 14. I’ve told part of this story before. My mother decided I needed a church and dragged me to that church in Ohio.

We were greeted at the door with such welcome. The greeter, her name was Gayle Means, I later saw, greeted everyone with openness and enthusiasm. But I felt it so personally. It only takes one person to make another person feel welcome. And she took me right over to the Director of Religious Education, who took me to the youth group room and introduced me to other young people my age.

Most of the young people were white but there were plenty of other kids of color.

I felt so welcome. I felt like I was home.

But it is like the stories of the Board members. For that greeter and that Director of Religious Education and for those young people…it was just what they did. It was not radical hospitality. It was how they lived in that community…every day.

Let’s face it, with Universalist in our name…and the Beloved Community as our goal…hospitality has to be on our agenda.

And perhaps it will start as a task…items on our “to do“ list. But if it is going to be radical and real, hospitality can’t wait until people complain…about our bathroom signs (which we are changing), or our assisted hearing technology… It can’t wait until the barriers we may unintentionally erect become a problem.

If our hospitality is to be radical and real…it needs to be preemptive…to not wait until it is missed.

First Unitarian became a UUA Welcoming Congregation about 20 years ago. The plaque is out in the lobby. This year we start the process of recertification. It is overdue.

And we need to look at the ways we are not yet welcoming. By asking who is not yet welcome and what barriers we will need to dismantle.

Our vision of the Beloved Community is not a retreat from the real world, it is an affirmation of a world that can be.

It is not a denial of the hatred and violence that surrounds us, but a commitment to meet that hatred and overcome it with love.

To claim a vision of Beloved Community is an act of resistance and a commitment to hope.

Theresa Soto:

“In this community we hold hope close. We don’t always know what comes next…we don’t always know just what to do…

We return to love like a North Star and the truth that we are greater together than we are alone.

We know the way of the world of which we dream, and by covenant and the movement forward of one right action after the next, we know that one day we will arrive at home.”

Welcome Home.

Topics: Radical Hospitality & Welcome