“You Are Cordially Invited…”
Gaye W. Ortiz
June 3 2012
Aiken Unitarian Universalist Church
Introduction
I am sure if you
try, you can recall an invitation that was very special to you; maybe it drew
you into a new friendship, a new conversation, a new activity, sport, or hobby
that had never caught your interest before.
This summer it
will be 10 years since our entire family survived a massive move from the north
of England; when my husband and I decided we would leave so he could retire –
and take up a new job at Ft Gordon in our hometown, we told our grown daughters
of our decision. We said, “You both have lives and relationships here; we’ll
come visit you and you can come visit us’…and they said ‘No! We’re coming too!’
We didn’t invite them to join us – but we were thrilled to have them come with
us, and it was no small feat to move them, their partners, children, and pets
across the Atlantic the summer of 2002!
So Wil and I
both had new jobs, our children and their families had settled into life in the
South after more than 18 years in North Yorkshire…but we were without a
spiritual home. Not long after I began to teach at Augusta State University I
was invited to speak at the UU Church of Augusta. I had only a surface
knowledge of Unitarian Universalism, but I was primed by several conversations
with the church member who invited me, who was a fellow academic at ASU and on
the worship committee at the church; she told me about the kind of church it
was and I was excited. I was flattered to be asked to give a guest sermon on my
academic area of expertise, theology and film. I prepared to give a dynamic
talk, knowing that I would have to repeat it twice because at the time the
church had 2 Sunday services.
I proceeded that
Sunday morning to completely wreck the first service! When the minister, Dan
King, invited me to come up to give my opening words I simply launched into 20
minutes worth of sermon. I didn’t realize just how big a boo-boo I’d made until
I sat back down and Dan took the podium, and he said something about how he was
sure I respected the order of service and that we would continue with
the offertory. Then I looked at the order of service and saw that I had
bushwhacked all the other parts of the service between the prelude and the
offertory.
Dan then bravely
invited me to share some closing words – and I did, off the cuff – and then we
had a debrief and a good laugh before I took on – and totally respected – the
order of service at 11am.
You would think
that after flubbing an invitation so blatantly as a visiting speaker that I
would have been too embarrassed to show my face again…but the next Sunday I was
in the sanctuary again, as a visitor; the Sunday after that I approached the
music director to ask if I could sing in the choir; the next Sunday I asked
about the women’s group and how I could join in the upcoming croning ceremony.
And so on, and the rest is history, and now I stand before you having created
our order of service this morning as your minister!
What held me in
that UU community since that first mortifying day is what I want to talk about
this morning: the potential of a congregation to transform lives and make the
world a better place. It transformed my life to find a welcoming, caring
atmosphere within which I was free to ask questions, make mistakes, and be a
seeker for my own spiritual path. It liberated me and I will be forever
grateful.
My first year as
your consulting minister – and as a ministry intern – is quickly drawing to a
close. At the end of this month I will be away for two months until the second
Sunday of September for our in-gathering service.
When I was
invited to serve this congregation I really didn’t know what to expect, and
neither did you, frankly! Some of you have been members since the initial
formation of what would become the Aiken UU Church, and some of you walked in
the door for the first time during this past year and decided to keep coming
back.
In reflecting on
what makes this Aiken community so special, I needed to consider what has made
our members accept the invitation to join this congregation: what are your
hopes and visions for belonging to a progressive religious community? What are
you contributing in terms of your time and talent and treasure? And why is it that
each of you feels empowered to keep on giving, feels encouraged to exercise
your own unique ministry to keep the Aiken UU Church going?
Our Goals
In 1985, Latin
American liberation theologian Leonardo Boff looked at the institution of the
Roman Catholic Church and said that, as it was currently realized, it “ appears
to have not much hope for survival” (Boff, Church:
Charism and Power, 1985, p. 3). He was criticizing the reactionary model of
the church that, after the brief era of promise of the Second Vatican Council,
became concerned “with a narrow aspect of reality controlled by the hierarchy”.
In other words, the power of the bishops was keeping the church from its true
mission, that of “service for the good of the community”(164).
Fr Boff called
for the Catholic church to be liberated so it could become a church ‘born of
the people’s faith’, ‘rising to human challenges’ and called to be universal in
achieving those goals.
Now, some of us
in this sanctuary have very little knowledge of the Roman Catholic Church; and
several of us may have quite a lot, by virtue, at some point, of having that
faith as part of our personal religious journeys. But I would propose to you
that those universal goals of Father Boff – being a universal church born of
the people’s faith, rising to human challenges – are very close to what our
goals have always been in Unitarian Universalism. We don’t have some of the
handicaps, like a patriarchal hierarchy, that Fr Boff alludes to in regard to
Catholicism; in fact, Unitarian Universalism prides itself on being a free
church in which democracy guides its polity.
As James Luther
Adams states in ‘I Call That Church Free’, his version of William Ellery
Channing’s ‘The Free Mind’: “I Call that church free which brings individuals
into a caring, trusting fellowship, that protects and nourishes their integrity
and spiritual freedom; that yearns to belong to the church universal.”
“Being Religious
Together”
I want to
reflect upon that image of our church as a caring trusting fellowship of
individuals – indeed, it’s worth noting that, as Rebecca Parker observes,
“There is no life apart from life together” (“Life Together” in A House for Hope, Buehrens and Parker,
Boston: Beacon Press, 2010, 33). The reason a religious community exists is so
we can “be religious together” and not alone.
When we connect
with others in an act of common worship we are attempting to nurture the
relational aspect of our spiritual path. Many of us have a cherished private,
personal spiritual discipline, be it praying, meditating, chanting, reading, drumming,
singing, walking in nature. But something drives us to be here together;
it may be, in part, because we have a vision of what we want this liberal
religious community to be and become.
Rebecca Parker’s
book with John Buehrens is called A House
for Hope; in her chapter “Life Together”, she examines our drive as humans
to be relational, and attempts to understand the challenge that is the
contemporary religious community. Ecclesiology is the study of religious
community, its Greek root is ekklesia,
meaning ‘called together’ (34). Parker notes that the early Christian church
drew upon the Pauline teaching of different people having different gifts in
order for the church to function - just as a body continues to live because its
different parts work together.
In his letter to
the Corinthian church, the apostle Paul said that if I am one part of the body,
I should realize that my contribution is just as important as that of another
part of the body. It sounds simple - but we all know, continuing with that
metaphor, that sometimes being a little toe or a sweat gland doesn’t get a lot
of respect as far as body parts go!
So it’s difficult
to envision the unity of a religious community, and we have to look at another
root word to give us help, that of the word ‘religion’: religio in Latin means to bind, to tie together. So we come to this place to bind
ourselves together, and the beauty of it is that we choose to be bound together;
we accept the invitation held out to us. Some of us need that security of being
bound together, tying ourselves metaphorically to other people in this
congregation.
Rebecca Parker
recognizes the attraction of being in a religious community when its walls give
us shelter – shelter from our insecurities, and our fears, but we also seek
shelter with like minds when we face persecution because of our difference to
those outside these walls. But walls that close us in can sometimes be
suffocating, as the Reformers found when they wanted to correct the abuses of
Christendom.
Protestants
fought for the right to have access to holy scriptures in their own language
without priests reading it to and for them; they rejected the clerical abuse of
the practice of granting indulgences, the hierarchical power to literally take
money from the faithful for their salvation in the next life. Some of those who
rebelled went overboard and did away completely with ritual and hierarchy,
smashing statues, stained glass and other sacred art along the way. But we know
that eventually the freedom they preached became a Protestant sacred cow; new
ecclesial power structures were built, new obligations constrained church
members, and new methods were created to punish members if they broke church
laws.
Parker refers to
the ‘perils of religious community’ that continue to exist today, which include
shunning or excommunication, or even the threat of eternal damnation for those
who don’t toe the ideological line of their religious leadership. The distrust
of religious community, especially by religious liberals like us, may be
because we have had disillusioning, or even traumatic, experiences in
oppressive religious communities. We may have exacting standards, and judge
religious communities as all too often failing to practice what they preach.
Rebecca Parker
reminds us that we are in good company – for example, “The Hebrew prophets
condemned religion when its priests soothed the privileged but neglected the
poor” (35). But maybe we need to remember what the famous reformer John Calvin
said about the church, that it is “a house always under reconstruction”(35)…
maybe, because it’s a human creation, we can see that religion is
necessarily flawed in practice if not in theory.
Parker urges us
to ‘rebuild’ the walls of community so that we can continue to have “meaningful
connection with one another” (37). She identifies two ways of being church for
‘liberal and progressive people of faith’: one is that congregations can
“provide an embodied experience of covenant and commitment among people; they
can foster freely chosen and life-sustaining interdependence” (37). This to me
is another iteration of Leonardo Boff’s wish for a church ‘born of the people’s
faith’.
The Covenant
Tradition
For Unitarian
Universalists the covenantal tradition is broad in human and historical terms; there
is a lengthy strand of connection, grounded “in a 16th century
Left-wing Reformation interpretation of Jewish and Christian covenantal
scriptures… the scriptural interpretation of 16th century English
Congregationalists is reflected in the Pilgrim Mayflower Compact of 1620 and
the Puritan Salem Covenant (1629) among many others, and adapted by the
Puritans to the American colonial circumstances in the Cambridge Platform of
Church Discipline (1648). It has been influenced by the 18th century
Enlightenment and by the 19th century Transcendentalists, …by
Unitarians (and other religious associations) at the end of the 19th
century, and by the 1961 consolidation of the AUA and UCA to form the UUA.”
(James A. Hobart, A Prologomena:
Regarding an Understanding of Our UU Ministers Covenant, October 2006, 2).
Let’s unpack that timeline a bit:
Writing about
the Covenant, William Johnson Everett says that we can see in the Bible the
earliest form of religious covenantal agreement. (Everett, “Recovering the
Covenant”, http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=1495)
Everett says
there is a constant need to balance power and justice within human
relationships because human beings are frail and because they aspire to be
powerful: certainly if you’ve read the Bible you know it does not shy away from
recognizing the full range of human faults, from Adam and Eve to King David.
Everett says that the exercise of just power in biblical times needed to
balance “the bonds of kinship with the freedom of consent”. When we’re trying
to figure out how we behave with people who are not in our “family, tribe, ethnic group, and race” we need to build
that relationship in a way that balances trust with diversity. This was one of
the radical things that the new Christian communities did as they began to
operate first in Jerusalem within the Jewish culture and then, as a separate
but growing network of faith communities, began to welcome Gentiles into their
midst.
Features of Covenant
By the time of
the Protestant dissenters in England and New England in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, a covenant theory was revived, based upon an
understanding of the primitive Christian church derived from the New Testament.
Each member of a dissenting congregation had both right and responsibility in
matters of decision-making, including shaping church policy.
This was a
revolutionary change from the practices of the established church, and it is
still a feature of UU covenants today: “active participation in constituting
the covenantal community” (Hobart, 3). Defining ourselves as Unitarian
Universalists means that the individual, in balance with the institution, can
enrich the common good.
Another UU
thinker, Alice Blair Wesley, sees the spirit of love, at work in covenantal
organization, as the transforming factor in a congregation (Wesley, Our Covenant, 2002, Chicago, Meadville
Lombard Press, 7). She stresses that a church needs a doctrine that flows “from
mutually shared loyalties of the members…seen at work in everything the members
do together as church people” (16).
This idea brings
us back to the goal of Fr Boff for the church to rise to human challenges. It
is what characterizes Rebecca Parker’s second way of being church for liberal
and progressive people of faith, that they can be “communities of resistance”
(37). “Resisting and even transforming an unjust dominant culture” through
membership in a group is often more effective than trying to do it alone:
Parker gives one example: of African American churches that “functioned as
countercultures to white supremacist culture” (38).
Another example
is of Unitarian churches in Hungary. Boasting a continuous presence over 450
years, these Transylvanian communities offered dissidents and freethinkers
refuge, especially when religion was persecuting science in Europe. The 20th-century
threat of extinction by the Ceausescu regime was overcome by the spirit of
dissent that had long been nurtured in these communities. And Parker observes
that “such community is established less by a historic creed or by apostolic
tradition than by covenantal relations among the members” (41). This is what
Alice Blair Wesley means when she calls for a doctrine of love at work in
everything the members do together as church people.
Is ours a
community that can nurture itself through love and renewal? In the words of
James Luther Adams, do we embody “the priesthood of all believers” that works
for the ministry of healing? Are we a community that is - or can become - a
community of resistance that is helping to transform our world? Again in the
words of Adams, do we embody “the prophethood of all believers” that works for
the liberty of prophesying?
Our Community
Let’s just think
for a moment and consider how we nurture ourselves and work to change the
world. Our children’s RE program, for a start, is how we renew our energies and
ensure our future. Our future
generations will need the kind of nurturing and prophetic witness that our
children are learning from us here. We invite them to follow us in building up
our church.
Our affinity
groups help to nurture our members – whether you enjoy the Sisterhood of the
Spirit, the Buddhist meditation group or the men’s group, or even the new Adult
RE Sharing Circles, you can agree that this congregation invites us all to
share in the wealth of relational opportunities in smaller groups that foster
bonds of friendship and common interest.
And when we look
to the goal of becoming a community that resists the dominant cultural status
quo and works to create a better world, we can see progress here too.
Our Share the
Plate monthly collection comes out of a desire to reach out to the wider
community with our resources, and its success is a sign of our members’ and
friends’ generosity. It is, by extension, our work in the community, along with
all the wonderful projects from the Service and Outreach Committee.
Our
participation in the UUA advocacy project, Standing on the Side of Love, has
brought us into contact with others in our wider community who want to work
with us in affirming the human dignity of every person. We have begun the work
this year of being designated a Welcoming Community, and that process will
continue with a variety of workshops, service and other activities for all
members and friends.
My enthusiasm
for this congregation knows no bounds, and I could happily stand here and spout
forth on more achievements, more projects, more goals…but in our Annual Meeting
today you will hear the reports from committees that have been engaged in
making this church a transforming and loving community. And you will hear about
people who have stepped up and have accepted the invitation to leadership. This
day, once a year, makes me proud to be a Unitarian Universalist who can have a
real say in the governance of this church. Our shared ministry is something as
a minister that I value.
Conclusion
Again I ask the
question, why do the members of this church continue to accept the invitation
to do this work? And those of you who are not members, who may have been coming
for some time, I want to ask you “What is stopping you from accepting the
invitation we hold out to you to help us do this work?” If being here with us
is worth your time on Sunday mornings, then become a member and commit yourself
to share fully in the transforming work we do. I can bring out our membership
book right now, and you’ll be able to vote in the Annual Meeting after this
service – instant exercise of your membership rights and responsibilities! And
seriously, having been a member of a religious faith tradition that does not
treat its members like grown-ups and does not give them any meaningful say in
how their church makes decisions, I consider the polity of Unitarian
Universalism a valued privilege of my membership.
The UUA
president Peter Morales puts it this way: “When you and I focus on what we love
and what we long to create, something almost miraculous happens. We are
energized. We form lasting bonds. We become eager to commit ourselves and to
work together. We become more generous. We come to care more about ‘us’ and
less about ‘me’. In other words, when we focus on what we love we ‘get
religion’ (‘Hand in Hand’, UU World
Spring 2010, 7).
So…you are
cordially invited again this morning to be an active part of our church family
– and whether metaphorically you feel sometimes like a little toe or a sweat
gland, remember that all of us are important in making this church body
not only function but thrive. Together we can nurture this church and its
members, its friends, and the wider community. Together we can rise to the
challenges that the future holds; together we can create a vision that
transforms our lives.
Gaye W. Ortiz
6/1/2012
Sources:
Boff,
Leonardo (1985). Church: Charism and
Power. New York: Crossroad.
Buehrens,
John and Parker, Rebecca (2010). A House
for Hope. Boston: Beacon Press.
Everett,
William Johnson. “Recovering the Covenant”, http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=1495
Hobart,
James A. (October 2006) A Prologomena:
Regarding an Understanding of Our UU Ministers Covenant,2.
Morales,
Peter (Spring 2010). ‘Hand in Hand’, UU
World, 7.
Wesley,
Alice Blair (2002). Our Covenant.
Chicago: Meadville Lombard Press.
Wright,
Conrad (1989). Walking Together.
Boston: Skinner House.
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