Last preached on March 25th, 2012
I love Church.
I think you all know that I love church.
I love almost everything about church,
and I really have ever since I was a child.
I grew up in church, made my first friends in church,
made my first good decisions in church.
I love church committee meetings,
and when I first admitted that among some seminary colleagues
one of them reached her hand over
to check to see if I was well.
I love church board meetings,
I love arguments between church committee chairs,
I love it when a church committee submits a budget request
that is for more money than they ever have before,
and when you ask why it is because they have a dream.
Now, I always worry when I admit this,
but I even love church conflicts.
As an interim minister in Michigan,
I was accused, with some justice,
of trying to teach those nice conflict avoidant Midwesterners
to have a good church fight with me.
Why? Because in church we are invited
to bring our whole selves,
and sometimes those selves do not agree.
If we are going to be real in church,
we need to know how to have good, healthy disagreements…
and if you are always avoiding the conflict,
then you are not bringing your true self to church.
I love everything from church picnics
to church men’s and women’s groups.
I love working with church staff,
I love working with church volunteers and with church lay leaders.
I love preaching on Sunday morning,
and I love both teaching
and being a student in Religious Education.
I even love the church budget process…
because you see nowhere more clearly what a church values
than what it does with its money.
I love church…
And, if the purpose of the church is doing all of these things…
if the purpose of the church is existing
for the benefit of its members…
then I have to wonder if my love is misplaced.
The sermon I’ve decided to preach today
is not exactly the sermon I planned on preaching
when I wrote the description for today
in the newsletter a month and a half ago.
I’m not even certain it is the sermon
I planned to preach a week ago.
I also hesitated because I am not
the called minister of this congregation…
and issues such as the purpose of the church
often rise to that level of ministerial visioning.
And yet, as we have been exploring
the concept of Covenant in our Liberal Faith this past month,
I’ve come to realize that I am not living my covenant with you
if I am not clear about why I think we do
all of the things we do together as a church.
I believe, with my whole heart,
that the purpose of the Liberal Church
is the salvation of the world.
I believe that everything we do as a church
from the way we make coffee on Sunday morning
to the Religious Education Classes we have
to the Mission and Vision we ask
our board and ministry to create with us
should connect ultimately to a purpose
of saving and transforming this world we humans inhabit.
That’s a big statement,
and it has one of those big, religious words in it
that often gets Unitarian Universalist Ministers in trouble.
Salvation. Notice I waited till just a few weeks
before Rev. Jan got back before I decided to use it.
And because it is such a large word with a lot of baggage,
let me be clear about what I mean in using it.
I’m not talking about salvation of souls
for some promised afterlife.
As a Universalist Christian,
I believe that all of those souls are already saved.
Whatever happens to us after we die,
it will happen to us all equally…
the oldest idea of Unitarian Universalist tradition
going back almost 1800 years to the Christian teacher Origen.
No, I’m talking about the responsibility that we have
because we do not have to worry about
who is saved and who is damned…
and that is the salvation of this world, in this time, for us all.
I am talking about a religious responsibility for a good earth.
I am talking about a sacred duty
to heal the suffering and the strife in this life.
I am talking about a divinely inspired calling
to justice, equality, and freedom.
The salvation that I believe Unitarian Universalism,
and all Unitarian Universalist churches are called to
is the salvation from the worst that we do to ourselves,
here, in this mortal coil.
And our world is desperately in need of saving.
Sometimes the many ways in which we see
injustice, warfare, strife, abuse, and inequality
in this world staggers the mind,
and makes me want to retreat into
my own little silos of safety.
I know that a part of my love of church
stems from wanting to build
my own little retreat of “Right Relationship”
and “Beloved Community” amidst a world
that seems so hostile to so many of the values
that I have come to hold dear.
The rest of the world may be going to Hades in a Handbasket,
but in my liberal Unitarian Universalist Church
I can find a place where we are at least trying
to live the values I believe in.
I can find a place where we are learning
to build relationships not on greed and self-interest,
but on generosity and common interest.
In the liberal Unitarian Universalist church that I love
I can participate in a community where
we seek to assume good intentions,
instead of how outside of my church I am told
it is a virtue to be suspicious of everyone.
In other words, in my Unitarian Universalist church,
I can find a fortress of covenant against an outside world
that everytime I turn around seems less and less hospitable
to the things I hold dear.
We can be that.
We can be that sacred retreat of Liberal Faith,
where people come to experience
the kind of open hearted community
that they cannot find anywhere else.
We can be a community of safety
in a world that is for many people unsafe.
Indeed we must be this.
We must be the place where people
who are seeking a better way for human beings
to treat one another come to find that community.
And yet, I do not believe that is all we should be.
Our world needs so much more from us than this.
Most of you know that I used to be a combat soldier
in the United States Army.
What you may not know is
exactly what that experience has meant to me.
I was not just any soldier.
For several years I wore the Green Beret,
as a supporting intelligence officer to a Special Forces Group.
I was involved in seeing conflict, drugs, and warfare
in Latin America…
which also meant I saw poverty, injustice, and oppression
in Latin America.
I was one of the peacekeepers who went into Bosnia in 1996,
and there I encountered, documented,
and helped to stabilize a country destroyed
by warfare, hatred, and genocide.
I would never have become a Unitarian Universalist
were it not for my experiences in the military.
Those experiences taught me many things,
but one realization about humanity has for years
seemed foremost to me among them…
and it is central to my call to the ministry
and to my purpose as a liberal religious human being.
Have I gotten your attention?
I hope so, because for something that has had
such a profound affect on who I am and on my life,
it is pretty boring sounding when I say it…
Here it is… Without intentional efforts to inspire us,
we human beings are far more likely
to feel less responsibility toward one another than more.
See, I told you it sounded boring.
There is a concept in political theory,
known as the “Social Contract”.
In its own way, the social contract is a form of covenant.
It is an often unstated agreement within a society
as to how the members of the society
will be responsible both to and for one another.
Here are some of the formulations of the Social Contract
here in America… you might be familiar with them.
If you work hard, and keep your nose clean,
you will be able to raise a family, pay your taxes,
and have a decent retirement at the end.
As you get older, the medical care you need
for a good quality of life will be available to you.
Your vote will count for just as much as anyone else’s vote.
No matter where you have started from,
you will have opportunity to better your situation in America.
Your children will be able to do better than you did.
If you are wronged, society will help you to find justice…
no matter your social or economic status.
The natural resources of our country are the property of us all,
and will not be sold off for private gain.
Rights, once won, cannot be taken away
just because of an election.
If you are down on your luck,
there will be a social safety net to make sure
you do not fall too far.
How many of you have heard these beliefs,
these aspects of what was once called the American Dream?
These were some of the basic assumptions
of what American society meant.
Now, let’s leave aside for the moment
that these assumptions,
these promises never really applied
to many communities of minority groups,
be they racial, cultural, sexual orientation, or gender.
Let us also leave aside that in practice
they worked better for those who began
on the higher end of the economic spectrum than before…
At one time, these ideas were believed
to be part of the American Ideal…
people believed they were true
and therefore they had the power
to inspire people to be better than they might otherwise be…
And to feel a responsibility toward one another because of them.
How many of us believe them now?
How many of us believe that we will find justice
if we are wronged?
How many of us believe that if we work hard
and keep our nose clean we will be able to retire comfortably?
How many of us believe that is true for our children?
How many of us believe that the resources of our nation,
what is often called “the commons”,
are being held in trust for all of us
rather than being sold off for private gain?
Political scientists call this trend in our society
to no longer believe in these aspects of the American Dream
as the collapse of the social contract.
People have good reason not to believe in these things anymore.
Our young people, newly graduated from college,
not only can’t find the jobs to begin their way
up the career ladder toward a comfortable retirement,
but they face not having said jobs
with crushing student loan debt.
More and more resources and services
that were once held “in common” among us
are being sold off to private enterprise
so that someone can make a profit off of them…
at the expense of the people.
This includes efforts to turn what remains of our social safety net,
programs such as social security, medicare,
and military retirements and VA benefits,
and turn them over to private industry
so that someone can make money off of them.
Rights that we thought had been settled long ago,
such as a woman’s right to contraception,
have become political footballs
bandied and debated on glittering debate stages.
And, everywhere we turn, we are being told
that the American Dream is not
that we are responsible for each other,
but that you are only responsible for yourself.
When we learn a practice of Covenant in our churches…
when we learn here how to live in right relationship…
when we learn here how to build the beloved community…
we do not do so in order to build a better church,
a place of safety in an unsafe world.
When we learn how to be responsible
for each other within our church,
it is not so that we can form our own spiritual retreat.
When we look closely at what in each of us
gets in our way in being in healthy relationship,
it is not so that we can have healthier relationships.
All of these things can and will happen…
we will build a better church,
and find our needed spiritual retreat,
and become better persons with healthier relationships…
but all of these are natural side effects
of the real purpose of the Church of Liberal Faith.
No, the real purpose of our church is the Salvation of the World.
The real purpose of learning to practice covenantal relationships
within our walls is so that we will be able
to teach and model that covenant to the wider world.
It is so that we can inspire our friends,
our local communities, our business associates,
our schools, our friends at the gym, our neighbors,
our state, our country, and the world
to be more responsible for one another, and not less.
The purpose of the church is to learn how
to be the change we want to see in the world.
We practice here, through the sacred nature
of Covenantal Relationship,
the way that we want the world to learn to treat each other…
That, I believe, is our mission.
That is the Church Universal that I belong to.
This is the center of my calling
as a Unitarian Universalist Minister.
It is the purpose of Church, for me.
Nothing less than the transformation and Salvation of the world.
So may it be, blessed be, and amen.