Last preached on January 9th, 2011
There was a day in 2005,
when I was the administrator and Student Minister
for the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Galveston County, TX,
when I ran into someone at the local grocery store who had visited the fellowship for awhile and then stopped attending.
She had participated in a “new to UU” class that I had taught,
and been really excited about having found
a community of people of liberal faith that she could join.
And then, after a few months she just stopped attending.
I had not seen or heard from her
until I turned from the aisle and almost ran into her.
She seemed embarrassed to see me.
I think I said something like “Hello!”
and “we miss you at the fellowship”.
I had left a few phone messages for her
when she first stopped attending,
but she never called back.
As we stood at the end of the aisle,
she said she had decided to attend a local Christian church,
even though she really did not think
of herself as a Christian anymore.
For a UU congregation, Galveston was pretty far
on the humanist end of our faith, and very much a Fellowship,
and she was pretty humanist herself… so I asked,
what was it that kept her from being comfortable
as a member of the UU Fellowship?
Her answer has stayed with me.
She said that at first it was wonderful,
the fellowship had good people who were really welcoming of her.
She said that I had been very supportive,
and that she had really enjoyed the “new to UU” class.
But in the end, she decided she just could not live up
to all the things that were expected of her
as a Unitarian Universalist.
I guess I looked befuddled…
I was not sure we expected much of anyone,
and yet her experience was that we expected too much.
We had not asked her to serve on any committees,
or preach a service, or even to make a pledge…
What were we asking that was too much?
She told me it happened gradually.
She had come to the fellowship looking for community,
for a group of friends, for someone who would care
if she was having a bad day.
She was newly divorced, and her husband
had gotten all of their friends in the divorce settlement.
She had moved to Galveston to start over.
She had no children, and her family was far away.
While we provided that community, we were asking a price for it…
we were asking her to care about a lot of things.
It seemed to her that on many Sundays someone came
and preached a service about a new injustice in the world,
about something else that she should dedicate her time,
her talent, and her treasure to.
There was genocide in Darfur…
there was marriage discrimination in Texas…
there was an unjust war in Iraq…
there was religious persecution in Burma…
there was some religious group going around
with signs that said hateful things about gay people…
there was another religious group coming to the Island
to tell gay people they just needed to read scripture
to be cured of “the gay”… and on, and on, and on.
After a few months, she said she just could not take it anymore.
There was only so much she had room in her life to care about,
and we had moved well beyond that space.
She was just looking for some friends…
We parted ways, but her critique
of our lived Unitarian Universalist faith has stayed with me.
It has long been a practice of mine to look
for some of those commonalities that bind us together
as Unitarian Universalists.
What is it that we UU’s, often of diverse theological backgrounds,
hold in common among us? What binds us together?
It is true we often have some demographic
and sociological commonalities…
but those commonalities do not hold true across our membership.
What is it that forms our center?
I’ve been told that in the UU ministry I am somewhat rare,
in that I came to seminary not from the “Church” movement
side of our religious tradition,
but from one of the oldest
and most established lay-led Fellowships…
Galveston is much more in line
with the traditional lay-led UU Fellowship
than we are here in Midland, in part because of our size
and our years of having professional ministry.
Yet I also served one of the oldest and most established
UU Churches in the Midwest, in Evanston, Illinois.
I had the privilege as a UU Military Chaplain
to be invited to over 45 congregations in the past few years,
and in that time I’ve seen that,
though each of our congregations is different,
and though there are some distinct differences
between UU Fellowships and UU Churches,
among those who stay and thrive
as members of UU congregations
there are some distinct commonalities.
During the rest of my time with you as your Interim Minister,
we will explore some of those commonalities together.
As I move into any service,
but particularly these were I am seeking
to name some UU Commonalites,
I will challenge you to come and speak with me
if in any way I seem to draw a boundary with this service
that excludes you.
Such is not my intent, and if I do I need to know where and how,
so that I can continue to develop this project.
It is one I hope will live on
beyond our time of exploration together this year.
What binds us together may be my first book…
and I invite you into it with me.
With each of these services,
I will try to gell each one into a “soundbite”,
or a single sentence that carries the weight
of what I hope to convey in the sermon. So, here goes…
No one carries a heavier moral burden
than the Unitarian Universalist.
No one carries a heavier moral burden
than the Unitarian Universalist.
Unitarian theologian James Luther Adams,
from whom came our reading today,
called upon our liberal faith to be a “Prophethood of all Believers”.
Moving a step beyond Martin Luther’s Preisthood of all Believers,
where anyone could find direct connection with God,
James Luther Adams called upon our liberal faith
to turn the religious life,
to turn our values, our principles, our beliefs
upon the society and cultures we inhabit.
He called upon us to understand our purpose
as a liberal faith movement to be one that
“stands between the epochs”,
to practice foretelling as well as forthtelling.
Yet is the life of a prophet one
that many people in this world would feel called to?
Is it the reason we come together into religious communities?
Can you build an enduring religious movement
based upon a commitment to stand at the edges of society
and speak truth?
I have always loved the story in the Bible of Jonah and the Whale.
Some of you may know the story,
God tells Jonah to go and prophesy to the people in Nineveh.
Jonah does not want to go to Nineveh.
The people in Nineveh were not usually nice to prophets.
They were certain to not be so nice to Jonah,
considering the message God was sending him with…
that the people of Nineveh were wicked and evil,
and that God was mightily displeased with them…
was not one that people usually liked to hear.
People don’t generally like to see the prophet coming for a visit.
Usually means bad things.
Jonah really did not want to go to Nineveh…
so he got on a ship for Tarshish.
Now, I don’t know, and the bible does not say,
but I’ve always imagined that the people in Tarshish
were likely to be nicer to Jonah.
Perhaps they were good God fearing people
who did not need to hear from a prophet.
The kind of people it would be wonderful
to spend some quality time with.
Kinda like why I’m preaching this sermon here at UUFOM
rather than in a UU Ministers Meeting.
You all are likely to be nicer to me.
God, in the story, sent a great storm
that threatened to wreck the ship that Jonah was on.
When the crew figured out that Jonah was the one
who was not doing what God had told him,
they threw him overboard,
where he was swallowed by a whale,
and then three days later the whale spit him out onto dry land.
Only then did Jonah go to Nineveh.
Many people portray this story as if Jonah was being evil,
that he was defying God and that he had to repent of his sin.
I have always thought that Jonah
was showing some good common sense.
The life of a prophet is hard,
and not one that anyone should take on lightly.
To stand either within or at the edges of a society
and speak publically and prophetically about that society’s ills…
about injustice or evil, about prejudice or wickedness,
about poverty or impiety, about war or hypocrisy,
about environmental catastrophe
or about a coming “day of judgment”…
to stand within or at the edge of a society
and point out its faults is not a good way to make friends…
though at times it is a way to influence people.
I believe the prophetic moral burden is heavier
on the Unitarian Universalist called to practice our faith
as a “prophethood of all believers” than it was on Jonah.
Why? Because Jonah could depend on the power of God
to forestall a coming disaster… and we cannot.
Or rather, we dare not.
In the story of Jonah, when he got to Nineveh,
he prophesied to the people that their wickedness
would bring destruction upon them, they repented,
and God had compassion for them and did not destroy them.
If only it were that simple for us as Unitarian Universalists.
If only.
Sometimes I think we forget that with human free-will
also comes human responsibility.
With the belief that many Unitarian Universalists share
that we humans make our own destiny
comes a responsibility for that destiny.
There is indeed much wickedness in the world today,
in our culture and society as well as beyond.
Wickedness is a difficult word to use…
but what else do we call knowing that we are destroying the world
with our dependence on oil,
for our cars, for our plastics, for our electricity?
And yet, even knowing this,
I drove here in my car burning that oil this morning.
I’ve tried not to… tried riding my bike and taking public transit.
In most of our communities it does not work…
and no matter how many cloth bags I buy
and use at the grocery store,
the plastic that seems to fill my life just continues to grow.
I could become a hermit, and indeed
many prophets do go that route.
They live in sackcloth in a cave and come to the edge of town
to yell about the coming destruction.
We have our own modern equivalent of living in a cave
wearing sackcloth and screaming at your neighbors, don’twe?
We’ve all met the occasional environmental purist, have we not?
The Bible has its fair share of these prophets,
and almost to a person these prophets fail to change anything.
No, I think we Unitarian Universalists are called to find a way
to speak prophetically about the society we live in,
to name its evils and ills, to come to terms that
even as we speak against it, we are products
of that same society and caught in its ills all the same,
and to work from within for another way, a better way of living.
To change the society from within the society,
to change the culture from within the culture.
It is why I titled this sermon “Living with the Prophetic Voice”,
almost as if the prophetic voice were a chronic affliction
that we carried with us, a burden that we bear
as a part of living as a person of liberal religious faith.
I name this a commonality because for those who find a way
to stay in this faith, who continue to come
to sermon after sermon,
social justice event after social justice event,
we find a place for both an increasing knowledge
of the world’s ills and a growing responsibility
to respond to those ills within our lives.
We each have to find such a place,
or the weight of the problems of the world
and our own responsibility for them,
can be too much to carry.
Just think of the charge we leave this building with
each Sunday… “go forth in peace, creating peace”.
Not just get Nineveh to quit making God angry,
but to create peace in the whole darned planet.
In Evanston the UU Congregation goes forth into the world
charged to “heal the planet, make it whole”
to not only patch up the wounds of us all,
but to return all of us, and mother earth herself to wholeness.
Each Sunday we leave this space with that as our sacred charge.
Sure, we’re not expected to do it alone…
and sure, it is not something we can ever fully realize.
But that is our call. That is our common goal.
To live with that prophetic imperative, without burning out
or ignoring all the lived aspects of our own lives,
we have to make a place for it within our lives.
I’m not certain how we all do that, but I have an idea.
Dr. Jonathan Shay, a psychologist who has focused
his professional life on working with veterans
suffering from PTSD and other Combat Stress Injuries
has written about something he calls “the moral horizon”.
In veterans, what he has tracked has been
how a soldier’s moral horizon shrinks
each time they feel betrayed by someone.
The soldier may begin the war thinking of himself as an American,
till he feels betrayed by those back home.
The soldier may think of himself as a member of a division,
till the divisional commander does not come through
with some needed support, and his buddies die.
The soldier may think of himself as a member of a company,
till the company commander makes a stupid decision
and puts the unit into unnecessary danger.
Eventually, the soldier ends up with a “moral horizon”
that includes only a few of his buddies
whom he knows he can rely on.
Sometimes, the soldier’s moral horizon is so small
it cannot even include themselves.
As I’ve learned more these last 24 hours about Jared Loughner,
the 22 year old young man who tragically
shot and killed five people, including Federal Judge John Roll,
and wounded fourteen others,
including U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords,
I’ve come to realize that his own moral horizon
had shrunk down to where he trusted almost no one,
and felt moved to commit this atrocity.
As our nation is rocked by this tragedy,
I cannot help but wonder at how our political discourse
over the past few years has followed
the same pattern of betrayal and distrust
that Dr. Shay points out in the experience of veterans.
Our nation has a shrinking moral horizon.
I bring this up because what I find among those of us
who remain Unitarian Universalists over long periods of time
is that we have broad moral horizons.
We seem to feel kinship in shared humanity with many,
even many we have never met and could never meet.
We seem to have an understanding of a shared responsibility
that goes beyond our own church or fellowship,
beyond our own demographic, beyond our own faith tradition.
Where we find ourselves being less than our best selves
is when we draw lines of division and otherness
that exclude others as outside our moral horizon.
It seems counterintuitive, but somehow having
this broad understanding
of connection, kinship, and responsibility,
this broad moral horizon, it seems to help us
make a place in our lives to carry
the sometimes crushing moral burden
that is part of Unitarian Universalism.
I think it is that, unlike Jonah, and unlike the soldier
who feels betrayed by everyone on the battlefield,
and unlike the young man who killed
and wounded so many yesterday,
it is because we Unitarian Universalists
always have this feeling that we are not alone.
That we are never really alone.
These ideas of the inherent worth of all
and the interdependence of all
keep our moral horizon broad and broadening.
I don’t know if it is something that can be taught,
or nurtured, or created in someone.
I don’t know if that woman who visited the fellowship in Galveston
could have found a way to carry
the moral burden of the Unitarian Universalist in her life,
or if it is just something about those of us who stay
that allows us to live with knowing the worlds ills
and knowing we can’t fix them all…
and working towards fixing them all anyway.
Perhaps it is that we need the self-development,
self-affirming, and self-loving aspects of our faith tradition
to be able to accept a broad moral horizon.
All I know is that each of us who remains in this faith tradition
must find a way to be at peace with knowing
we live in a hurting world, knowing we cannot fix it all,
knowing that we are a part of that hurt…
and still claim a goal to “Heal the planet, make it whole”.
All I know is that we, as a congregation of this liberal faith,
are called by that faith to bear prophetic witness in the world.
I’m told that this city of Midland,
this area we call the tri-cities of Mid-Michigan….
This area is full of evangelicals.
We are not called to be such evangelicals…
we are called to be Mid-Michigan’s prophets.
And, I believe it is that place for the prophetic voice
within each of us that, in the words of Rev. David Bumbaugh,
“Binds us together, despite time, and death,
and the space between the stars. “
So may it be, blessed be, and amen.