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| Date Taken: 28 Dec 2011 Place: Bangalore, Karnataka, India  |
This is the text of the sermon I delivered to the congregation I serve, the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church Unitarian Universalist. You can listen to the podcast if you'd prefer.
Welcome
In Spanish it’s, “Bienvenidos.” Our friends in Oltheviz Transylvania would
say, “Isten hozott mindenkit.” Our other
overseas partner, the Nongkrem Unitarian Church in the Khasi Hills of India, might
offer a simple, “Phi long kumno.” I’ll
just say, “Welcome everyone.”
<go
into our usual welcoming words>
First
Reflection
Good morning!
How many of you are back in school already, or have a sibling who’s back
in school? Any of you know an adult
who’s back in school now?
For a lot of people this feels like the start of the
year. I know that New Year’s Day is the
first of January, and that Chinese New Year is in February. Some people think that the new year begins in
springtime, and some feel like their birthday is the start of a new year. (My younger son was born on December 31, so
I’ve always told him that all those fireworks are to celebrate his birthday!) The Jewish New Year – Rosh Hashanah – begins
at sundown next Sunday. (And did you
know that on the Jewish calendar it’s not 2015?
It’s 5775!)
Lots of days and lots of ways of marking and celebrating the start of a new year. We have In-Gathering Sunday with its wonderful Water
Communion. This is how we start a new
year of being together. I don’t know how
long we’ve been doing it, but I know that it’s been quite a while. I also know that in Unitarian Universalist
congregations around the country people recently have done, are doing today, or
are soon about to do what we’re going to do in a little while – pour our
individual containers of water into one big container so that they all get
mixed up with one another Anybody know
why we do this?
The Water Communion is a way of acting out with our
water what we do as people. We come
together here, each of us unique and each of us different from everybody
else. Yet when we come together week
after week for worship – here or in the children’s worship room (which this
year, you know, is going to be next door over in Summit House) – when we come
together week after week to learn together, and sing together, and play
together, and laugh together, and sometimes cry together … when we come
together over and over again to do these kinds of things we also – just like
the water – start to become one big something instead of just a whole bunch of
separate somethings. And that big thing
we could call, “community.” Each of
these separate people – including you, including me – come together and become
a community.
Now … the water has something to hold it: the bowl.
What do you think holds us? Our
covenant. (Some of you may remember that
at the start of RE year last year you made a covenant together for your
class.) A covenant is really just a
promise, but it’s not a one-sided promise like when I would promise my mom that
I’d never put my dirty shoes on the couch again, or that when I was done with
something I’d put things back where I’d found them. A covenant’s not like that. A covenant is a
two-way promise – you and me, we both promise it to each other. I promise to you, and you promise to me.
And here at TJMC we have a covenant, a promise that we
all make to one another as a way of holding our beloved community.
I’d like to read our covenant to you this morning, and
I’ve put it in less formal language than you’d find it on our website, in the
framed picture in the Church Office, or on the big sign in the Social
Hall. Here’s our covenant, our promise,
in words that even I can understand:
So that we can make TJMC
the kind of place we all want it to be, we promise to each other:
·
That we’ll talk to each other with kindness
and respect, especially when we don’t agree with each other;
·
That we’ll make room for all of our
differences and work really hard at including everybody;
·
That we’ll be there to help each other;
·
That we’ll work for justice, fairness,
what is right, both here in our congregation and in the world around us;
·
That we’ll give happily to this church
with our time, our money, and our energy;
·
And that when we forget these promises, we
will remind one another in loving ways.
I think that those are pretty good promises.
I hope this new school year, and this new church year
will be really fun and full of wonder for each of us. And all of us together.
Sermon
So … here we are.
As one of the hymns I’d thought about having us sing puts it, “Here we
have gathered; gathered side by side.
Circle of kindship, come and step inside.” Whether you have been away for the summer, or
just for part of it, or have been here doing the day-to-day as if summer was
just another season no different than any other (except for the humidity) –
welcome back. To students coming back to
town for a new semester, and parents whose children have gone back to school,
and children whose vacations are over, and people who for a myriad of reasons
“took the summer off” from church – it’s good to see you all again at the start
of this “new” year, this new church season.
To those who’ve been here pretty much each and every Sunday throughout
the summer – it’s been nice to see you all along and it’s nice to see you now
amidst all these returning folks. Kumno. Isten hozott mindenkit. Bienvenidos.
Earlier we did our annual Water Communion. Our separate vials of water comingling in the
bowl to create one common pool. At some
level we all get it – each of us comes here as an individual and together we
create a community. I’ve found myself
wondering, though, just what kind of community is it that we’re creating? “Community” in the abstract? Some kind of generic community? Somebody’s probably thinking, “a Unitarian
Universalist community!” but that’s kind of a generalization too, isn’t
it? Liberal, progressive, free thinking,
spiritual, loving, welcoming – these are all a part of it, yet I don’t think
that any of them really captures it.
From time to time I remind us that each week we create
a unique congregation – this particular combination of people has never been
together before and won’t all be together, in
this same way, ever again. Even if
next week everyone here returned and no one else joined us, it still wouldn’t
be the same as it is right here and right now because many of us would be in a
different place physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. The energy, the feel, of the group would be
different. We would be different.
So this community thing that we say we are building,
that we join and say we’re a part of, that we come home to in this homecoming, is
a kind of fluid thing, isn’t it? In
fact, there are people who think of themselves as part of TJMC who haven’t
attended worship or anything else in a long time yet who still feel that
connection. And there are people who’ve
moved away yet who also feel a tie to this place and these people. And there are people in book groups who’ve
never met some of the people who have breakfast together every week, who may
not know the new families that have been coming for the past couple of weeks or
the widower who’s dipped his toes in every now and again for the past couple of
years and thinks he’s now ready for more of a commitment. The truth is that we’re never all together at
the same time in the same place, yet still, almost despite ourselves, we are
one community.
And it’s sure not theology that holds us
together. It might not be immediately
obvious, because we UUs often hold our religious beliefs and practices pretty
privately, but there are a lot of folk here who are really deeply and
passionately trying to live their lives in accord with their beliefs. Of course, the person sitting next to them
might be equally passionate for entirely different reasons. As the quote so long erroneously attributed
to Transylvanian martyr Francis David says, “We need not think alike to love
alike.” So it’s not our theology that
holds us together, nor is this the kind of community that is built by constant
face-to-face encounters with one another.
What holds us
together, as I said earlier, is our promise.
Our covenant. I’ll bet that many
of you didn’t know we had one, or were surprised to hear that it’s posted in
several places. I would bet good money
that there’s no one here who could recite it from memory. And I am fairly sure that its unpacking
wasn’t a part of any Newcomer Orientation, nor was it even explicitly shared at
the time of “signing the book.” (In
preparing for this sermon it dawned on me that this would probably be a pretty
good idea –asking people to think about and then actually make these promises
as part of formalizing their membership.
How can we expect each other to keep them if it was never really clear
that we were expected to make them?)
So … we’re going to try to make up for that oversight
this morning. I would like to ask you
all to rise in body or spirit, and for the folks on this side to look at the
folks on that side (and vice versa).
Here’s our formal covenant:
In
order to create the beloved community we all desire for ourselves, we, the
Congregation of [and I realized that that probably should be “we, the members
of …”] Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church Unitarian Universalist Covenant to:
·
Communicate
with compassion and respect, especially when we disagree,
·
Celebrate
diversity and nurture our inclusivity,
·
Embrace
one another spiritually and emotionally,
·
Promote
social justice within our congregation and the larger community,
·
Generously
support the ministries of the church with time, money and enthusiasm, and
·
When we have fallen short, lovingly call each other back into
covenant.
As I said earlier – I think those are pretty good
promises. I think they are strong enough
to hold us together even as entropy – and elemental group dynamics – work to
undo us. These promises tell us who we
are as a community – we are a people of covenant, of mutual promise, and these
are the things we have promised to one another.
May these promises guide us in the coming year. May they keep us safe; may the encourage us
to try new things; may they get us through any hard times (and there probably
will be some of those!); may they remind us inspire us to go deeper and reach
higher; and my they be there to catch us when we have – as each of us at some
point no doubt surely will – forgotten and fallen short of them.
Welcome home, everyone. I think it’s going to be a great year.
Pax tecum,
RevWik
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