"Tell Me About Your Church"
Delivered at The Fourth Universalist Society
New York City
August 25, 2014
Hymns
#112 Do You Hear?
#298 Wake Now My Senses
Readings
Wild Geese by Mary Oliver
From “The Gospel for an Age of Indifference” by Rev. Frank Oliver Hall
Delivered before the General Convention of the Universalist Churches
Detroit, MI,October 24, 1909
"Tell me about your church," said the old bishop to the Servant in the House, "I am afraid you may not consider it an altogether substantial concern. It has to be seen in a certain way under certain conditions. Some people never see it all. You must understand this is no dead pile of stones and unmeaning timber. It is a living thing. When you enter it you hear a sound, a sound as of some mighty poem chanted. Listen long enough and you will learn that it is made up of the beating of human hearts, of the nameless music of [people’s] souls.
The pillars of it go up like the brawny trunks of heroes: the sweet human flesh of men and women is moulded [sic] about its bulwarks, strong, impregnable: the faces of little children laugh out from every corner stone: the...spans and arches of it are the joined hands of comrades, and up in the heights and spaces there are inscribed the numberless musings of all the dreamers of the world.
It is yet building—building and built upon. Sometimes the work goes forward in deep darkness; sometimes in blinding light; now beneath the burden of unutterable anguish; now to the tune of great laughter and heroic shoutings like the cry of thunder. Sometimes in the silence of the nighttime one may hear the tiny hammerings of the comrades at work up in the dome—the comrades that have climbed ahead."
#112 Do You Hear?
#298 Wake Now My Senses
Readings
Wild Geese by Mary Oliver
From “The Gospel for an Age of Indifference” by Rev. Frank Oliver Hall
Delivered before the General Convention of the Universalist Churches
Detroit, MI,October 24, 1909
"Tell me about your church," said the old bishop to the Servant in the House, "I am afraid you may not consider it an altogether substantial concern. It has to be seen in a certain way under certain conditions. Some people never see it all. You must understand this is no dead pile of stones and unmeaning timber. It is a living thing. When you enter it you hear a sound, a sound as of some mighty poem chanted. Listen long enough and you will learn that it is made up of the beating of human hearts, of the nameless music of [people’s] souls.
The pillars of it go up like the brawny trunks of heroes: the sweet human flesh of men and women is moulded [sic] about its bulwarks, strong, impregnable: the faces of little children laugh out from every corner stone: the...spans and arches of it are the joined hands of comrades, and up in the heights and spaces there are inscribed the numberless musings of all the dreamers of the world.
It is yet building—building and built upon. Sometimes the work goes forward in deep darkness; sometimes in blinding light; now beneath the burden of unutterable anguish; now to the tune of great laughter and heroic shoutings like the cry of thunder. Sometimes in the silence of the nighttime one may hear the tiny hammerings of the comrades at work up in the dome—the comrades that have climbed ahead."
Sermon
“Tell me about your church…” I love Frank Oliver Hall’s description of the church that can only been seen under certain conditions – and some people never see it at all. The living church he describes is not about a building, not about stones or walls. It is about people, about the beating of human hearts, the nameless music of people’s souls.
What is your church, your Fourth Universalist Society, about?
Each week you affirm our human “capacity for goodness and grace, for freedom and purpose and joy.” You say to one another: “We are not trapped in our past, but freed by creation to live and grow today.”
That’s good news! This kind of religious community, this kind of church,
is good news.
Now maybe this is your first time here, or maybe you’ve been sitting in this sanctuary for years. Either way, I invite you now to think about how you came to be here.
Did a friend tell you about their congregation and invite you to come some Sunday? Were you passing by one day and the sign out front caught your eye? Were you church shopping and this was one of many stops along your way?
Were you a web catch from the “find a congregation” page at UUA.org or the “belief-o-matic quiz at beliefnet.com. (Believe it or not, more and more people are discovering that they are Unitarian Universalists thanks to this simple quiz that asks about your spiritual beliefs and recommends a community for you.)
Were you looking for a community of faith, for a church, for a place to belong, for a spiritual home?
One the long-time members in the congregation I most recently served, David, tells a story about the first time that he and his wife Janet encountered the richness of the Unitarian Universalist message. They were driving by the church at Easter-time and heard the strains of a song through the open windows. They pulled over.
“This is my song, O God of all the nations,” the congregation sang. A message of peace, of love, a message that understands that our perspectives are different, but the dreamers of the world have the same hopes. As David tells it, sitting in the car outside, Janet smiled, a smile that said: “this is our home.”
A spiritual home is a place where the proclaimed message – the message that wafts out the windows – resonates with our own heart’s song. A spiritual home is a place where we are accepted, loved, cared for and celebrated for who we are. It is a place – a faith – where we are called to love others, challenged to be our full and most-human selves.
A spiritual home is a place where we are accepted, loved, cared for and celebrated for who we are. It is a place – a faith – where we are called to love others, challenged to be our full and most-human selves.
Now you may know this already, but I’ll tell you that in my experience, when people hear about Unitarian Universalism and Unitarian Universalist communities, they get pretty excited.
And when people in the congregations I’ve served and the congregations I’ve visited share about their Unitarian Universalist spiritual homes, they share their joy at having found a place filled with kindred spirits who may believe differently, but share a quest for meaning, for love, for purpose and for justice. They shared that their congregation is a place – a faith – that they are willing to dedicate themselves to, to work for, to stand by and to share.
What about you? However you arrived here, what has made you stay? What is happening here at Fourth Universalist that strikes you as special, as important, as making a difference in people’s lives? What makes you want to be a part of what is happening here?
The next question is: do you tell people about it? (That’s the tricky part.)
A spiritual home is a place – a faith – where we stand on the shoulders of those who have come before us and where we are part of creating a better tomorrow for those who come after us.
In this place, this community of faith, there is the power of the past – you are part of the rich history of Unitarian Universalism; this is truly a cathedral of Universalist heritage. There is the passion of the present – your dedication to each other and to the world and to your shared faith. And there is the promise of the future: This gathering of souls is moving forward together into a new era of Unitarian Universalism and indeed, a new era of religion itself.
In the masterful sermon from which this morning’s reading comes, Rev. Hall goes on to state that many people “…have the idea that religion belongs to the realm of the unreal and the unverifiable, that the church [deals] with uncertainties and unrealities.” He outlines the indifference people have toward religion, and says that: “…if the church is to regain [people’s] respect and loyalty,” … then religion “must be shown to deal with real things in a real way and to play a practical and important function in human life.”2
I could not agree more.
Huffington Post author the Rev. Diana Butler Bass writes about what she calls the “end of church,” “the collapse of the religious market.” She cites declining membership in the Catholic Church, decline among all mainline Protestant denominations and conservative Protestant congregations as well.
Rather than staid, institutional “religion,” Bass says, people are looking for an “experiential faith whereby they can connect with God, the divine…or wonder with their neighbors and [have] that wondering “lead to a more profound sense of meaning in the world.”3 Americans, she says, “are searching for [congregations] that…offer pathways of life-giving spiritual experience, connection, meaning, vocation, and doing justice in the world.”
What are you looking for?
What are you offering?
Bass’s article came out last spring, in 2012. Frank Oliver Hall delivered his sermon to the Universalist National Convention over one hundred years ago in 1909. Just two years earlier the country had been rocked by an economic crisis. In one day, the stock market had been decimated and the country plunged into a severe depression. Sound familiar?
As the recovery was getting under way, Hall challenged the Universalists of his day to be concerned with people’s earthly needs, to preach a gospel of social values that led to justice and equality.
So what, Hall said, if nineteenth-century Universalists had a message of Universal Salvation for all souls “a hundred thousand years hence.”
Who cares, he said – well not exactly, but essentially – he said, Who cares if Jesus or God, loves all people, if those people don’t have enough to eat, or to pay the rent or to make the mortgage,
or to get kids through school?
Who cares about the end of time, if one is not valued as a human being here, now?
The world, he said, needed a new gospel. The word gospel literally means good news. The world needed a new gospel. that proclaimed, as Jesus had, that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand, and that human beings were the angels we had been waiting for.
Hall and other members of the Social Gospel Movement saw an opportunity not only to transform society, but to transform the very nature of religion.
Just a few years later, in 1915, Hall’s protégé, Clarence Skinner, declared boldly in his book, The Social Implications of Universalism, that though people were tending to withdraw from traditional religions, it did not mean that they were less religious; it meant that they “wanted religion in bigger and more vital terms.”4
The way I see it, the same is true today.
We are, each of us, seeking our place in the family of things, finding the ways that the world calls to us – harsh and exciting – looking for the places where our souls can sing.
I believe that what we do in our congregations – what you do right here at Fourth Universalist – is so big, so vital, that it is life-saving.
I believe that being a religious community – yes, even (and perhaps especially) a Unitarian Universalist community – means that we are in the salvation business.
“Salvation,” author and former Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor writes, “is a word for the divine spaciousness that comes to human beings in all the tight places where their lives are at risk.”5 Let me say that again: “Salvation…is the divine spaciousness that comes to human beings in all the tight places where their lives are at risk.”
“Sometimes,” she says, “it comes as an extended human hand and sometimes as a bolt from the blue, but either way it opens a door in what looked for all the world like a wall.”
If we are honest with ourselves, we can admit that our lives are often at risk – less physically so than those of our fellow human beings in war-torn regions of the world, given the privilege we experience living where and how we do in America, – but I would hazard to guess that each one of us could tell us something that is or has put our lives at risk:
For some of us it is simply the way we are living – or not living.
Perhaps it is our pace – too fast or slowed to a deadening crawl,
For some it is our accumulated possessions and our attachment to them, and for others of us, it is the crushing weight of poverty.
Some of us are living with deadly illnesses of body, mind or spirit.
How has your life been at risk? And what has saved it? What is saving your life right now?
This is the question that Taylor challenges us to ask ourselves as a regular spiritual practice:
“What is saving my life right now?”
How is the world offering itself to you, sparking something in your imagination that makes you remember you are alive?
Mary Oliver’s poem has been a mainstay of my spiritual life for many years and perhaps it is familiar to many of you.
Her words serve as a reminder of some of the hardest life lessons – and they are life saving:
You do not have to be good.
Your body knows what it loves, what it needs.
Your job is to care for it as you would a sweet, soft animal.
Despair will come, and so will people to listen and to share it.
Yours is not the only heartbreak.
And the world goes on, glorious in its majesty – waiting for you to notice.
The world not only has a place for you, for each of us. It offers itself up to you.
You, no better or worse than anyone else, no more or less special,
but unique, worthy of announcement.
I have come to understand that the work of church – the work of religious community – is to celebrate the uniqueness of each human life and to companion each other in our humanness.
Each of us is a part of that work – children and adults, members and visitors, lay person and minister, those that went before, and those who have yet to walk through those doors.
This is how we seek meaning, how we find connection: We ask each other to be human together.
We listen to the beating of each other’s hearts, and we respond together to how the world calls us.
People often ask me what the best part of being a minister is. So far, I can tell you that the best part is the people, specifically how people come together to create a congregation and do ministry together.
Now I am a do-er. I like to get things done, to make things happen, and often, I like to make them happen a certain way. But in ministry, my job is not always to do. I have learned that the job of the minister is to enable the ministry of a congregation by equipping and supporting the people of the congregation as you minister to each other and as each of you discovers your unique ministry within the congregation and as you discover together the congregation’s unique ministry in the world.
Now, I am not trying to argue myself out of a job, or Rev. Rosemary, or any other minister for that matter. Ordained ministers are vital to congregational life because we are trained to facilitate your ministry. But I see our work as being companions to you as you live into your deepest callings, and that is the blessing of our shared ministry together.
You minister to each other when you feed each other in body and spirit, when you witness and share each other’s joy and sorrow, when you tend each other’s wounds. You minister to each other when you balance your individual needs and desires with those of the community.
You minister to the world when you act beyond these walls to make your city and our nation and the world more loving and more just and, in the process, find yourselves becoming more alive, more awake, more fully human, more whole.
When we allow ourselves to hear the world calling, when we let our imaginations respond, when we discover what makes us come alive, and make room for that divine spaciousness that comes in the tight places, then each of us and all of us can find and do and live and love the ministry that is uniquely ours in the world. We find our place in the family of things.
It just may save our lives.
The good news is that salvation is possible, right here, right now.
And the world needs that good news!
I believe that we, each one of you, this community of faith, and Unitarian Universalism have a solid and unique place in the religious marketplace of the twenty-first century.
This congregation is certainly not dead pile of stones.
It is a living thing.
You have built upon your past, and you are yet building.
This congregation – this faith – makes a difference in people’s lives.
You are real people, concerned with real things, in a real way.
You are seeking meaning together, and you are making meaning together.
Here. Now.
Your faith is big and it is vital.
So listen to your hearts.
Listen to each other.
Listen to the call of the world.
Open the windows, throw open the doors and let the music waft out.
Keep proclaiming your message.
Keep sharing the good news.
What will you tell the world about your church?
Notes
1. The Gospel for an Age of Indifference. by Rev. Frank Oliver Hall. Preached before the General Convention of the Universalist Churches in Detroit, MI, October 24, 1909. Published in Annual report of the Board of Trustees of the Universalist General Convention.
2. Ibid.
3. “The End of Church” Diana Butler Bass. The Huffington Post. February 18, 2012.
4. Clarence R. Skinner, The Social Implications of Universalism (Boston, 1915)
5. Barbara Brown Taylor, Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith (New York: Harper Collins, 2007)
“Tell me about your church…” I love Frank Oliver Hall’s description of the church that can only been seen under certain conditions – and some people never see it at all. The living church he describes is not about a building, not about stones or walls. It is about people, about the beating of human hearts, the nameless music of people’s souls.
What is your church, your Fourth Universalist Society, about?
Each week you affirm our human “capacity for goodness and grace, for freedom and purpose and joy.” You say to one another: “We are not trapped in our past, but freed by creation to live and grow today.”
That’s good news! This kind of religious community, this kind of church,
is good news.
Now maybe this is your first time here, or maybe you’ve been sitting in this sanctuary for years. Either way, I invite you now to think about how you came to be here.
Did a friend tell you about their congregation and invite you to come some Sunday? Were you passing by one day and the sign out front caught your eye? Were you church shopping and this was one of many stops along your way?
Were you a web catch from the “find a congregation” page at UUA.org or the “belief-o-matic quiz at beliefnet.com. (Believe it or not, more and more people are discovering that they are Unitarian Universalists thanks to this simple quiz that asks about your spiritual beliefs and recommends a community for you.)
Were you looking for a community of faith, for a church, for a place to belong, for a spiritual home?
One the long-time members in the congregation I most recently served, David, tells a story about the first time that he and his wife Janet encountered the richness of the Unitarian Universalist message. They were driving by the church at Easter-time and heard the strains of a song through the open windows. They pulled over.
“This is my song, O God of all the nations,” the congregation sang. A message of peace, of love, a message that understands that our perspectives are different, but the dreamers of the world have the same hopes. As David tells it, sitting in the car outside, Janet smiled, a smile that said: “this is our home.”
A spiritual home is a place where the proclaimed message – the message that wafts out the windows – resonates with our own heart’s song. A spiritual home is a place where we are accepted, loved, cared for and celebrated for who we are. It is a place – a faith – where we are called to love others, challenged to be our full and most-human selves.
A spiritual home is a place where we are accepted, loved, cared for and celebrated for who we are. It is a place – a faith – where we are called to love others, challenged to be our full and most-human selves.
Now you may know this already, but I’ll tell you that in my experience, when people hear about Unitarian Universalism and Unitarian Universalist communities, they get pretty excited.
And when people in the congregations I’ve served and the congregations I’ve visited share about their Unitarian Universalist spiritual homes, they share their joy at having found a place filled with kindred spirits who may believe differently, but share a quest for meaning, for love, for purpose and for justice. They shared that their congregation is a place – a faith – that they are willing to dedicate themselves to, to work for, to stand by and to share.
What about you? However you arrived here, what has made you stay? What is happening here at Fourth Universalist that strikes you as special, as important, as making a difference in people’s lives? What makes you want to be a part of what is happening here?
The next question is: do you tell people about it? (That’s the tricky part.)
A spiritual home is a place – a faith – where we stand on the shoulders of those who have come before us and where we are part of creating a better tomorrow for those who come after us.
In this place, this community of faith, there is the power of the past – you are part of the rich history of Unitarian Universalism; this is truly a cathedral of Universalist heritage. There is the passion of the present – your dedication to each other and to the world and to your shared faith. And there is the promise of the future: This gathering of souls is moving forward together into a new era of Unitarian Universalism and indeed, a new era of religion itself.
In the masterful sermon from which this morning’s reading comes, Rev. Hall goes on to state that many people “…have the idea that religion belongs to the realm of the unreal and the unverifiable, that the church [deals] with uncertainties and unrealities.” He outlines the indifference people have toward religion, and says that: “…if the church is to regain [people’s] respect and loyalty,” … then religion “must be shown to deal with real things in a real way and to play a practical and important function in human life.”2
I could not agree more.
Huffington Post author the Rev. Diana Butler Bass writes about what she calls the “end of church,” “the collapse of the religious market.” She cites declining membership in the Catholic Church, decline among all mainline Protestant denominations and conservative Protestant congregations as well.
Rather than staid, institutional “religion,” Bass says, people are looking for an “experiential faith whereby they can connect with God, the divine…or wonder with their neighbors and [have] that wondering “lead to a more profound sense of meaning in the world.”3 Americans, she says, “are searching for [congregations] that…offer pathways of life-giving spiritual experience, connection, meaning, vocation, and doing justice in the world.”
What are you looking for?
What are you offering?
Bass’s article came out last spring, in 2012. Frank Oliver Hall delivered his sermon to the Universalist National Convention over one hundred years ago in 1909. Just two years earlier the country had been rocked by an economic crisis. In one day, the stock market had been decimated and the country plunged into a severe depression. Sound familiar?
As the recovery was getting under way, Hall challenged the Universalists of his day to be concerned with people’s earthly needs, to preach a gospel of social values that led to justice and equality.
So what, Hall said, if nineteenth-century Universalists had a message of Universal Salvation for all souls “a hundred thousand years hence.”
Who cares, he said – well not exactly, but essentially – he said, Who cares if Jesus or God, loves all people, if those people don’t have enough to eat, or to pay the rent or to make the mortgage,
or to get kids through school?
Who cares about the end of time, if one is not valued as a human being here, now?
The world, he said, needed a new gospel. The word gospel literally means good news. The world needed a new gospel. that proclaimed, as Jesus had, that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand, and that human beings were the angels we had been waiting for.
Hall and other members of the Social Gospel Movement saw an opportunity not only to transform society, but to transform the very nature of religion.
Just a few years later, in 1915, Hall’s protégé, Clarence Skinner, declared boldly in his book, The Social Implications of Universalism, that though people were tending to withdraw from traditional religions, it did not mean that they were less religious; it meant that they “wanted religion in bigger and more vital terms.”4
The way I see it, the same is true today.
We are, each of us, seeking our place in the family of things, finding the ways that the world calls to us – harsh and exciting – looking for the places where our souls can sing.
I believe that what we do in our congregations – what you do right here at Fourth Universalist – is so big, so vital, that it is life-saving.
I believe that being a religious community – yes, even (and perhaps especially) a Unitarian Universalist community – means that we are in the salvation business.
“Salvation,” author and former Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor writes, “is a word for the divine spaciousness that comes to human beings in all the tight places where their lives are at risk.”5 Let me say that again: “Salvation…is the divine spaciousness that comes to human beings in all the tight places where their lives are at risk.”
“Sometimes,” she says, “it comes as an extended human hand and sometimes as a bolt from the blue, but either way it opens a door in what looked for all the world like a wall.”
If we are honest with ourselves, we can admit that our lives are often at risk – less physically so than those of our fellow human beings in war-torn regions of the world, given the privilege we experience living where and how we do in America, – but I would hazard to guess that each one of us could tell us something that is or has put our lives at risk:
For some of us it is simply the way we are living – or not living.
Perhaps it is our pace – too fast or slowed to a deadening crawl,
For some it is our accumulated possessions and our attachment to them, and for others of us, it is the crushing weight of poverty.
Some of us are living with deadly illnesses of body, mind or spirit.
How has your life been at risk? And what has saved it? What is saving your life right now?
This is the question that Taylor challenges us to ask ourselves as a regular spiritual practice:
“What is saving my life right now?”
How is the world offering itself to you, sparking something in your imagination that makes you remember you are alive?
Mary Oliver’s poem has been a mainstay of my spiritual life for many years and perhaps it is familiar to many of you.
Her words serve as a reminder of some of the hardest life lessons – and they are life saving:
You do not have to be good.
Your body knows what it loves, what it needs.
Your job is to care for it as you would a sweet, soft animal.
Despair will come, and so will people to listen and to share it.
Yours is not the only heartbreak.
And the world goes on, glorious in its majesty – waiting for you to notice.
The world not only has a place for you, for each of us. It offers itself up to you.
You, no better or worse than anyone else, no more or less special,
but unique, worthy of announcement.
I have come to understand that the work of church – the work of religious community – is to celebrate the uniqueness of each human life and to companion each other in our humanness.
Each of us is a part of that work – children and adults, members and visitors, lay person and minister, those that went before, and those who have yet to walk through those doors.
This is how we seek meaning, how we find connection: We ask each other to be human together.
We listen to the beating of each other’s hearts, and we respond together to how the world calls us.
People often ask me what the best part of being a minister is. So far, I can tell you that the best part is the people, specifically how people come together to create a congregation and do ministry together.
Now I am a do-er. I like to get things done, to make things happen, and often, I like to make them happen a certain way. But in ministry, my job is not always to do. I have learned that the job of the minister is to enable the ministry of a congregation by equipping and supporting the people of the congregation as you minister to each other and as each of you discovers your unique ministry within the congregation and as you discover together the congregation’s unique ministry in the world.
Now, I am not trying to argue myself out of a job, or Rev. Rosemary, or any other minister for that matter. Ordained ministers are vital to congregational life because we are trained to facilitate your ministry. But I see our work as being companions to you as you live into your deepest callings, and that is the blessing of our shared ministry together.
You minister to each other when you feed each other in body and spirit, when you witness and share each other’s joy and sorrow, when you tend each other’s wounds. You minister to each other when you balance your individual needs and desires with those of the community.
You minister to the world when you act beyond these walls to make your city and our nation and the world more loving and more just and, in the process, find yourselves becoming more alive, more awake, more fully human, more whole.
When we allow ourselves to hear the world calling, when we let our imaginations respond, when we discover what makes us come alive, and make room for that divine spaciousness that comes in the tight places, then each of us and all of us can find and do and live and love the ministry that is uniquely ours in the world. We find our place in the family of things.
It just may save our lives.
The good news is that salvation is possible, right here, right now.
And the world needs that good news!
I believe that we, each one of you, this community of faith, and Unitarian Universalism have a solid and unique place in the religious marketplace of the twenty-first century.
This congregation is certainly not dead pile of stones.
It is a living thing.
You have built upon your past, and you are yet building.
This congregation – this faith – makes a difference in people’s lives.
You are real people, concerned with real things, in a real way.
You are seeking meaning together, and you are making meaning together.
Here. Now.
Your faith is big and it is vital.
So listen to your hearts.
Listen to each other.
Listen to the call of the world.
Open the windows, throw open the doors and let the music waft out.
Keep proclaiming your message.
Keep sharing the good news.
What will you tell the world about your church?
Notes
1. The Gospel for an Age of Indifference. by Rev. Frank Oliver Hall. Preached before the General Convention of the Universalist Churches in Detroit, MI, October 24, 1909. Published in Annual report of the Board of Trustees of the Universalist General Convention.
2. Ibid.
3. “The End of Church” Diana Butler Bass. The Huffington Post. February 18, 2012.
4. Clarence R. Skinner, The Social Implications of Universalism (Boston, 1915)
5. Barbara Brown Taylor, Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith (New York: Harper Collins, 2007)