Liturgical Materials for Sunday the 6th of January, 2002
Mark Belletini, Minister First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, Ohio
Opening Words [Next] [back to top]
We are here,
as the New Year flows into the future,
to worship, which is to learn and unlearn,
to celebrate the wholeness of our lives
in the light of our ideals and deepest commitments,
and to drink deeply the nourishment that comes
from both root, branch and fruit of the Tree of Life.
And may our reason and passion keep us true to ourselves, true to each
other,
and true to those shared visions of what we can together
become…
Preface to the Silence [Next] [back to top]
O Spirit of Life,
be now a steady breathing in this our village,
our small community set in a garland of communities
around the globe.
Breathe in the awe that thrives in each of us
whensoever we open the gifts of life and love
that come our way.
Breathe in the jarring we feel when we greet
the loss of loved ones like Joe Hambrick face to face,
and when we burn in outrage over vandalism
against our local sisters and brothers
who gather for Muslim devotions on Broad St.
Breathe in all the decisions we have made
that have taken us on all our present paths.
Breathe in our remembrance of all the paths
we might have taken but did not,
that we might sigh and move on.
Breathe in our words of hello and greeting.
Breathe in our common singing.
Breathe in our common silence.
(silence)
Breathe, thou Breath of Life, in our love,
our longing, and our anguish.
As we call to mind or voice the
the presences of all those
with whom our life is woven,
woven like the branches of trees in the wind,
woven like the tangle of roots in the earth.
Lovers and loners, parents and siblings,
friends and foes, the quick and the dead,
we remember all now who press themselves
into our hearts by our imagination…
aloud or in silence we lift them up in blessing.
(naming)
Blest are the roads we have taken to bring
us to this very moment, and the roads we did not
take which have also brought us to this very moment.
For those choice have made all the difference.
First
Reading [Next]
[back to top]
comes from a very fine poem by Minnesota poet Meridel LeSueur. This
is part of a series of poems, first written for a group of women in the US
to send to a group of women in Vietnam as the war was ending. The Vietnamese
phrase Doan Ket means Solidarity.
Let us seek each other in the villages of the earth,
In the root, dark, where we live in the dust,
Find us singing in the underground vein,
the germinal seed, in the returning sun;
And bring our goodness to enormous,
fertile and perpetual harvest, toward zeniths of noon,
toward total expansions in crops
of brotherhood and sisterhood.Let us await each other in the village field
in the new year;
risen in ancestral dust, from the furrow,
from the loom of the people where, amid lamentations
we have loomed our life in pollen;
where the leaves forgive the root
and our children rise in perpetual sunrise,
in immense globular light.
We await each other!The light returns on no enemy faces,
but upon the communal chorus,
roused in villages of the earth,
to cry salute and sing,
Shout in choruses of millions,
Rising toward communications,
toward extremities, nadirs…
the entire solar light on all flesh,
on all fields and all villages.
Roused from sleep, rouse us,
let us seek each other and move from the violent,
the broken, the predatory, to the enormous
and myriad fertile and impregnated harvest,
the global village
We sing with you in choruses of millions.
Second
Reading [Next]
[back to top]
comes from the poetry of the late and great North American poet, William
Stafford, of Oregon. Those of us who attended the Large Church conference
out in Portland heard a number of Mr. Stafford's poems used in worship, including
this one. Its called
A RITUAL TO READ TO EACH OTHER
If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made
may prevail in the world,
and following the wrong god home,
we may miss our star.For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts
the horrible errors of childhood storming out
to play through the broken dike.And, as elephants parade
holding each elephant's tail,
(but if one wanders the circus won't find the park),
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.And so I appeal to a voice,
to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should
consider -lest the parade of our mutual life
gets lost in the dark.For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give - yes or no, or maybe -
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
Sermon: Roots and Branches: Walking Together…[Next][back to top]
I remember the first time I met a Unitarian bishop. It was in 1987, at the triennial International Association for Religious Freedom convocation held at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.
The part of Rumania where the Bishop lived was being terrorized in those days by a megalomaniac named Ceaucescu. Ceaucescu simply could not stand the Hungarian speaking minorities in his nation, of which Bishop Kovach was an excellent example. So he bulldozed their churches and villages, harassed them with exquisite bureaucracies, and otherwise made their lives perfectly miserable. The people of Rumania eventually deposed him, and killed him and his wife, as many of you will surely remember. But when I first met the Unitarian Bishop, Ceaucescu was still in place, and all the Unitarians from Rumania and Hungary came to Stanford looking defeated from the bureaucratic nightmare of arranging travel to the States. They also came wearing wary and frightened faces.
The bishop wore a black suit and white shirt. He was a stocky man as I recall, with a wide, worried face. When he led worship during the conference, he wore the black cape-like vestment that Eastern European Unitarian ministers always wear during services. He seemed very serious all the time. But then, if I knew my village might be bulldozed to the ground while I was abroad, I might look pretty dour too.
Most Unitarian Universalists in North America I talk to are surprised that there can be any such thing as a Unitarian Bishop. They are also surprised when they travel there to find out that Unitarian Universalist type churches in Northern Ireland are called "Non Subscribing Presbyterian Churches." I admit it's not the most lovely of phrases. But it is easy to explain. What these churches don't "subscribe" to are the creeds and articles of the churches in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. The word "presbyterian" refers not so much to theology, but to how they govern themselves… they are not episcopal, like the Unitarians in Rumania and Hungary; instead, they have presbyterian polity, which means they elect elders to meet in groups called "presbyteries" that help them decide things.
Polity. Not a frequently used word to be sure, but one that every Unitarian Universalist should know. Polity is the 50 cent word that asks the question of a religious community, "How does anything get done around here?"
The Unitarians in central Europe give a lot of power to one person, a bishop. Thus they govern themselves by episcopal polity. The Unitarians in Northern Ireland use a presbyterian polity, distributing authority to a larger base of church councils. And the Unitarian Universalists in North America use congregational polity, which means that the congregation itself has the final say on all important issues. Most Jewish, Baptist, United Church of Christ, and Disciples congregations also use congregational polity. This should be no surprise. For as there are many roots in a tree, there are many branches also.
Now note, congregational polity is not a "Swiss democracy," with everyone coming to large town meetings to make every decision and micromanage church affairs. No, boards and committees described by a constitution or a set of by-laws are often empowered to make decisions on behalf of the people of the congregation. Several times a year, the congregation must gather, as we will this early afternoon, to be informed or to ratify what the smaller board or committees have voted on. Or they can be gathered to help determine new projects and directions for the church, including all realms spiritual, fiscal and institutional.
I do need to point out that no single system of governance is foolproof. You can, after all, have a wonderful, compassionate bishop who beautifully and inclusively directs many programs for the improvement of the world. And, you can also have a congregation right next door that supposedly governs itself but which enjoys bickering and complaining so much that nothing of value ever gets done and everyone is exhausted and bitter.
Of course, I know, you can also have rigid presbyteries or cranky, controlling bishops. This, in contrast to great congregations in the congregational tradition that take their governing responsibilities up as a spiritual privilege, in order to create dynamic, mission- teaching- and compassion-oriented communities.
And, it's fair to say that all three standard polities, the episcopal, the presbyterian and the congregational can each be authentic expressions of democratic methods. Tyrannical bishops are often deposed. Synods are disbanded by the vote of the people. And all congregations have committees and boards, not just churches of congregational polity. And those of us who have been parts of churches or synagogues or mosques all of our lives have figured out that most congregations have people within them who take on almost episcopal authority upon themselves without any vote of the congregation.
Thus, you can tell, I hope, that the three polities blend and merge a lot more than most of us would imagine. After all, nothing is clean and simple when it comes to human community.
Furthermore, there are folks in every congregation who disregard the teachings of church authorities, no matter who they may be, and yet claim full membership. The number of Roman Catholic women who have studied for the priesthood, or who practice birth control, engage in consensual sex before marriage, or even who have had abortions and not confessed it as a sin, is very high despite the clear teachings of the bishops. The number of people in Episcopalian churches who do not accept the doctrine of the Trinity, or the virgin birth, or the miracles and literal resurrection of Jesus is also higher than most people would imagine. And the number of people in congregational polity churches who stop coming when the vote does not go their way shows that no form of governance governs everyone perfectly.
In recent years, with the rise of Pentecostal and large Evangelical fundamentalist churches in the suburbs, you have another kind of polity, one where the pastor/s is/are the final spiritual and financial arbiters of everything in the congregation. This is a combination of congregational and episcopal polity in one single congregation, and it's a relatively new form of government. I wonder how many more years it will take before it has a name.
Our congregational polity has deep historical roots of course. We expect students to know something about it when they enter our ministry. We probably should teach more of this to all who come to our churches as lay people, too.
Congregational polity… governance of local congregations by the congregation itself through elected officers… stems largely from a document called the Cambridge Platform of 1648. The Platform outlined a method of church government we still use in this church. It was agreement entered by a number of New England churches who had given up government by bishops while they were still back in the old country. All officials in these congregations, including the ministers and educators, were elected for a certain period. When their term of office was over, or they retired, or moved, they were no longer officers or ministers or educators. Their authority existed only in relationship to the local congregation. Their learnedness and experience did not diminish, of course, just their authority.
In the United States, our forebears grew out of Puritan Christian churches. These were, at first, State churches, all upkeep and salaries supported by taxes collected by the state. Once the revolutionary ideas that led to the creation of the United States began to separate the concepts of Church and State, the liberal Puritan congregations led the way in creating a system of church support free of the state, with the free offering of pledges and tithes complementing the right of each person to freely covenant with the church.
The covenant or church agreement was at the center of this idea of congregational polity. Members agreed to join the church freely by agreeing to a simple covenant. This was usually very simple and not terribly doctrinal. It was never, ever a creed.
Rather, it briefly described the whole notion of a totally free and voluntary association of people. The Salem Church, which in those days was a Puritan church but in our own day is a Unitarian Universalist church, had a very simple covenant in which the people agreed "to walk together" "in the truth and simplicity of our spirits." They formed a church, that is, entered into a covenant together all the way back in 1629. This covenant proved effective for awhile. But there seems to have been some trouble with interpreting this very simple language, because only seven years later in 1636, the congregation voted on a couple of admonishing additions to the phrasing. To wit: "We promise to walk with our brothers and sisters in this congregation with all watchfulness and tenderness, avoiding all jealousies, superstition, back-biting, censuring, provoking, and secret uprisings."
Clearly, some folks in the church must have serious found bite marks on their backs in order for this to have made it into print.
And this change in the Salem church covenant does reveal one of the problems frequently found in the free congregational system. Folks can get on each other's nerves, irritate each other, "back bite," and there is no bishop or synod or council to lift the responsibility of confrontation off the shoulders of the irritated party. All such interpersonal difficulties, which are native to all human communities I know of, have to be addressed by the people themselves. And this can be tough.
Now folks who join this congregation come from every background imaginable. There are folks raised without church or synagogue or mosque experience, and there are folks raised with every sort of church/synagogue/ mosque experience possible… ranging from the conservative to the liberal, the progressive to the controlling, the loud to the quiet, the authoritarian to the free and easy.
This diversity of upbringing alone can make a community like ours, with our congregational polity, difficult to grasp at first. People may be trying to understand us through the lens of their own past. After all, there is a marked tendency in most of us, including me, to assume that past experience has something to teach us about present experience. In many cases it does, to be sure, but not, I repeat, not always.
For example, if I hear someone say, "Why can't we sing an old traditional hymn that everyone knows, like "I Walked in the Garden Alone,' I always respond, "I don't know it. I never sang it. It may be 'traditional,' but it's your tradition, Vern, not mine. You may like the melody, but that does not mean I know it." Or when someone outside the church calls me and asks me to make a decision about building usage for some special event, and I tell them I can't get back to them until I have consulted the office manager, as well as this committee and that (none of which meet for three more weeks), the caller gets frustrated fast. "How in hell do you get anything done over there? It will take how many weeks to get an answer back to me?"
Those who were raised in a church or family or political party where there was a lot of agreement may also have trouble with congregational polity. Not long ago, I talked with a woman who is a member of this church but whom I did not know and had never met. She had not been around much for a couple of decades, she told me. She wanted to talk to me about an issue she was dealing with, but when we were done with that, I asked her why she hadn't been around for awhile. "Oh, well, do you remember the grape boycott?" she asked. "Gosh," I said, "that was decades ago."
"Well," she said, "there was a woman here who told me that, as a Unitarian Universalist, I should simply not be eating any grapes. She did not tell me why I should boycott grapes. She thought it was obvious why, and that I should know it and agree with her. She did not do me the courtesy of talking with me, so I could ask her questions and discover her reasons for making such a choice. She just assumed I should automatically think like her, and that she was a representative Unitarian Universalist. Instead, all she did was pass out her shame and guilt as if her reality was everyone else's reality. Well, I got tired of that sort of treatment and I started to stay away."
"Well, I can certainly understand why!" I said to her.
"What I want to say to you was that the woman who made assumptions about you was not being a very good Unitarian Universalist. She assumed agreement and was not willing to entertain your questions or concerns. She obviously had no idea how a Unitarian Universalist congregation governs itself. Not by creeds, either religious or political. Not by the laws of the state or the unspoken desire for uniformity and agreement. Not by any of those tings, but by honest conversations between persons over a long period of time. Our tradition has held for a thousand years that there can be no coercion from any source when it comes to the practices and beliefs of one's religion. Even the attempt to shame someone else is a form of coercion. When someone acts that way, they reveal how little they understand about our polity."
Now I say the practice of refusing to make assumptions about anybody, the practice of refusing to co-opt each other into common belief is profoundly spiritual work… the spiritual work that our congregational polity asks of us. Such work requires us to get to know each other, little by little, over years. It asks us to tell our stories, share our concerns, and sincerely to listen to other stories and concerns, and to walk together in truth and simplicity.
Otherwise, as the poet William Stafford says, "If you don't know the kind of person I am and I don't know the kind of person you are, then a pattern that others made may prevail." This is correct as far as I am concerned. If we don't take the time to get to know each other, then we can become unconscious about who we are, and trot out our family patterns or our previous church experience from our youth and try and use assumptions, based on those experiences, to "do church." If we do, the poet says, we may follow the wrong god home and miss our star. The horrible errors of childhood, the poet warns, can storm out to play… This is a powerful metaphor, one that should give all of us pause. A congregationally run church is not a church where every single member is supposed to trot out his/her own personal concerns and make them universal concerns. That is not "walking together," that is forcing a game of "follow the leader," an entirely different form of game, you can be sure.
And, furthermore, the poet says, we have to pay attention to whom we follow. If someone, like a circus elephant, wanders far afield, lost, and drags everyone with him or her because no other "elephant" in the parade is willing to let go of the tail in front and return to the road, then we have missed the point of our great spiritual inheritance. For it is important that awake people be awake, says the poet. A fine poetic line. In fact, I can think of no better charge to members of a congregationally run church.
Furthermore, we have to give clear signals when we communicate, says the poet… yes, no or maybe; otherwise, we will grow discouraged and go back to sleep… that is, move unconsciously through the world.
Let me give you an example of what I mean. In one former church I served, the by-laws stated that a new member could only vote in an all-church meeting if he or she had joined three months earlier. Why this strange rule? Because when the members were, in the poet's words, "sleeping" one year, a man who wanted the church to go off in a totally different direction - his direction - got a whole bunch of his friends outside the church to join the church the day before a voting meeting. This man was almost successful in using the democratic method to destroy a democratic religious community. Fortunately they awakened and put this rule in their by-laws to protect themselves. Our ancestors rejected the idea of original sin with good reason; but they did not deny that you have to watch out now and then. Being trusting and optimistic about humanity does not translate, after all, into being foolish and naïve.
So congregational polity is not about theological agreement or any sort of coercion… it's about a certain solidarity in purpose, a promise to walk together in peace. And where are we going together as we walk, or as it may be these days, roll along?
To gather the harvest, Meridel LeSueur reminds us. To bring our goodness to enormous, fertile and perpetual harvest. To harvest crops of brotherhood and sisterhood. To wait for each other as we work to see our children rise in perpetual sunrise, with light not on our enemies but on the faces of our own communal chorus. We walk, we roll, we sing together to rise toward greater and greater communication, to shout and salute and sing the new day, to seek to move from the violent and broken and predatory, into the dreamed of promise of the global village. Meridel LeSueur's poem says it all for me in beautiful, evocative words. I would not dare to try to add any words of my own.
Our beautiful and difficult polity asks us to travel - together - toward a world worthy of our dreams. But finally, in this large and diverse world, we cannot even say that our polity, stunning and demanding and egalitarian as it is, is the only way, or even, necessarily, the best way, for others. Many people, if not everyone else, are walking alongside of us toward that vision of the new and shining day, with Unitarian bishops dressed in black capes and Irish councils and presbyteries and synods and renegades and heretics and saints and rabbis and imams and sanghas and lamas and roshis and parties and discussion circles and groups and lecturers and artists and singers and fighters and pacifists and lovers. And to this, I say amen.
Prayer [back to top]
O Reality that no lie or deception
may finally hide,
blow in the wind that fills our sails
rise in the sea that holds our barque afloat,
move in the hands that interpret a service
like water interprets a sunrise,
or move in hands that join in
a confluence of justice and peace.
Roots of our heritage, quench our thirst;
wings of our dreams, hold us safely
high above the cataracts of our cynicism.
But you, Love, be more than nourishment
or image or metaphor; be our fidelity to
honesty, our willingness to embrace
conflict as an invitation to growth;
be the comfort in our discomfort,
the strength in our footing,
the joy in our journey,
the resolving chord in our song of life,
the humility in our silence,
the courage in our caring.Love, unite us in setting us free.
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