"Good News Part I - the Free Church

Good News, Part One - the Free Church

By the Reverend George Buchanan

A sermon delivered to

The First Unitarian Church of Cleveland

September 19, 2010

 

 

First Reading (Call to Worship)

 

“Come, come, whoever you are.

Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving ….
Ours is no caravan of despair.
Come, even if you have broken your vow a hundred times,
Come, yet again, come.

Rumi

 Second Reading, prepared and read by Mark Weber

"Yom Kippur, which we observed yesterday, is about three main principles: forgiveness, truth, and death.

 

1.    Forgiveness: If we wish to seek forgiveness, why would we prostrate ourselves before God?  Instead, we must approach those whom we have wronged, cheated, deceived, or defamed as ask them for their forgiveness. It is the hardest and only kind of genuine atonement.  Asking God for forgiveness for injuries we have visited upon our friends, neighbors or business associates lacks both forthrightness and honesty.

 

2.   Truth: Part of our atonement should be a resolve to speak the truth even when there are many who do not wish to hear it. We must not surrender to the fear of the unknown. We will not repair walls that have already fallen. We will not turn the sages of our past into infallible guides. We will not run away from wisdom even when it comes from new sources. Truth is our guide. If old laws no longer fit, we will revise them. If old postures keep us from moving with grace, we will find a new way to walk. A free world makes tradition only one of many options. There is more to life than imitation. Our ancestors created. So can we.

 

3.   Death: As the day of atonement draws to a close, we remember friends and loved ones who died in the preceding 12 months. As we remember those deceased whom we loved or admired, we do not ask God why did their deaths happen? That question, when asked, never receives an answer. Death is about courage. It is the courage to face our mortality and not to beg for that which will never be granted. It is the courage to love life even as we see it slipping away. It is the courage to confront a world that is not fair. It is the courage to accept that which cannot be changed. And it is the courage to face our final exit with determination and with quiet dignity; not with recrimination for whining.

 

Atonement is not about abasement and prostration. Instead it is about forgiveness, truth, and  facing the end.

Sermon

 

The word “gospel” comes from old English, and it means “good news.” So in the Christian tradition, the Gospel of Mark and the Gospel of John are really the Good News of Mark and the Good News of John. 

Now, this morning I talk about our good news - the good news of our Unitarian Universalist faith, and the good news of this congregation.   We have a bounty of good news here – lots and lots.  So much that I need two sermons to cover it.   Next week I will talk about our good news of love.

Today’s good news is expressed in short form in the words we used earlier for our candles of community – the FREE CHURCH, the CHURCH UNIVERSAL.    We throw our doors, and our arms, open to all comers – all comers.   We ask only that those amongst us respect one another,  and respect the guidance of their individual hearts.  

Turn to the phrases from our call to worship to flesh out this good news, these words from Rumi. 

 “Come, come, whoever you are.

Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving ….
Ours is no caravan of despair.
Come, even if you have broken your vow a hundred times,
Come, yet again, come."

“Wanderers:” hear our good news and be with us. Hear the good news as our free church beckons to spiritual and religious wanderers, and those who have left other faiths.   So, so many of us have been seeking a safe and sympathetic community, a place where we can be religious and spiritual, and do this without binding our hearts to words foreign to us. Wanderers, this is your community.  

 “Worshippers:” hear our good news and be with us.  We are worshippers here, hungering for times set aside for contemplation of worthy things - poetry and prose, music and visual images, heartfelt expression and the workings of reason.  We draw freely on wisdom from our own faith, and all the world’s faiths.  We bring all this together in a way respecting the integrity of our hearts.  Worshippers, this is your community.  And this is good news.

 “Ours is no caravan of despair. “  Life brings its joys and sorrows, moments of success and times of loss.  We gather to share life’s joys and sorrows, agreeing to share the journey together and find comfort in our community. We are a caravan of mutual support, of encouragement – not a caravan of despair.   This is also our good news. 

Come join with us to share your moments of joy, and strengthen us all. Come join with us in times of sadness to find strength for the continuing journey.    

“Even if you have broken your vows a hundred times. “ We all make mistakes, have times of regret. We realize that we have not kept our promises. Our hearts change, and we are saddened when we recall our failings of the past. And our free church is a place where we honor and support those changes of heart.    This too, is our good news.

This is not a congregation of perfect people.  Rather, it is a community where we aspire to grow, and change, and allow our hearts to be transformed in a good way.   And we respect one another’s integrity as we do this.  

Yesterday was Yom Kippur in the Jewish tradition, a time for deep reflection and atonement.    Our music and readings this morning honor the wisdom of Yom Kippur,  the need in all our lives for reflectionand resolution to do things differently in the future. 

So hear Rumi’s words one more time:

 “Come, come, whoever you are.

Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving ….
Ours is no caravan of despair.
Come, even if you have broken your vow a hundred times,
Come, yet again, come.”

 

So here is what our good news makes us.

 We are men and women and children of different religious upbringings, different races and ethnic origins.

 We are the young parents, wanting an open minded, progressive Sunday school for our children, and a religious community for ourselves.  We have found a place where our children can work out their own answers to life’s most important questions.   This is our good news. 

 We are those children and teenagers, learning and growing and understanding ourselves better.

We are people who hunger for justice, and come to this community for a matrix in which to work towards a better world.

We are elders, who are running into more and more bumps on the road of life.  We have found a supportive community where we can laugh a little at our foibles, and strengthen ourselves for the days ahead.

We are couples who come from different religious backgrounds, and have found a supportive community respectful of our traditions.  We have all sorts of pairings – Jewish and Episcopalian, Catholic and Humanist, and more.    Good news, here.

We even have some couples where one spouse came from the West Side. 

 

We are gay and lesbian couples, and singles who find a welcoming home here.  

We are the teenager who is not sure about her sexual identity, her feelings, and finds a safe place here to better understand herself. 

We are the widow, seeking comfort and community as she wakes up to each new day. 

This is all our good news.

We are young adults trying to figure out what it means to be spiritually healthy in this fast-paced, messy world we have inherited – balancing college and jobs and health insurance and relationships and the new apartment. 

We are a middle-aged man, transformed by life-threatening illness, grateful for each precious moment of life and seeing the world through new eyes.

This is all good news .  This is our good news.

 

As we dig deeper into the meaning of our good news, we run into what seems like a problem.   Lots of folks define religious diversity in terms of different ways of worshipping God.   This implies you have to believe in God to be a religious person, and that a religious community must be about belief in God.

Well, there is a different and better way to view this.

We have experiences in life which change our hearts in deep ways.  We might find ourselves forgiving a friend, or making a new decision about what kind of work calls out to us. We reflect deeply and recognize a mistake in our past.  We suddenly have a new, deep feeling of connection to our Higher Power, whether we call it God or not.  A brush with death brings new clarity and understanding.

These are all changes of heart, and all religious experiences, by my definition.   When my heart changes in a positive way,  I am undergoing a religious experience. 

Our sense of God or Higher Power may be involved in these positive changes, or it may not.    The defining characteristic is the positive change of heart.

A religious community, such as ours, has two jobs. 

First, our congregation needs to be a place where congregants of all ages come to better understand the changes of heart in their lives.  These changes leave us sad, or glad, or sometimes confused, and sometimes all three at once, as odd as that sounds.  We need our congregation to help us better understand these experiences.

Second, our congregation needs to be a place where we encourage and cultivate these religious experiences, these positive moves of the heart. Our worship services, our small groups, our classes, our community service – we can experience changes of heart in any and all of these.

Some of us will frame these change of heart experiences in terms of a Higher Power.  Others will not. 

No problem here.  This is definitely good news.

And in our free church, we learn from and encourage religious experiences without forcing ourselves into a frame commanded by ancient tradition.  

This lack of routine answers can actually mean more work in the short run, as many of you know.  But we believe it is worth it. 

 So, flowing from this definition, here is the test we apply to ourselves. 

First, are we helping each other understand our religious experiences?

Second, are we encouraging religious experiences in our worship and in other aspects of our community?

 This way of viewing and testing religion, by the way, is based in scholarly work by John Dewey, among others, and is sustained by recent work of UU theologians.

I like this view of religion, based in changes of heart, because it allows our free congregations to include themselves as full members in the parade of faith communities. 

We need not define ourselves by things we are not, and the things we do not have.

 Rather, we are the free church, the liberal congregation where we deeply trust our own hearts and the hearts of others.  We are a congregation sustained and protected by the commitments we make to one another, and the commitments we make to the world.

We welcome you who you are, and as you are, knowing each is of us is imperfect and each of us is beautiful.  We can, and do, stand proud of the way we welcome the wanderers and the worshipers, those whose hearts are heavy, and those who are flush with success. We welcome and understand the religious search. We hunger for understanding, and community and friendship along life’s way.  We are a free church, a community open to all who would join us. 

This is our extremely good news.

 May it always be so.