Sermon by Rev. Kathleen McTigue, December 2, 2001
Author and theologian Thomas Keating begins his book, The Human Condition with these words: "Where are you? This is one of the great questions of all time….It is the question God asked when Adam and Eve had taken off for the underbrush after their disobedience. He called out to them, 'Where are you?' This marvelous story of creation is not just about Adam and Eve. It is really about us….The same question is addressed to every generation, time and person. At every moment of our lives, the Holy is asking us, "Where are you?"
Fifty years ago a small band of men and women with foresight and ambition decided to start a Unitarian congregation together. It is likely that they never pondered together this fundamental question of the spirit that Keating names as so important. They were, after all, mostly humanist in their orientation. They didn't often read the bible or seek out sermons based on it. But I can imagine that, if as they gathered one evening someone had pulled out a grubby sheet of notebook paper on which he or she had scribbled down Keating's words, and said, 'Hey, before we figure out who brings the coffee next week, listen to this'… that little band of founders would have listened carefully to this new slant on an old, old story. 'Where are you?' Not, 'What chair are you occupying' or 'Which house do you live in', but where is your heart, your passion, your biggest dream? What is guiding your life right now?
They would have listened, and they would have known exactly what to answer. They were here, in this faith community which had not yet been born, surrounded by these faces they would never meet, in this shelter of walls that was not yet even sketched out on paper. Not literally, of course! Literally, they were sitting around someone's kitchen table or gathered in a crowded livingroom, looking at each other and asking, 'What if…?' and 'Do you think we could?' Literally, they were probably lying awake at night after the kids were asleep and the lights were off, and as they thought about what it would take to start a congregation they would feel their hearts speed up and a little anxious knot form in the belly. That's where they were literally. But in spirit, they were inhabiting the dream.
Fifty years ago when that little group first gathered, they must have had their moments of supreme doubt. Who were they, after all, but a motley and unlikely collection not so different from what we would find in a random culling from our own ranks? They were smart, opinionated, prone to intellectualize, more than a little mouthy; sometimes they were sharp with one another, sometimes they were enthusiastic and brave, sometimes weary and cautious. They were too busy, they were sometimes crabby and intolerant; they encouraged each other, or sometimes they didn't. They would have had their Pollyanna, someone whose bubbly enthusiasm made the others groan silently and roll their eyes, and they would have had their Eyeore, someone who always pointed out the ways in which the endeavor was already doomed.
They would have counseled patience to one another, as the months of meetings stretched into years, and they would have counseled faith, when they passed through the periods, as they surely must have, when it seemed as though they might end up as a friendly pot-luck group but nothing so grand and long-lived as a congregation.
They knew how to keep a certain lightness and sense of humor. Anna Deming remembers how deeply involved her own mother, Rachel Huntington, was in those early conversations. Anna was a founding member too, but by her own account her memory of those earliest meetings is blurred not only by more than fifty intervening years but by the fact that she was expecting, and then coping with, her first child as all of this began. She does remember one meeting of a nominal Nominating Committee in her home, however, which even before there was an official founding of the congregation, was supposed to come up with a slate of officers. That alone was enough to make me pause in wonder. But Anna went on to tell me that when it looked as though they were short for a quorum, she was sent upstairs to bring down her son, Hunt, to join the meeting. He was roughly two months old at the time; the record shows that he had no objections to the Nominating Committee's choices…
This unlikely band of people turned out to be our ancestors. They were the faithful heretics, and the ones who are still alive are faithful heretics to this day, still holding our hands as we muddle into the second fifty years of their dream.
We are connected to them irrevocably not only by the history that gave birth to this community, but because we are the ones carrying on the flame of the faithful heretics. That's who we are too -- heirs to the unconventional path laid out by our earliest ancestors. They were the ones who spoke out the heresies of their day, heresies so large and radical that the speaking of them was done under peril of a very unpleasant death.
The large Unitarian heresy said that for all the divine light that shone out of his life and for all the saving grace that shimmered in his teachings, Jesus was a human being who bled and wept and laughed and ate his daily bread just like the rest of us. He was not part of a trinity, said the first Unitarians, because God is one. The large Universalist heresy said that no human being born on the earth was bad enough to go to hell. Not a single person, since the first man and woman woke up and blinked at the sun, was so evil that they would turn around on the far side of death to find they were doomed to eternal pain and suffering. The universe is tilted toward goodness, said the first Universalists, and at the end of time all beings will find themselves with God.
Those large heresies don't seem so radical anymore, unless we really think about them. And as the heirs to the passion and courage of the Unitarian and Universalist heretics, we had best really think about them, at least from time to time. In a world in which those who claim the Jewish God are at war with those who claim the Muslim God are at war with those who claim a Hindu God are at war with those who claim a Christian God -- it is still radical to claim that God is One. In a world in which we are still busy creating hell all around us, through war and torture, through economic injustice and racial oppression, it is still a radical claim to insist that hell is not our destiny, and to hold out a little flame of persistent hope that tells us, despite everything we have seen from one another, that we can still find a better way forward.
So we are still heretics, still walking the path of our ancestors. The word heresy arises from the Greek roots meaning 'to choose' and 'to take'. We are still choosing for ourselves. We are still looking skeptically at claims of truth and revelation, trying them on for size and taking them off again if they turn out to pinch.
I like to think that we are also still in the ranks of the faithful. I want to conjure up again our immediate ancestors, the ones who dreamed this place for us in the small cracks and spaces they carved out in their busy lives. They were not faithful in the sense that they had some fully realized dream, knew exactly where they were going and how to get there. They were faithful simply because they stuck to it. Through the doubts and inevitable conflicts, through the delays and the setbacks and their own anxiety, they took things a day at a time. By that perseverance -- or stubbornness -- they managed to bring to birth a religious community that has been not only relevant, but essential -- life-sustaining -- for fifty years. That's faith.
Many years ago a writer named Jeannette Scholer wrote, "To be faithful is not to be full of an emotion or a belief; it is to act steadfastly on the basis of a commitment or a relationship." Isn't that why we're here, after all? 'Steadfast' is a word that sounds so old-fashioned; it's got so much of the ring of poetry and romance to it that we can hardly imagine using it in everyday conversation, but what a wonderful word to reclaim!
To be steadfast means to be in it for the long haul -- rooted in our purpose. It doesn't mean we get to leave our doubts and confusions behind us; it doesn't mean we sail serene together, unruffled by the storms that come our way. It means only that we stick to it, that we stick together, and that we remember at least a little bit of the great good thing our steadfastness makes possible. We form something here, together, that shifts our lives in transforming ways. We shape a thing together here that plants itself in the hearts of our children, a golden seed that can blossom for them long after each one of us has faded from their view. We don't get to see the whole garden of our lives; but we can know, by what we have already seen, that the piece of it we nurture here, together, is a large and vital one, worthy of our loyalties, worthy of our dreams.
So while we may well be tongue-tied from time to time when it comes to our separate beliefs, I hope that we can make the same claim that Gary Gunderson can make for his church, with the words from our reading: 'Come with me to this space, to my place of faith, and let me show you where people are fed, where ministries begin, where people invest their lives beyond the pull of mere self-interest. Amid the bricks and the stone and the wood, we remember what [holiness and human hands] before us have done here. Even when I have trouble naming what I believe, it is easy to say where I believe. [I believe here].'
AMEN.