by Rev. Kathleen McTigue, September 12, 2004
In welcoming you all back again - welcoming us all back again -- to the start of another congregational year, it seems a good time to remember, together, why we come to this place. For most ministers I know, the question isn't so much why people come to our place of worship instead of to another one, but why people come at all. It's a question that provokes a certain amount of anxiety among the clergy, and I confess that I'm not immune.
For those of us who serve congregations that still hold to the habit of mostly taking the summer off, it's pretty standard in the week or so before Homecoming to start worrying about whether or not anyone will show up this year. In the gloomy file-drawer of our psyches where we keep vivid images of various imagined worst-case scenarios, there is one labeled "Homecoming Sunday When No One Came Home".
Of course it's also true that at least occasionally, in looking out at a nearly full congregation, precisely the opposite fear can kick in. The minister, like Heschel's rabbi, looks out at the crowd of people and wonders what in the world they're doing here. No less an intellectual light than Reinhold Neibuhr once said, "Now that I have preached about a dozen sermons I find I am repeating myself". Most religious leaders have the nagging suspicion of repeating ourselves considerably before the twelfth sermon has passed our lips, so the occasional moment of panic should come as no surprise.
Fortunately, it turns out that ministers and rabbis and imams are not the central event, no matter what the religious home and no matter how long our sermons might ramble on. We know - all of us know, not only the anxiety-prone ministers - that there are other reasons, better reasons, why people choose something else instead of their golf game or their picnic, their gardening pleasures or their lazy morning with the New York Times.
The "something else" we choose is a spiritual community. We are beckoned through these doors with the promise of something different, something that plays on a chord in our hearts and minds that leisure pastimes don't seem to touch. In Heschel's words, some of us even arrive at our place of worship with profound expectations. In my experience, most arrive with profound expectations, even when we might have a hard time articulating precisely what they are.
There are three profound expectations in particular that most people bring to their religious homes, and we're right to bring them here, right to hold them forth and right to demand that churches and synagogues and mosques live up to them.
The first one we bring is the expectation that at the very least, we will be taught to turn our faces toward the Holy. We have very different ideas and languages to explain to ourselves and each other what we mean by God, what we feel as a sacred moment, or what we're yearning toward in the hope of a deeper spiritual life.
But we know that much too much of the time we stumble through our lives as though we're sleepwalking, without paying half as much attention as we want to and intend to. We know we don't make enough time and space in our days to remember the essential fact that both the time and the space granted to us will come to an end. We know that the small notes of our lives are part of a much larger music, and we sense that there are good ways and not-such-good ways to play our pieces while we live.
These and other intuitions about our spiritual lives bring us to the point of seeking out a religious home. We have the right to expect that within those homes we will find help in waking up to our lives, paying attention, learning better how to grow into who we are called to become.
Our second expectation is for love. That sounds corny on the face of it, mostly because the word 'love' has been used in so many weird ways for so long. So when we talk about finding love, here with each other, we tend to use more vague and general words like "connection" and "support" and "community".
But what is it that makes a group of strangers into a community if it isn't love? In our spiritual homes we are right to expect that we will be welcomed without judgment, that we will be heard in our fumbling attempts to speak our truth, that we will be treasured for the gifts we bring (however quirky or unexpected), that we will be forgiven when we let each other down, and that we will be accompanied when we fall. Those are things that add up to love.
Last fall I came across a short excerpt from an essay by Sarah Vowell, who found a reminder of this dimension of community in an unexpected place. Vowell wrote, "Once, while heading uptown on the 9 train, I noticed a sign posted by the Manhattan Transit Authority advising subway riders who might become ill on the train. The sign asked that the suddenly infirm inform another passenger, or get out at the next stop and approach the stationmaster. Do not…. pull the emergency brake, the sign said, as this will only delay aid. This was all very logical, but for the following proclamation at the bottom of the sign: 'If you are sick, you will not be left alone'".
Vowell goes on to say, "This strikes me as not only kind, not only comforting, but the very epitome of civilization…the crux of the social impulse. Banding together, pooling our taxes, not just making trains, not just making trains that move underground, not just making trains that move underground with surprising efficiency at a fair price - but posting on said trains a notification of such surprising compassion and thoughtfulness. I found myself," Vowell says, "scanning the faces of my fellow passengers, hoping for fainting, obvious fevers, at the very least a sneeze so that I might offer a tissue."
If you are in need, you will not be left alone. We might have our doubts about whether or not that promise would actually hold true on a subway in New York City, but here in our religious home we should have no doubts at all about being accompanied, being connected, being known and treasured - being loved, and taught better how to love.
And there is a third expectation we bring with us, which is that this place will help us to be of use. Not that it will make us busier, load our arms with tasks and our minds with long 'to do' lists: but that it will help us to be of use. When we center ourselves in a community of faith we should find the encouragement, the clarity and the will to turn ourselves out from that center of faith over and over again, and bend our efforts to the work of our world.
We've just passed the third anniversary of the September 11 attacks, and we live every day with news of the war and suffering that have unraveled ever since. The work of our world is hard to miss; it weighs on our minds and our hearts and troubles us with the large questions at the core of being human in these times. Can we find a way to live without visiting such violence on each other? Can we deepen our vision, so we see what binds us together instead of the awful divisions of race and tribe and religion? Can we teach ourselves patience and forgiveness before we're destroyed by our hunger for vengeance?
Our spiritual home should be the place that guides us in the face of these questions and inspires us for the work of justice and compassion to which the questions urge us. It should be the place that never lets us forget how our lives are entwined with all other lives, and how our choices echo out far beyond what we can see or touch.
Poet May Sarton writes:
"Return to the most human, nothing less
will nourish the torn spirit, the bewildered heart,
the angry mind: and from the ultimate duress,
pierced with the breath of anguish, speak of love.
Return to the deep sources, nothing less
Will teach the stiff hands a new way to serve,
To carve into our lives the forms of tenderness
And still that ancient necessary pain preserve."
That's a wonderful summary of what brings us here, on this Homecoming Sunday or on any Sunday. "Return to the most human"; "return to the deep sources". Welcome back to your religious home. AMEN.