UU Society of Cleveland

November 11, 2007

A Community of Strangers

by Rev. Colin Bossen

We are a community of strangers. We come together as seekers questing for religious truth, in need of a community and desiring of a place to share our life's passages. We are not united by ties of ethnicity or family, but by our common covenant with each other. We strive to be a community where all are welcome.

This morning I want to start with the story of one of the few miracles in our heritage. There are not a lot of miracles in the Unitarian Universalist tradition. Most of us do not believe in the immaculate conception of Jesus and in general we seek rational explanations for the world around us. And many of us would admit that miracles, when they do occur, could as much be random chance as divine providence. Be that as it may, the story of this miracle comes from our Universalist ancestors.

Before the Revolutionary War there lived a man named Thomas Potter. He was a farmer and, with his wife, he had a farm along the coast of New Jersey. Thomas was a deeply religious man but, his neighbors thought, he had some peculiar ideas about God, Jesus and the Bible. He could not read but he felt in his heart of hearts that God was love, that Jesus preached a message of love and that after death God would not condemn his creations to everlasting torment. Thomas was, in short, an old fashioned Christian Universalist. No one knows how he got his ideas. Some people say that he thought them up himself and others believe that they came to him through his conversations with nearby communities of Quakers and German Pietists.

There were no other Universalists in his community but Thomas had faith that God was going to bring him a preacher to preach the message of universal salvation. So, he built a plain little church on his farm. And he waited. He waited many years until one day a ship appeared.

There once was a man named John Murray. He was born into an English Calvinist family and grew-up believing in a vindictive God. When he was about ten years old he and his family were caught up in the rapidly growing Methodist movement. John quickly showed himself to be a bright child with natural leadership abilities and he was soon viewed as a young leader in the Methodist community. He began preaching. Time passed. John became a young man. His parents died. John moved to London where he found work in a cloth mill. He joined the local Methodist church and met a young woman named Eliza Neal.

Things being as they are, John and Eliza got married. They were devoted to their church and to each other. Then, one day, people in the community began to hear about a new preacher in town named James Relly. Relly preached a dangerous message. He thought that God was love and that God would not condemn his creations to everlasting torment when they died. Relly was a Universalist.

Some people from the Murray's congregation began to attend Relly's worship services. John was sent to reason with one them and help her correct her errant thinking. During their meeting John became convinced of the truth of universal salvation. Shortly afterwards John and Eliza began to attend Relly's church and John even started to preach there occasionally.

We might not have ever learned John Murray's name if tragedy had not struck next. John and Eliza's little baby died. And then, overcome with grief, Eliza herself died. And then, John was thrown into debtor's prison for the medical bills he had accumulated trying to save his wife and child. When he got out of prison he decided to leave England for the New World. He wanted to build a new life for himself and vowed to never preach again.

On its way to New York the ship he booked passage on got stuck on a sand bar off the coast of New Jersey. The captain needed someone to go ashore to search for supplies. John volunteered.

Shortly after John landed he met a farmer named Thomas Potter. After supplying the crew with fish, Thomas told John his story. And, he added, that this very day a voice had told him that he would find the Universalist preacher he was looking for on the boat stuck just off the coast. Thomas asked John if he was a preacher. John denied being one but then Thomas asked him if could deny if he had ever preached. John had to admit that back in England he had preached at Relly's church on occasion and, that to boot, he was a Universalist in his theology.

It was a Friday and Thomas was convinced that he had his man. John, however, wanted nothing to do with Thomas's crazy church and dream of finding a Universalist preacher. He told Thomas that he would not preach on Sunday. The ship was free of the sandbar and as soon as there was a change of wind it would leave for New York. After much discussion Thomas managed to convince John that if the wind did not change by Sunday John would preach in his church.

Of course the wind did not change and John Murray preached such a powerful sermon that he managed to convince himself that his experience with Thomas Potter was a sign of divine providence. After the service the wind changed and John and his shipmates traveled on to New York. From there John became a circuit riding preacher and eventually organized the first Universalist church in America, the Universalist Church of Gloucester, Massachusets. He went onto be one of the founders of the Universalist Church of America, one of the precursors to our Unitarian Universalist Association. Today, if you like, you can visit the farm where John Murray landed. It is the home of the Unitarian Universalist retreat center, Murray Grove.

I like this story because I think it illustrates a central truth about our liberal religious community. We are a community of strangers. Thomas Potter and John Murray were strangers to each other when they met on the New Jersey shore. They shared a common belief that God was love, that Jesus preached a message of love and that after death God would not condemn his creations to everlasting torment. This allowed them to come together for worship and build a religious community.

Today the dream of our community is to live out the words of our opening hymn. Together we should be able to throw open our doors and proudly proclaim:

Come, come, whoever you are,
wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving.
Ours is no caravan of despair.
Come, yet again come.

The words for this hymn are taken from a slightly longer Sufi poem that is attributed to the poet Rumi. There are a few different versions of the poem circulating. One reads:

Come, come, whoever you are,
Wanderer, idolater, worshiper of fire,
Come even though you have broken your vows a thousand times,
Come, and come yet again.
Ours is not a caravan of despair.

I see this poem as a invitation for everyone to join in community together. Even the outsiders, the wanders, the idolaters, the worshipers of fire—which I imagine meant the pagans, to Rumi—are to be welcome. The addition of phrase "even if you have broken your vows a thousand times" is an important one. I think that we do ourselves somewhat ill when we omit it from or hymn. This suggests that to me that the community is not only for the righteous, the pure or those who are already living perfect and holy lives. The religious community is not just for the people who are already part of it. Instead, it should include everyone, even those who have repeatedly made mistakes in their lives. Perhaps the community should especially include such people; they may need support the most.

I love the line that reads "Ours is not a caravan of despair." It should not be. When we gather it should be a joyous and uplifting experience, a chance to recharge our spirits, a time to seek and give comfort and, maybe, even laugh a little. No matter what we face together we should not become a caravan of despair. We should welcome sorrow, even embrace it, but we should not despair, for despair is about losing hope, and we gather together to find hope. We should be a place where we can join hands across the many dividing lines we find in our society, learn to worship together and collectively strive for a better world.

This text does not come from a Unitarian Universalist source but from a Muslim Sufi. The call it contains is not to join our community, but to join a community of religious ecstatics. We Unitarian Universalists find inspiration in many sources. It is important to acknowledge what sources we draw from. It is also important to embrace the vision we find when we read them from our own perspective. The hymn this morning offers us a powerful vision for a community. It is a universalist vision, a vision that calls us and challenges us to be as inclusive as possible.

This vision is a challenge for this congregation. If we strive to truly welcome all, we have some work to do. We are small and, in some ways, largely homogenous. Like most Unitarian Universalist congregations we are probably more inwardly focused than we should be. The demographics of our congregation do not mirror the racial and economic mix of Cleveland Heights and the surrounding area.

To make our vision a reality there are some changes that we will have to make. First among them, our congregation will have to shift its conception of itself from being a family to being a community of strangers. This may sound a little scary. Pretending that it is not will probably not do us any good. We are in the midst of change and with change comes both excitement for the new and a sense of loss for the old. It is important that even as we embrace change we take time to mourn that which we think we are losing.

Change is inevitable in congregational life. Religious communities are constantly faced with three choices: grow, struggle to remain the same or decline. In the long run the last two choices are essentially the same. If we do not adapt in some way to the shifting culture around us, we will eventually become irrelevant.

The question then, is not will we change but how will we change. This congregation, in the face of change, has decided to grow. We want to attract more families and build our religious education program, we want more people from the neighborhood to come into our religious community, we want to deepen our commitments to our spiritual lives and we want to be a strong presence for social justice in Cleveland Heights, the Greater Cleveland area and beyond.

In order to grow we have to shift our conception of ourselves from being a family church to being something larger. We need to become a community of strangers. A recent survey conducted by C. Kirk Hadaway, called Faith Communities Today, indicated that congregations that feel like families are more likely to be in decline or stagnant than congregations that do not. People do not come to worship with us on Sunday morning because they are looking for a family. Most people who visit us already have a family. They are not looking for someplace that feels like family or for something to replace their family. People come to us because they are looking for a community. They join with us seeking meaning in their lives, looking for a way to be of service or hoping to connect to something greater than themselves. Some people come because they are looking for a place to give their children a liberal religious education.

We come together as an act of free choice. All of you made a decision to enter this worship space today. As far as I am aware, no one forced you to come here. This religious community is voluntary in the sense that you are not a member of it because you live in a certain geographic area or belong to particular family or ethnic group. Before you came through our doors you probably did not know each other. We are a community of strangers.

Contrast this with the family, a family is not a voluntary association. You do not get to choose which family you are born into. Your parents are your parents, no matter how you may feel about them. In a family clear roles are defined--we are parents, children, grandparents or aunts and uncles. People are united by their family ties. Whether you choose to or not you will always, in some way, remain part of your family. Except by marriage it is very difficult to join someone else’s family.

In a religious community, we can choose to join or leave at any time. We are united not by our familial ties but by commitment to our common covenant. Before we gathered together most of us did not know each other. Even after we have been together a long time we will in some way remain strangers to each other.

I want to you expand your definition of the stranger. In his book, Welcoming the Stranger, theologian Patrick Keifert defines the stranger as "the irreducible difference between two persons that exists in any encounter." In this sense everyone is a stranger because, as Keifert write, "even with our closest friends and family members, there remains an irreducible difference. They remain in significant ways strangers."

If we are strangers, what then unites us? We are united by our commitment to each other and to our community. We are also united by the powerful life-affirming message of liberal religion. Each of us knows, in our heart of hearts, that there is more that unites humanity that divides us. We understand that the human impulse towards religion and community, whatever they might be, is a common—probably biological—impulse. While the truth we find when we go looking for it may be different for each of us, we know that the struggle to make meaning is inherent in us. We are called by our religious heritage and our experiences to respect all human life and the planet. And we know that together we can make a difference.

We are committed to service. As Unitarian Universalists most of us do not believe in an other worldly heaven. Instead, we share a common understanding that what happens in this world and in our communities is of the utmost important. The problems on our planet and in our society have been created by humans and it must be humans who solve them. We know that, in this modern age, we have everything we need to usher in an unprecedented era of bounty for all of our brothers and sisters.

We believe that everyone should be welcome in our congregation. On a pragmatic level this means that we should do our best to be hospitable to our guests. They have come us as strangers. Perhaps they will remain in our community. It is up to each one of us to extend them a welcome and include them within our circle.

In all of these things we are responding to the challenge of the great Unitarian minister, A. Powell Davies, that was contained in our reading this morning. It is not enough for us to sit content with our vision. We are challenged to share this message and bring others into our community of strangers.

Like Thomas Potter and John Murray, we never know when we might meet someone who will join with us. They might appear unexpectedly, long waited for or unannounced. We should always be ready to extend our hands to them and say welcome, friend.

When we do widen our circle a little more we create greater possibilities for ourselves. The Universalist minister Bill Breeden once told me that our goal should be to widen our circle enough to include even our enemies. What a message that is! What healing for this earth and for humanity would be possible if we were to include everyone within our circle of strangers.

Welcome all, into our community of strangers. May you find comfort, joy, truth, and work for your hearts and hands.

Amen and Blessed Be.