UU Society of Cleveland

June 8, 2008

Towards Beloved Community

by Rev. Colin Bossen

My message this morning is that a strong and healthy Unitarian Universalist congregation is one that is dedicated to the spirits of life, love and liberation. Such a congregation cannot help but change the lives of its members and the greater community of which it is a part. I offer you this message today as we near the end of our first program year together. Now is a good time to reflect upon our collective work and what we might do, what we might become, together. As part of that act of reflection, today I present you with the first part of a sermon diptych. This morning I want to lay forth a vision for this congregation. Next week I will lift up a vision for the Cleveland area and the role we, the Unitarian Universalist Society of Cleveland, might play in it.

Before diving into the meat of my sermon let me share that it has been a wonderful experience serving as your minister for these last ten months. I think that both you and I have grown in our ministry together. I have learned a lot about what it means to be a minister over these last months. Perhaps more importantly, I have learned a bit about what I need to learn to be a better minister. Most importantly I have been reminded, consistently, that what makes a religious community strong is love, the love the members of the congregation have for each other, the love that I have for you, the love for truth and for the wider world that we all share. Tonight at my installation we will be formally acknowledge our shared love and shared vision. I hope that they will do nothing but deepen over the next many years.

Let me return now to pursuing my metaphor of a diptych. In the world of visual art a diptych is two images that fit together to somehow tell a story. Classical diptychs are physical objects with the two panels joined together by a hinge. This physical connection emphasizes the relationship between the two images. Such diptychs might include a birth and a death or picture of a person in prayer in one panel while Jesus or a saint looks on from the other. Viewed in isolation the pictures did not make as much sense as when placed together.

I want you to imagine with me the two panels of our diptych. In the first panel we see this congregation and its history in rich detail, a vivid and constantly moving mosaic. Each of you is there. Also present are the many people who have been members of this community in the past and the many people who will be members in the future. Interwoven with the people are the objects and events important to the history of this congregation. There's the cornerstone from the old church building that stood at 82nd and Euclid. Faded into the background is the old gothic building itself. The members of the congregation can be seen standing for marriage equality for gays and lesbians, marching for civil rights in the sixties and sitting together during a vigil to commemorate the lives lost in Iraq. Woven and around these images are the many births, deaths and marriages that have been part of this community over the years. Some of these events and people are recent and recognizable while others are slipping softly into the general background.

The more you look at the panel with its whirl of images the more three themes seem to emerge. These are the themes of life, love and liberation. These themes connect everything. Contemplating them order and coherence are revealed from seemingly overwhelming chaos. You notice when looking at a child's dedication the love of the parents, the power of the life force, and the hope for a better tomorrow inherent in each infant. In the memorial service of a longtime member you see the love that the gathered assembly holds for their departed friend, the stories of kindness and resistance from a life's long struggle and the knowledge that even when one dies life continues. The three themes of life, love and liberation give our panel meaning. Without them we see only a cacophony of colors. With them we see a story, we see our story.

It is this first panel that we will be focusing on today. The other panel, the one that completes the pair, shows the story of our polis, the greater Cleveland area. We will examine that panel next week. For now, though, let us focus on our attention on this first panel.

The first thing that catches our attention in the panel is the many images of life. The spirit of life pervades the community. Without life there is nothing. The spirit of life is present in the births, deaths, marriages and rites of passages that we observe together. It is also among us in each moment. It is our breaths and heart beats. The spirit of life unites us with all things and reminds us that we share a common finitude with everything, from the flowers and insects to our friends and family members.

Forrest Church, a contemporary Unitarian Universalist theologian has written "Religion is our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die." This congregation, and all other religious communities, are a testament to the spirit of life and the human need to mark life's passages, to share our life stories and to somehow try and make meaning of it all.

There are few, if any, other institutions in our lives that offer us such an opportunity. So much of our society is segregated by age. As children, youth and young adults our education takes place with those who are of or near our own age. As adults most of us spend our working lives with other adults. Many of us will finish our lives in retirement communities and nursing homes where we will continue to be surrounded by others of the same generation. A religious community like ours is inherently an intergenerational community. It allows us to bear witness to all parts of the human life cycle. As if to demonstrate this point, this week we have seen both a memorial service and a child dedication, two ends of the same spectrum.

So we gather to celebrate life, to mourn life's passing, to break the mundane with flowers and song and to stand with each other throughout our lives. Conrad Wright, a retired Unitarian Universalist historian from Harvard Divinity School, calls this "walking together." It is our commitment to walk together in celebration of and in mourning for the spirit of life that makes us a religious community. As Wright puts it in his essay "Walking Together": "We believe deeply in the capacity of men and women of good will to walk together in religious fellowship, despite...doctrinal differences."

It is those last three words, "despite...doctrinal differences," that make Unitarian Universalism unique. We understand that what is most important is our ability to come together to honor and uphold the spirit of life. Our individual beliefs matter less. I may be a theist and you may be an atheist but we can both agree that death is a difficult thing to face. You may be a Christian and your friend might be Jewish but I suspect that we can all agree that the birth of a child is beautiful. Life has its bright moments and its dismal moments. Religious community helps us to mark them and make sense of them. Together we can celebrate the times of joy and offer each other succor in times of sorrow.

The spirit of love, what the Unitarian Universalist theologian Alice Blair Wesley would call the holy spirit of love, is what allows us to walk together. If we look closely at our panel we see that love is the second theme that emerges. A desire to mark life's passages, to wonder about where we come from before we are born and where we go after we die and to celebrate the terror and the beauty embedded into the fabric of the universe is not enough to build a religious community. We can do any of these things on our own. We need love to bring us and to bind us together.

One of the foundational myths of our time is that of the individual. Truly there is no such thing. We human beings are social creatures. From the moment we are born until we die we are dependent on and interdependent with others. To thrive a child needs love and human contact just as surely as it needs food, air and water. The spirit of love is inherent in our efforts to reach out and seek connection with each other. If religion is that which binds us together then love is the glue that binds us. The stronger the spirit of love in a community, the stronger the community.

This spirit of love does not look like anything extraordinary. If you look at our panel on the diptych you will see depictions of mutual aid, gestures of friendship and small acts of kindness as love. The spirit of love is amid and among our community whenever someone reaches out to another. It is present when we organize a work day to help an older member who needs assistance maintaining his or her home. It is present when we visit the sick and the shut-in. It is here with us when we bring food for a potluck to share. And it is amid us when we engage in all of the small acts necessary for the life of this congregation--the committee meetings, the work parties and conferences. It permeates the air when we gather for worship and lift up the spirit of life itself.

Within our Unitarian Universalist tradition the spirit of love runs deep. Our Universalist ancestors were bold enough to declare that God loves everyone. Benjamin Rush, an early Universalist and signer of the Declaration of Independence, wrote: "A belief in God's universal love to all his creatures, and that he will finally restore all those of them that are miserable to happiness, is a polar truth." His words were in reaction to the dominant theological calvinism of his day. That tradition teaches that only an elect few are worthy of God's embrace. Rush and the hundreds thousands of other Universalists who proceeded us spoke up for a larger vision of the love of God, one that honored all of creation.

Today we Unitarian Universalists uphold a vision of community where love is not limited to one segment of the human family. We understand that all of the human family is united by common bonds and common needs. We proclaim that everyone is worthy of our love.

This spirit of love feeds into the spirit of liberation. A sense of care for all of creation and all of humanity leads to a desire to see all peoples and all communities flourish. Rob Hardies, the senior minister of All Souls, Unitarian in Washington, DC describes religion as "people telling each other stories about hope." Like Forrest Church's definition it is only a partial one. Nonetheless, it captures an essential truth about why we gather together as community and why any religious community might form. We come together seeking liberation.

The orthodox Christian narrative is organized around the story of salvation. In this worldview each child that is born is stained with an original sin of wickedness and depravity. It is only through the grace of God, manifest in Jesus Christ, that this original sin can be washed away and wholeness and freedom be found. If you here with me this morning you have more than likely rejected this narrative. Yet there is an inherent truth to it. While we might not be born into original sin we are born in need of salvation. The salvation that we seek is an end to isolation. Each of us is born connected to our mothers. Throughout life we need to seek connection with others. Without that connection we are isolated. The more isolated we become the harder it is for us to thrive and our psyche's suffer.

The spirit of liberation is that spirit which calls us to not only seek connection but encourages others to seek it as well. Connection comes in many forms. The spirit of liberation urges us to remember that each of us understands how to meet our own needs the best. Being true to this spirit means honoring pluralism and working to ensure that all peoples and all communities have what is necessary to make their own connections. These necessities are easy to articulate--food, shelter, love, clean air and water, opportunities for education and honest work and the freedom to unlock creativity--but they appear to be difficult to obtain for all. The spirit of liberation challenges us to remember the dictum of Eugene Debs: "While there is a lower class I am in it; while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free." When others are limited in their ability to make connections we are limited in our ability to make connections with them. Each of us loses out, if only a little, when someone else is limited.

This spirit of liberation says to us that if are to be an authentic religious community, one that takes the charge of the spirits of life and love seriously, we must struggle for justice. Indeed, we must place this struggle near the center of our religious life and honor it as much as we do the holy spirit of love and the primal force of life.

Looking back at our panel we see the spirit of liberation alive in our community. It may be muted at times but it is present when we speak up for marriage equality, work for better housing and strive to end racism, sexism, violence, poverty and any other factor that limits human potential.

Taken together the spirits of life, love and liberation push us towards beloved community. Towards beloved community could be the name of our congregational panel. You might have heard the term beloved community before. Martin King used to it described his vision for a better world and a better country. It originates with the philosopher Josiah Royce and was popular with progressive Unitarians and Universalists in the early and mid-20th century.

Royce understood that we human creatures are fundamentally social beings. We come together to form communities as a matter of course. We do not have a choice as to whether or not we will form communities--the number of truly self-sufficient individuals in human communities is so small as to be discounted as anomalies--but we do have a choice as to which communities we will join, how we will work to shape those communities and how in turn they will shape us. He described this choice as the philosophy of loyalty. He defined loyalty as "the thoroughgoing and loving devotion of an individual to a community."

The goal of life, in Royce's understanding, is to find a community worthy of one's loyalty. If the community is a true community and the loyalty, the love, that is given over to that community is real then participation in it might point to what Royce called the beloved or the universal community. The love that is given and experienced in such a community is fact a love for the universal. Joyce wrote:

The spirit that loves the community...is essentially one, despite variety of special causes, of nationalities, or of customs. The...development of the loyal spirit is...the rise of a consciousness of the ideal of an universal community of the loyal,--a community which, despite all warfare and jealousy, and despite all varieties of gods and of laws, is supreme in its value, however remote from the present life of civilization.

Such an experience of love and loyalty is fundamentally transformative. It pushes anyone who experiences it beyond their own boundaries and into communion with all of humanity. It is difficult for us to reach such a goal but the more we as a community honor the spirits of life, love and liberation the more possible it is for us to experience and grasp towards the beloved community. Sometimes, when we are at our best, we might even experience that sense of love for the universal community among us.

Indeed, if you recall the congregational panel of our diptych the spirits of life, love and liberation were already present among us. Our challenge is to bring them ever more forward. This, then, is a vision I have for our congregation. That it would worthy of the loyalty and love of each of us. If it is it will truly transform not only us but help us to heal our world and our broader community. How it might do that, however, is captured most completely in the other panel of our diptych. That is the topic for next week's service.

So, in the hopes that this community is worthy of your loyalty and that the spirits of life, love and liberation have grown in each of us this hour, I say Amen and Blessed Be.