A Community of Service

A Worship Service by the Reverends Mark W. Christian & Jonalu Johnstone

First Unitarian Church of Oklahoma City

Sunday March 20, 2005

Prayer and Meditation

by V. Emil Gudmundson

March 20, 2005

            What we are we have reached because of other people’s planting.  The thoughts, the values, the ideas, and the feelings we possess are articulate because we have been the recipients of knowledge, kindness, love, and understanding.  And above all, the Mystery we call Life we owe a presence yet unknown yet still very near to us.  For these gifts not our own, we give thanks.

            And now, may we have the faith in life to do wise planting, that the generations to come may reap ever more abundantly than we.  May we be reminded of the wise ones of old who admonished, “If you plan for one year, plant grain; if you plan for ten years, plant trees; if you plan for centuries, plant souls.”  May we be bold in bringing to fruition the golden dreams of human kinship and justice.  This we ask that the fields of promise become fields of reality.

A Community of Service

A Sermon by the Reverend Mark W. Christian

Delivered to the First Unitarian Church of Oklahoma City

Sunday March 20, 2005

When I’m writing a sermon, sometimes a maverick idea pops into my head and won’t leave.  This is something like the song snippets that get hung in our consciousness from time to time.  At any rate, when one of these rogue thoughts pops in, I have discovered that the best thing to do is to entertain them, treat them hospitably and ask them to leave.  If they don’t leave, I have discovered the next step is to try and put them to use.  Lemons and lemonade, you understand.

This morning’s sermon is part of a series based on the affirmation we share each week as worship begins.  Specifically this week we focus on the line that asserts the promise that as a covenanted body we will “Serve others in community.”  The impish thought that rooted itself in my thought process this week comes from an old Twilight Zone episode titled “To Serve Man.”  Some of you remember the story, aliens arrive with all the technology needed to turn earth into a paradise.  Suddenly clean, fresh, water is everywhere; there is more than enough food to go around, warring factions die off and peace reigns.  The aliens say the only thing they want in return for this bliss is the opportunity to set up reciprocal space ship visits.  In essence they want to have earth come over for dinner. 

The blue print for the operation is found in a big book in a virtually untranslatable language.  After months of study a researcher makes a breakthrough and discovers that the title is simple, straightforward and seems to confirm the best intentions of the aliens.  The books title is “To Serve Man.”  It isn’t until it is too late that the book’s contents come to light—recipes.  To Serve Man is a double entendre.  The improvements to the planet were real—the aliens brought in bountiful food and abundant fresh water.  Their intent was less appealing.  They have essentially turned earth into a feedlot.

Rod Serling ends the episode with these words:  “the evolution of man, the cycle of going from dust to dessert, the metamorphosis from being the ruler of a planet to an ingredient in someone's soup.  It's tonight's bill of fare on The Twilight Zone.”  As with many Twilight Zone stories—this one is dependent on the twist that comes to surface at the end.  There is also a twist in our affirmed commitment “To serve other’s in community.”  That twist is not just that we are to serve those in our church community and we are to serve the larger community—that double focus is pretty easy to spot.  The real twist is that we commit ourselves to service as a condition for residing “in community.”

For many years, I viewed the appropriate role of social action in our movement as individual empowerment.  People would come in on Sunday morning—we would recharge their batteries, wind them up and point them back into the world, Lone Ranger Fashion, to right wrongs and supplant injustice with justice.  There is nothing wrong with that approach—other than the fact that it doesn’t go far enough, it reinforces a kind of false independence of individual persons and it burns people out. 

Perhaps the tipping point for my reverse twist has been our Change for Change program.  You see, part of why I limited my understanding of service to others to individual actions was that I deeply believed there wasn’t much we could agree on to undertake as a community.  Even the few examples we have of non-controversial service projects, like Horace Mann School, have relied largely on the organization of solitary persons and individuals deciding to give their time and money.  I don’t want to take anything away from the things that a committed individual can accomplish—bending Margaret Mead’s observation—indeed nothing is ever achieved without individual action.  What I have learned amid the diversity of our Change for Change recipients, and the abundance of our contributions, is that that finding enough common ground to take common action isn’t as hard as I imagined.

What Change for Change has taught me is that we have an institutional asset—in fact we are the asset.  Our community is a resource—a resource that isn’t controlled by any one person (lay or ordained).  When we turn that resource toward an issue things happen—How could they not?  Sometimes we accomplish a particular objective.  Perhaps, though, our presence as “a Community of Service” is more like throwing a boulder into a pond instead of a handful of pebbles.  They both create rings—it’s just that the rings from the boulder are bigger, more noticeable and less likely to be lost in the chop.

So what are these assets?  Very clearly money is part of it.  Of course, as you know, the church doesn’t have “money” per se.  We have connections with people who have money and we have the ability to mobilize giving.  When appropriately targeted that giving “in community” makes a difference.

Another asset we possess as a Community of Service is our moral presence.  A number of years ago when this church affirmed itself as a Welcoming Congregation it created a sort of moral precedent that empowers and guides us.  This communal statement allowed me to write without ambiguity our outrage at last year’s state question denying civil rights to persons in gay and lesbian relationship.  While not affirmed in a statement like the Welcoming Congregation, our long-standing commitment to reason and science let us speak boldly against efforts to excise evolution—the most efficient theory of life on earth we have—from textbooks.  Similarly, our history gives us moral authority to stand in favor of the separation of powers between the church and the state, between the sacred and the secular. 

Make no mistake, there are some who will learn of our support for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender and Intersexed issues and say—“Those Unitarians.  What else do you expect?”  There are those who will say “The Unitarian’s support Darwin and Jefferson—what else is new?”  That is not a sign of futility.  It is a sign of success.  For every person who casts our communal moral opinion aside, I believe there is a person who never knew a church would affirm such things.  As an individual they may affirm these things—but they never dreamed that there might be a church who took the same stances in service to the world that they want to.  I suspect that there are a number of you present today who fit that bill.  In this way our action as a community serves as a saving beacon to souls who feel lost and alone on storm tossed seas.  When we act in concert we save lives.

These are among the assets we have at our disposal when we understand ourselves not only to offer service to the community but to be a Community of Service.  As important as money and testimony is we have an equally important asset.  You’re sitting in it.  This facility is an asset in its own right.  How we use this facility is an expression of our embodiment of faithful individuals in a Community of Service. 

Just this month we hosted a celebration for World Neighbor’s project “The Work of Women” and a community-organizing event for Results.  We play host to Campfire, the Oklahoma City Chapter of the United Nations Association, Parents and Friends of Gays and Lesbians (although they may soon move their meeting).  We have hosted the Sexuality and Scripture Conference, fundraisers for the Laotian Women’s organization, high school and junior high Rallies and Social Justice Conferences.  In fact just this week one of our newer members, Hugh Meade, told me he’d like us to open our facility to the Mesta Park Homeowner’s Association—I can’t think of an easier way to be a Community of Service.

All these things are part of what is implied when we claim “To serve other’s in community.”  There is another facet of this, another twist—if you will—that I’d like to hold before you today.  When I looked at that line from our affirmation, as I reflect on what it means to be a Community of Service, I see an obvious connection to the work of Unitarian Universalist Service Committee. 

Service, I believe, should transcend all parts of our institutional presence—but it is in the UUSC that service takes center stage.  In the same way that the church can present a more authoritative moral posture than we can as individuals—so, too, the UUSC creates a bigger footprint of service than we as individuals or individual congregations can.  They marshal a larger pool of resources.  The UUSC can locate more efficient means of delivery of services than we can either as individuals or as an individual church.

This year’s focus from the UUSC deals with water—and a growing crisis around the potability and availability of that precious resource.  Having lived for a time in the New Mexican desert, I am acutely aware of water.  Estimates are that by 2025, two thirds of the world’s population will be facing a water crisis of one kind or another.  I will tell you that this is not a “them and us” situation.  This is an “us and us” crisis.  I have seen portions of New Mexico that simply won’t have the water to hydrate already existing areas of development.  I listened a few weeks ago as the President of the Chamber of Commerce said that one of Oklahoma City’s advantages over other communities for economic development is that we have a reliable water source for the foreseeable future and they don’t.  The “They” he referred to isn’t in the Third World—it is here in the U.S.

Through the UUSC, I learned about the privatization of water resources around the world—and in this country as well.  I am not opposed to commerce.  I think commerce is a pretty amazing deal.  I believe in fair trade and free enterprise.  The question that the UUSC has put before me, and that I before you, is this:  Is water a resource or a commodity.  Water it seems to me is so basic to human life that it verges on being a human right.  The United Nations has identified fresh water as part of the global commons—like air and the oceans, something that extends beyond the boundary of any individual or individual nation.

The UUSC marvelously embodies that sense of Community in service to Community that we affirm each week when we covenant “To serve other’s in community.”  To this end, I’d like to ask our local UUSC representative, Lana Henson, to come forward and renew my membership in UUSC (actually I have re-instituted it since I let it lapse last year).  I call on you to do the same.  I have chosen to renew at the $60 level since that gift is matched by the UU Congregation of Shelter Rock.  I see this as a concrete and tangible action derived from the affirmation we share together.  I urge you to consider the UUSC on its own merits and see if together we can create a better world than the one that is looming before us.