In and Out and Roundabout

A Seeker Service by the Reverend Mark W. Christian

Presented to the First Unitarian Church of Oklahoma City

Sunday August 21, 2005

Reading

From Born Again Unitarian Universalism

Forrest Church

When D.H. Lawrence, the famous British novelist, was a young man, he entered into a discussion of religion with a Reverend Robert Reid.  Reid was a close friend of Lawrence’s mother and served the Congregational church of Eastwood, where Lawrence was born and raised.  After Lawrence left home, Reid continued to send him his sermons.  The author's response to one of these survives.  Apparently, it was a sermon on the necessity of conversion for salvation.  Lawrence answered, in part, as follows:

I believe that one is converted when first one hears the low, vast murmur of life, of human life, troubling one's hitherto unconscious self.  I believe one is born first unto oneself—for the happy developing of oneself, while the world is a nursery, and the pretty things are to be snatched for, and the pleasant things tasted; some people seem to exist thus right to the end.  But most are born again on entering maturity; then they are born to humanity, to a consciousness of all the laughing, and the never-ceasing murmur of pain and sorrow that comes from the terrible multitude of brothers [and sisters].  Then, it appears to me, one gradually formulates one's religion, be it what it may.  A person has no religion who has not slowly and painfully gathered one together, adding to it, shaping it; and one's religion is never complete and final, it seems, but must always be undergoing modification.

We have here, in the lost yet familiar sermon of Mr. Reid and in Lawrence's response, two very different notions of what, precisely, a religion is.  On the one hand, there is the more traditional definition of religion, religion as a body of teachings and practices to which one conforms either out of habit or by a leap of faith.  Lawrence is talking about something altogether different when he speaks of religion.  To him, religion is a gradual process of awakening to the depths and possibilities inherent in life itself.

Reading

To Be of Use

Marge Piercy (In Good Poems)

The people I love the best jump into work head first without dallying in the shallows and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.  They seem to become natives of that element, the black sleek heads of seals bouncing like half-submerged balls.  I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart, who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience, who strain in the mud and much to move things forward, who do what has to be done, again and again.  I want to be with people who submerge in the task,  who go into the fields to harvest and work in a row and pas the bags along.  Who stand in the line and haul in their places, who are not parlor Generals and field deserters but move in a common rhythm when the food must come in or the fire must be put out.  The work of the world is common as mud.  Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.  But the thing worth doing well done has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.  Greek amphoras for wine or oil, Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums but you know they were meant to be used.  The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real.

Prayer and Meditation

Rabindranath Tagore (SLT 519)

Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers,

but to be fearless in facing them. 

Let me not beg for the stilling of my pain,

but for the heart to conquer it. 

Let me not look for allies in life’s battlefield,

but to my own strength. 

Let me not crave in anxious fear to be saved,

but hope for the patience to win my freedom. 

Grant me that I may not be a coward,

feeling your mercy in my success alone;

but let me find the grasp of your hand in my failure.

In and Out and Roundabout

A Seeker Sermon by the Reverend Mark W. Christian

Delivered to the First Unitarian Church of Oklahoma City

Sunday August 21, 2005

There’s a hand game most of us learned as children—

Here is the church.

Here is the steeple.

Look inside.

Where are the people?

 And, of course, its sister—

Here is the church.

Here is the steeple.

Look inside.

There are the people!

Really makes you wonder what kind of research I was doing this summer.  Doesn’t it?

They’re here.  They’re not.  They aren’t.  They are.  One of my very earliest memories is as a tiny tike playing that game in the basement of Eliot House (That’s the building with the staircase off the Allen Courtyard).  As many of you know, I grew up Unitarian.  More than that, I grew up in this church.  When I played the hand game, “Here is the steeple,” I thought of THAT steeple.  “There are the people” meant THESE people.  You, or perhaps more accurately, an earlier version of you.

The proof that I haven’t fully “Grown up” is that I still spend my time looking at the church, looking at the steeple, peering inside and looking at the people.  I remember when I was small actually naming the finger people I found inside my make believe church.  I was there, as was my mother and father, my brother, a couple of grandmothers and precisely two friends from church.  Why so few?  There were only eight fingers in that imaginary church—so competition for the pews was pretty fierce.  These days there is room for more than eight of you, and I guess I will have to admit, I can’t name everybody sitting in this church.

I can’t name all of you.  At first I thought that’s a sign that I am not doing my job.  In truth, I’m not sure that’s a bad thing, though.  Don’t get me wrong, I do know most of you by name—there’s (name a few on the front rows—and get one wrong).  Still, I’m not sure it’s a bad thing to admit that there are some of you here who I don’t know—or don’t know well.  If I knew everyone’s name then I think that would mean we are dying church.  Living churches always have new people coming in.  That is, in large measure, why I do this series of sermons.  People see our church, see our steeple and look inside to check out the people.  Of course, the steeple and church they see first these days is most likely on the Internet—but you get the gist.

The people who study such things talk about new people in congregations as “Come-In-ers” and “Come-Out-ers.”  Some come out of other churches.  Some come in from the “unchurched” culture.  How many of you here today came in, directly from another religious tradition?  Can I have a show of hands, please?  Better yet, stand up if you are so inclined along with this role call.  Who came to us from a Baptist background?  Catholic?  Methodist?  What else? 

Now, how many of you came in from the unchurched culture?  How many of you either didn’t grew up in a church or have been gone from that church so long that you’re essentially religiously feral?  Just to round things out—how many of us here today attended Unitarian, Universalist or Unitarian Universalist churches as children or teenagers?  Of this group, how many of you grew up in this church?

We come from many places.  We come with differing experiences and expectations.  To really look at the church—getting past its steeple and on to its people, you have to look “In and Out and Roundabout.”  There is a paradox that I love about churches—actually, if you heard the first sermon in this Seeker series last week, you know that there’s an array of paradoxes about churches that fascinate me.  The one I refer to today though is a question of what constitutes a church.  Is the church a building or an amalgam of people.  We often call the building the church—but there was a time when that word was only applied to people.  The building was the Meeting Hall.  The people were, and in a real sense, still are the true church.

Now don’t get me wrong.  The building is very important.  It is so important that we will be operating a Capital Campaign this fall to revamp, revitalize, restore and redesign much of this facility.  I guess one of my messages today is that even when we are putting major energy into our facility that we have to remember that the church, in the truest sense, is never just a building.  The church is an assembly of people from different backgrounds with differing needs and experiences; people who gather together for reasons as diverse as their backgrounds.

We maintain this facility to serve the needs of people.  If we become fixated on the building we err—I have jokingly called this having an “Edifice Complex.”  The bottom line is that this facility must never become as a shrine.  The bricks and mortar, plaster and tile, hardwood and carpet have to be seen as tools.  In the same way—this pulpit and the pews you sit in have to be seen as tools.  Marge Piercy in her poem, “To Be of Use,” says it better than I can.

Greek amphoras for wine or oil,

Hopi vases that held corn,

Are put in museums

But you know they were meant to be used. 

The pitcher cries for water to carry

And a person for work that is real.

This place must never become a fetish or an idol.  This facility cries out for people to serve, for work to do.

To keep succeed in understanding the church as a tool and not a shrine, we have to constantly ask what end we serve with the work of this community.  We have stay focused on the mission of this church.  Up until now, everything I have said could apply to just about any church or synagogue.  It is here that we begin to be differentiated from the rest of the religious world.  Most religious assemblies would say that they exist to glorify God and do the work of God on earth.  I can agree with that—I might have to do some careful defining and a bit of mental gymnast have a different mission.  We exist to serve human beings.  We exist to serve human need.  We exist to transform human lives to make a difference in the here and now instead of the here after.

I deeply believe that in this tradition we are all humanists of one stripe or another.  I say that because the liberal tradition has always started with the question of humanity.  We believe that until we know who and what human beings are then we don’t need to try and understand God.  We believe that until we know what we are called to do in the moments between our birth and death—and until we actually do it—that to worry too much about God’s plan is premature at best and folly at its worst.

I have come to understand that the mission of this church is quite simple.  We exist to transform people who transform the world.  That is how we exercise our humanity and that is also how we pay homage to the transcendent.  Transforming People Who Transform the World is how we honor the spirit of ongoing creation that is, was, and ever will be.  To make it clear that this mission is broad enough for the theist and atheist alike, I believe that the miracle of human transformation is precisely how God is present to us in the world.  The thing about this transformation is that it doesn’t exist until we make it so.  In the same way that the church can’t be the church without the people,  we can’t serve God or creation or humanity or the Holy without this transformative power.  This power is human power.  It exists in us, through us and for us.

With this power comes responsibility.  Our mission is one of Transforming People Who Transform the World.  The challenge is to fulfill that mission responsibly.  Who are the people we are trying to transform?  Are they the eight fingers I counted as a child while playing a hand game.  Yes, the people we seek to transform are as close our very hands.  They are beside you now.  The transformation we seek includes people of this church—people we can know and name. 

Our friends and family and coworkers and neighbors will be among those we transform.  However grand that group may be it is not enough, though.  We are called to look In and Out and Roundabout.  This church has to do the things to minister to and transform the people who come through our doors.  But an honest look In and Out and Roundabout quickly takes us beyond the walls of this building, beyond the people who gather in this place.  We have to find ways to transform our city, to transform our community, to transform the world.

As much as our mission is “In” here, it is also out there.  It’s a bit like an apocryphal story from the life of Henry David Thoreau.  Thoreau was arrested following an act of civil disobedience protesting the Mexican American War.  Thoreau’s failure to pay his taxes led to his arrest.  When his friend—the sage Mr. Emerson arrived to secure his release, it is said that he asked, “David, what are you doing IN there?”  To which Thoreau replied—“Waldo, what are you doing OUT there?”  What indeed.

This church is a building.  This church is a community.  This church exists to serve the needs of it members and friends—but that is not enough.  In some ways that is the easy part.  It is relatively easy (costly perhaps but easy) to acquire and maintain a facility.  It is relatively easy to do what we do on Sunday mornings.  It takes some skill and practice but gathering the faithful together on Sundays is pretty easy.  It is even relatively easy to minister to the needs of the community—to dedicate, educate and ignite the spiritual imaginations of our children; to marry and bury; to provide compassion as a balm for the indignity, randomness and cruelties of life.  It is even pretty easy to help people see the wonder and possibility of each day.  But we can’t stop there.

All of those things happen “In” here—at least metaphorically.  These things are easy when compared to what we have to do beyond those doors.  What happens “In” here is easy when compared to what is going on “Out” there.  War and famine and injustice, an assault on the environment and the degradation of human beings and creation is going on “Out” there and we are called to respond to it.  We are called to transform people who transform the world—however big we discover that world to be.

We look in.  We look out.  We look roundabout.  And we see so much, so much to do.  So much calls to us and all I have to offer is the hope of transformation?  Jeez.  How about a flak jacket and an instruction manual?  But that it were even that easy.  This is work that can’t be done simply on Sunday.  Church culture has evolved largely around Sunday as a day set aside for religious pursuit—but that isn’t enough.  There is a paradox about Sunday in our larger culture though that I think underscores the transformation that is both our responsibility and our greatest hope.  Is Sunday the first day of the week or the last day of the weekend?  Does Sunday come first or last?  Do we retreat to Sunday or do we proceed from it? 

I would tell you that when we do it right, when we look “In and Out and Roundabout,” when we look “In” here and the turn around and look “Out” there—then Sunday is both a beginning and an ending.  It is the alpha and the omega and ours is an all day, all week, all month, all year kind of faith.  Sunday is the place we proceed from and the place to which we return.  It is a place to gather our energies and a place to repair our spirits.  Sunday is a place to learn who we are and the place that tells “That isn’t enough.”

In and Out and Roundabout.  We are called to look in all these places.  We are called to serve all these things.  That fuller view of life and humanity and creation is the source of our inspiration.  It holds the hope of our restoration.  It is the field of our transformation.

Here is the church.  There is the church.  HERE is the church.  Don’t worry so much about the steeple instead look all around you.  Where are the people?  Are WE the people?  Are we ALL the people?  Surely not, if we have really searched our lives.  We have amongst us the seeds of hope and the tools of our transformation.  I pray that we look In and Out and Roundabout and discover ourselves and our truest calling.  May it ever be so.  AMEN