Horizons
A Sermon by Aaron McEmrys, May 4, 2008
The Barbican Art Gallery in London is currently running one of the most interesting, and comical, art exhibits I have heard about in a long time. It is called, “The Martian Museum of Contemporary Art.” The premise behind the show is that a group of anthropologists from Mars set out on a mission to understand life on Earth. Somehow or another they stumble into an Earthling art museum and begin their work. Looking at the world around them they try to imagine what use all of these artifacts had; how the humans used them, and what they meant. After all, if these artifacts were being carefully stored in a special building they must have been very important tools indeed!
The exhibit is designed for us to experience as if we, the visitors, are Martians visiting an exhibit about humans at a museum on Mars. Believing that all the things have real, functional purposes, paintings, sculptures and pieces of music have all been painstakingly labeled, categorized and humorously over classified. Oddly, this helps the Barbican’s human viewers begin to experience art through new eyes, while also making fun of the ways we humans can so easily view one another through our own alien eyes, seeing difference before commonality and drawing hilarious and thoroughly foolish conclusions about other cultures, insisting that we will only look at things through the lenses of our own narrow sensibilities.
What a great idea for an exhibit. Makes me want to hop the next plane to London! But I don’t think I need to travel far to experience life as an alien anthropologist – I’ve got all of Santa Barbara right here!
And so I have spent my week, as excited, overwhelmed and sometimes confused as any anthropologist; any stranger in a strange land. This week I have been immersed in this community; learning about you through a thousand avenues – talking, laughing, playing and lots and lots of eating! And while you certainly have much in common with most of the other Earthlings I know, you are still you, the people of the Unitarian Society of Santa Barbara, with your own quirks and gifts and stories and dreams – of which I have caught only the barest glimpse.
But, like any good Martian anthropologist I have tried to keep a few especially important questions before me, questions that I think are critical keys to help me understand who you are, what you dream about and where your dreams and mine intersect.
Here are three of the questions I have been pondering this week: “Who do we want to be?” “How do we want people to feel?” And finally, because even the most compelling of visions isn’t much good without a clear sense of the path ahead - “How will we get there?”
One of the very most influential voices in my life is that of the Sufi poet and teacher Jalaluddin Rumi, who was wandering around what is now Turkey and Afghanistan almost a thousand years ago. One of his poems has become very popular among Unitarian Universalists, “Come, Come, Whoever You Are.” I think this poem contains a roadmap to what I see as the very most important answer to the question, “Who do we want to be?” – A beloved community.
“Come, come whoever you are, wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving.
Ours is no caravan of despair. Come yet again come.”
There is an awful lot packed into those two brief lines, and we’d do well to study them carefully and often, since building the beloved community is one of the most difficult and counter-cultural of endeavors. Building the beloved community may begin with creating a community of searchers in which everybody is welcome, but that is only the beginning. Rumi tells us that “Ours is no caravan of despair” – and what do caravans do? They move, they travel, they explore – in this case traveling far beyond the oasis of these four walls along dusty silk roads of possibility and transformation, traveling always into the mysterious unknown, even as we remain grounded here in the simple beauty and support of this place and these people.
I realize that these lines are extremely common among UUs and somehow keep bobbing up among us even though Rumi’s great work, the Mathnawi, runs five full volumes and thousands of lines all by itself! So I ask your patience, because what I find so fascinating about this poem is not the lines we sing and say ad nauseum, but the lines we leave out. You see, most UU versions of this poem leave out the line “though you’ve broken your vows a thousand times – come yet again come.” I find this fascinating. I know that none of us like to be reminded of how often we fall short of our best selves, but that just makes this line all the more important because it reminds us how terribly important forgiveness is in all relationships and in every community. A beloved community is a forgiving one, accepting that we all make mistakes and that we all fall down.
The beloved community is always a place of welcome, support, exploration, argument and love - and like a deep well of cold spring water the abundance of our hearts, our energy and our dreams can’t help but bubble up in such a place, overflowing the edges of our chalice and pouring jubilantly, curiously and compassionately into the world around us. The beloved community is first and foremost a community of abundance!
Getting to know you this week I have seen incredible abundance, and I believe this congregation is called to share that abundance in some very important ways. Many of you are already deeply involved in this community and beyond, but I envision USSB as a vocal, powerful leader in Santa Barbara and beyond. In the end, one of the few things UUs can agree on is that what we do here matters! Most of us aren’t waiting around for some glorious and theoretical afterlife – what matters most to us is what we do here, how we live our lives in the here and now. Thus the most powerful expression of Unitarian Universalism is to simply live our values as honestly and as fully as we can. Citizenship, neighborliness and community action and engagement of all kinds thus become a critical part of our spiritual path. The voice of the Society and its members should be heard whenever our values can help heal wounds, resolve conflicts, formulate public policy or help the voiceless be heard.
I envision abundance of this congregation flowing far beyond the border of Santa Barbara. I see us as leaders within our beloved Unitarian Universalist movement, a congregation that leads by example and helps shape the very future of our movement in the difficult days that lie ahead.
And the reason people will want to learn with us, sing with us, worship with us and partner with us is not really because of who we can become outwardly, but because of who we can become inwardly. After all, everything we do and say in the wider world is really just a reflection of who we are and what we believe on the inside.
And so I envision a place of hope, of healing and of respite. A place where we are brave enough to walk together to struggle together and to ultimately be transformed as we puzzle and fumble and search our way through everything that matters most to us.
Ultimately though, what I want most for this congregation is simply this – I want us to be needed. By every one of us – by the people who walk in these doors, by a community that must wrestle with difficult choices and by who knows how many strangers who may never find their way here or know our names, but whose lives will be touched in ways large and small by all of us and the way we live our lives. I want this congregation to be needed.
It is not easy to live UU values in a world like ours. We get tired and frustrated; overworked and over-worried. But most of all, we forget. Amnesia, I believe, is the Achilles heel of humanity. As Howard Thurman wrote in today’s reading, “little by little, there crept into my life the dust and grit of the journey. Details, lower-level demands, all kinds of cross currents – nothing momentous, nothing overwhelming, nothing flagrant – just wear and tear.” This is why we all need a congregation like this – because we are so forgetful, and we need places and people to call us back, to help “keep fresh before us the moments of our high resolve”, to keep fresh within our hearts those things that matter most, so that “we may not forget that to which our lives are committed.”
When I was a kid my family attended one of our towns many Lutheran churches. Our family was poor, and I don’t think any of us ever felt like we fit in. My mom especially had had such a tough life – first married to an abusive alcoholic and then a divorced single mother in 1970s Wisconsin where divorce was still far from acceptable no matter what the reason. She had to struggle and work so hard just to hold everything together, and she needed a community that would care about her and respect her, a place where she could keep her hope alive. I think our whole family needed this.
Our church was a very tight knit community. Even to my young eyes it was clear that there were very definite “in” groups that quietly ran the show, just like the “popular” kids at my middle school. Sometimes it seemed like everybody was in the in group except for us. But one Sunday morning, Pastor Jerry, our minister, was out of town, and a lay leader gave the service. She was one of the very most “in” of all - she was a young mother: pretty, fashionable (by rural Wisconsin standards) and smart if a little smug. I didn’t like her one little bit.
She told a story about a man who was lonely and needed to find some meaning and comfort and friendship in his life. She told us how he finally got so desperate that he just walked into a church one day, looking for something he knew not what. She told us how the man first sat by himself in the service and then stood by himself in coffee hour, hoping that someone, anyone, would come talk to him. She told us how the man left that day, still alone, still so hungry for connection – and did not return.
Hearing this story I thought, “Yes, that’s how I feel sometimes!” For the first time ever in that church I felt like someone was talking about something that really mattered to me – and that I must have horribly misread the lay leader telling the story. Obviously if she could tell a story like that, she must be so much more than I had thought. So as we filed out of the sanctuary, I did something I had never done before. I walked up to her. I shook her hand and told her how deeply her story had moved me and then….and then I stopped. She wasn’t even looking at me, wasn’t even listening to me – just shaking my hand mechanically and smiling on auto-pilot.
Now there are a million perfectly reasonable explanations for why she didn’t notice me, didn’t really see me. Maybe she was still over-excited after the service, maybe she was nervous, maybe she had as thousand things on her mental to-do list…maybe, maybe, maybe all perfectly understandable maybes, but still – when I saw that I was invisible to her, even after I had drummed up the courage to reach out, something warm inside me went cold in a heartbeat and deflated like a spent balloon. I felt even more like the man from the story than I had before.
I suspect all of us can relate to this story in one way or another. I suspect all of us have been on both sides of the equation – both the outsider looking in AND the insider who, for whatever reason, does not see him.
More than anything, I want to do everything we possibly can to make sure that nobody who walks through our doors ever feels like that. I envision a congregation that is ever-more welcoming and ever-more hospitable; a congregation where every single one of us, from the littlest child to the oldest elder always feels seen and heard – and always knows that they truly matter. I envision a congregation where every single one of us knows that the whole community is richer because we are here.
A good friend and colleague of mine recently told me about something that happened in his congregation. One day he was in his office when the phone rang. A young woman had died suddenly, out of the blue, leaving behind a devastated husband and three small children. She was thirty-six. My colleague Nathan was deeply embarrassed that no matter how hard he tried, he could not place her, couldn’t conjure so much as a single hazy image of her in his mind’s eye. And as he asked around, it turned out nobody seemed to know who she was. The friend who called him about her death wasn’t connected to the church at all – but it turned out that before she died she had attended regularly, sitting in the back and then leaving soon after the service ended. Her friend said that she had often talked about how much she loved the church and how much it meant to her, so after she died, her friend immediately thought that the memorial service should be there.
They did hold the service there, and it was very difficult. How are we to make sense of such a young healthy woman – gone, just like that, and leaving her family buried in grief? There are no words for things like this. But words aren’t what the family needed right then. They needed a community, and that’s what they got. The sanctuary was filled to overflowing for that memorial service; filled with friends and family, but also with hundreds of congregants – almost none of whom could ever remember meeting her. But they came because she was part of the community, even if at the time – she was the only one who knew it.
This is important – to be there for one another simply because we are all part of this community. This is why it is so important for us to learn how to see through the eyes of the stranger, to be able to see from the outside looking in – because we never know how we touch (or don’t touch) the people sitting right next to us, the people who might need us, the people who certainly have great and beautiful gifts to share if only they are seen and heard and welcomed. A community that can do this can do anything.
So how do we get there? How do we become the people, the congregation that we are called to become?
What I have learned from you this week is that it all boils down to a genuinely shared ministry; a ministry that builds strong relationships, a ministry that honors freedom and diversity and disagreement, a ministry that connects people to their passions. I have no desire whatsoever to come in here and lead you to the Promised Land, wherever that is! I don’t want to put a flow chart up on the wall and say, all right folks, here’s where we’re headed. No. Even if I had the best plan, the clearest vision in the whole world, I would still not want that. It is only through sharing, collaboration and the slow deepening of trust that we can truly come into our own as individuals and as a community.
This week I have been thrilled to see so many bright intersections between you and I; your dreams and mine. Here are a few of them:
Worship that is collaborative, supple, free, inspiring, bold, flexible, thoughtful and authentic - worship that speaks to the heart as well as to the head and where laughter, tears and transformation are all welcome. A community full of music – music for everyone. Whether you like Bach or Joni Mitchell; Palestrina or REM, whether you sing like a bird or only in the shower – here is a place for you. I see multiple choirs, ensembles and instrumental groups so that everywhere we turn there will be music echoing through the halls.
I see a wise and caring community, where we all work together to make sure that no one falls through the cracks. I see a ministry that seeks to transform the world as we live out our values. A ministry that does not stop at the church doors but flows out joyously as we “build a land where justice will roll down like waters and peace like an ever flowing stream.”
I see a holistic, intergenerational community, a community full of the laughter of children, the energy and fire of youth, the steady hands of parents and the deep wisdom and love of many elders.
Now let me say this: A great deal of what I envision is already here! I see all of these things in various stages and various forms everywhere I look! This is why I wanted to come here in the first place and why, now that I have been here with you this week – I can barely contain my excitement. You are an outstanding congregation, and I can’t imagine any group of people I would rather serve. You inspire me, you astonish me with your wisdom and commitment, and you make me laugh at your jokes. You remind me why I wanted to become a minister in the first place and help me see the minister I can become.
Thank you for that.
Now let me make you a promise:
If you call me as your minister, I
will challenge you to be ever more loving.
I will challenge you to continue to cultivate a culture of abundance and
generosity.
I will challenge you to keep searching.
I will walk with you through times of grief, crisis, joy, and triumph
I will seek to speak truth with love, even when what I have to say is hard to
speak and to hear.
I will take care of myself, my marriage and my family, striving to live the
kind of balanced and healthy life I will always encourage you live.
I will talk about love a lot, and
I will strive to always act out of love.
I will inevitably disappoint you. When that happens, whenever conflict arises,
I will do my best to respond in a spirit of respect and care.[1]
Thank you all. Amen.
© Aaron McEmrys, Unitarian Society of Santa Barbara, May 4, 2008