Shall We Gather?

I'm about to confess something that I thought I might never say.

I'm pretty close to being "churched-out."

Your Board of Trustees and I have just returned from our annual retreat together, and it was a doozy! 

We engaged in spiritual development work together and THEN after doing that tried to see how our own individual developments fit together, or didn't, and how we might bring our work back to the congregation.

There was a lot of discussion about how and why we gather together, which dovetails quite nicely with Roy's music this morning.  I don't know whether I should thank both Roy and The Universe for that, or just enjoy a happy coincidence.

What is it about human beings and our need to gather in community? 

Being together can be messy, uncomfortable, challenging and sometimes down right difficult.

And yet we do. We gather.

We are not like other solitary animals in the world. We do not get born, pass through adolescence and strike out on our own, like the male lion or the female black widow.

Even if we do strike out on our own from our family of origin, we create a new community, sometimes even what's called a "family of choice."  Or as I heard the Rev. Mark Bellatini said once, "After many years and  heartbreaks, I have come to love my horizontal family, and my vertical, or biological, family."

It was the support of Rev. Mark's horizontal family, the family he created for himself, that helped him to make peace with the family he was born into.

Churches are often described in terms of a family. Ministers study both family systems and church systems, and many of the models overlap.

Back home in Chicago, I have church aunties. There is Betty, Bette, Joan, Madieria, Evelyn and Cindy. There used to also be Polly and Ann, but they have passed on.

My church aunties have as much authority in my life as the aunts who are related to me by blood, some have more.

These are the ladies who taught me so very much about how to navigate the world in a new way, in the way that my class-jumping education required of me. They are my mentors, and when I go home to visit Chicago if I don't see them in church, oooo there is trouble!

In fact, Betty's daughter and granddaughter recently moved to Oakland, and I got a call from her. "Jala has moved to California, I want to know how far you are from her, because she's out there without any other family."

Any   "other"  family.

It doesn't matter to Betty, or to Jala or her daughter, that they are African American and I am not. What matters is that we have a church family connection.

If we can let ourselves relax into our communal relationship, there are so very many benefits. Yes, it might be a little scary at first. Letting one's guard down can be very frightening. By the time you've reached the age that you are, the world has kicked you around a bit.

I can say this with confidence because by the time each of us has reached kindergarten, the world has already gotten in our way.

In my time here already I have seen the bonds of a church family.  I have talked before about the time I was new here and I was so moved by the fact that 10% of this entire community showed up at Martin Zonglit's Memorial, each with a job to do at the memorial and the team, though I doubt they'd use that word, worked like a well-oiled machine of caring. More than 10% of course came to honor Martin, but that isn't so surprising, after all he was a long time member and very active. 

I mentioned this at our retreat this weekend, and then others said "Well, about 10% of our whole community works regularly with Bill on shelter meals," and "about 10% of us went to the City Council meeting with you last year," and about 10% of us .... and the list goes on.

So, this got me really thinking about 10%. What is it with that number? 

I have to and want to tell you that 10% is a very respectable chunk of people from a church to show up to do work together.  And it's not always the same 10% who show up, either.

One of the exercises  we did this weekend was to think about a goal. And then we were asked to come up with three categories for that goal.

What is the minimum result of this goal that you can live with?
What is the actual goal?
What is something that you can imagine that would make this goal an outrageous success? 

10% of a congregation showing up and working together is a good goal. It's a laudable goal, and you should be very proud that this happens regularly here.  But what would be an outrageous goal? 90% participation? 

That would be outrageous and amazing. 

Imagine a project where we could 90% of the congregation could agree to work on one project together, may be a project with multiple facets. 

So the Board agreed that one of the tasks they would take on this year was to figure out what sort of a project would ignite the passion of this congregation. What sort of social justice work would resonate with enough people that 90% of the congregation would focus energy on one project.

In order to do this, the Board wants us all to have coffee together. In the coming weeks, the Board is going to start having conversations with people about finding out what our community-wide passion is. This will take time, which members of your Board of Trustees are willing to invest, outside of their regular duties, to help bring into fruition.

Because this is a big undertaking, the Board will be recruiting some help. In it's current, but developing form, there'll be a few open ended questions that you'll each be asked, and then we'll gather all the information and present it to the congregation.

I hope that when they call you up to meet for coffee, or to take a little time during social hour, you will do your best to meet with them. It's for the good of the whole.

What we have here is a lovely and loving community. The Rev. Sonya Sukalski, who led our Board retreat this weekend, said to me "What a fine Board. They really care deeply about their work and each other."

I have seen people try to care for each other, which is such a beautiful thing. Karen Odell has issued a standing offer to help Jane Fenton come to church. I have seen Kathy Conrotto and Ann Krabach help Aileen Olmheim time after time. We have people check and re-check to make sure that Ted and April can move around our sanctuary unencumbered, week after week.  

There's a line in "What a Wonderful World" that gets me every time. "I see friends shaking hands, saying How do you do? They're really saying 'I Love You."

To me, that's church.

We are in a year of transition. Of course, this is actually year 3 of a transition, but who's counting?

By this time next year your new minister will be in the office where I now work, they will be standing behind this pulpit, and have just spent a weekend with the Board on retreat, working on a direction for the congregation for that year, and likely beyond.

While things are especially fluid, it is a good time to do things like look at the congregation's 5 year plan, an effort which is being led by Brittney Miller. It's a good time to re-evaluate the church's finances, led by John Patton, who is working side by side with Doreen Souza and Mary Lee.

It's a good time to look at a lot of things.  What is the gift this congregation offers to the Central Valley?

This Fellowship contains both amazing power and amazing potential.

These questions about direction and mission are not for me to answer, but for you, the collective you, to answer. This is work you must do together. It may well be work that brings you closer together, closer to being a church family.

Roy just told us a story and we sang "Shall We Gather By the River."*

There may not be an actual river here on this property, maybe only a metaphorical one, and the answer to the question "Shall We Gather?" is yes.

You bet we should. 

*Guest musician Roy Zimmerman

© The Rev. Joe Cherry

Written for and presented to

The Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Stanislaus County

August 18, 2013

A Year of Justice

It is good to be together again.

This afternoon the Unitarian Universalist Legislative Ministry here in California, will be having a training here, after church. Perhaps you saw the training on our church calendar, which is on our website, maybe you saw Kevin Byrne’s request for volunteer help through our weekly eBlast. Maybe this is the first you’ve heard of it. Anything’s possible.

The Unitarian Universalist Legislative Ministry of California, or UULMCA for short, is one our largest and best organized Legislative Ministries across our nation. In the past 10 years they’ve done a lot of work, organized a lot of folks and made a real name for themselves in Sacramento. Rev. Lindi Ramsey is just completed a decade of work with that community ministry.

And we know a little bit about community ministries here in this congregation. We have two ministers who work in their “semi-retirement” for the greater good of the people of this very county. We have Rev. Leroy Egenberger who has been working with veterans and their families, helping them to adjust to life after military service, and we have Rev. Bill Greer, whose ministry of feeding those who are hungry has deeply infected and affected almost all of us. By its very nature, Rev. Leroy’s work is quiet and contained.  But not Rev. Bill’s.  If you have worked with Bill in the kitchen, or served food in the last year, please raise your hand.

I am grateful for the work of both Bill and Leroy. They do things that I cannot. I wouldn’t have time to run a program that feeds hundreds of people each month, and I don’t have the training to do the specialized work that Leroy does.  They are both tremendous assets to our congregation.

Rev. Lindi Ramsey is another person whose work I am grateful for. When I arrived in Modesto 20 months ago, and Lindi called me up to do some sort of political action, I responded, and so did Rev. Denis Paul. We showed up in your bright yellow clergy shirts, and helped to hold 4,000 prayers from across theological and geological barriers, that were being delivered to Governor Brown’s office, hoping they would inspire him to consider more equitable immigration policies.

He was unable to answer our prayers that time, by the way.

At the time we first met in person, I told Rev. Lindi “I’m so new to California, and I'm so new to ministry, that I have no idea which end is up with regard to the political and the social in California. I also don’t feel like I have much time right now to figure it all out. So how about we make a deal? When you need me to show up, you just call me, and I will show up. You give me the talking points you want me to say to any media who asks me, and I will say it. Our ministries are co-mingled.”

I have said similar things to both Leroy and Bill.

And so I have now been to Sacramento, to the State Capitol, and petted the Golden Bear in front of the Governor’s office 3 times. That is more times than I was EVER in the State Capitol of Michigan, where I lived for 27 years and was a gay activist.

So when the UULM asked to hold a meeting here today, I said “Yes!” and was inspired to talk with you this morning about a year of social justice.

In June, Solange Gonçalves Atlman was a guest speaker in this congregation. Ms. Altman is an immigration attorney and shared with the congregation a terrific talk about immigration and the unjust laws that currently govern it here. She told us heart breaking stories of children who, by no choice of their own, came to be here in the U.S. without documentation.  She also quoted to us a rather famous story of an exchange between Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

“In 1848 Henry David Thoreau, a transcendentalist, was arrested and jailed after refusing to pay his poll tax, a tax that would be used to support slavery and its extension through a war with Mexico intended to acquire its northern territories. His friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson came to see him in jail, and exclaimed upon seeing him, "What are you doing in there?" Thoreau replied, "Waldo, the question is what are you doing out there?"

Thoreau's brief detention became the inspiration for his essay, Civil Disobedience. In that essay he explains that in a constitutional republic like the United States, people often think that the proper response to an unjust law is to try to use the political process to change the law, but to obey and respect the law, in the mean time, until it is changed. But if the law is itself clearly unjust, and the lawmaking process is not designed to quickly obliterate such unjust laws, then Thoreau says the law deserves no respect and it should be broken. He tells us that "it is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for what is right."[1]

Immigration reform and the just treatment of those in our community who among us without documentation is an issue that we take seriously and work hard for in Unitarian Universalism. The very president of our Association of Congregations was arrested in Arizona two years ago protesting the treatment of so called “illegals.”

The UULMCA gave me my first chance to be a voice, the voice of a religious leader, on the issue of reforming the laws for immigration.

But the UULMCA does more than work to reform immigration policies. They work on environmental issues, developing lay and young leadership, and for years worked to coordinate efforts to provide marriage equality for same sex couples here in California.

Let’s hope they can retire that topic once and for all.

But it’s not just Rev. Lindi Ramsden and the UULMCA who are doing the work. The UULMCA is, for me, a clearing house of information. The UULMCA cannot do its work effectively without dedicated Unitarian Universalists who work hard, who carry signs, who go to city council meetings, who pack lunches, and hug those who are marginalized.

This year, though, I’m going to challenge us to focus energy on Social Justice. I know, I know, we have that whole pesky “search for a new minister” going on, and that whole “rethinking the way we fund our Fellowship” thing, oh, and the whole “This is our 60^th year gathering together as a congregation,” thing.

All kidding aside, I think these are exactly the reasons that we should really focus some serious energy into Social Justice.

I want to tell share with you and story I read on the Ms. Magazine blog. It’s the story of a group of women in Israel who call themselves “The Women of the Wall.”[2]

These women, who are of different branches of Judaism, have been meeting together and praying together for 24 years, at the Wailing Wall.

So what, you might say, people have been praying at the Wailing Wall since Herod the Great started building  the Second Great Temple in 19 BCE (before common era, what used to be called “Before Christ”) and it was destroyed by the Romans in the Frist Jewish-Roman war in 70 CE (what used to be called A.D.)

Well, it turns out that the Women of the Wall do not pray in the tiny section of the Wall that the Ultra-Orthodox have decided should be the section for the women. No, these women have the nerve to pray wherever they want to, along the wall! Also, to the consternation of some, they read aloud from the Torah, which according to some, is against Jewish Law.

In the 24 years they have been meeting, they have been hassled, harassed, tear-gassed and arrested for praying together along the Wall. Shira Pruce, who is the Public Relations Director for the Women of the Wall, was interviewed for the article, and she reports that the ultra-orthodox have used their political influence unduly in trying to restrain the freedom of expression and religion expression in the democracy that is Israel.

I bring you this story from Ms. Magazine in part to bring you back to the reading earlier by Emerson, that great radical, that great free-thinker, who we are so often proud of. He says there are some things that are fated, and that there is a nobility in accepting those things.

And yet his dear friend, Henry David Thoreau challenged him on it. And this example of these women praying together offers yet another challenge to that idea.

So, not to through Emerson out with the bathwater, I ask you, what are the things in your life, in our collective lives, that are noble to accept, and which are the ones we should work like Hell to change?

I have seen a bumper sticker that says “Well behaved women rarely make history.”

I must confess that I love that bumper sticker.

Think of all the women in our faith’s history that have re-shaped the world because they refused to accept the status quo, and also think of the men who worked by their sides.

This, as well as a self-examining faith that requires no statement of belief or creedal test, this is among the greatest gifts and challenges of our legacy.

We are a people who work to improve the world around us. We claim little, if any knowledge about the next world, the world beyond death, even if there is one.

As unsure as we are about all of that, we are as sure that it will take the hands of people like us to shape the world into a more fair and just world for all.

Theodore Parker famously wrote “the arc of the universe is long and it bends toward justice.” Well, the arc isn’t going to do that all by itself. It’s going to require people to help shape that arc.

Working actively for social justice can do many things for us as congregation. As we are out visible in the world, more people will see us, more people who are like-minded to us may see us and wonder just who those people over there are, and why do I keep seeing that group of lovely folks at every social justice event I attend. Maybe I should go talk with them.

Working actively for social justice will catch the attention of minister’s who are looking for just such an amazing group of people who are here, in Modesto.

Working actively for social justice will help to enrich our lives both individually and collectively, and aren’t we a congregation about enriching lives?

So let us commit ourselves, in this our 60^th year as a Fellowship, let us renew our commitment to engaging in social justice.

You can start by staying around for this afternoon’s meeting.

---

[1] Unjust Laws: The Moral Case for Immigration Reform,” © Solange Gonçalves Altman, 2013

[2] Misogyny at the Wall, http://msmagazine.com/blog/2013/08/05/misogyny-at-the-wailing-wall/

A Year of Justice

© The Rev. Joseph M Cherry

Written for and delivered to:

The Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Stanislaus County

August 11, 2013