Fourth Universalist Society in the City of New York

Waters of Life
A Homily by-
The Rev. Rosemary Bray McNatt
The Fourth Universalist Society
In the City of New York
September 19, 2010
Religious life is filled with symbols, and we are living through a
symbolic season, a time when signs stand in for other more
important things. Our Jewish sisters and brothers have just
completed the most sacred season of their year, the Days of Awe, a
time to examine their lives, to beg pardon and to receive it, to make
amends and to begin again. Our Muslim sisters and brothers
completed the holy month of Ramadan a few weeks ago, a time of
fasting and remembrance, a way to bring themselves closer to Allah
in worship and prayer.
What symbols then, do we have, as liberal religious people?
What marks more than sacred time for us? How do we acknowledge
a special season, and how do we know it’s upon us? The truth is that
we Unitarian Universalists do have our own symbolic moments,
after decades of ebb and flow and argument. These moments are
not always writ large, because just as we agree on the priesthood
and prophethood of all believers, we agree that everything–and
every day–is holy. Still, we have our symbols, and water
communion today is one of them.
Water is necessary, essential, to every living thing. Life could
not have begun, and could not continue, without it. In religious
language of most faiths, water is always a symbol for new life. In
liberal religious language, water also speaks to the deepest level of
our connectedness, our interdependence, the ways in which we
depend on one another for the most ordinary as well as the most
urgent parts of life. So it is that most of our congregations introduce
a new church year with Water Communion like the one we have
experienced today. In covenantal community such as ours, this
communion reminds us that we all have a role to play in the
fulfillment of our promises to one another. To fill that silver bowl,
each of us has a little water to add–from our taps, from our trips,
from rivers far away or a fountain close to home. Some of us forget
to bring our gifts, and so we share them. Some of us have more than
enough, and so we pass along the blessing of too much water to
someone else. Some of us bring water in film canisters, others in
soda bottles, still others in empty mayonnaise jars. And like each of
us, our water has a story unique to us, perhaps reflective of who we
are and where we’ve been lately. And together, our diverse and
unique tale forms a larger creation story, the story of a liberal
religious people and how it is they come together.
Our promise, our covenant to be together, is fluid, to be sure.
Like water, it takes the shape of what is holding it. Our promise to be
together no matter what, is a promise that looks remarkably like a
busy, harried, urban church populated by tough people with tender
and open hearts. Thank goodness for that.
But we are meant to do so much more; we most move in
broader directions than our care of one another. Adams reminded
us in our reading last week that the covenant of being into which we
have entered has a special duty to those at the margins. He wrote:
“The covenant responsibility is especially directed toward the
deprived. Whether these people suffering from neglect and
injustice, or those who are caught in the system that suppresses
them–it is the gap between covenant and system, between ideal
and behavior, which creates deprivation….”
Adams’ words echo those of the ancient prophets of Israel;
from Isaiah to Micah to Amos, these voices of faithfulness remind us
that worship for show just won’t cut it. Amos speaks on behalf of
that greater love that holds us all when he says that nothing can take
the place of justice and the work of justice-not our most serious or
devout prayers in beautiful buildings, not our most glorious
celebrations of our faith and our history. Amos, a prophet raised up
from a desert people, reminds us urgently that when people are
parched and dry and the oppressions of this life are choking them,
only the unfailing stream of justice and righteousness will do.
The prophet Amos, the theologian James Luther Adams, a look
at the morning paper–all these things remind us of the depth and
breadth of the promises we make and the promises we are called to
keep as liberal religious people. We have promises to keep to those
with so many more miles to go than the rest of us. Perhaps their
journey is longer because of age, or their physical ability. Perhaps
their journey is made longer by the false witness others bear against
them {Muslims in America; immigrants in America; the Roma in
France} placing them in danger. Our covenant extends to them too,
and to the work of justice on their behalf, not just for their sake but
for ours. We cannot do everything, solve every problem or right
every wrong. But neither can we stay ignorant, or feel overwhelmed
by hopelessness. We need only find, and do, our small part of the
great work of justice. But the part we can do, we must do.
For who are we, if we don’t? Who do we become if we fail to honor
our part of the covenant of being, if we will not stand up for justice?
What good are our promises if we fulfill them for ourselves and
forgo them for others? If liberal religion is the seedbed of
democracy, then we are the water that must nurture those seeds.
Amen.

Standard Podcast [ 9:36 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Promises, Promises
A Sermon by
The Rev. Rosemary Bray McNatt
The Fourth Universalist Society
In the City of New York
Sept. 12, 2010
For those of you who are here for the first time–Welcome! For
those of you who have returned after being away, welcome home. I’m
glad to see you on this beautiful September day. Isn’t it gorgeous
outside? What else could you be doing today besides sitting here
listening to me talk? _______________________. So what on earth are
you doing here?
I think I know; I think you are here because you made a promise
to yourself and to this community. We all know what promises are,
right? They’re an agreement to do something. We promise to do our
homework, or to go to bed on time, or to take better care of ourselves,
or to visit someone we haven’t seen for a long time. One of the
readings we heard this morning, from a Unitarian Universalist thinker,
James Luther Adams, says that making promises is one of the things
that makes human beings the way we are. We tell one another we’re
going to do something, we work hard to do that thing, or we don’t keep
our promise, we don’t do it, and we feel sad about that (has that ever
happened to you?) It’s happened to me, lots of times.
We make a special kind of promise here at Fourth Universalist,
different than a lot of other kinds of promises, so different that we call
this promise a different name. We call it a covenant. The promises we
make, the covenant we have, is big enough and important enough to
support everything that we do here. We’re not the only church that
has a covenant–all Unitarian Universalist congregations make these
kinds of promises. Each church agrees to support the other churches in
keeping that covenant. They promise to help one another act in ways
that are different from other places in the world. When we come to a
Unitarian Universalist congregation, we promise to treat one other
differently than other places in the world might treat us. When we
come to our congregations, we promise to support ideas that
sometimes are inconvenient for other people, or are too hard for other
people to live up to. What ideas: that every person is important–no
matter how they look, or how much money they have, whether they
move around the world on their own two feet or use a walker or a
wheel chair; whether their skin looks like my color or it looks like your
color, no matter what, we promise to act as if every person is
important.
We believe people have a right to their own opinion about
everything–about whether there’s a God or a Goddess or no particular
thing at all. We believe that people’s ideas about the holy can change,
and that they ought to be able to change their minds if they want to.
We believe the whole world and everything in it is really connected,
deep down, where we can’t even see it all, and so we depend on
everything around us for the life that we have, and everything around
us depends on us for the life it has.
In the old days–God made promises to people and people made
promises to God and they were hard to keep and often cruel. But God
changed, as God often does, and thought of a new way to be in
relationship with us: these words in the Tanakh talk about it: “But such
is the covenant I will make with the House of Israel after these days–
declares the LORD: I will put My Teaching into their inmost being and
inscribe it upon their hearts. Then I will be their God, and they shall be
My people.” No longer will they need to teach one another and say to
one another, “Heed the LORD”; for all of them, from the least of them to
the greatest, shall heed Me–declares the LORD.1
James Luther Adams speaks of these promises in terms that a
religious liberal can understand, and he wrote this essay in the context
of what he saw as a changing world. No longer were we struggling in a
world of simple domination, with rulers and subjects, with individual
tyrants opposing a specific regime. No–Adams was a prescient leader
who understood that the next great struggle of our time would be
against systems, against systems that seduced us into believing that we
are less than human, systems that make us just another product,
systems that persuade us to work and to live against our own best
interests. He put it this way, “A major question today in a world of
multinational corporations is how to achieve a separation of powers
and consent of the governed, a self-governing society in the midst of
corporate structures that are rapidly becoming a new cage.”
Adams knew that we liberal religious people had a role in creating
that separation of powers, we have a role in maintaining what is most
human about us–our capacity to make choices, our ability to make
promises and our willingness to keep those promises.
We of liberal faith do not so much place holy teachings into each
other’s hearts as we uncover them, reveal them to one another in the
light of each sacred hour. Our promises to one another place us in right
relationship, connect us to the covenant of being, no matter the words
we use to describe it. Convenants are always mutual–I promise you
and you promise me.
There is a part of the covenant that we forget–the forever part.
It’s easy to see why–what could be forever in this transient,
throwaway consumer world, where we shop for churches the way we
shop for clothes or food or Ipads? But covenants are meant to be
forever. I didn’t say they were meant never to be broken, because that
is beyond human capacity. We make and break promises all the time,
sometimes accidently, sometimes on purpose. But to be in covenant
means that you never stop trying; means you are always there; means
that whether times are good or bad you are there, covenant means
that together, we hang on to the world as it spins around, we don’t let
the spin get us down, things are moving fast but if we hold on tight, we
can last and we do last, we do.
The covenantal religious community never leaves us, even if we
leave it. It is a community of freedom–we cannot threaten you to stay,
or force you to be part of it. It is not perfect, because we are not
perfect. It is not always pretty because we are not always pretty. It
does not always behave well, because heaven knows we do not. But it
is constant, because, like Adams says, it is not ruled by law, but by love.
This past few months have been among the hardest and saddest
years of my life. Perhaps the world has been like that for you, too. My
son is ill and struggling. Getting better all the time, but still with a long
way to go, and I miss him. One of my best and dearest friends in all the
world is actively dying right now. She cannot move, and can barely
speak, and all the times we spent laughing and ministering and
campaigning and hanging out are only memories for us now. Some of
you have lost your jobs and are piecing your lives together. Some of
you have been deathly ill and are still recovering. Some of you have
lived for months with the dull ache of a broken heart, and some of you
are weighed down with other unspoken sorrows.
But we are still here, aren’t we, in this sacred space of stone and
marble, along with other people here whose lives are filled with
unspeakable joy right now, who have found their way out of the
shadows and into the light for today, and still others who are
somewhere in between, along with some whose days are dwindling
down to a precious few and others whose lives are only just beginning,
and it doesn’t really matter where we are on this road when you are in
covenant. It doesn’t matter, what matters most about covenant is that,
no matter what is happening, we don’t have to go through any of it
alone. This covenant of love and freedom is here for us if we choose to
embrace it. If we choose to participate, if we remember that the
church makes us promises and we make promises to it, we can be part
of the great gifts of free religious community. We don’t have to go
through any of it without love, without care, without grace. This is the
true meaning of covenant in our church and in churches like ours. It
means that nothing and no one, no circumstance and no situation,
trumps the active, living love we have for one another, the love that
grows between us if we allow it.
Which brings us to the piece of paper you have in your hand.
Covenants, promises are always a two way street. This church, this free
religious community is an embodied promise of a spiritual home for
you. On your piece of paper, we want to ask you to write a message to
yourself–what promise do I most want to make to my religious
community? This promise is between you and the holy, not for us, so
write your hearts desire and place it in the envelope. And while you
write, I will pray.

Standard Podcast [ 14:13 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download