MARCH MADNESS
Or, the Way of Engaged Spirituality

A Sermon by James Ishmael Ford

3 March 2002

If you’re a visitor today, you’ve probably chosen a very good time to come. This is our official annual operational pledge drive kick-off Sunday. I know, I know, you might wonder how I can connect two such sentences, "a good time to visit" and "pledge drive Sunday?" In fact, I’m sure one or two of our old timers are even thinking, "James, that sermon title March Madness was misleading. This is the annual sermon I check for in advance in order to miss."

Well, don’t worry. I’m not going to be delivering one of those traditional fundraisers with titles like "Sermon on the Amount." Not that those don’t have a place, you understand. The tendency on the part of some to separate "good spiritual" from "bad material" (here read, raising money) in fact has no place in a spirituality like Unitarian Universalism, with its commitment to bringing the whole of life together, to being real. So talking about money here is totally appropriate.

That said, I’m not going to, at least not in any significant way. Rather I want to spend this special time where the thought of financial commitment simply hangs in the air, and instead speak of what it is that we’re supporting. I want to devote this time to speaking of the First Unitarian Society in Newton; where and what it is, where and what we are, and where it is we might be heading in the next few years or decades.

So, let’s start with some reflection on mission. Mission statements have become the common currency of institutions. When done well, they become a touchstone, allowing us to measure and review and hopefully to correct for drift. The problem with mission statements is that they’re very nearly always like that horse designed by a committee, coming out a camel. Most mission statements tend to be somewhat cumbersome, with more subordinate clauses and dangling wish lists than lumps and humps on that proverbial camel.

So often, being the product of committees, our official mission statements are less true descriptions of what it is we’re about, and instead more like laundry lists of what we think we should be. But, it doesn’t have to be that way. When a mission statement is distilled, when it is reduced to a brief sentence or possibly even two or three words, then we can have a description of mission, we can see what it is we are.

Not that such is necessarily a happy thing. I’ve told this story before. But, it can be quite useful, particularly in this context. Back in Arizona once, when shaking hands with people following the service a young woman approached me. She said she was doing her doctoral work in religion over at Arizona State, I forget in what field, Shivite Hinduism in the fifteenth century, or some such. Anyway, she said she was embarrassed that she wasn’t familiar with Unitarian Universalism. But, she figured out of the last hour she had spent with us that we were derived at some point from Calvinism.

I think I turned several shades of red. She did in fact put her finger on one aspect of who we are. She noted the forms of our program, and while the content had shifted quite a bit, we were indeed using the basic structures of Protestantism. And more specifically, even though I found myself feeling somewhat uncomfortable at that moment in my Geneva gown, the traditional preaching garb of Unitarian ministers, it is in fact derived from our Calvinist origins.

Rather like that old story about the guy walking in downtown Chicago in the thirties, when he got caught up at the edge of a labor dispute turned riot. A policeman started beating him with a club. Holding his hands over his head he protested. "Stop! Stop! I’m an anti-communist." In response to which the cop gave another swipe with his nightstick, declaring, "I don’t care what kind of communist you are!"

Something we often forget in our a-historical culture, both as Americans and as devotees of liberal religion, is that much of Unitarianism, and because of that of Unitarian Universalism, is a reaction to the extreme statements of our Calvinist ancestors. For the most part we’ve rejected Calvin’s answers, but to this day we live by his questions. What is the nature of humanity? And what is our fate in this cosmos?

Calvin opted for utter depravity, and dual predestination. We take those same questions, and somewhat hesitantly declare for some essential goodness in the human condition, and also somewhat hesitantly for freewill in our choices. In that sense we’re the anti-Calvinists. But to this day we still share the forms of our liturgy, the trappings of our ancestors, and the questions of the European Reformation and Enlightenment.

So, knowing that we have unexamined aspects to who and what we are, but most importantly observing how it is we act, what mission might we be able to discern among us? I’ve now served here for a year and a half. I spent a year prior to that learning everything I could about this community. And out of all this I think I know what the mission of this Society is, whatever our formal statements might be.

Ours is a mission of engaged spirituality. Our mission is engaged spirituality. Let me unpack that. First that word "engaged." Here we see the leading aspects of who we are. We live fully in this world. Our concerns with the next life, or even whether there is a next life, are at best secondary to our concerns with how we live life here and now. Ours is a way of ethics, framed in that old line "salvation by character."

We are concerned with the real world. We have a usually undefined, but nonetheless clear understanding of social engagement predicated upon our understanding of relatedness. Broadly speaking, this sense of relatedness leads us to want opportunity for everyone, and a safety net for those who don’t succeed. And we act upon these social principles.

As almost everyone here knows one of our founders, that is founders of this specific congregation, the First Unitarian Society in Newton, was Horace Mann, congressman, social activist and founder of the first public school in our nation. From the beginning our community has been social engaged. We were a hotbed of abolition in the years before the Civil War. Since that time we’ve given disproportionately of ourselves to civic life, to education and medicine and the law. The typical member of FUSN is probably a schoolteacher. If not, she is a social worker. We live and work in the real world.

Typical of us, the second offerings we collect about nine times a year and which average about fourteen hundred dollars, are given to the last penny to those efforts of care and justice which we name at the collection. We give our time and our money to works of mercy, to helping the poorest among us, and also to those projects that might shift our larger culture to being a little more concerned with mercy and compassion. Here when I say we, I mean you and you and you and you.

After Religious Education, our largest committee is Social Justice. Unlike many other congregations, ours is devoted to a healthy dialogue and a harmonious balance between those works of mercy and the aspiration to justice. This is true even to the point that while the large majority of us are politically left of center, I constantly hear from among us questions like how we can learn from the wisdom of our more conservative members. We look to the voices of descent for wisdom.

Which itself speaks to a core theological principle that we seem easily able to manifest, which is uncertainty. We reject certainty as a religious value. We know we don’t know. We have profound intuitions, and we act upon them. But even as we act, as a spiritual principle, we hesitate. So, I spoke of those principles of essential goodness and free will. Even principles we embrace, like goodness and free will, we hold hesitantly, knowing there are human experiences that challenge them. So, we are engaged, we question, we challenge, even our own thoughts and aspirations, because we aspire to being real, to being authentic.

And that brings me to spiritual. What is it about this society that raises it from simply being a gathering of do-gooders? Why do we commonly call ourselves a church? And why, even for those who twitch at the word church, we still see ourselves as a spiritual community? Most of you have heard me use that simple definition for spiritual, deriving my meaning from the etymology of the word in breath, and saying spiritual is that which gives us life. For humans that which is life giving, is finding a vital sense of meaning, of purpose, of direction.

Here, activist and rational, deeply concerned with the real, we also engage the questions of meaning and hope. When we speak of salvation by character, it suggests we are deeply concerned with how we act, what it is we do. But at the very same time, it suggests that all this engagement has to do with salvation, with salve, with healing. Our gathering is about healing. We here are about healing the wounds of our own being, and the wounds of the world itself.

If you count our Small Group Ministries, gatherings of seven or eight or so to share conversation on issues of deep meaning, you find a unique Unitarian Universalist spiritual practice. Here we take our propensity to talk, and force ourselves to listen. At that moment of listening, of uncertainty, of openness, the possibility of harmonious action arises in an astonishing alchemy of the heart. As we listen, as we achieve awareness, we discover an authentic spiritual way.

But, of course, being who we are, one thing is not going to be the only thing for us. So, we also have the Zen meditation group. We also have the Insight meditation group. Soon we will be adding the Dzogchen meditation group. We weekly observe a healing activity. Each of these things are practices of presence, disciplines of paying attention, ways of finding awareness.

All together two hundred adults, members and friends of our Society, are engaged in one of these spiritual practices or another, all activities directly sponsored by FUSN. That’s just shy of half our adult membership engaged in practices of awareness. Here we bring together our deepest aspirations, our commitment to action, and our commitment to inward looking, in order to create a community of spiritual engagement.

The most visible aspect of this is our public worship. Now we’re Unitarian Universalists, so we need to define everything, and make sure it is what we really mean. So, let’s quickly consider worship. On the one hand it can speak to an object of worship, as in a deity. Most of us in this room are theists, but a substantial number among us are not. So, what, in our mixed crowd can worship mean?

I think as we look at what it is we’re doing together on a Sunday like this one, it becomes apparent. We gather to sing, to laugh, to mourn, to look to the deeper things of our lives. Within our gathering we discover opportunities for involvement, and we find the silent companionship of those with whom we join. Together we begin to unfold what is holy, what is good. And that, I believe, is our worship.

Then there is our Religious Education program. As I mentioned before, it is the largest thing we do together. More than half of our membership is involved in our programming for children and youth. In fact we now have the second largest religious education program in our district. With two hundred and sixty children and youth, our program is bursting at the seams. If you count in the adult programming, almost all of us are involved in a commitment to life-span learning.

This is another aspect of our spirituality, of who we are in this particular religious Society. We stretch and learn, we never, or at least at our best never rest on our laurels. We constantly try. We constantly strive. We are a restless people. We are always in process. And because of that, while it is hard to put a finger on who or what we are at any given moment, what we can see is how we’re always getting wiser and deeper and more engaged.

We are a mixed community, spanning the human lifetime. I think it is wonderful that we have people in their seventies and eighties, and people who come into this great hall with babies in their arms. We have infants and children and youth, we have young adults, people of middle years, and every category of elder. We are not as racially integrated, as we want. But we are aggressively welcoming to gay and lesbian folk. And we are welcoming to a wide variety of philosophical and theological perspectives.

And, oh my, we are engaged.

So here we are. The institution of the First Unitarian Society is about fostering that mission of engaged spirituality. So, where are we going? What might an engaged spirituality look like over the next few decades of the twenty-first century, such a troubled time, such a hard time?

I see a beacon of light in these hard times. I see the birthing of possibility taking place right here, among us. I see paths to depth, and ways to live, all manifesting through the leadership of you and you and you and you. I see our liberal religious movement, and specifically our First Unitarian Society in Newton, as beacons of possibility in troubled times. I see us doing the good work, seeking wisdom and manifesting it with our own hands. I see us birthing hope into the world.

And in this time of March Madness, of our annual operational pledge drive, I celebrate that mission. I thank you for supporting our way of engaged spirituality. And I hope you will continue to give of yourselves to this wondrous cause, to this glorious mission. The spiritually engaged, that is you, truly are the best hope for this poor planet. So, thank you.

Thank you.

Amen.