Opening Words

Good morning.  Welcome to a brand new church year, and for many of you, welcome back!  And for those of you who are visiting, you couldn't have joined us at a more perfect time.

A quick logistical note, and then we'll move on.  If you've previously attended a service I've led, you will probably have noticed that the flow of our worship will be different from last year.  Your Orders of Service reflects this. 

Your Worship Committee and I have been collaborating in further developing, in further deepening, how we are together on Sunday mornings.  We have refined and also added some elements of worship.  You will also notice, as we go along, that our lay Worship Associates will be playing an increasingly more prominent role in our services.  And, for those of you who have enjoyed reading our sermons on the web, you will now have the added possibility of listening to those sermons.  Exciting things are underway! 

And amidst all that excitement, it's wonderful to be here today with you.  The past several weeks have been amazing as the staff and I have been preparing for this day.  The hallways of our beautiful building have been filled with almost a static electricity of excitement.  Many of you have expressed how much you've been looking forward to today, to being back in our larger circle of friends and family. 

And, here we are.

There is much I could, and will, say about the joy in my own heart, and about the many exciting prospects of this upcoming church year.  All in good time. 

For now, let us partake of, and let ourselves into, that enthusiastic energy that is among us today, let us enter into that joy, hearing the words of world renowned humanitarian, Patricia Cane.  She writes:

"We join with the Earth and with each other,

to bring new life to the land,

to recreate human community,

to provide justice and peace,

to [care for] our children, [and] to remember who we are...

We join together as many and diverse expressions of one loving mystery,

for the healing of the Earth and [for] the renewal of all Life."

                   From Life Prayers, edited by Elizabeth Roberts.

Let us join together, with one another, and with that beautiful mystery, that spirit of life, that spirit of love, that surrounds us all.  Come, let us worship.

WATER COMMUNION CEREMONY

As many of you know, I'm a firm believer that if we human beings engage in religious ritual we should be clear about the reason why, clear about what it symbolizes.  And even more so than just knowing that, I believe the most meaningful experiences of ritual occur when we are able to enter into that reason, enter into that symbolism, with our hearts and our spirits.

And so we have our annual start-of-the-church-year ritual, which we call a water communion.  Communion is an interesting concept.  Who or what are we communing with, and even more importantly why?  If you look up the definition of communion, or even an encyclopedia entry, the primary religious definition is Christian.  As a religious term, there is no ambiguity, the concept of communion is Christian.  It is a sacrament, a symbolic act of participating in the Last Supper by reenacting the sharing of bread and wine at that dinner.

On the Unitarian side of our family, there is a history of differences around the nature of communion.  One of our most famous ministers, Ralph Waldo Emerson, resigned from his first (and only) parish ministry in Boston because he refused, as a minister, to offer communion.  He thought that it was a hollow ritual, that people participated in it in a rote manner, devoid of deeper meaning.  The church and he could not agree, and so he resigned, never again returning to parish ministry.

We modern day Unitarian Universalists don't subscribe to the Christian understanding of communion.  We have taken a term that has deep religious resonance and redefined it in terms of our own theology and worldview. 

It's worth noting that this process of redefinition is something we Unitarian Universalists do not only with the word communion, but also with words like God, grace, salvation, karma, or dharma.  I, for one, use such words all the time, as poetry, as metaphor.  And in doing so, I use such terms in a redefined manner, never in any traditional sense of the word.  We do the same when we use the word 'communion' today.

Before the word was given religious significance by the Catholic church, its original meaning in Latin was to indicate 'a sharing' of something.  Today, we use the word 'communion' as a sharing that brings us into deeper relationship with one another.  Many of you have brought small amounts of water with you from places all over Florida, from even different parts of the world.  Wherever your water may be from, even if it is from the tap here at church, what you have represents a small piece of who you are; of places you have been, of connectedness.  We are each connected in some way to what we will be contributing.

As we begin our ritual, I invite you, in that spirit, to come to the front of the sanctuary, share your water with us, and share its significance to you -- very briefly, in no more than a sentence, if possible. 

It's fine if you did not bring water with you; I didn't.  I'm going to use the water of our church, the water of this building, as the part of myself that I'm sharing with the community.  So, if you did not bring water, please don't let that stop you. 

As others come forth, and we sit in the pews, I encourage you to listen.  There are many ways we can listen -- with grocery lists and to-do lists running through our heads, for example.  But, we can also listen with full presence.  What makes our communion holy and sacred is our being fully present to one another, lending our full energy and support.  As the water flows, we are fully and deeply accepting one another into our community.  It is with that intention and spirit that I encourage you to both share and listen.

I will start us off, and as the spirit moves you, please join us up front.

Sermon

I've been reflecting on how we Unitarian Universalists symbolize being together in community.  We start the church year with a communion of water, a communion that brings us all back together.  We then continue our symbolic communion every Sunday through the lighting of a flame, our chalice.  It's an elemental juxtaposition – water and fire.  Instead of water and fire why not use, I don't know, dirt?  Or leaves?  Or cupcakes?  I like that idea: we could have a Cupcake Communion!  Wouldn't that be fabulous?  And it would be convenient...as it is, I already look for excuses for you all to bring homemade cakes and cookies to church.  This would just make it official.

We start the church year with a communion of water.  As human beings, we are basically water.  While we see skin outside, inside our most basic element is water; it is, in fact, the majority of what we are.  We could easily be called 'water beings,' instead of 'human beings.'  So, in a way, by contributing water in our communion we are contributing something that we are.  Symbolically, we bring ourselves to the communion – we bring not only water, but water that we are in relationship with. 

Water is seamless.  As we contribute it, we flow into one another combining, melding, complementing one another to form a unified whole.  We are symbolically re-creating our church community, and, through this elemental symbolism, acknowledging that we are bringing our most basic humanity to this community.  It is an act of great care and trust.  I encourage you to view it as such.

The places where we can turn to, where we can bring our whole selves, exist but are hard to find.  In other parts of the planet human beings still live in tight-knit, inter-dependent community; we live in individualized and commercialized isolation.  One of the spiritual teachers I met this summer began telling me of his plans to create a small community of spiritually-oriented people, spiritual leaders, who would live in adjacent plots of land, working inter-dependently to support basically the creation of a small village or settlement.  He told me this with a gleam in his eye, not saying it, but clearly hoping to entice me.  And I found myself thinking about it.  What might it be like to get away from the madness that at times surrounds us?  What might it be like to be in a place where every single person contributes to the life of the community and is deeply valued?  And the icing on the cake: the possibility of being in deep community with other spiritual liberals.

Well, you all know me and my penchant for social and political activism.  I'm too much of the world, and wanting to change the world, to hide from it.  It wouldn't really make sense for me.  But what was telling was the fact that for a few minutes I really, deeply thought about it. 

Wow. 

I thought about running away from humanity, and it actually sounded idyllic.  What does it mean that so often we have to run away from our cities and towns – go to retreats and cabins, mountains and deserts, deep into the woods, or far into the ocean – in order to find peace?  Why is peace so elusive when you're living in a city?

As we all know, there are many reasons for this reality, and those reasons are deeply engrained in mainstream American culture.  Madness is a part of our culture; and, yes, so is a lot of really good stuff, but nonetheless, madness is a part of it.

We need this church, we need this community.  For within it we can find salvation – we can find a spirit of love, a shared sense of values, a sense of common purpose and support – that can save us from the inescapable craziness.  By reminding us of who we truly are, the best most loving human beings we are trying to be, this church, this community, is a source of salvation.  It is a source of hope.  It has been for me, and I know, for many of you here.

And, as much as we need this church, the world needs us.  We are not a self-satisfied or insular people.  Many churches are.  We're not one of them.  We live our values into the world, showing the world what it means to be a Unitarian Universalist. 

The chalice is a symbol that.  Among other things, it represents how we live our faith in the world.  The flaming chalice was the underground symbol of the Unitarian Service Committee in Europe, during World War II.  As Jewish people were smuggled out of Nazi controlled areas, safe-houses were marked by the presence of a visible burning chalice.  The chalice was also used as a wax imprint to seal communications between the Unitarians who were doing this work.  Those courageous actions of social justice created a symbol that now identifies our entire faith.    

In our Sunday services, we light a flame at the beginning of each worship service to mark the fact that the community has gathered to worship and pray.  But, as we know, the chalice is more than that.  It's the symbol we show the world, it's how we represent ourselves.  And in this instance we've haven't chosen water, we've chosen fire.  Fire is dynamic, it doesn't flow, it doesn't caress, like water.  It represents the active energy of combustion: heat and light that is pushed out into the world.  It is the fire of our commitment; the passion of our faith; and, hopefully, the passion it ignites in each of our souls.  It is the fire that demands that we speak out about injustice after injustice.  It is the fire that ensures we show up at rallies, that we lobby politicians, that we give our time and resources for the sake of environmental causes, for aiding the homeless, for working towards global peace.  If you haven't already felt the fire of this community, please stick around, you will. 

We bring our sense of community, our sense of commitment, with us, into this new church year.  We begin this year as one in which we can redefine and re-imagine our music program.  We have an identical opportunity with our religious education program.  These are two bedrock programs of any church, and during this year each of you has the opportunity to help define what those programs might look like for the next decade or more.  I have never been at a church, never even heard of a church, that has had the opportunity to re-vision both these programs in tandem.  The ability to dream wildly, to look for synergies, to bring on exciting and complementary new staff members is exciting. 

We are forming Search Committees for both the Music Director and Religious Education Director positions.  Those committees will do the visioning work, helping define what kind of programs we are dreaming of.  Those committees will then look for, interview, and eventually hire staff members who can get us there.  I have done search committee work and I can tell you it is exhilarating.  You have the opportunity to profoundly change and bring further dynamic energy to our church.  This work is, perhaps, the most significant that we will be doing this church year; it will certainly have a long-term impact.  If I've piqued your interest, please know that any church member can serve on either of these committees.  And, if you've been attending regularly for some time, and just haven't taken the plunge yet of joining the church, this might be a fantastic time to join.  Talk to me or Board President Dave Coale after today's service; I hope you'll join us in this ground-breaking work.

The waters of life, the fires of passion.  These are but symbols of who we are and who we strive to be.  Ultimately, it is each of us who must give life to those symbols.  We must embody them.  That is difficult work, but it is work none of us need do alone.  We have one another.  Welcome to what I know is going to be an incredible church year. 

Much love to each of you.