Sermons

Preacher: Rev. Dr. Duncan Newcomer

As our days here dwindle down to a precious few, I continue to want to give you my best shot because I want you to have your best shot. What has evolved between us is the theme of the value of religious life, something I know some of you have doubts about, saying: why not just have a fellowship of faith; why have a religion, much less a God and God-language?

If you scroll back through your web site archive of my sermons here, that Kent Price has so faithfully maintained, my persistent insistence is that this is a religious institution and it has a crucial role to play in your life, the community, and in the lives of future generations. I have offered that religious questions and answers will be the vocabulary of the future as science becomes more cosmological, psychology becomes more soulful, and the resolution between our national communities ever-more critical.

So religion, God, and the future are at stake in the fate of this church, this church and its cousins and its sisters and its nephews and its aunts.

You never know what contribution you will make to the lives of people here– as has been done for people in the past here. I keep coming across references to people and events that feature Castine, Maine. For example, one of Abraham Lincoln’s closest friends during his presidency was Noah Brooks, the journalist, who became a really trusted and significant figure in Lincoln’s life and presidency. Noah Brooks, I have just read, was from Castine. And I guess you already know about the very significant revolutionary war events that happened here. In a group in Belfast we’ve just been studying the catastrophic Penobscot Expedition that took place out there in the bay and on these hills. I also look forward to more of the history book that Lynn Parsons, its author, gave me when I first came.

So history is at stake here and that religion is crucial to the fates of history is because religion is one of the two safe havens for what we value most: personal life.

Personal life is the axis of all life as we value it. The idea of personal life is the fulcrum that moves our world. The status of the human person, that value of the self in the world has become—through the convergence of political philosophy and religious theology–the point and the reason for life and all that we value.

Politically the Enlightenment ideas of equality and the worth of the individual–ideas so basic to the Unitarian vision–have triumphed. All competing political ideas, ideas that did not include the sanctity of the individual have failed. We judge the remaining political agendas by how well they sponsor our belief in the worth of human life. The fight with violent Islamic fundamentalism, all fundamentalisms in fact, is because of the failure to value individual human life. Drugged teenage-girl suicide bombers is reason enough to reject such ideologies. Enlightened reason—especially as it includes the commonwealth– will win the day, and its cohort is enlightened religion. Why? Because even more than political ideas, it is religious ideas, spiritual realities, that establish the value and the meaning of individual human life, as well as how we relate to each other in community. The Golden Rule—to treat your neighbor as yourself—is not only good politics, it is a practical psychology, and it is a spiritually dynamic force. What makes the Golden Rule real are the stories and the scriptures of various world religions. The Golden Rule becomes a motivating idea, for example, in the parable of the Good Samaritan. It is more than just a refrigerator-door affirmation “Be Happy!” or ”Seize the Day!” Religious scriptures give heart and soul to good ideas and to transcendent spiritual forces.

So through the convergence of political ideas and religious dynamics the life of the individual person has become the measure of life itself. Whether we work toward saving the planet from climate change or support the rights of mothers and the rights of infants, we are all standing on the ground of the individual human life’s worth.

By the way the other great safe haven for human life is Romantic Love. Along with my professional practice as a spiritual formation director I do workshops on romantic love. It is the yellow canary in the coal mines of civilization. If that precious little yellow bird of romantic love dies in the toxic fumes of our civilization then we are doomed. So you see I not only believe in religion, I believe in romantic love.

But it is church relationships and religious life I turn to here. My view of church life over my 20 years of ministering in six different churches is that human community and individual personal life is what is a stake in church life. It is not theology and it is not even social ethics that draws people into church bodies. It is the deep desire to be able to be personal, to be seen as a person, a person of value, and to be able to care about other people, other persons of value.

Now I have seen people in very personal situations, as you can imagine, all my life, as a teacher and as a therapist. But as minister I have my own scrapbook of persons. Each church is really like novel. In some ways a church community is like a 19th century English novel. Maybe a Russian but there is not usually so much sex and alcohol as in the Russian. So I want to share that scrapbook of personal life with you as testimony to the deep value you hold in your hands as the people of a religious place.

(The second thing I want to say will happen in the sermon in two weeks, the June 5th sermon. In it I will share with you the ways personal relationships formed the spiritual life of Abraham Lincoln, his life with children, with women, men, and with God.)

I found, as you would expect, but I was surprised, that to think, write, and think to speak, of these churches and their relationships was painful and difficult for me, as well as rewarding. Hopefully it’s been a healing process for me and can be a worthy guiding process for you all. Church relationships have all the pain and promise of all personal relationships, only the expectations are higher and so the real trauma can be deeper, at least deeper than anything but love, marriage, and family. Certainly these are not hero stories meant to make you feel the guilt of not being able to achieve the ideal. Hero stories are often not so good for sermons for just that guilt-inducing result.

So several novels on the personal life in churches: Real stories with enough disguise to make them discrete, but the characters in these stories are entirely factual and any resemblance to anyone living or dead is surely intended.

The River Village church near Haddam. Never more than 100 members. Its twin wooden steeples had been the Methodist church up on the hill. Sometime in the 19th century teams of oxen rolled it down on big logs to be nearer the river and to become a Congregational church. Beautiful stained glass windows and a circle blue Rose Window in the rear. The little church’s claim to fame was that it housed the parts of one of five remaining hand-made pipe organs from Boston in the 1820’s. One of the others is housed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The 30-40 members of the church rallied around a five-year project of restoring this antique musical gem. They consulted experts. They sold pies and cakes, and over the years they made it happen, put it back together It had a wonderful wooden-and-pipe sound, hard to describe, except to say it was authentic and antique. The Metropolitan one has a CD you can get. Professional organists from around the country would come just to play it or give us a concert. We had a local music teacher who took it over and learned to make it sound.

There was an old woman who sat in the back of the church each Sunday, quite alone. Someone would help her in and out. She lived across the street. As a little girl she had been the one who pumped the air pump to make that organ work when it had been in tack. She was pretty old. The organ was like a huge wooden box, the size of those early computers. It was housed in the center of the altar area and its golden pipes gleamed. You could walk around the beautiful wooden box and look in at the moving parts—like a big old clock. There you could see where Doris had sat as a little girl and pumped the air with her legs. When Doris died the local volunteer fire men, several of whom sat in church somewhat near her for years, took her out the upstairs window by ladder, the stairs too step in her old house. She hadn’t really died however so I often visited her in her nursing home where she lived with her sister who had been a model in New York in the 1920’s and had a fashion photo of herself on her dresser.

Doris was but one person you got to know in that church.

As a church community they could not get beyond being a family tribal community to become an open inviting church. More club house, little mission. The presence of something holy and other was missing. But their fierce loyalty to each other was witness to the power of church life to be a place for personal relations, with all the better and the worser angels of our nature.

On Groton Heights this next church stood three hundred years old, all made of field stones brought in by farmers who lived along the harbor and the river. Not unlike the Castine community they had been the scene of a major British victory in the Revolutionary War. Benedict Arnold burning down New London and British soldiers taking the Heights. Every single man from the church save one elderly deacon died in the Battle of Groton Heights.

Built by field stones to replicate an English Chapel the church also had a real Tiffany Window of great yellow and brown tints.

When I took the church they were in the throes of the final legal settlement of the former minister’s long history of sexual abuse of boys and men in the church. This is the most difficult thing a church community can endure. They had struggled with it for five years when I got there. And now there was the trial, and were they going to support the young boy who blew the whistle on the male minster? I was able to join them to do what they most wanted to do. They told the church Conference they would rather close down as a church and lose all their money than to betray this boy. Relationships can mean that much in a church. And so the boy got a quarter of a million dollars because we would not support the insurance company’s defense, and so they had to pay. It was my finest hour I can say.

We also endured the attacks of 9/11 in that church and had worship services where the American Flag stood in the door way. I wouldn’t let them put in on the altar. The US Navy’s nuclear submarines were stationed down the hill in New London Harbor and they went out that night. I remember staring at the blue stained-glass window in one corner of the sanctuary of George Washington knelling in prayer at Valley Forge, and wondering what the country had come to. The history, the presence, of that church defined our experience of that time.

Earlier one family had lost its father and so the family gave money to the church for a new kitchen. We decided to have noon dinners once a month for people to bring friends to church. They called it Second Sunday. It became a popular Sunday of each month. Churches can be very creative in relationship building projects.

My hometown church in Middlesex County Connecticut had really poor relationships when I became their interim. Next to sexual abuse the forced removal of a minister is the most traumatic event in a church community. I had lived in this Connecticut Valley town for years but had never attended the local UCC church as I heard the minister’s sermons were so bad. Finally the folks in the church came to feel that way too, and although the man had done a good and faithful job in many ways they just could not wait another few years for him to retire. So the forces for change and the forces for loyalty fought on. The church divided. The minister left. People did not trust each other. Some people would not come back. Nothing important could ever be talked about within the church because of the fear, bitterness, anxiety and mistrust. This, of course, happens more than not in churches all the time. But there are ways to mend, heal, grow and move ahead. Over two years these folks did do that. They stopped talking about each other in the Parking Lot. They recited a pledge before meetings to be honest and civil. They made plans together. They even went through a process of voting whether or not to have the church steeple be a cell phone tower. They were amazed at themselves being able to talk and vote about such a controversial issue. Two years of worship and sermons and prayer and Bible reading etc. really helped create a new culture. So the value of a long lasting church community prevailed. The church has not grown much. Churches like ours don’t. But it did not fail nor fall apart, nor disappear at all. They just completed 10 years with the minister they found during my interim time. So good for them!

In New Haven, next to Yale, there is the illustrious UCC Church of the Redeemer. They were the most successful church I have ever seen at forming personal and community relationships. There is a book written about them called “Telling It Like It Is” by Lillian Daniel, the minister who turned this large old Flagship Church around. It was selling off parts of its building and thinking of closing its doors as the membership had shrunk so much. But this young former rock band singer and powerful writer and preacher, Lillian, turned them all around. While I served after her they raised $800,000 for building restoration. They also had devised together a four-part program for relationship building. They had affinity groups called Friends in Faith. Such as a kayak group, a sewing group, a bicycling group, flowers, books etc. Fun things for people who were church members to do together, just to get to know each other outside the pews. They also formed dyads, pairs of two, who would call each other up and meet for coffee in town. They were called One on One’s and they did this to meet to talk about their spiritual life for an hour. It deepened the flow of words between the 100 or so members, which grew to about 200. Out of some of those one on one talks came sermons with Testimonials. They decided to open all church meeting with a current personal sharing about where and how they each saw God or the Holy Spirit to be alive and well in the world, locally or worldwide. They often took half the time allotted for the meeting and it invariably meant that the meeting business part went fast smooth and successfully. I was amazed. Shocked really.

All this community relationship building also meant that there was a supportive group for radical social political action in New Haven, and the church teamed up with other churches in town to become a real political force for change at Yale and in New Haven. These people enjoyed each other and they sang together. The church paid four professional singers to join the choir and that helped lift the music program. It also touched the lives of the professional singers. Over time as many as a dozen young people and mid-career people decided to go into the ministry. The young man associate minister at First Parish in Brunswick is one of them. A middle aged Black woman, HR person for the phone company, became a minister and now leads the Connecticut program for criminal justice and against mass incarceration in the state.

Well that is four out of six “novels” that I could write about relationships in church, spiritual communities that are communities necessary to the personal lives and the quality of community life in the places they exist. If we had more time I would take you to Washington, D.C., on the Potomac River, and then to Owensboro in western Kentucky, on the Ohio River, the home town of great barbeque and the blue grass singer Bill Monroe, to the German American Zion UCC church. Maybe all churches need to be near rivers or bodies of water.

All of the institutions in our country, schools, government, media, medicine, are going through harsh times of difficult change. The church is no different. But it is different in terms of the zone of human relationships it addresses, the inner life of people, our emotional and soulful life, and the ferment for social change and ethical living, decent community. All of these are necessary for our lives to work and for our democracy to work. The need for these binding blessings will only grow as our psychological challenges and social crises only loom larger. Bless be these ties that bind.

So Be It!