Sermons

Preacher: Rev. Margaret A. Beckman

Readings:
Love is the spirit of this church,
and service is its law.
This is our great covenant:
To dwell together in peace,
To seek the truth in love,
And to help one another.
James Vila Blake
Selections from The Unitarian Universalist Pocket Guide, Edited by Rev. Peter Morales; Foreward by Melissa Harris-Perry. Boston: Skinner House Books, 2012.
If you join in fellowship with Unitarian Universalism, you can hold any opinion you want about the existence of a god and what to call that god. You can change your opinion over time. You can follow your conscience, your readings, your thoughts, and your desires on issues like the existence of an afterlife, the idea of sin, the value of prayer, or the authority of religious texts. . . . . Having set aside divisive doctrinal battles we seek a straightforward commitment to the fluid, open, collective work of seeking our truths together without assuming that we will all share the same truth. . . . Our faith is a practice of intellectual humility, reminding us of our own limitations. Our faith assures us that we are not alone and that we can be part of something greater than ourselves. . . . The journey is the joy. The companions are the comfort. The work is the faith.
Melissa Harris-Perry
Sermon

One Sunday morning many years ago now, a man approached me after the service. He was an older gentleman with white hair and a closely trimmed beard. He stood tall and looked down at me from under the navy blue with gold lettering ball cap he had placed back on his head. The cap indicated that he had served on a battleship in the United States Navy. I reached out to shake his hand and his face broke into a wide smile. This is what he said. “I have been wondering about returning to a church for a long time, but I didn’t think I could find a place where I could be comfortable and where I might fit in. I am an atheist and what you said this morning makes me think that I might be welcome here even though I have no faith in a god and can’t subscribe to any religious doctrine.” I asked him his name and then said, “Well, Don, I’m delighted you are here today and you are not only welcome here, but I’m pretty sure you’ll find people who share your commitment to ethical humanism and your suspicion of any form of theism. Although Don never in ten years stayed for a coffee hour, he did join the congregation, took on various leadership roles, and cherished our time of shared joys and sorrows. Like all of us, his life is complicated and he really appreciated the time to sit in quiet reflection and time to stand and sing (he maybe came to church because he loves to sing and every congregation love each other fiercely through all of life’s rewards and challenges. He belonged, and he knew it.

Belonging is not something that just comes to us as a result of breathing air and drinking water. Belonging is the sense that one is accepted, mabe even appreciated and loved. Sounds simple, but, as with so many things, it is not. Psychologists tell us that belonging is a basic human need. Folks prosper more when they have well-developed sources of belonging. We suffer when we lack the connections that come with belonging.

Remember Abraham Maslow from Psychology 101? He’s the guy with the still widely accpeted theory that human beings have a heirachy of needs, each of which needs to be satisified in order to live a fully deveoped and self-actualized life. Well, belonging is the second level of human needs – right after food, clothing, shelter and safety. Psychologists, Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary (1995), argue that the need to belong is a fundamental human need to form and maintain at least a minimum amount of lasting, positive, and significant interpersonal relationships. Satisfying this need requires (a) frequent, positive interactions with the same individuals, and (b) engaging in these interactions within a framework of long-term, stable care and concern.[1]

When we do not have a place where we belong; when we do not belong to a group or a people, we are lonely and our lives lack fullness. We are at risk for deeper negative consequences including alienation, long-term depression, and even in some cases suicide.

Our busy lives seem to conspire against belonging. Charles Eisenstein, author, public speaker and spiritual activist, writes about the many ways that our economy, technology, education and media erode our sense of belonging and contribute to an uneasy separation. We might easily mention things like our indoor lifestyles and individualistic pursuits through the many Apple and Android apps that keep us focused on a universe that is 3 by 5 inches in size. There is more. Our money-based economy, with its dependence on fees for services and electronic transactions, has replaced an older economy of interpersonal exchanges of time and labor characterized by giving and receiving among community members. Even our approach to medicine has rendered the interaction between a physician and a patient one of diagnosis and intervention rather than one of listening and taking into account to totality of a person’s life and circumstances.

Eisenstein calls this the Story of Separation – a story that increasingly defines us as separate souls in a universe of other. In a world of otherness, we long to recover our lost connections; to belong once more, he says, to the land, to the tribe, to the planet, and to the cosmos. People are longing to belong again, to be at home in the universe.[2]

We experience separation not just from our selves and other people. We are also separated from the natural world and even the world of the stars from where we came. So, here we are, in 2016 trying to figure out how to create, or re-create, deeply relational and satisfying belongingness. (It’s a word – I saw it on the Internet!)

What to do. Well, when we pay attention to our gnawing sense of separation as it arises in us, we can notice what is happening. Sometimes, we can even manage to pause the machine that drives our life away from each other and hit the reset button.

Coming together as we do each week as a faith community is an expression of our desire to be together; to belong to something bigger than any of us. It may be a time to pause and hit the set button. Our Unitarian Universalist faith does not ask us to leave our skepticism or our doubts at the door. It does not ask us to place our trust in supernatural beings doing supernatural things and it does not ask us to believe 21 impossible things before breakfast. It allows each of us to hold our own views about religion and religious ideas. It allows us to change or refine our views as our lives take us toward different truths and deeper ways of interacting with life itself. Here, we do not need to think alike to belong. We are free to follow our search for truth and meaning in the company of others who provide encouragement and support.

As Melissa Harris-Perry says:
Having set aside divisive doctrinal battles we seek a straightforward commitment to the fluid, open, collective work of seeking our truths together without assuming that we will all share the same truth. . . . Our faith is a practice of intellectual humility, reminding us of our own limitations. Our faith assures us that we are not alone and that we can be part of something greater than ourselves. . . . The journey is the joy. The companions are the comfort. The work is the faith.
Without doctrine or creed to be our unifying and identifying faith attributes, we may wonder what it is that holds us together. We are held together in voluntary relationship through covenant. We are held together by how we are with each other. Our behavior with each other matters more than our beliefs together. We come as we are – without pretense or pretext. Once here, we ask each other to be good and trustworthy spiritual companions. Then, we get to work.

We belong together and we belong to each other. We are kindred spirits interacting together with love and compassion. We don’t always get it right and there are times when the notion of belonging to each other seems beyond reach or possibly even our sanity. But we come back. We come back to each other because this is where we have found a true belonging; a belonging that connects or reconnects us with the whole of Life, with the Interdependent Web of Existence of which we are a part. We come back because we continue to carry with us the notion that here we have the best chance for being and becoming the people we have always aspired to be.

Covenants and affirmations, hold us together. Many of our UU congregations choose to adopt one of the affirmations from our gray hymnal. In these affirmations, we speak about who we are and then how we are.

Love is our spirit
Service is our prayer
We dwell in peace
We seek the truth
We help

Many congregations have crafted their own statement of vision, affirmation, and mission. Here are two of my favorites.
Arlington Street Church in Boston, Massachusetts- Gathered in love and service for justice and peace.

First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin, Texas – We gather in community to nourish souls, transform lives and do justice.

These are short sentences, but they tell us about how the members and friends of these two congregations are with each other and the world. It takes a lot of work and time; patience and perseverence to get the vision into 9 or 12 words that energize and enliven the lives of individuals and the congregation.

In our covenant here, we say how we will be together.
We covenant to support and sustain the spiritual, ethical, intellectual, and overall well being of our members. Covenant is our practice with one another.

As a practice, we admit that we have not yet perfected all of what we promise. We are, however, always engaged in doing our best. And we know that there will be times when we could be better. When that happens, we stop and make amends and make necessary adjustments. Then, we begin again, in love. Belonging isn’t about being perfect. It’s about being authentic and being engaged with others in love and service for justice and peace. And this practice is what we promise each other when we come together. It is what we offer to those who seek a place of spiritual exploration and belonging.

In this world of separation and alientation, we seek comfort and meaning. We want to know and be known. We want to experience something greater than the sum of our individual lives. We may call that something God or Love or Cosmic Energy or the Ground of Being or Creation, or the Big Bang or Star Dust. By whatever name or character, it comes to this: We Belong.

Come, whoever you are. Come just as you are. You are welcome here.

Blessed Be. Amen.

1 Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary (1995) argue that the need to belong is a fundamental human need to form and maintain at least a minimum amount of lasting, positive, and significant interpersonal relationships. Satisfying this need requires (a) frequent, positive interactions with the same individuals, and (b) engaging in these interactions within a framework of long-term, stable care and concern.

Despite the lure and excitement of changing romantic partners, the need for some stable caring interactions with a limited number of people is a greater imperative. Baumeister and Leary claim that human beings are “naturally driven toward establishing and sustaining belongingness.” Hence, “people should generally be at least as reluctant to break social bonds as they are eager to form them in the first place.” They further argue that in many cases, people are reluctant to dissolve even destructive relationships. The need to belong goes beyond the need for superficial social ties or sexual interactions; it is a need for meaningful, profound bonding. A sense of belongingness is crucial to our well-being.

2 Blog post on the Huffington Post by Charles Eisenstein. August 19, 2016.