SERMON: "A Genuine Welcome"

Rev. Paul Beedle

September 23, 2007

READING: from “The Benefit of Doubt” by John Patrick Shanley

There are two predominant ways of dealing in this country. There is the culture of doubt, and there is the culture of dogma. Both are remedies to the problem of choice. ... “Should we stay in Iraq or should we get out?” It's an irritating question because ... it is not human. It appears to be direct and clear, but it leaps over everything important that needs to be discussed and understood. It's dogma framed as choice. So I have a suggestion. Don't fall for it. Responsible, thinking people do not lead a yes-or-no existence. Responsible, thinking people do not have to reduce complicated subjects down to “for” or “against.” ...

There is a tendency in our time and perhaps throughout time to simplify. We all want it simple. We want to know what to do. A great communicator is one who can break it down for you – “Just give me the bottom line.” “Cut to the chase.” Well, life and morality and governance, adequate citizenship, is not about “the chase.” Just as having a spiritual life is not about making up your mind once and for all. True spirituality is present, it's alive and observant.

Doubt is not paralysis. Certainty is. Doubt keeps the doors and windows open. Belief is one room with no way out. Do not let others impose a polarity of response on you. You need not live a reactive life. Don't look to have life explained to you, presented to you. Live the life that emanates from your interior greatness. Be an overwhelming bounty of impressions, ideas, conflicting theories, and let the propellant behind all this be generosity.

SERMON:

The Universalist Unitarian Church of Riverside, California, sits on a corner lot right downtown. On the corner is a red granite sign, inscribed with the name of the church and the legend, “A Genuine Welcome Extended To All.” The woman who gave the money for that sign, in memory of her husband, was also the church historian. That legend, “A Genuine Welcome Extended To All,” had appeared historically on the church's orders of service and other literature. What more appropriate motto for a Universalist church? If, as Hosea Ballou (one of the founders and builders of Universalism in America) put it, “on the last day the last sinner will be dragged, kicking and cursing, into heaven,” then certainly all who came through the doors of a Universalist church ought to receive a genuine welcome. But do they?

To live a faith grounded in dialogue and tolerance and lifelong learning, it is a great challenge to hold oneself open, particularly if one feels in need to be secure in oneself. It is a great challenge to be vulnerable to another, to be open to being changed, to adopt the idea that it is always one's own turn to change and not the other person's turn, when one perhaps is not entirely sure what one would be changing from. One of the facts of spiritual life is that we grow and develop our spirituality and our faith our whole lives long, and we have to develop and reach someplace solid, we have to have “a there there” inside ourselves, before it can be comfortable for us to let go and become fluid and be changed again. Spiritual growth is like that: we're fluid, and then we're firm, and then we open up and are fluid again, and we reconfigure and firm up in a new way, and on it goes. That's how we adapt in healthy ways to our own physical and psychological development, as well as to whatever life hands us. We can't hold on to doubt forever, keeping the doors and windows open in disregard for the weather of our emotional and spiritual lives; and we can't hold one set of beliefs forever, shutting ourselves in one room with no way out. The freezing and thawing dynamic of belief and doubt is in our nature, and it's in the nature of good spiritual health.

And while it's always a good idea to be as authentic as we can be, it's also a good idea to be considerate and appropriate. We often speak of this as being polite, but there's more at stake than socially conventional behavior. At least, there is here on Sunday morning. Folks visit a church because they want something that's important to them – comfort in a crisis, something to fill an empty place in their soul, something to give their children to answer their spiritual and religious questions. And when they visit us – after we've advertised that here there is “room for different beliefs: yours” – they're looking for evidence of a genuine welcome for them, as they are and as they believe or doubt right now, today. They're looking for evidence not only in how we welcome them, but in how we treat each other and how we show regard for spiritual and religious matters. It's not only the language and liturgy of the service that impresses them, or the topics addressed, it's the way the gathered community holds the space and itself. Can they feel under their feet the bedrock of dialogue and tolerance upon which our Unitarian faith is built? Can they see our Universalist heritage, that love is the doctrine of this church – can they see us living as love demands?

I had an interesting conversation with my colleagues when we met for lunch on Wednesday, as we do once a month. Mark and Becky Edmiston-Lange have been reading about evolutionary psychology, which is very complex, but one part of it is the idea that our brains are built to create narratives. I could say to create stories or to tell stories, but we all have ideas and feelings associated with telling stories, and what I want to focus in on is narrative as a form of thought. Our brains want to construct narratives to make sense of our experience. It's a way of organizing information. And so in evolutionary psychology they look at everything from children's behavior on the playground to sophisticated forms of literature to try to see the workings of evolution and adaptive behavior in the narratives our minds work out spontaneously (as on the playground) or in very intentional ways (as in art).

Well, what we fell to talking about was the way we create narratives about our individual spiritual lives and our life together in congregations, and how different people regard those narratives. Some folks are comfortable saying, “that's the story I (or we) tell,” and other folks want to say “that's the truth!” And the difference between those positions describes how open we are to seeing our experience in a new light, or accepting another's interpretation of a shared experience. We might be more or less open to different perspectives depending upon how much is at stake for us, how invested we are in our own view. And it also can have to do with where we are on our faith journey. That's another kind of diversity that we sometimes forget about.

You might have heard of a book called Stages of Faith, by James Fowler. Fowler described six ways of holding our spirituality and our religious ideas that he saw as developmental stages, and related to stages recognized in developmental psychology. He talked about children's faith having an early stage that is imaginative and imitative, fantasy-filled and fluid, a non-logical understanding of religion and faith that is succeeded by a literal, rule-filled grasp of faith. The shift happens after the child develops what psychologists call concrete operations; when that new ability kicks in, narrative becomes a key way their minds make experience cohere. When the child's world expands significantly beyond the family, the next stage comes: what Fowler calls “conventional faith.” Contradictions between different narratives that the child had held comfortably in the family setting need to be reconciled in some authoritative way so that the child can move between a number of settings – family, school, and later on work, peer groups, the neighborhood, the media, church, and so on – without losing a sense of continuity and security. Faith supplies a sense of identity and “what I am.” Fowler said many adults reach this stage and stay there.

Those who go on reach what Fowler calls an “individuative” or “reflective” faith. When valued sources of authority conflict, one has to try to assess the authorities and judge for oneself who's right about what; even when one isn't troubled by disagreements among the authorities one relies upon, critical reflection on how one comes to form beliefs and how they change with experience can spur a person beyond conventional faith. Fowler associates this “reflective” faith with young adulthood and the sense of self-actualization and self-fulfillment that young adults yearn for and usually experience as they begin their careers. But he says this self-actualization may happen in one's work life while one's spiritual life remains conventional or conforming. If it happens in spiritual life, clear distinctions and abstract concepts to do with faith, spirituality and religion take center stage. When these distinctions and concepts become too small or too flat to account for or satisfy one's spiritual life, Fowler says one moves to a fifth stage, which he called “conjunctive” – it involves the yearning and pursuit of one's “deeper self” and some reclaiming and reworking of one's spiritual narrative: so it's a return to narrative, a building up after a time of breaking down. Fowler thought this was related to knowing “the sacrament of defeat” and “the reality of irrevocable commitments.” One reincorporates myth, symbols, paradox, and openness to “the strange truths of those who are `other.'” One develops a sense of the richness and meaning of one's own spiritual journey. The sixth and last stage Fowler describes transcends even this reintegrated stage. Those who reach it are universalizers who seem lucid and simple, intensely present to life, and subversive of the structures and narratives others use to define themselves individually and as groups. He says such folks are rare – perhaps it's a high mountain to climb, or perhaps they just get killed off by those holding so tenaciously to a particular defining narrative.

The thing is, we have all this diversity in some measure in every congregation. We see this kind of diversity in our visitors. And whatever stage someone is in, what we should strive toward as the ministry of our congregation is to support that person where they are. Fowler's map of these six stages is in some respects too simple, and others have come along and modified it, trying to make it fit the evidence a little better. But the idea that we never stop growing and developing our whole lives, or at least that that's possible, does fit. And when we frame it in other ways – some people talk about different religions as different spiritual paths, but really they are ways of walking the one human spiritual path; or we look at it as a problem to solve, how to speak a religious language that satisfies both theists and atheists, but really those are just two different sets of concepts one can arrive at in Fowler's stage four, two ways of clarifying one's experience and knowing oneself, which is the common problem both theist and atheist are working on – when we frame this diversity in those (what I think are false) ways, we separate from one another instead of engaging in the dialogue and tolerance and curiosity which are the core and hope of our faith tradition. So we need to be careful that we don't obscure our commonalities and common yearnings with what we perceive as our radical differences but really are only incidental, different inflections or expressions of human spiritual development. When we speak of “working on your own spiritual growth” as an expectation of membership in the congregation, this is an important part of that. We must never forget that we are more alike than unalike.

We are who we are in relation to one another, and in relation to the values and virtues that we unite in studying and striving toward. Anyone who comes on Sunday – or any time – to visit us should see us engaged in the activity of reflecting upon and practicing and learning from each other what love demands. There's a story in the biblical book of Numbers in which Moses gathers 70 elders and brings them to the Tent of Meeting, in which Moses regularly communes with God. He stations them outside the tent, and he goes inside it and the spirit of God comes upon him, and then he goes out and puts the spirit of God on them, and they speak in ecstasy. Meanwhile, back at the camp, two men experienced the spirit of God upon them and they speak in ecstasy in the camp. And a youth in the camp comes running to Moses to ask him to stop them, that they're usurping his place as prophet. But Moses says, “Don't fret about it. I wish everybody was a prophet.” And they return to the camp. Which is to say that inspiration doesn't come only through designated people or places. You might get a better message in a committee meeting than you heard on Sunday morning. Or on a night out at the theatre. And if you do, share it. I think Moses went back to the camp to hear what those two men had experienced and to learn from them. If you care about inspiration, don't you keep looking for it wherever you are?

Another of our expectations for membership in this congregation is that folks come to worship on Sunday. Now maybe you, or someone you can think of who is not in the room with us now, come to worship and hear me talk about God or the Bible or something else that you in your heart of hearts regard as myth or idle fantasy, and you doubt that it does you much good to come to worship. Maybe you'd rather just come to the Adult Discussion Group and give worship a miss. And sometimes maybe that's just what you need to do. There are some folks who never come to worship or the Adult Discussion Group, but they're here at 9:00am for the Sunday Circle. If you don't know about Sunday Circle, it's an hour of silent meditation, shared reflection and discussion on the topic of the 11:15 worship service. That quieter, more reflective experience in a smaller group is all that a couple of folks come for on Sunday. They leave at 10:00am rather than stay for Adult Discussion. And that can be OK. But when you come for the whole Sunday experience, you expose yourself to more of the diversity and more of the inspiration that this congregation has to offer.

And the practice of coming to worship to develop not only tolerance but a capacity to listen respectfully and with compassion and curiosity to religious material that doesn't float your boat – to develop that attitude in worship helps us to have that attitude when meeting and welcoming and making room in our congregational home for newcomers. Did you ever have a friend who put an extra hanger in the coat closet just for you? or kept your favorite flavor of tea in their cabinet, even though they never drink it? That's the sort of effort I'm talking about. If you're an atheist, keep a little God in your cupboard. If you're a theist, keep some decaf or herbal spirituality in your house. Learn how to make it. You don't have to drink it, nor refrain from your favorite brew when company comes. But set a splendid table.

I hope that's what we do here on Sunday. A conversation got started in the last few weeks about aiming for thematic unity to the whole morning on Sunday – that the topics of worship and Adult Discussion Group and the children's program all relate and hang together each week or as often as possible. That's an exciting idea, and I think we ought to play with it, experiment with it a little at a time and explore the possibilities and what we need to do for each other to allow that sort of thing to arise fluidly and naturally from what we are striving toward and feel called to do in the different ministries and programs of our congregation. The key is to expand that conversation and keep it going, which is why I mention it now. It is part of our faith and heritage that we share the ministries of our congregation and all participate in order to keep them vital. That's why it's another expectation of membership to give time and service to our ministries as you're able.

I see this goal of creating thematic unity for the whole of Sunday morning as setting a splendid table in the way that our hospitality committee strives to do at coffee hour. All those goodies are brought by several different people, like at a potluck except it's not expected that you have to bring something in order to partake. Behind the scenes there's phone calls and e-mails, conversation and planning ahead, some fear and fretting, some creativity and fun, and a genuine desire to extend a genuine welcome and a pleasant experience and an attractive setting to all who come on Sunday. We can do that with our Sunday worship and classes and activities, too. Let's expand the conversation and keep it going so that together we can imagine and become committed to setting that splendid table.

Certainly all who came through our doors ought to receive a genuine welcome. But do they? Do they see us studying and striving to live as love demands? Do they find a splendid table set for them? Really set for them? Is the cupboard stocked with what nourishes them, and their hanger in the closet and their chair waiting? I don't think we need to agonize about how to make room for spiritual or theological diversity. I think we just have to be committed to making room for the whole human soul and the whole human spiritual journey in our beloved community and in our hearts. May we have joy in so doing. Amen.