EXPECTATION

a sermon preached by the Rev Dr Tim W Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Palm Sunday April 1st, 2007

“To dwell together in peace, to seek knowledge in freedom, to serve humanity in friendship, to the end that all souls shall grow into harmony with the divine....” That all sounds relatively simple and straightforward, doesn’t it? A shared devotion to the principles of peace, freedom, and friendship grounded in the values of Love, Truth, and Service, and focused on the goal of creating more harmonious relationships between each and every one of us and all creation -- this is basically what you are signing up for when you sign the book to become a member of the First Religious Society in Carlisle. When you look at it in this light, although the task itself sounds relatively simple, the challenge it represents is truly profound. The good news is that we don’t have to accomplish it all in one sitting. In fact, just the opposite. One might easily devote their entire lifetime to this task, and still leave plenty more for others to do after they are gone.

Likewise, the physical act of joining a church like FRS is an easy one, but the spiritual decision to do so in the first place can often be quite life transforming, especially in this day and age, where there are so many other potential activities competing for our attention. Nowadays, the decision to join any church at all is hardly automatic; in fact, if anything, it almost qualifies as an “alternative lifestyle choice.”

Not so many years ago, Work, Home, Church and School were considered the four cornerstones of community life. But nowadays (statistically, at least), most Americans live at some distance from where we work, and spend an increasing portion of our time either in front of a screen or behind the wheel of a car. Rather than sitting down with our families around the kitchen table for a home cooked meal, we eat in restaurants or pre-packaged “convenience” food, or (worst of all) fast food passed to us through the windows of our SUVs as we rush from one place to another.

The number of recreational and entertainment opportunities available to us is staggering. And then, of course, there is always “shopping.” Church has become just another activity to be squeezed into an already crowded schedule of activities, rather than a Sabbath where we set aside time from the “Busy-ness” of our mundane, secular lives in order to contemplate and celebrate the spiritual and sacred dimensions of life itself.

Furthermore, the fact that church membership is increasingly an optional, voluntary lifestyle choice rather than a routine aspect of normal, everyday living has especially interesting ramifications for non-traditional faiths like Unitarian Universalism, whose congregations are organized around a Covenant rather than a Creed.

Most churches define membership according to Belief. There are a particular set of theological doctrines and dogmas which define the “true” faith (and differentiate it from all its competitors); and when you join that church or mosque or temple or synagogue, either through conversion from some other religion, or by baptism and confirmation, or perhaps simply by making a “profession of faith,” you are in effect declaring that you share those particular beliefs as part of the price of becoming a member of that particular faith community.

But Unitarian Universalists see things a little differently. Love is the Doctrine of this Church; our Creed is All Truth, and our Profession of Faith, Divine Living. Rather than asking individuals to subscribe to a Creed, we instead offer a Covenant: an agreed-upon set of obligations and responsibilities which bind us together in a relationship of “mutual trust and support.” The individual members of this “community of memory and hope” obviously may well share a great many beliefs, but it’s not the beliefs themselves which define the parameters and the boundaries of the community. Rather it is the Promises we make to one another (and to God) to pursue, faithfully, our shared Ideals of Love, Truth, and Service through our mutual commitment to the values of Peace, Freedom, and Friendship, that define us as a distinct religious community and faith tradition.

This subtle difference between Covenant and Creed can sometimes seem a little confusing to folks who don’t ordinarily have much occasion to think about these issues at any great length. It may well be, for example, that the first thing someone hears about the Unitarian Church is that Unitarians are so liberal it doesn’t really matter WHAT you believe. And that may even sound pretty good (or at least different and intriguing -- even if it does seem a little random for a “real” church), but then all of a sudden you start to hear all this talk about “obligation” and “responsibility” and “commitment,” and maybe you start to wonder “Just what the H-E-double toothpicks have I gotten myself into now?” So let me try to explain exactly what it is you join when you join a UU Church like FRS, and more importantly, what you should expect from your experience here.

A few months ago, just after the start of the New Year, I preached a brief series of sermons on the topics “Time,” “Talent,” and “Treasure,” and it might help to keep those categories in mind as you listen to what I’m about to say now.

Because the first thing you join when you become a member of FRS is a Congregation. A congregation is simply a group of people who have “congregated” together at a particular time and place for a particular purpose, and the only qualification for membership is showing up. In other words, it’s an investment of Time -- whether it’s just an hour a week (or maybe even every few weeks), or a considerably larger commitment. Not everything that happens at this church happens on a Sunday morning. There are all sorts of occasions when we congregate together to do God’s work in the world: to care for our neighbors and offer hospitality to strangers, or even just to have a little fun, and enjoy the pleasure of one another’s company. But before any of this can happen in your life, first you have to show up. You have to invest your Time.

The second thing that happens when you join a Unitarian Universalist Church is that you also become a member of the “Church Universal.” Our Puritan forebearers sometimes used to refer to the “Church Universal” as “the invisible church triumphant” -- that community of the faithful, both living and dead, which transcends the limitations of time and space and includes all authentic people of faith everywhere.

Of course, the Puritans would have also said that these “saints” were selected by an omnipotent and omniscient God before the beginning of time itself, and were thus were predestined for salvation regardless of any special piety or merit they may or may not have possessed; while Unitarian Universalists today would basically say the same thing, except that we believe that ultimately All Souls shall be harmoniously united with their Creator (insofar as we are capable of understanding what that means).

But the key concept here is one of Church as Ecclesia or the community of those who have been “called out” -- summoned by God to cultivate our talents and fulfill our full potential by answering the call to seek the truth about ourselves and the world we live in. This calling is literally our “Vocation” -- the challenging task of cultivating, within the context of a larger community, the integrity of character which makes us the best possible persons we can be, in relationship to one another as people of Faith.

And then the third thing that happens when you join a church like FRS is that you become a member of a Religious Society. A Religious Society is a voluntary association of individuals who have organized themselves into a legal entity in order to act collectively as the custodians of a public institution which we have inherited from our religious ancestors, and hold in trust as a legacy for our spiritual descendants. This is the part of the sermon when you have to pay attention to the history lesson, but have you ever wondered why all the UU Churches around us: Concord, Bedford, Lexington, Chelmsford, and even Billerica are called “First Parish,” while here in Carlisle we have the First Religious Society?

Back before the First Amendment made the separation of Church and State the norm here in North America, the churches here in New England were tax supported public institutions, just like the schools are today. The advantage of this, of course, was that they enjoyed a much broader base of financial support; but the disadvantage was that often people who didn’t really care that much about the church also held the purse strings, and sometimes tended to vote their own pocketbooks rather than the needs of the institution.

Then in 1758, Timothy Wilkins decided that he and his neighbors needed a Meetinghouse closer to home, so he gifted the portion of his own farm here on this hilltop to “The First Religious Society of Carlisle” -- a newly-formed voluntary association of his “neighbors and fellow creatures” devoted to providing public worship and other religious services right here in the center of what would half a century later become the Town of Carlisle.

I don’t know all the precise historical details of what happened here, but I do understand the general pattern pretty well. As members of a Religious Society, Wilkins and his neighbors would have typically been exempted from paying taxes to support the First Parish in Concord, but they would have also been responsible for paying all of the expenses here. Oftentimes this was done by selling the pews in the Meetinghouse as if they were condominiums, and then taxing each pew annually according to its assessed value in order to pay the minister’s salary and the other expenses of the church. And, of course, there would have been special collections too, as well as bequests from people’s estates and other gifts to support “liberal preaching” here in Carlisle on into perpetuity.

After formal disestablishment of the New England Standing Order in the 1830’s, virtually all of the Churches here in Massachusetts adopted some form of this arrangement, which eventually evolved into what became known as the “Voluntary System” -- in which the pews were free and people could sit wherever they liked, and then were asked to contribute generously based on their own “Providential Good Fortune” and fair share of “God’s Abundant Blessings,” so that people who couldn’t afford to rent a pew might still enjoy the benefits of church anyway. And this is still pretty much the system we use today. We try to pay our own way when we can, and also a little extra, so that our less-fortunate neighbors, and those generations who will come after us here on this hilltop, might likewise enjoy the benefits of our legacy of free and liberal faith.

Of course, all of these same ideas can also be expressed in more traditional Theological language. Taking time to participate enthusiastically in the life and activities of a congregation is an act of Fellowship. Answering the call to develop our talents and follow our own spiritual vocation though membership in the Church Universal is an act of Discipleship. And, of course, accepting the responsibility of investing our treasure and serving as trustworthy custodians of the institutional legacy embodied in a Religious Society is an act of Stewardship. But as those of you who have heard me preach on this same topic in years past know, there is still one more “ship” waiting to come in, and that of course is Leadership.

Leadership typically begins with a Vision, a sense of purpose or mission which sees the world differently and inspires the visionary to try to change things for the better. Leaders also attempt to communicate that vision to others, in a way that likewise inspires them to join in and follow that same path to a better place. And of course, leaders also lead by example -- they literally try to practice what they preach, so that others might see and do likewise.

But the point I’m trying to make today is that when you decide to become a member of this church, you are also volunteering to become a leader in the larger community. Because we are all leaders in this church, just as (in a very real sense), we are all ministers OF this church. And our mission -- our shared ministry -- is to communicate our Vision of a better world in a dynamic and inspiring manner, and to become exemplars of those shared Values of Love, Truth, and Service on which our covenantal faith is based. And so we give of our Time, our Talent, and our Treasure, in the expectation that the value of our vision is equal to the price, and the more abundant life we receive in return is worth everything we give, and more.