Sermon
Unitarian Universalists care about this world. We do not see worldly existence as merely a platform for us to work out our salvation and escape into the next life. Instead of preparing for the hereafter, we want to make a difference today in the lives of those around us and around the globe. Whether or not we embrace the same concept of God, we believe that we are called as human beings to protect and uphold the diversity of life flourishing on this blue green orb hung in the blackness of space.
A great source of pride for the liberal tradition of faith has been our concern for the welfare of the community especially of those who don't follow the crowd or who are discriminated against. The Reverend Duncan Littlefair who served the Grand Rapids Fountain Street Church from 1944 till 78 walked our talk. . I appreciate Lillian Niebbling for sharing with me a video extolling his great ministry I watched about a week ago while I was pondering what I might say about my sermon topic: interfaith cooperation. While the Fountain Street Church is not Unitarian Universalist it has called our ministers and uses our hymn book Littlefair was a dynamo of social activism starting all sorts of interfaith social programs to address the needs of Grand Rapids. He was interviewed for the video and I was inspired listening to this veteran of socially engaged ministry speaking so eloquently the liberal vision of religion and its connection to social action. Listen to his words:
Any time you are dealing with the spirit, if has any significance, it has to result in doing something about the problems of living. I don't care how it works out. If you are spiritually concerned, you are going to be socially concerned. You are going to be concerned about any and every problem the community confronts.We must not vacate the community. Any church which is worth its salt has got to be involved in everything that goes on in the community as much as it can.
One way we enact this belief in being involved in the community, be it local, national or global, is gathering once a year to do the business of the Unitarian Universalist Association and passing resolutions translating our beliefs and values into concrete positions and actions. This democratic process is very important because we, like Fountain Street, are independent congregations. We don't have a pope or a holy ecclesiastical council to tell us what to believe. It is at these meetings we decide what Unitarian Universalism really is. It is at these meetings we discover who we are and who we are becoming.
The big change this year was the implementation of a new procedure passed the year before for doing our social witness. Since the merger of the Unitarians and the Universalists in 1961, the General Assembly delegates have been passing resolutions which state how Unitarian Universalists feel about different social issues. Sometimes ten or fifteen or more ( 20 in 1973) of these resolutions would come out of the yearly meeting. The delegates often passed resolutions that got some congregations mad because the resolution didn't represent their point of view. Unfortunately, because of the time and expense required to attend General Assembly, we often don't get the most diverse congregational representation. Sometimes the resolutions were cobbled together late at night by a few people without enough opportunity for larger review before they were passed.
The process was then changed to allow congregations to get a chance read and suggest changes in language to resolutions passed by the General Assembly slowing down our pronouncement process stretching it out over three years instead of one. Well, people were not happy with this process either so it was changed in 1996 to yet another process.
We now have a new three year process for trying to articulate our values to each other and to the world. The new process begins by congregations suggesting topic areas for a statement of conscience. These are narrowed down in a parish poll to three topic areas. One of the three topic areas is then selected at General Assembly for study. The selected topic area is then passed back to the congregations who are asked to study it and make recommendations for a resolution. We will meet at 9:00am next Sunday morning to come up with these recommendations. Our Association's Commission on Social Witness will take all of our input and craft a draft resolution which will be accepted or rejected by the next General Assembly. The resolution will come back to the congregations for debate and revision. In the third year, the Commission on Social Witness will present a final draft which will be accepted or rejected at that time. The final product will be a statement which defines a value of Unitarian Universalism to ourselves and to the world.
Our first resolution for study this year is on the topic of interfaith cooperation. The printed material I received on this topic I felt was a little deceptive because the language used to describe this topic area addressed only one theme of cooperation: protecting the rights of religious minorities, particularly Native Americans. While this is something I think many of us can support, I have a sense there is a broader interpretation of this topic area which I would like to address this morning. Our theme for General Assembly last June in Phoenix was "building interfaith cooperation" which tilted the scales a bit for this resolution. The feeling I heard in the speeches for this topic area had an expanded vision of what we should study beyond protecting religious minorities.
The larger vision of interfaith cooperation has been a touchy issue because we disagree, sometimes strongly, with those of other faiths about fundamental beliefs and values. How can I cooperate with the Roman Catholic Church when we differ so strongly on birth control, abortion and euthanasia? It wasn't so long ago that Catholics were forbidden from even being inside a non-Catholic church or participate in the service of another faith. Still today, some Christian sects, though they believe in the same God and Savior, will not allow non-members of their sect to share in communion. We Unitarian Universalists have long been shunned by conservative Christian churches so proposing cooperation can be unsettling.
The reason we can even be talking about such cooperation is because we are living in a time of unprecedented interfaith toleration. I was speaking to the president of the Charlotte County Ministerial Association, a First Alliance Protestant minister, who I was very surprised to learn will be speaking this Sunday at the Catholic Church for Interfaith Sunday. Can you imagine this happening fifty, even twenty five years ago?
I think the civil rights work done in the 1960's under the leadership of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King who we honor tomorrow moved us a long way toward getting churches to see beyond their doctrinal limits. With the message of the social gospel at the turn of this century directing Christians toward humanitarian service, churches have remembered that they have a sense of social responsibility to a larger community than their own congregation. In this era of toleration today, we are realizing more than ever that the social issues in our community must be addressed by all the congregations not just one or two.
The way I get concrete about interfaith cooperation has been by attending the Charlotte County Minister's Association meetings. This group gets a decent representation of Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Jewish and Catholic clergy from Port Charlotte, Charlotte Harbor and Punta Gorda as well as usually a reporter and a few leaders from social service organizations. I've been going to these meetings off and on since I arrived here in 1993. I did a little research this week on the organization and discovered that it has been meeting for at least 25 years or so. In the middle seventies when there were only around twenty churches here, about five or ten ministers would gather for breakfast once a month. Now we can get upwards of 20 or 30 clergy at our first Thursday of the month luncheon. You'll be happy to know that our Fellowship has been involved off and on over those years. Even though we didn't have a minister in our early years, the President of our congregation was invited to attend these meetings.
One of the things I've liked about this group has been its interfaith feeling. There has always been involvement by the local Rabbi or a representative of the Temple. Both Catholics and Protestants regularly attend. Of late we've had regular participation from African American Clergy. The Minister's Association puts on an interfaith Thanksgiving and a Good Friday and Easter service. They sponsor a Holocaust service each year which is held in both Christian and Jewish congregations. When prayers are offered, there is an attempt to be inclusive of different faiths. The ministers try to put aside sectarian differences and come together around the issues and concerns of our community.
The Minister's Association has been a way for Charlotte to express its social concerns. In the early 1980's, a story appeared in the paper with the picture of a Punta Gorda Pastor and a man needing a job. This article got some ministers talking and founded the Good Samaritans to help people in emergencies to pay their light bill, their rent or get some food or clothing. Initially sixteen congregations agreed to cooperate with each taking a Sunday to gather food, clothing and money to make resources available.
Another group which the Charlotte County Minister's Association has supported is Habitat for Humanity. Habitat for Humanity helps build homes for poor people right here in Charlotte County as well as in 42 countries around the world. It has strong interfaith support from a wide variety of denominations and from many Unitarian Universalists. Sam Emerick, a retired Methodist minister here in town who helped found Habitat 25 years ago is currently helping to get a church relations committee off the ground. They are starting a speakers bureau and I expect to invite them to come and speak on a Sunday this spring.
In early February, Friendship United Methodist Church in Punta Gorda collects backyard citrus to be sent to Appalachia to be distributed by the Society of St. Andrew. It is a small project but it makes a big difference. "You can't imagine how we appreciate these oranges and grapefruit to those of us who have so little." Said Frank Wylie of Kentucky. "We especially appreciate this ray of Florida sunshine in the midst of this year's cold winter."
At our last meeting, Sheriff Worch spoke to us about the holes in the law and in social services here in Florida that causes them problems. What do you do when a child cannot be returned home because they are a threat to their mother or father yet cannot be arrested because they have not yet committed a crime? How do we deal with the homeless? The sheriff pointed out that it isn't against the law to be homeless. How do we protect the elderly from crime and abuse? Is there a place here for interfaith cooperation?
If we believe in the value of interfaith cooperation, I recommend we become more active than we have been in these interfaith activities. Yes, we are a small congregation and can't do much on our own. We can be proud of the ways we have contributed but still we just don't have the resources to do a great deal by ourselves. To have much of an impact on the social problems facing our community, we will need to be involved with other churches often working under their leadership. While this may not be great for our pride it will make a difference for those who are helped. And we can help in small ways, like donating oranges and grapefruit from our trees. In Duncan Littlefair's words:
Social action should be considered the fruit of religion, not religion itself. Because the function of the church is to cultivate the spirit. Social action follows, but if you design yourself for social action you are minimizing the enormous role and significance of spirit.
This is an important lesson for Unitarian Universalists. We are not a political or social agency for fixing the world. Our primary function is to cultivate the spirit of and a sense of religious community for the members and friends of this congregation. If we do that well, social action follows. We need to have the avenues available for members of this congregation to allow the spirit cultivated here to put our beliefs and values into action. Interfaith cooperation is a powerful way for us to both cultivate the spirit and make a positive difference in this community today. We all need a way to see our beliefs and values become actual.
When we get past the differences in belief and doctrine and get involved in interfaith cooperation, we will find we have much more in common than we may realize. At the core of Jewish, Christian, Islamic and Buddhist faith is a compassionate concern for the well being of human beings and the planet which supports us. This fundamental human concern becomes crystal clear if we could all watch the earth rise over the surface of the moon from space as the Apollo astronauts did.
This came home to me when Paul Hagen won a gingerbread house from Publix right before Christmas. It was huge so they donated it to the Fellowship. Bob Hansman suggested during Conversations Among Friends we couldn't eat it so we should take it over to the Methodist Church on Quesada. They serve a free Christmas dinner to hundreds of people. I figured they would get much more enjoyment out of it than we could. And they did. As my sister and I carried the house into their social hall where they were preparing for the dinner, I realized we could have participated in helping put on that dinner as well. We can help in small ways, like this gingerbread donation that matter and make a difference. This tiny moment of interfaith cooperation brought me much closer to these Methodist volunteers and to the spirit of Christmas.
I hope our congregation will support this resolution on interfaith cooperation and it will serve as a catalyst for us to become more active in our interfaith community here in Charlotte County. We are fortunate to have a socially concerned Minister's Association with which we can work. I think interfaith cooperation can do some great things for this community and this congregation. While we have strong differences with each other, there already is a spirit of interfaith cooperation among the ministers which has strengthened just in the time I've been attending. I'm grateful for the Minister's Association and this resolution to bring interfaith cooperation to our attention.
Copyright (c) 1998 by Rev. Samuel A. Trumbore. All rights reserved.