Story of Us
When I was a kid, my mom was known for her kitchen table. Not in the homemade cake with a glass of milk sense—though occasionally she would do that too. No, our kitchen table is where she would invite the neighborhood’s “bad” kids over for coffee. [pause] Now, that’s probably enough information right there for you to get the sense that she is a highly usual person. I mentioned her in my last sermon, how—when I was a teenager—she used to ask me what my old woman self was telling me from the future. She did this to encourage me to take more of a narrative view of my life—to think about what kind of story my life would be when I was older, and imagine how the present would fit into the larger picture. Last week I challenged you to do the same. [pause] It wasn’t the first sermon she has ended up in. I like to tease her by saying she preached at me all the time when I was a kid, and now she’s moved on to inspiring my preaching. More of her maternal jujitsu maybe.
Anyway, I remember sitting around the table with those big, tough looking kids with their chains and ripped jeans, and stirring Nestle Quik into our instant coffee. Soon my mom would get them talking. She wanted to know who they were. What were their dreams? She would take what others perceived as their negative traits—stubbornness, insubordination, disrespectfulness—and give them new names: perseverance, leadership, outspokenness. In that sense, she helped them retell their stories in different words. But most importantly, she listened. In this way, and in others, she modeled respect for the inherent worth and dignity of all people, in a city full of racial tensions between whites and Mexicans, and class tensions between the rich and the poor. I watched, and learned.
Meanwhile, my mom drove my grandmother, my sister, and me nearly an hour out of our rural Oregon town—population 750—to the city—Portland, where we attended the First Unitarian Church. Here was affirmed what my mother modeled and what I felt to be deeply true: that everyone counted. God did not pick favorites, or—like certain other tough kids, make you his ally by threatening you with a terrifying alternative. At our church there was no simple secret you had to buy into in order to be good.
This was the context in which I learned what it meant to be human. It’s why, later when I was a teenager working as a nursing assistant in a care home that sat like a remote island right on the side of a busy highway, I was deeply disturbed by the lonely condition of my community’s elders. It’s why, around the same time, I took up Spanish in high school and started hanging out with the immigrant kids, and why—when they were harassed by police, or were on the receiving end of racial slurs—both of which happened often, I was hurt and angry. I knew I had to find a career that would counter the innumerable things in our world that violate the human spirit. It’s why I kept coming back to church, and it’s one of the reasons I eventually decided to dedicate my life to our Unitarian Universalist mission. This is a key thread in my story, or—to use the phrase I introduced last week—it’s my “story of me.”
Your “story of me” is different in many ways, similar in others, and most interestingly, it leads to the same place—this sanctuary. Here we are together, having woken up this morning, and noticed the grayish sky; sipped something—perhaps over a paper or while chasing after children or walking a dog—and having made our way almost in unison to the gift of this sanctuary. [jokingly] It’s not that we didn’t have anything to do on fourth of July weekend: we’re avoiding the traffic, celebrating in our own way, maybe enjoying some downtime—or not—but we have shown up for one another and for ourselves. That’s the “story of us” in this room, but of course it’s not the only story of us. We are also part of a bigger “us,” the “us” of our Unitarian Universalist faith. In that story, this unison trek to sanctuaries—physical and virtual—occurs over and over again. In that “us” we are part of a group—growing or shrinking, depending on whom you ask—in which hundreds of thousands of individual stories converge. And each one is critical, because each story of “me” that leads into a story of “us” is the story of who we UU’s are, where we are going, and why. When we share them, they become “Public Narratives.” And they are critical, especially if you are someone who looks at the growth in numbers of Unitarian Universalism, sees that it is slower than the growth of the population as a whole, and takes that to mean we are actually shrinking, percentage-wise.
While First Parish is not small, and there are other large UU churches, too, it is baffling that our denomination overall could decrease in size when our values are becoming more and more common, when it is becoming harder to argue that we are “the uncommon denomination” like the bumper sticker says. Yet for years I have regularly heard newcomers exclaim, “Why didn’t anyone tell me there was a church like this? I have been looking for this for years!”
Well, we’re trying to get the word out. The UUA has been running an edgy ad campaign in Time magazine, Time.com has a religion discussion facilitated by UUs, and we have growth workshops across the country. But meanwhile, something else is stirring from the ground up—another approach that was there all along but is growing in strength, growing through the lives and voices of UUs. It’s what UUA President Bill Sinkford describes as a mantra he heard at a gathering of ministers from large, successful congregations. And it sounds more like an imperative than an ad. It goes: “Nurture the spirit, help heal the world.” Because while we may come to this faith for what it is, we stay because of who we are, where we are going, and why.
Now, saying exactly who this “us” is, who we are, can be a little tricky. After all, we are a diverse bunch, and not just within each congregation, where theists, atheists, and everyone in between sit together on Sunday mornings. We are diverse across congregations, which range from hundreds of years old and carrying forward the best of our radical tradition, to newer congregations that formed more recently, more as a response to the present, with eyes boldly--almost defiantly— oriented toward the future. What do they have in common?
A while back, I heard a fellow UU ministry student say that rebellion is “a huge part of our philosophy.” I know what he means. We’re proud heretics. But at the same time, something about his comment made me cringe. It was an oversimplification. Too emblematic of the difficulty of describing Unitarian Universalism. Rebellion is not a religion.
Think once more about your personal story. This time, I don’t just mean a snapshot, like my description of the kitchen table, but the larger story. Where does it begin? On the day you were born? The day your mother first thought of your existence as a possibility? Or maybe when your ancestors emigrated? Maybe your story is about the land they never left. But what if we always told our stories beginning only from when we were teenagers? From when we sought to distinguish ourselves from our families of origin. We would probably end up describing how we are different from our parents, perhaps without saying anything of the traits and values they imparted in us that contributed to our ability to discern who we wanted to be. If we defined ourselves beginning with rebellion, we would inevitably focus on what we are not. And we would be left rather groundless, without explanation for who we are.
Likewise, my colleague’s comment prompted me to think that we must ask ourselves what it means for UUs to recount our denomination’s history from instances of rebellion: the break from Trinitarianism, from judgmentalism, from dominant culture. This tells us much about what we are not. Somewhat less about what we are. And practically nothing about the ancient tradition from which our theologies of love and justice have emerged—nothing about the “story of us” that has the power to hold us together and move us to action, the one that says who we are, where we are going, and why.
I’m imagining a class on UU history that started “in the beginning.” One that began before Sarah and Abraham, tracing Unitarian Universalism not backwards to controversies, but forward from some of the first stirrings of the ancient question: What does this mean? What if the rebellions were not presented as breaks at all, but as continuation? After the death of Jesus, for example, there were many ancient communities competing to make sense of his teachings. From among them, Trinitarianism emerged. But before that, God was Unitary. In truth, ours is an even older, more historic faith than we usually recognize.
So why do we so often define ourselves in contrast to so-called “mainline” Christianity? I think it has to do with power. Our tradition’s ancestors saw that they disagreed with the doctrines being formulated by the most powerful people. Today, that power continues to inform our identity, both in the telling of our history and in our individual stories. So many UUs come to the faith bearing scars from painful, disempowering encounters with religion. Encounters that violated the spirit. We leave our past religious communities in self-defense and find in Unitarian Universalism an affirmation that what happened was not right, or necessary. Unfortunately, we forget to notice that our bad experiences are not the natural evolution of the tradition that began “in the beginning” and grew to include the life of Jesus; the tradition that has often been thought of as bucking tradition but which we can instead say included centuries of sacrifices and bold decisions to honor the spirit of his teachings and of our roots before that, growing eventually to include wisdom from other sources as well, all in the name of what is most holy. No stubbornness, insubordination, or apostasy here. What we have is perseverance, leadership, and outspokenness. What we have is one heck of a story of us. What we have are the elements of a public narrative that can inspire unity, action and even salvation in the world around us.
As Marshall Ganz explains,
“Our Story of Self allows others to experience the values that move us to lead. Our Story of Us makes common cause with a broader community whose values we share. And a Story of Now (or mission) calls us to act, so we can shape the future in ways consistent with those values.”
Our mission, as UU’s, is nothing less than to nurture the spirit and help heal the world.
Whatever led you into this sanctuary today, whether it is the first time or thousandth time you have joined this group in worship, my prayer is that you, too, will be captivated by the story. May it stir in you those elements of your own journey that move you to lead. May you be gathered into this common cause, nurtured by the people here and by the spirit of this sacred and enduring tradition, and may you, too, speak your story and help heal the world.
May it be so.
Amen.
Having theologically contextualized the story of me, and touched on its implications as one part of a PN, this sermon aims to further introduce listeners to the idea of PN, get them thinking about how their individual stories tie into a story of us, and challenge them to rethink the way UUs tell our story.
Nurture the spirit, help heal the world, by William G. Sinkford