Rev. Jane Page
November 10, 2019
What are we here for? – Here at this place – the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Statesboro. So far in this sermon series, we’ve examined the following purposes for our presence:
This is:
A Place for Community
A Place to respond to the injustices of the world
A place to share our time, talents, and treasure
A place to celebrate who we are – with a special focus on gender and sexuality.
A place to honor life and death.
And today we are exploring how this is a Place to simply Love One Another.
(Sing) “Love is a many splendored thing!” Yes, it’s splendid, and magnificent and complex, and often painful – but oh, so necessary.” Why do we need to love? Why do we need this place to love one another? And how can we do that when we are so different in many ways. Those are the three questions I want to touch on today in this message.
So – Why do we need to love?
We as human animals have evolved the
capacity and need to love. We can go all
the way back to at least our early mammal ancestors in looking at this. Israeli Professor of Human Evolution Ada
Lampert wrote a book called The Evolution of Love which helped me to understand
this. She states:
The placenta and milk
are expensive investments that mothers make for the sake of their kids, but
they are worth nothing unless they are part of a caring, devoted, alert mother.
To watch the child eat is a joy; to watch it sleep is to dissolve in pleasure.
To think of any threat to the little one’s well-being gives rise to deep fear;
to know that the threat is over brings forth deep relief. This is the new
emotional world of concerned, caring, loving mothers. In the same way that
evolution selected milk glands, the womb, the birth canal, and so forth, it
selected the urge, the concern, the joy and the satisfaction that motivate
mothers.
The mammalian mothers
were the first in evolution to feel concern about others, and they set the
cradle for the evolution of love, the dependence of every individual on
proximity, belonging, being cuddled.
Throughout evolution,
love, first as touch and then as a rich cluster of loving behaviors, has become
a need, and even a prerequisite, for physiological and psychological
well-being.
I’ve witnessed all those feelings again firsthand as I prepared this sermon AND cared for my little great granddaughter Alayna who was with me for a couple of weeks.
So – we’ve evolved these feelings that help our offspring survive – then that carries over to helping other family members survive – even our offspring caring for us as we age – if we are lucky. So, it began as a survival technique for the family and continued to expand to the extended family and to the tribe. We take care of our own. And, as the song we sang recently said – “We need each other to survive.”
But the world has changed. We no longer stay put with our families of origin – or with our tribes, our lands of origin. Many of us find ourselves among strangers. Yet we still have these same aspects of our evolution to connect and belong and love. We talked about some of that in the first sermon in this series when we talked of coming together for community. We find our new tribe in new places. And for some of us, Unitarian Universalism is a place where we can call home. And a place for us to find and give love.
So =Why do many of us need THIS place as a place to share love? We are attracted to Unitarian Universalism for different reasons. Some come because they want the freedom to seek their own spiritual or religious paths. Some come because there are like-minded (or open minded) folks here. And others come to be part of our efforts to improve ourselves and the world. But we are all quite a bit different – kind of like a family made up of children from different cultures and backgrounds – all adopted by the same parents – as teenagers. It makes for some interesting – and sometimes difficult situations. So that leads me to that third question.
How can we possibly love one another when we are so different in many ways?
I have a true story that I want to share that I read about in UU world in an article by Rev. Victoria Stafford. Now I could tell you similar stories about some of you – but I don’t think that would be a good thing to do in this situation. Sometimes it’s better to look at others and see how it may relate to us.
Rev. Victoria writes:
In the first weeks of my first ministry in an old New England
congregation, a woman came to see me. Nearly 90 years old, she was a lifelong
member of that church; her parents had joined in the late nineteenth century.
She didn’t like change, she said. She wasn’t sure that she liked me, or what
she called my “point of view.”
“Just remember,” she said. “I have outlived all of your
predecessors, and I will probably outlive you.”
This woman was a dedicated political conservative in what had
become a progressive community; she was a liberal Christian in a congregation
that had known gracious eras of theological diversity and also some fits of
intolerance; she’d worked for the U.S. State Department through three wars and
for the American Unitarian Association through the merger with the Universalist
Church of America. In this church of her childhood, which she’d never left,
most votes at most annual meetings had not gone her way for the past forty
years. She was no stranger to discord.
In the end she did outlive me there: she died shortly after I
accepted a new call in another state, and I was saddened by the news.
Over ten years we cultivated a fierce, respectful love for one
another, and what I loved in her most was her commitment to that church, no
matter what; her fidelity to it; the ferocity with which she paid her pledge
each year, no matter how wayward the budget or insufferable (in her humble
opinion) the sermons. She kept her covenant with that people, with their proud
history and the bright promise of their future, and with the free faith
tradition they embodied. I was a young minister then, and her way of being in
relation, her integrity, taught me more about Unitarian Universalism than
anything I’d learned in seminary.
Why did this member stick around – even when so many things
didn’t go her way. Because this was her
tribe, her people. And she was living
out the promises she had made to herself and to them. We say that we are bound
not be creed – but by covenant. By the
promises we make to one another about how we will be together.
When we come into the membership of a Unitarian Universalist
congregation – it’s kind of like coming into a marriage. We are making a family – or coming into a
family. And since we are very different,
we usually find that we can walk together in our differences if we covenant
together.
In 2007, after five years of living with Greg Brock, I agreed to
marry him. And when two folks marry –
they also make a covenant together – usually called their marriage vows.
Now a covenant is not
really like a contract. When you “break”
a contract, the contract is null and void.
With a covenant, you might mess up – but the bond is too important, and
you just keep recommitting to it as long as you both agree to it.
Unlike some couples who
write separate sets of promises, Greg and I decided that we would make the same
promises to each other on our wedding day – and these really were to be just a
restatement of what we had been LIVING for the previous five years together. But since we wanted to say the same thing, we
had to find words we agreed on. Needless, to say, our wedding vows were very
short.
I, Jane Altman Page, take you, Gregory John
Brock, to be my husband –
to have and to hold from this day forward,
in times of joy and times of sorrow,
and to grow with you throughout the seasons
of life.
May our home be forever filled with peace,
joy, and love.
Nuff said. That’s a covenant. The Greg and Jane covenant.
Covenanting with one another is a very old practice among
Unitarian Universalists – going all the way back to our Puritan spiritual
ancestry. The leader of the Puritans
aboard the Arabella, John Winthrop, saw the need for this as they were still on
the high seas. You may recognize his
name from history as the first governor of Massachusetts. Here are his words.
Now the only way to avoid . . . shipwreck, and to
provide for our posterity, is to follow the counsel of Micah, to do justly, to
love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. . . . [W]e must be willing
to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’
necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness,
gentleness, patience, and liberality. We must delight in each other, make
others’ conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer
together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the
work, our community as members of the same body. So, shall we keep the unity of
the spirit in the bond of peace.
What
Winthrop was presenting was a Declaration of Interdependence. In her UU World article on covenants, Rev.
Stafford stated:
Those who heard John Winthrop speak would surely have grasped
the metaphor of danger: they would have been afraid not only of foundering,
literally, on New England’s rocky shore, but of failing in their errand to
establish this commonwealth, their “city on a hill.” The only way to avoid
shipwreck, spiritual or otherwise, was to “keep the unity of the spirit in the
bond of peace”—to make and keep a sacred covenant together.
Similarly,
the early churches of the standing order in New England made covenants among
themselves as congregations and in association with each other. We, as Unitarian Universalists have continued
this tradition.
When
I was in seminary in the early 2000’s, the value of the covenanting process was
re-emphasized at our seminary and within UUA.
More small groups, large groups, and congregations began to use a more
formal covenanting process as they struggled to “love one another” with various
challenges and differences. Some
congregations moved to having more specific covenants that addressed how they
would be with one another, often called a relational covenant.
Ten
years ago, I encouraged this congregation to adopt a relational covenant when I
shared my sermon, “Can You Say Covenant.”
We surveyed the congregation, had a small group to work to draft
something, get feedback, and present to the congregation. Then in November 2009, we voted on it and
many who were there signed it.
Last
year we made the decision to recommit to our covenant at this every year on the
day we had our Annual Meeting and offer the opportunity for others to sign as
well.
I’ve
printed these and you or your neighbor should have one. I’m going to ask you to stand as you are able
and Let us read this covenant together.
Congregational Affirmation and Relational Covenant
Love is the spirit of this fellowship, and
service is its prayer. This is our great covenant: to dwell
together in peace, to seek the truth in love, and to help one another.
To this end, we, the people of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Statesboro, affirm the following relational covenant:
To this end, we, the people of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Statesboro, affirm the following relational covenant:
·
We warmly
welcome all who gather in our community.
·
We honor and
support one another as we explore our spiritual paths.
·
We embrace
our diversity and grow from sharing our different perspectives.
·
We address
our disagreements respectfully, communicating directly with the person or group
involved, and see conflict through to a genuine resolution.
·
We serve our
Fellowship community with generosity and good humor, and we acknowledge and
express gratitude for the service of others.
·
We respect
our individual boundaries and the boundaries of others.
·
We support
one another in love through times of joy, need and struggle.
(You
may be seated.)
Now
- Will we always be successful in
staying in Covenant? Probably not, we may still say things that
hurt someone’s feelings or not have careful boundaries, etc. But hopefully we will catch ourselves or one
of our other loving members will gently share with us that we are out of
covenant, and we can make amends and begin again in Love.
So,
in summary:
Why
do we need to love another another?
We
have evolved the feelings of love to help one another survive.
Why
do we come HERE to the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Statesboro to love
one another? We are attracted here to
each other and to this place for many different reasons. Here we have found our tribe! Our people – and we give and receive much
needed support and love.
And
HOW do we love one another when we are very different in many ways and have
disagreements? Through covenanting with
one another, and coming back into covenant to begin again in love when we
falter.
This
place is a Sanctuary. We have proclaimed
it to be a sacred space – indeed a holy place.
And we can bring our whole selves – our heads, hearts, and hands – and
even sometimes our dancing feet – to this place and love one another.
For
as the song says, “When our heart is in – a holy place. When our heart is in a holy place. We are blessed with love and amazing
grace. When our heart is in a holy
place. “
May
it be so!
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