With Our Blessing

Why do you come to church? Why do you connect with Zoom and put up with the frustrating glitches that our dedicated A/V team works hard to prevent and troubleshoot but that occasionally disrupt your experience anyway? Why do you get dressed and leave your house and hunt for parking spaces?

At a time when participation in faith communities in this country is steadily declining, and churches are closing at record rates, why do you come to church?

If this were some other church I imagine the reasons you might give would include things like family expectation or even pressure, and “as a believer my faith demands it of me”. Those reasons probably hold true for some of us in this Unitarian Universalist setting, too, but other reasons are likely to be more common or of greater weight, if you answered my questions aloud.

We’d probably hear things like:

To refill my spirit for the week ahead

For the music

To provide my kids with a religious education

For help in making sense of life/the world

For moral or ethical guidance, and the big one–

For community.

How many of you said/thought community when I asked why you come to church?

Whether community is our primary reason for coming to church or not even in our personal list of reasons, most of us find it at church anyway and come to consider it an invaluable perc.

Institutionally, community looks like joys and sorrow in our weekly worship services, like our pastoral care committee and volunteers, like our UUCS Members Facebook group, like our covenant groups, like our choir. Community even looks like our 2nd annual pool party coming up in a few weeks.

None of these is strictly necessary for the refreshment of the spirit or transmission of moral or ethical guidance or religious education. None of these is a prerequisite for tackling life’s big questions of meaning. None of these is even a required element for excellence in church music. Yet all of them—joys and sorrows, pastoral care, the Facebook group, the choir, the pool party—all of them deepen, enliven, and enhance our experience of all the other reasons we come to church.

Having our joys and sorrows invoked in this space and time helps us feel less alone in the universe, reminding us of the commonalities of our existence, and a loop of community grows, feeding itself with each cycle, and more than that, offers insight and nuance to our meaning making. Likewise, giving or receiving visits, rides, phone calls, meals or other gestures of pastoral care, none of which were why we walked through the doors or Zoomed into this church in the first, connect us more deeply with one another.

The same thing happens in our covenant groups. The curriculum leads participants in structured reflection, meaning making, moral and ethical consideration, and the experience of doing all that with the same small group of individuals over and over again both creates community and adds dimension to the reflections and the discussion.

So it is with our choir. as well. The choir is composed of people who love to sing but singing with, and for, church members sets that love afire. And when we hear the voices of our board members and social justice,volunteers and longtime members and new members offering us their time and talent, we hear a holy beauty that we wouldn’t hear from any other group, even professional groups. The choir is a community and the choir blesses our community.

When parents and grandparents bring their children and youth to church for a religious education they many motivations: they don’t feel equipped to answer all their children’s big questions, they want their children to be able to say they have their own church if friends and neighbors question them or invite them to their churches, they want to satisfy family members who think it is important for children to be. Some parents even bring their children to church because they want them to learn the values they hold central in life. Whatever the motivation of any family, one thing that happens up in Phillipa’s Place is the germination of community.

And on it goes.

We’ve made explicit today our belief and our intention and our hope that when we leave here–children and adults–we carry with us the blessings of this institution and our community. Megan and I wanted all of us, not just the children and youth, to catch the blessings of love and bravery and courage and …… and ……, and think consciously about filling our bags–physical or metaphorical–with those blessings. It is good, sometimes, to say what might be overlooked or forgotten or taken for granted.

Here’s what I know: you go forth from here with all our blessings every Sunday, whether you’re on Zoom or here in the room. I know this because I see the love and delight in your eyes when you see one another arrive for church, because I feel deep caring when worship associates read joys and sorrow, because I see your comments on Facebook posts, because I hear your eager conversations in Rahn Hall, because your participated in the backpack blessing so willingly and with such good humor. I know we all go forth from here with all our blessings because I hear that some of the services in July went a bit or a lot awry, but nobody, not a single person, called or texted or emailed me about it until August 1. You blessed me with an uninterrupted vacation–and that was but one manifestation of the love and trust you bless me with every day.

We live in uncertain, perilous times. Perhaps every time has been such, nevertheless we live in these times, when our planet, source of our very existence, is raging against our mistreatment; when state legislatures and even the Supreme Court of the United States are exerting regressive, deadly control over trans children and youth and people capable of becoming pregnant, while restricting voter access, and rewriting history in ways sure to lead to civil instability as miseducated children grow to adulthood; when we are still reeling from the first failure to transfer power peacefully in our nation’s history; when repeated lies become accepted reality; when preservation of party power takes precedence over governing. We live in these times, and for our survival and to sustain our efforts to heal and make peace and bring about justice we need the assurance, the awareness, the comfort and the courage of knowing that we go with our blessings, the blessings of this faith community wherever, however, whenever we go. May it be so. Amen.