Candlelight Labyrinth Walk for the Winter Solstice

Inaugural Labyrinth Service
Sunday evening, 6 pm, December 20, 2009
(Service put together by GNOUU Intern Charlie Dieterich,
in consultation with Rev. Melanie)

For this service, the Sanctuary was darkened, except for the lights of the stained glass window in the chancel and the church Christmas Tree. The Labyrinth laid in the tile floor is marked off with flickering LED tea lights (available online, discount for quantity orders).


Prelude (recorded music of Renaissance chanting, which plays during the whole service)

Greeting (Participants are greeted quietly as they take seats around the periphery.)

Chalice Lighting (Chalice set up on small table in Labyrinth center.)
From Gordon B. McKeeman

Deep calls unto deep,
joy calls unto joy,
light calls unto light.
Let the kindling of this flame
rekindle in us the inner light
of love, of peace, of hope.
And “as one flame lights another, nor grows the less,”
we pledge ourselves
to be bearers of light, wherever we are.

Winter Solstice Meditation
Adapted from Christine C. Robinson

We join our hearts and minds together in a time of meditation or prayer;
spoken, silent, sung, and shared.
It is a precious time, and all precious times want preparation,
so I invite you to settle yourself in a straight posture,
both feet grounded on the floor,
to take a deep breath, hold it until you notice your need to breathe out,
and relax.
I invite you to close your eyes,
for vision is the single most energy intensive activity of our brains.

These next few days are the days of the Winter Solstice,
a time when those who are very attentive to the skies
note that the sun, which has relentlessly moved southward on the horizon
since last June, seems to pause on its journey
before beginning to climb northwards to center again.
Solstice is a time of pause.
So… pause. Breathe. Relax. Rest. Be at peace.

Spirit of winter rest,
help us to enjoy your peace in this quiet place.
Remind us to pause during this season.
Grant us awareness, keep our gratitude fresh each day.
May the songs in our heart be blessings
and insights to us and to others
and may compassion always shine forth
from the depths of our hearts.

Labyrinth Walk Instruction
Adapted from "An Altar In The World" By Barbara Brown Taylor

Not everyone is able to walk, but most people can,
which makes walking one of the most easily available spiritual practices of all.
All it takes
is a decision to walk with some awareness,
both of who you are and what you are doing.
Where you are going is not as important,
however counterintuitive that may seem.

This truth is borne out by the labyrinth --
an ancient spirtual practice
that is enjoying a renaissance in the present century.
Laid out in a [circle] with a curling path inside,
it rarely comes with walls.
Instead, it trusts those who enter
to stay on the path voluntarily.
…[I]t includes switchbacks and detours,
just like life.
It has one entrance, and it leads to the center.

The important thing to note
is that the path goes nowhere.
The journey is the point.
The walking is the thing.
…As I said earlier, not everyone is able to walk.
Thich Nhat Hanh is a Vietnamese Buddhist monk
who figured out a way around that reality.
At Plum Village, his monastic community in southern France,
he teaches many forms of attentiveness, including walking meditation…

When someone comes to Plum Village in a wheelchair,
an instructor finds a comfortable place
for that person to sit and watch the walkers.
He asks her to pick one of the walkers,
focusing intently on what that person is doing
as she deepens her own breathing…

After about twenty minutes of this,
most people discover at least two things:
first that they can do walking meditation
without leaving their chairs,
and second, that their bodies are not as localized as they had thought.
Watching the walkers,
they sometimes lose track of whose foot is in the air…

Augustine of Hippo [wrote] "It is solved by walking."
What is "it"?
If you want to find out,
then you will have to do your own walking,
spiritually or physically.

Our labyrinth leads from the entry to the center.
You are invited to settle your mind,
and when you are ready, come up and we will give you a LED tea light
for you to take to the center.
Do not walk as slowly
as those Buddhist monks who take five minutes savoring a single step.
Instead walk as if you were at a graduation ceremony,
going to begin a new life.

Your breathing should be steady and calm.
You might check it each time you turn.

And when you reach the center, you may leave your tea-light, and
-- avoiding cross traffic --
walk across the back of the Labyrinth, and then back to your seat.

Spirit of winter rest,
help us to enjoy your peace in this quiet place.
Remind us to pause during this season.
Grant us awareness, keep our gratitude fresh each day.
May the songs in our heart be blessings
and insights to us and to others
and may compassion always shine forth
from the depths of our hearts. [From Christine C. Robinson]

Walking the Labyrinth

Expression of Gratitude
This Labyrinth, this sacred space,
Resurrected from the flood waters,
Is a labor of love by essentially one person
Who gave of her time, her talent, and her labor,
Spending her own funds for supplies and equipment,
Spending also almost all of her time from work
And even her sick days,
To complete this Labyrinth.
The church’s Board of Trustees has dedicated
This evening’s offering as an expression of gratitude
To help partially reimburse
The talented and dedicated artist who created it.
A heart basket is being passed among you –
Please give from your heart.

Closing Words
From “The Moment of Magic” by Victoria E. Safford

Now is the moment of magic,
when the whole, round earth turns again toward the sun,

and here's a blessing:
the days will be longer and brighter now,
even before the winter settles in to chill us.

Now is the moment of magic,
when people beaten down and broken,
with nothing left but misery and candles
and their own clear voices,
kindle tiny lights and whisper secret music,

and here's a blessing:
the dark universe is suddenly illuminated
by the lights of the menorah,
suddenly ablaze with the lights of the kinara,
and the whole world is glad and loud with winter singing.

Now is the moment of magic,
when an eastern star beckons the ignorant
toward an unknown goal,

and here's a blessing:
they find nothing in the end but an ordinary baby,
born at midnight, born in poverty, and the baby's cry,
like bells ringing,
makes people wonder as they wander through their lives,
what human love might really look like,
sound like, feel like.
Now is the moment of magic,

and here's a blessing:
we already possess all the gifts we need;
we've already received our presents:
ears to hear music,
eyes to behold lights,
hands to build true peace on earth
and to hold each other tight in love.

Extinguish Chalice
We are a small but special group,
For we are the first ones to walk the Labyrinth at the Solstice.
We have been at one with our thoughts in the dark,
We have watched as the Light made its way around and around.
We extinguish the lights now,
But not what the light means to us.
Let us now depart in silence, in peace, in love.

Departure in silence

Gifts of the Season

A Sermon by the Rev. Melanie Morel-Ensminger
North Shore Unitarian Universalist Congregation
Sunday, December 13, 2009

Before we begin, I want to invite you all to the Annual Holiday Open House that Eric and I hold at our house every year. It will be held on the Sunday after Christmas, December 27, from 1 to 5 pm, and there will be light refreshments and drinks and holiday music and cheer. I hope that any of you who wouldn’t mind crossing the lake will stop over.

And please remember that on the first Sunday of the New Year, January 3rd, First Church will host the first annual shared Greater New Orleans UU Jazz Funeral for the Old Year at 10:30 am. We’ll have a brass band and a real casket to bury our cares and concerns from 2009 to clear the way for the New Year, ending with a joyous secondline. Readers in the service will include North Shore’s Terry Van Brunt as well as Rev. Jim and Rev. Jane Dwinell and our Ministerial Intern Charlie Dieterich. We hope you’ll all be there.

Our Meditation and our Reading this morning remind us that all children and all people are special – not only that: all life is a miracle. Christmas time, the holiday season, is a good time to remember those important things. Christmas may just be another day on the calendar, but most of us are either unwilling or unable to see December 25th as just any another day. If you have small children in your household or in your extended family, it would be almost impossible to convince them that there was no reason to make a big deal of the holiday. But even without children, it would take either a very determined person or a very depressed person to ignore all the holiday goings-on around us. (And only the grinchiest of Grinches could not have been touched by the joy and excitement caused by the snow on the North Shore during the holiday season this month.)

There are always good excuses for NOT celebrating. Yes, it’s true: it costs too much money, it takes a lot of time, and it’s a lot of trouble. And yes, in almost every year, there comes some kind of trouble or major problem that seems to call the holiday season into question. After 9/11, after Katrina, after the recession – after any disaster or negative happening, many people question whether holding a holiday is appropriate.

Well, I’m a 5th-generation New Orleanian, so my answer is always Yes, it’s a good idea to celebrate the holiday (whatever the holiday is). For one thing, human beings, even we modern human beings, are seasonal creatures. We are affected in ways we don’t even understand by the pulls of time and tide, the changing angles of light, and the subtle shifts in the length of the day. As near as we can tell, human beings have always marked the change of seasons with special rituals and holidays. Maybe it’s not just “OK” to celebrate the season – maybe we need to do it.

Recent news reports about studies on the links between happiness, health, and social relationships point to another reason to celebrate the holidays, especially with loved ones. In brief, the study, by James H. Fowler and Nicholas A. Christakis, looked at a research cohort over 20 years, and came to the conclusion that being happy makes you healthier, and that happiness is catching. Of course, they did not phrase their finding in quite that way; as one academic reviewer put it,

A recent meta-analysis of longitudinal observational studies found that measures of happiness, cheerfulness, and related constructs were associated prospectively with reduced mortality, both in initially healthy people and in those with established illnesses.…

…Regardless of methodological caveats, the work by Fowler and Christakis is groundbreaking in positing the intriguing hypothesis that some psychosocial determinants of health could be transmitted through social connections.

Yikes! To put all that in language we’re more used to, it’s simple: hanging around with people who are happy makes you happier, and makes you healthier too, no matter your socioeconomic status, your environment, or your pre-existing medical conditions. Think of that – celebrating the holidays with people you love, people who are glad to be with you, people who enjoy the holiday season – can make you happier AND healthier.

This is not to say that in order to be happy and healthy during the holiday season you have to subject yourself to every holiday party that comes down the pike, endure endless loops of badly played Christmas carols, bake 20 dozen cookies, decorate your house inside and out with hand-made ornaments and decorations like some crazed Martha Stewart, or spend yourself into bankruptcy buying wildly expensive gifts. In order to truly enjoy the gifts of the holiday season, you must learn to be a good and even strict editor of your holiday activities.

The first thing you must do to have happy holidays is to only do those holiday events or activities that bring you joy and make you happy. Eliminate or reduce all those things that are stressful or upsetting to you. Buy cookies or holiday goodies instead of killing yourself standing on your feet all day in the kitchen, making everything from scratch – who cares? The store-bought goodies will be just as appreciated and as gratefully received. Have the store or the mall wrap the gifts. Never, ever, do holiday shopping on weekends. Decide what’s the minimum holiday décor to set the scene for your Christmas, and then call it a day. Draw a healthy boundary around yourself, as a gift from you to you, and you’ll be glad you did.

The second thing to ensure enjoyment of the holiday season is to maintain an “attitude of gratitude” – be thankful for what you have, for the beauty around you, for good things that happen to you and for the good people that cross your path, for this congregation and for the community of our three congregations. You don’t have to have a person or thing to thank, just wake up and go to bed grateful. Realize that things could always be worse and be grateful that they’re not. I promise, you’ll always find things to be grateful for.

Third, get outside yourself and reach out to those who are not as fortunate as you. And no matter your situation, there’s always folks less fortunate than you. As Margaret Collier Graham wrote in a little Christmas book published in 1906, “There is always somebody to be made more cheerful and there is nearly always a way of doing it.” Drop coins in the cauldron by the Salvation Army bell-ringer. Bring a scarf or a coat or a sweater for the Mitten Tree that the Sunday School children are collecting. Donate money or items to the organizations in St. Tammany that collect for needy families and individuals. Babysit for a single parent friend, or parent-sit for a friend with an elderly parent at home.

Rev. Jim and I have recently gotten involved with the important issue of wage theft in the greater New Orleans area; hundreds, even thousands of construction workers, day laborers, domestic workers, and restaurant workers are cheated out of their proper wages every pay period. This is a justice issue very close to home. Let us find ways as individuals as families, and as a congregation, to devote our money, our time, our skills to help others – and you’ll be amazed at how much better YOU feel.

Finally, savor the small joys of this time of year, those unexpected moments, which can give such unalloyed holiday pleasure. Many of these holiday delights are free or inexpensive. Go to the Ritz Hotel in the old Maison Blanche building in downtown New Orleans and check out the life-size gingerbread house. Go to the Roosevelt Hotel and admire the block-long lobby's decorations -- and be sure to look for my husband Eric as a giant Toy Soldier playing a herald trumpet for Santa at the Teddy Bear Tea. Savor the way old Mandeville is decorated for the season. Drive around your neighborhood and scope out other people’s outdoor decorations and be sure to fire your inner aesthetics critic – just enjoy the love, enthusiasm, and holiday spirit being exemplified. Visit Celebration in the Oaks in City Park or drive over to Lafreniere Park and gawk at Al Copeland’s decorations once again. When your favorite holiday song comes on the radio, turn it up and sing along. When somebody says, “Have a Christmas cookie,” say thanks and enjoy the taste of it. (If you’re on a diet, just have ONE.) Draw in deep breaths of the Fraser fir Christmas tree smell. Look at your gifts with appreciation before you open them, and open them all, even the flannel pajamas and the re-gifts, with a sense of appreciation and gratitude for the love being expressed, however clumsily or awkwardly.

We all need joy in our lives, and the holiday season offers us many opportunities. May we face the holidays knowing our limits, filled with gratitude and generosity, and a sense of appreciation. So might this be! AMEN – ASHE – SHALOM – SALAAM – NAMASTE – BLESSED BE!

Reading Before Sermon at NSUU

Adapted by Rev. Ellen Cooper-Davis
from a meditation by Rev.Leslie Takahashi Morris
North Shore Unitarian Universalist Congregation
Sunday, December 13, 2009

Once again, we contemplate a story of the season: that in an ordinary place, without grandeur and gold, someone waits. The place is a stable, it is in a field, it is a shed, it is in a split-level house or a planned community, it is in a garage, it is in the church fellowship hall which houses those who find no room at the inn. And what do they await? A promise. A prophecy. A gold-en truth around which to pivot the axis of life. Or just a word. A gesture. A seed of hope cloaked in a small act of kindness. And why do they wait, in this mythical story? Because an omen foretold waiting. Because a commandment decreed it. Because they resist a jealous king’s degree. Because their old ways of life no longer fulfill them. Because they have lost the ability to find peace in their own lives. Because they want someone to care for them. Because they need to find themselves connected to something larger than themselves. Because, in some sense, much of life is spent searching, searching, searching.

And who waits in this story? Shepherds and kings, wise men and animals, innkeepers and expectant couples. Some have identities hidden, mysterious. Some have identities others would not claim. Some work fast food or retail, others peddle knowledge. Some pace the streets on restless feet and others get parking tickets on their own couches. And who are the travelers? They come with gifts. They are regal. They carry priceless knowledge. They use coins and bills. They remove their shoes in airports. They yearn. They seek. They want. They recognize places never seen before. They open themselves to potential.

And who are we to this story, this echoing tale of infinite proportions? Do we seek to stand outside: reporters and astronomers, scoffers and stand-up comedians? Or do we remember that none are merely guests on this earth, and step forward to offer our hospitality, our humor, our hubris, our hopes, and put our hands to the work of earthly hosts, tending and loving this place of dirt and miraculous new life? Do we open the door to let in the boy with his crust of bread and, at the same time, know ourselves in the boy? When cast, do we accept the role of gift-bearers? Do we carry the sweet smelling gifts of love and devotion, bear the most wonderful toys to celebrate the miracle of childhood, the talismans of wisdom and reason, the precious metals of inquiry and truth, the jewels of mystery and promise? In the story of the season, do we dig out the audacity to say we are as good as gold, that we carry a jeweled possibility of an intertwining hope that we are saved by the new day and our thoughts upon waking?

Do we step inside the story to ponder the mysteries as well, to try on the part of the heavenly hosts -- the ones who leaven, who lift, who raise our world and our lives up to a new level, a new height? Do we labor to connect the firmament of this earth to the ethereal promise that in the darkest, most still moments of our lives we meet our yearning to connect to that and those beyond our current grasp, to know a greater unity, to commit ourselves to its vision?

As we approach this night of wonder and awe, let us stand for a moment in this story and know ourselves to be part of a great unfolding tableau. A promise that we carry, and that carries us. We know ourselves as bearers of the hope that is larger than us. For we are hosts, not guests, in this, our world.

MEDITATION AT NSUU

“All Miracles” – A Christmas Meditation
by Chip Roush, minister, Traverse City, Michigan (2006)
North Shore Unitarian Universalist Congregation
Sunday, December 13, 2009

“Attention, shoppers! We bring you good tidings of great joy! A baby has just been born, in the bathroom at the front of the store. If you’d like to purchase a gift for this new family, our infant supplies are in aisles 17 and 18. There is a 10% discount on diapers, if you buy a case. Thank you for shopping at Wal-Mart.”

At first, I didn’t believe the announcement. In fact, I thought it was crass, and disrespectful. I heard others around me dismissing it, too – “blatant manipulation,” one person said, while others just laughed it off.

But I couldn’t let it go. Something inside me told me it was real – and that this child was somehow special. Once I was checked out (I did *not* buy a case of diapers), I took a detour past the bathrooms where the birth had supposedly taken place. There was a small pile of diaper boxes, and some toys and clothes and formula, on a bench outside. The store’s security guard was standing watch over the whole process, and he said I could go on in – nobody was inside except the new family. He said he’d watch my cart.

I make it a point never to go into store bathrooms. The ugly walls, the
feeble attempt to cheer it up with a dying flower, the grime that remained no matter how often an employee signed their initials on the “clean up” sheet on the door – it’s all just too depressing. This bathroom was no better, but somehow, it didn’t feel as bad as I expected. The mother was lying on the floor, holding her sleeping baby, amid a nest of new fleece blankets in multicolors. A man (the father?) was offering her a drink from a cup with the store’s logo on it.

I excused myself for interrupting them, but they insisted it was okay. A few people had already come and gone, and each had been quite kind, they reported. Her name was Mary, the man’s name was Joe. They were still searching for a name for their new boy. They hadn’t expected him quite so soon.

They were on their way back to New Orleans, they said (it seemed they were eager to explain why they weren’t in a hospital). They’d lost their house in Katrina, and had lived for the past year with her cousin, Elizabeth, in Pennsylvania. Now FEMA finally had their check ready, to replace their house and belongings, but they had to pick it up in person, in New Orleans. They didn’t have enough money to pay for hotel rooms, so they’d been living in their van for the trip south. When Mary began her labor, Joe had gotten off at the very first exit, and she’d insisted on coming into the store for the delivery.

As they finished their story, three young men came bursting into the bathroom. They were quite excited, and kept exclaiming how special this baby was, and how honored they were to attend his birth. Mary finally got them to calm down, and they explained they’d received text messages on their cellphones, explaining that an uncommon birth was happening beneath the giant smiley face at this exit.

None of the three knew who had sent the text message, but they were all elated to have trusted their instincts and gone in search of the babe. One of them bragged that he was the first to arrive, because he’d been so resourceful, and asked a police officer about the smiley face.

At this, Joe became quite agitated. He demanded to know how much the man had said. Had he mentioned the baby? The man said no, he didn’t want to seem too weird; he’d told the policewoman that he was searching for his girlfriend, that she’d given him that landmark. Joe relaxed, and explained that he and Mary had been rousted from a roadside rest stop the night before. They had been trying to get a few hours of sleep, but a highway patrolman had forced them to leave. There was a 4-hour maximum for parking at the rest stop. When Joe had protested, and explained about the baby, it had just made things worse. The patrolman had accused them of being Mexicans, trying to deliver a baby in the United States so their “brat” (he’d used other terms, that Joe would not repeat) would get the benefits of citizenship. They could not prove their citizenship – all their legal papers had been lost in the flood – so the cop had threatened to arrest them, and call the INS. Mary talked him out of it, but they were still wary of the police.

The young men were strangely moved to tears by this story, and they vowed to go back out into the parking lot, and tell any police that did show up that it was a hoax. They encouraged Mary and Joe to get the baby into the van as soon as possible, and escape.

As they left, each man knelt down beside Mary, and handed her a gift, for the child. The first gave her a small collection of gold coins, each worth several hundred dollars, which they could easily trade. The second gave her his Blackberry, and explained that he would continue paying for its internet and telephone service for the next 18 years. The child would have the world at his fingertips. The last man offered a plastic folder, which he said contained a paid-up health insurance policy, with well-baby care and a prescription benefit. Mary began to cry at this gift, and Joe fell to his knees, to embrace the man.

A few moments later, I enlisted the help of the security guard, to carry the gifts out to their van. Then I returned to carry the baby, as Joe helped Mary make her way out. She got herself situated, in the makeshift bed in the back, and I handed the baby in to her. Her face was shining with gratitude and hope, as she thanked me for all I’d done. When I protested that I’d done very little, she replied, “So many people have helped us today. So many have said that our baby is special. We will raise him to know that ALL people are special; and we’ll dedicate our lives to helping others, just as we have been helped today. If you want to do something more, please go out and help others. Please pass this gift of love along.”

And so I do. And so I tell you, now. If you want to honor this miraculous birth, and this family’s miraculous message, do something good in their name. Treat the next person you meet as if she or he was a miracle, and the next, and the next. You are a miracle. We are all miracles. Let’s treat each other as if we recognize that truth.

So may we be.

“THEOLOGY & ANTHROPOLOGY” 4 of 6 in a Series on Covenant

A Sermon by the Rev. Melanie Morel-Ensminger
First Unitarian Universalist Church of New Orleans
Sunday, December 6, 2009

Before we start, I want to make you aware of the special holiday events coming up. Next Sunday, December 13th, Music Director Betsy McGovern will lead a service filled with wonderful music on the holiday traditions bequeathed us by the ancient peoples of Ireland. On December 20th, at the regular time, I will preside over a service about Yule, the Winter Solstice. That evening at 6 pm, for the first time ever, we will hold what we hope will be a new tradition, a Candlelight Labyrinth Walk service. On Christmas Eve, also at 6 pm, we will celebrate the birth of Jesus with the nativity story, a simple open-table communion, and a homily on Christmas for religious liberals. Before and after the service, there will be potluck Christmas refreshments, including hot cider. On December 27, our Greater New Orleans Unitarian Universalist Intern Charlie Dieterich will host an informal service (VERY informal – he’s inviting folks to wear sweats!) to close the year. That afternoon, everyone is invited to my home for a Holiday Open House from 1-5 pm. And then, on January 3rd, we will once again hold our New Orleans Jazz Funeral for the Old Year, complete with a traditional jazz band. This year, we'll be joined by the other 2 churches in the Greater New Orleans UU cluster. Please spread the word amongst your friends and relations about these holiday happenings.

This morning we continue our ongoing series on covenant in the UU context, based on the Minns Lectures given by my colleague Alice Blair Wesley in 2000-01. This one deals with how words – and religious ideas – change and evolve over time.

As many of you know, Eric and I got a dog this fall, a little Corgi-Rottweiler mix that we named Keely Smith. We are training Keely to do things like “stay” and “sit” and “come” and we all are doing pretty well with it. The other day, I was trying to teach the dog “come” and to help, I put a treat on the floor. She did not seem to see it, and so I did something that is foolish when you are dealing with a pet – I pointed to it. Like any pet, even a very smart one, as Keely IS, she looked at my finger and not what I was pointing at.

Sometimes we UU can be like that too – we get hung up on a word that makes us uncomfortable, ignore what the word is pointing at. Words are metaphors that point to other realities; they are symbols that sometimes, shift meaning or gain new meaning. In Alice’s lecture, she talks about how certain words, such as "save" and "icon" and "bite," have become associated with computers, without losing their original definitions, and she also cites the sensitivity of some religious liberals to traditional religious words like “pastor.” Words not only convey meaning or have double meaning – they can sometimes confuse or obscure meaning.

Within our shared free religious tradition, there are words whose meanings are vitally important and yet which have shifted over time. What does it mean to be “human”? Are human beings fatally flawed, doomed to making wrong choices without superior guidance? Are human beings inherently good, and able to choose rightly? Are human beings essentially communal, or essentially individual?

A connected and equally important religious question is, What or who is God? Catholic doctrine refers to God as “3 persons;” another orthodox definition is “the perfect, omnipotent, omniscient originator and ruler of the universe” (Free Dictionary online). A more liberal definition would be Alice’s term “third reality” – the whole of being, or as the 7th UU Principle has it, “the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.” In fact, Alice says, God is the shortest name we have “for that reality greater than all, but present in each.” (ABD, Lecture 4) God is just so much easier to say.

Different answers have been given at different times to all these questions, even in recent history, and the answers are not academic – they matter. How we think about ourselves as human beings affects how we think about everything, including “God” and our relationship to God. If human beings are “fallen” and depraved, then God needs to save us. If humans are essentially individuals, we think of God the same way, whether or not we believe in God. If human nature is inherently positive, then God is more a force than a being or a person. If humanity is defined in terms of community, then God becomes a kind of glue holding us together.

But we usually don’t talk to one another – or even think to ourselves – in terms of dominant metaphors. We just talk. What can break down our communication is what Alice calls “broken metaphors” – when terms we use become a barrier instead a bridge for our connection.

Covenant is one such word. In the time of our religious ancestors, covenant was clearly understood, coming from the world of the Bible, which in turn got it from the cultural milieu of the ancient Near East. Covenant originally meant a promise, in terms of a people promising to obey and serve a king, who would then protect them from harm, whether from an outside force, or even from themselves. This at first meant a human king, and in Biblical times, evolved to mean – through the use of metaphor – between the Hebrew people and God, and later, with all humanity and God.

As with all metaphors, there were ways in which the covenant between an earthly king and his people and the covenant between God and humanity were alike and NOT alike. Human kings tended to crush the freedom of the people at the bottom; absolute power corrupted absolutely. Power flowed like a pyramid, with a very few at the pinnacle resting on a huge base of oppressed people at the bottom.

But the King of the Universe was not like human kings. Rain and sun shine are for everyone, showing God’s love for the world, inspiring our love in return, love for each other, animals, and the earth. No longer would covenant be, as Alice says, a kind of "protection racket," but something freely entered into, a new way of perceiving Ultimate Reality. Jesus took the evolution of covenant further, refining it so that God was no longer titled “King of the Universe,” but “Abba,” God the Father.

Our religious ancestors, notably the ones we’ve been looking at in the colony of Massachusetts in the late 1600s, took their covenant from little house churches of the New Testament, forming free congregations bound together by the “spirit of love” at work among them, and promising to walk together as best they could. Their religious promises led naturally, as we have seen, to immense changes in their – and our – political world.

Alice Blair Wesley writes: Today, you and I – we, all of us –

stand in the long tradition of the covenantal free church. Our con-temporary refinement of the understanding of covenant is to add the modifier “humanist” – we say ours is a humanist tradition, meaning that our everyday world has forced upon us the recognition that valid religious insights, even the most extraordinary, are always rooted in ordinary human experience of concrete events. To know anything about reality, or God, we make inferences from our limited experience to great encompassing truths, not the other way around. Therefore, even those insights we claim and stake our lives on are to be stated humbly, always with the awareness that we might be wrong.

For us as religious liberals, what we place our faith in has to make sense to us, even as we acknowledge that what makes sense to us is limited and finite and the universe is unlimited and infinite. Thus, we recognize that the covenants we make will need adjustment, will need to evolve, as we gain new insight and new knowledge – and will also need to be remade as we inevitably break faith and break our promises. Alice puts it better than I ever could:

…While the interdependent web of existence of which we are a part judges us and frustrates us, not only as individuals but as peoples, when we disregard or violate its laws, it is also gracious, offering us, over and over again, new chances for the practice of authentic, creative, lawful and loving, redemptive freedom.

These points have implications for both Unitarian Universalist congregational life, and for UU worship. Because of the wealth and richness and beauty of human life, which we did not and could not create, it is appropriate to begin our church events and especially our worship services with expressions of praise and gratitude for all gifts not made by human hands. Because we human beings are both promise-making and promise-breaking creatures, we ought to regularly take time to reflect on how we keep our covenants and our congregations should be places where the spirit of love guides all our actions and plans, where we forgive and begin again in love.

What I want for this church is what I want for our free religious faith: that we take our place as a beacon of both freedom and love, where people of all kinds can be brought together by the spirit of love to reason, to reflect, and to act in the world to bring about more freedom and love for all people. No matter what challenges we face as a congregation, may we always remember that as our first purpose. So might this be! AMEN – ASHE – SHALOM – SALAAM – NAMASTE – BLSSED BE!

“BREAD & ROSES” A Homily for Thanksgiving Bread Communion

by the Rev. Melanie Morel-Ensminger
First Unitarian Universalist Church in New Orleans
Sunday, November 22, 2009

All over the world, in nearly every culture, bread is considered the staff of life. Bread is the metaphor both for nourishment and hospitality; having a guest eat with you is said to be “breaking bread together.” In the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus taught his disciples to ask for “our daily bread.” (A few years ago, there was a popular bakery on St. Charles Avenue called “Your Daily Bread” where we used to get my son's birthday cake every year) Despite the prevalence of diets that restrict or even ban the eating of bread, for many people, a meal just isn’t a meal without some form of bread on the table.

I am reminded of a story shared with me by one of the founding members of the Chattanooga UU Church, who said that when he was a soldier during World War II he ate his first meal in a Chinese restaurant and insisted, to the dismay of the Chinese waiter, that he needed bread to complete the dinner. After a lot of, ahem, discussion, the waiter finally gave up and went down the street to a grocery store in order to get the bread. But as much as we need it and love it, bread isn’t all we need for life. Even for us New Orleanians, there really IS more to life than just eating. (Really!) We are reminded once again that we do not live by bread alone.

Hymn #109 in our hymnals is an old protest song written early in the last century by union organizer James Oppenheim. Our hymnal, in the tradition of religious songbooks, has titled it “As We Come Marching, Marching,” from its first line, but it is better and more widely known by its original name “Bread and Roses.”

Oppenheim was inspired to pen the words in 1912 after witnessing a march by women workers in the textile industry, who were striking for higher pay and better working conditions. He later said he was struck by a sign carried by one of the women: “We want bread -- and we want roses too.” (Later researchers were to dispute the veracity of all details of this story, but the song “Bread and Roses” had already been written.)

Bread and roses, bread and roses. Whether the story is literally true or not, the idea that the striking women would have had the nerve to demand not only more money for their labor, safer and more humane conditions for their work, and the right to organize a union to help protect them, but they would also want beauty, “a sharing of life’s glories” as well is an inspiration to all of us. As the words of the song so poignantly remind us, “hearts starve as well as bodies.”

By the way, that strike was settled on term generally favorable to the workers – they won pay increases, time-and-a-quarter pay for overtime, and a pledge by mill owners not to retaliate against the strikers. The women strikers are credited with devising the moving picket line, in order not to be arrested for loitering. We followed their example this Thursday night, as a group of approximately 3 dozen workers, organizers, and clergy gathered on Bourbon Street and marched in front of The Absinthe House and Tony Moran’s Restaurant to protest wage theft by the owners of those establishments. The organizers told us specifically to keep moving so we couldn’t be arrested by the NOPD for obstructing the street.

We enter this week into the winter holiday season, a time for many of rejoicing and celebration, a time for purchasing and making and receiving gifts of all kinds, gifts that symbolize our affection and abundance. But it is also time to remind ourselves that store-bought gifts only partially assuage the hearts of those who are lonely, who need companionship, who seek a fulfillment greater and deeper than consumerism can reach. The material abundance of the holiday season can mask emotional, spiritual, as well as physical emptiness. Hearts starve as well as bodies.

Let us remember in this season of giving to give of ourselves, to give gifts that cannot be bought and paid for – gifts of service, of time, of love and compassion, of tolerance and acceptance, gifts of senseless beauty and random kindness. As we remember to do this, on every day and in every season, we help to build a world where all human beings can enjoy both bread and roses.

All of the breads gathered on our communal table are more than just bread, for they represent the life experiences and cultures and backgrounds and loved ones of many of the people in our congregation. Let us bless the bread and share it together, saying the words for Unison Blessing that are in your Orders of Service.

Behind the Mask: Social Justice Analysis

A Sermon by the Reverend Melanie Morel-Ensminger
At First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston
Sunday, November 15, 2009

Since Katrina, a lot of reactive bumper stickers have appeared in New Orleans. “Proud to swim home” is one; another spells out FEMA in a way I can’t say in church. On Thursday, on the North Shore, I spotted one I hadn’t seen before – the cartoon character Calvin of “Calvin & Hobbes” urinating on a hurricane symbol marked “Katrina.” But the one relevant today is the bumper sticker seen on all kinds of vehicles all over the city. It says simply, “Thanks, Houston” and that is the message I bring you from my hometown and from the 3 UU churches of metro New Orleans: “Thanks, Houston.” It’s not over yet, and we still need lots of support, but we are truly grateful for all you did for New Orleans, and I’m grateful for this opportunity to speak with you this morning.

According to my unscientific survey in the French Market, masks are the #1 souvenir purchased by tourists in the Crescent City. Some are elegant, some are artistic, and some, admittedly, are cheesy rip-offs made in Taiwan. Masks and New Orleans are essentially linked in the public mind, what with Carnival and Mardi Gras, Halloween, and the Day of Decadence. We New Orleanians seemingly wear masks at the drop of a hat. The association between the city and masks goes back centuries, as when Louisiana was under the control of Spain in the late 1700s, and authorities tried to ban the wearing of masks – and it didn’t work.

The Spanish governor had a point – masks act as a disguise, hiding what lies behind. It’s easier to get away with something when you are wearing a mask; it’s easier to conceal what’s really going on. To discover someone’s identity, to learn the truth, you have to go behind the mask. This principle applies not only to people in costume – but also to other situations, and most especially in social justice work.

What you think you know about New Orleans can function as a kind of mask. Example: I read this week that New Orleans was the fastest growing city in the United States in 2008. That sounds great, doesn’t it? But the title of “fastest growing city in the United States” is a mask: look behind it and you see a city where a significant part of the original population has still not been able to return after the forced evacuation 4 years ago. In reality, ours is a depleted city, some of whose native citizens are prevented from coming back home, even as more affluent outsiders stream in.

Another mask New Orleans wears is her old nickname of The City That Care Forgot – the party town, Sin City. Sure, we’re comfortable wearing that mask; we’ve worn it for generations. We still have our celebrations and our festivals; we still eat the best and most diverse local food in the country. We still know how to laissez les bon temps roulez, cher. If you visit the French Quarter or ride the St. Charles streetcar, you might believe the mask is our real face. We are still an incredibly beautiful and culturally rich city. But go behind the mask, go to the 7th Ward or the Lower 9th Ward or Gentilly or Lakeview (where Community Church UU is located), and you’ll see that even now, 4 years after the Storm, vast areas of the city remain vacant, lost, destroyed. Neighborhoods that never had a vacant lot before Katrina show empty acres; some formerly prosperous middle-class neighborhoods exhibit only “jack o’lantern” progress, with a few renovated houses on blocks of devastated homes.

Even some of those abandoned homes are masks – some of them are actually occupied. With housing projects being torn down, the term “affordable housing” itself a mask for what the city no longer has, and with many low-income home owners unable to access programs that rehab houses, some New Orleanians have come home only to have no homes. According to Mike Miller of UNITY (a nonprofit organization working on post-Katrina homelessness), some people – numbering perhaps in the thousands – are squatting in their own destroyed house, or one that belongs to someone else. Some are squeezed into the homes of friends or relatives as they struggle to rebuild or find a new home. They are, in affect, homeless in their own home.

Even the quiet, well-kept 19th century residential neighborhoods Uptown (affected only by wind and rain during Katrina, not flooding) wear masks over hopelessness. On October 30th a man on Upperline Street fired shots into the street and threatened to kill himself after receiving an eviction notice. He told a reporter who reached him while he was barricaded inside his home, “I’m too old and too crippled to live on the street.” He was eventually talked out by a police negotiator, who told the Times-Picayune that the man expressed the characteristics of post-Katrina traumatic stress: “loneliness, despair, feeling abandoned, and paranoid about the government.” What New Orleanian does not feel those things, to some degree, at one time or another?

In the cluster of UU churches that make up Greater New Orleans UUs, the mask might be how well we seem to outsiders – we hold worship, we teach our children and youth, we gather for fellowship events and we work on social justice projects. We’re even jointly teaching an intern. We host volunteers from around the country, and we do our best to show them both sides, the good and the bad, the fun and the devastated. But despite the new members and our active ministries and our visibility in the wider community, it is still a struggle. Some parishioners in all 3 churches are still without a proper home of their own; people of all ages cope with nightmares and anxiety, symptoms of continuing PTSD. The North Shore church, struggling under a too-high mortgage, gets professional ministry only with a little help from their friends at the other 2 churches, as Reverend Jim Vanderweele and I devote some time with that congregation. Community Church struggles to rebuild from scratch, and First Church struggles to get basics like floors and electricity and a church kitchen. We tell each other with grim smiles, “Recovery is a marathon, not a sprint” – but if we’re expected to do it entirely on our own, it won’t happen. We are grateful to the UU churches that have agreed to partner with us, pledging certain amounts of money per year, holding fundraisers for us, dedicating offerings to us, and walking with us until this long journey is done.

A mask that is often hard to shake off in doing justice work is our own sense that we know what’s best for someone else. When Katrina happened, I was astounded at the number of people outside of New Orleans – even UUs! – who told me that the city should not be rebuilt, or if it were, to be rebuilt “somewhere else.” (They never did say where exactly.) After Katrina, lots of good-hearted volunteers from around the country insisted they knew best where to direct their labor. Some UU volunteers refused to work on First Church’s devastated building, saying they preferred to work with people “who really needed help.” (It was news to us that we didn’t.) Other volunteers turned their noses up at mowing lawns – until it was patiently explained to them that exiled homeowners could lose their houses to seizure by the city if the grass went uncut for too long.

In doing social justice work as a UU congregation, it is necessary to go behind all kinds of masks, masks that keep us from seeing the true depth of a situation, masks that prevent us from realizing root causes in the issues we face, masks that hamper our effectiveness. One mask is the so-called conventional wisdom; another is assuming we already know what ought to be done. While even the lowest level of charity is preferable to doing nothing at all, UU churches that want to have the greatest impact should go be-hind the mask and employ a clear-headed analysis in order to make true and lasting positive change, and in order to build right relations in the wider community. Social analysis requires going back to basics, looking behind the received wisdom about a situation, asking hard questions of ourselves and others to learn what we don’t already know about a given issue.

For example, giving even used books or computers to a public school in an impoverished neighborhood is a good thing. But an even better thing would be to dig deeper as a congregation and ask questions, to learn why such a school does not receive funding to have a library and computers, and to lobby elected officials with the power to effect change, not just for one school, but for all schools in the Houston system.

Another, related, example might be housing. Where do poor and working class folks live hereabouts? Are those neighborhoods near to jobs that pay a living wage? What kinds of schools are in those neighborhoods? Is there public transportation to help people get to jobs and schools if they don’t have a car? What are the streets like in those neighborhoods – are they smooth or are they potholed? If folks in those neighborhoods want to move to other neighborhoods, is that possible? Is affordable housing available all over the metro area, or only in designated areas? What do our principles call us to do? What might your congregation – especially if united with other Houston-area congregations – do to change the overall situation for the greatest number of people?

We UUs often say in our stewardship campaigns that folks should give to their church “till it feels good” and we often promote doing social justice work in our communities by saying how good it makes you feel. Donating money and time and effort to our congregations and to causes we believe in does feel good, and that is a valid reason for doing them. But an even better reason is because we are all in this together. People who be-long to a Unitarian Universalist church need to stand together with other folks in UU churches because we are all sisters and brothers in faith. We stand together with people in need in our local communities because we are all Houstonians or New Orleanians or New Yorkers. We stand with people who have survived hardship or disaster in our country because we are all Americans. We stand with those reaching out to us around the world because we are all human beings. When we take off our masks of difference, we find we are all the same. As hymn #134 proclaims, “Our world is one world/what touches one affects us all.”

Some years ago, an Australian Aboriginal woman named Lila Watson and her collective confronted a group of First World missionaries who had arrived to “help” their community. The Collective had worked hard on what they wanted to say, and while Lila Watson is often credited, she has made it clear it is not hers alone, but a group statement. You may have heard it before, it’s all over the Internet; we have it posted on a doorway of the New Orleans Rebirth Volunteer Center, housed at First Church New Orleans. It goes like this:

If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time.
But if you have come because your liberation
is bound up with mine, then let us work together.

When we go behind the mask and discern what is really going on in our communities and in our world, we are better able to make common cause with justice-loving peoples everywhere, and make lasting contributions to the spread of freedom. So might this be for all of us! AMEN – ASHÉ – SHALOM – SALAAM – NAMASTÉ – BLESSED BE!

"How We Came to Forget"

3rd of 6 in a Series on Covenant
Based on the Minns Lectures by Alice Blair Wesley
Given by the Rev. Melanie Morel-Ensminger
First Unitarian Universalist Church of New Orleans
Sunday, November 8, 2009

Close to 20 years ago, when I was a seminarian, First Church minister Suzanne Meyer recommended me as a guest preacher to churches in the district which were without a minister. When I arrived in San Antonio, Texas, for my service, church leaders were laughing about an incident that morning involving their brand-new church secretary. Entering the office early that day, she had inadvertently set off the alarm. ADT called, checking to see if someone had broken in. The secretary identified herself and said that she could not remember the passcode. “We’ll have to ask you some questions to see if you’re legitimately in the building,” the security company told her. She successfully gave the church address and phone number, and knew who the church president was. Then, the security agent asked the “capper” – “Recite the creed!” “Oh my god!” the new secretary wailed, “We don’t have one!” “OK, you’re the church secretary,” came the reply.

That’s funny, ‘cause it’s true that we UUs don’t have a creed. But what if the alarm company had asked about the church doctrine? Who could've answered that question correctly? This sermon series on Covenant is based on the Minns Lectures given by my colleague Alice Blair Wesley in 2000-01, in which she contends that we have an important “lay doctrine of the free church” that consists of aspects bequeathed to us by our New England ancestors from the 1630s, aspects that characterize our Unitarian Universalist churches today. These are:

•Being intentionally based in the spirit of love, rather than any particular belief;
•Being concerned with the health of the wider civil society;
•Defining membership as the free choice of a person to join and to commit to promises, a covenant, without regard to gender, economic status, or occupation;
•Investing the ultimate authority of the church solely in the collective conscience and reason of the gathered members, to make all decisions pertaining to the church, by democratic vote, including for lay leaders and ordained ministers.

It is safe to say that even though generalizations about UU congregations are difficult, if not impossible, virtually ALL Unitarian Universalist congregations in North America still adhere to these points. But there is one more point that Alice mourns has not been as faithfully followed in the 350-plus years since the founding of the Dedham, Massachusetts, church. And that is, the expectation that neighboring churches will be in covenant with each other, meeting together regularly in what were called “councils”, advising each other, learning from each other, and gaining strength and comfort from each other. This aspect of the free church, says Alice, has been honored more in the breach than in reality.

Why would this be so? Why would we UUs so faithfully keep the principles handed down to us from the 17th century, and yet neglect this one point? Let’s explore what happened in our history and in our concept of ourselves as religious liberals that led to this regrettable development.

To explain how we religious liberals came to forget about the covenant between churches, Alice tells 2 stories. The first she calls the “Cinderella” story; here’s how it goes: our religious ancestors held that every soul is “like Cinderella, born into a low estate she is powerless to change, but from which she can be rescued, by the power of divine mutual love.” It was the job of the educated clergy to thus “free” the souls of the congregation, by presenting the life and glory of Christ and by showing the splendid spiritual life available to those whose hearts have been first humbled (in knowledge of their imperfect condition) and then lifted to heights of love with the Prince of Peace. And when Cinderella meets and knows the Prince, she falls passionately and deeply in love, just as the Prince already loves her. “The salient point is the ecstasy of their union” (ABW, Lecture 3).

While our ancestors did not expect their spiritual lives to be ALL ecstasy, all the time, they did expect that the experience of ecstatically transforming and sustaining religious love would be normative for church members. But after the first generation of New England members, something happened. Young adults of the second generation were not joining; brought up within the free church their whole lives, these young people had no ecstatic religious experience to prompt them. They felt connected, they always had, but there was no dramatic and emotional “Cinderella” moment for them; thus their children could not be baptized. The grandparents, the original members, found the situation untenable.

The older members decided to compromise. Members could join if they did certain things, acted a certain way, even if they had not (yet) had an ecstatic transforming experience. It was, Alice says, bad theology, based on the mistaken notion that ONLY ecstatic religious experience was the hallmark of authentic free religion. The older folks of the 1650s should have said to the young people, “Let’s talk about what we mean by promising to be a community dedicated to the spirit of love. If it makes sense to you, and if you too yearn for a life in holy community faithful to that spirit, then we invite you to join us in covenant.” (Indeed, says Alice, that’s exactly what we should say to new folks today.) But they didn’t say it, because they believed so strongly that religious commitment required the ecstatic event.

And so, what had begun as an explicit understanding of church membership as covenantal slowly devolved into more of a contractual understanding. Over time, it also meant that New England free churches – most of which later became Unitarian – became more about family connections and ethnicity than an intentional, conscious choice.

So what was the deal with those second-generation New Englanders? Why didn’t they join their parents’ churches? They attended services faithfully but did not join. Alice says that instead of being Cinderella members, they were “Cynthia” members, and here’s the story as Alice conceives it:

Cynthia is a girl who, unlike Cinderella, grows up in the court of the king; her parents are court officials, and she’s known the Prince all her life. She often hears the adults speak of how union between her and the Prince would be a good thing. The love that she and the Prince have for each other starts childishly at first and then deepens and matures. There is no “aha” moment, no experience of sudden spiritual ecstasy – just the slow and steady growth of the spirit of love until Cynthia feels not only that she truly belongs, but also has responsibility for making “the realm” – the wider world – a better place.

For some time, both concepts of “salvation,” if you will, existed in the New England free churches, which, Alice points out in her lecture, were “small u” unitarian before they became “capital U” Unitarian. Later, conservative members complained that the liberals were subverting the original theology of the church, because the Cynthia story altered the idea of God’s arbitrary choice of some people, and not others, to be bride (or Cinderella). Instead, the Cynthia members, in effect, chose themselves – thus bringing into the proto-unitarian churches a form of “small u” universalism.

The conflict of the liberals and conservatives in the New England free churches came to a head in the 1800s, and resulted in Unitarianism breaking permanently from the Standing Order. As often happens in such arguments, each side held that they were the true heirs of the founders. Alice thinks – and I agree – that the Unitarians were following the spirit of the original founders. As we saw in the first sermon in this series, theological doctrines such as predestination and the depravity of humanity are entirely absent from the founding documents of the Dedham church. Only years later did the conservatives try to assert their importance.

The fight got personal: liberal and conservative churches refused to allow their ministers to exchange pulpits – one of the key ways then and now that churches evidence lateral relationships. A new generation of Unitarian young people arose in the 1830s (200 years after the founding of the Dedham church), complaining that Unitarian services were without emotion and soul, and made things uncomfortable among churches for a generation or more.

To top it off, at this same time, a Unitarian minister of one church in Boston began to strenuously preach against the alcohol policies of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts – notwithstanding that many parishioners of his and other Unitarian churches made their living in one way or another from the production of rum and the infamous Triangle Trade. Between liberals and conservatives, Transcendentalists and Unitarians, wets and drys, conscious cooperation between free churches dwindled to almost nothing.

Interestingly, the contrast between the Cinderella and Cynthia style of church membership was repeated in the way Unitarian churches got started. Either a group of people would be struck by an ecstatic experience of transformative love, and come together as a church; or would over time come to realize the deepening of their spiritual commitment and then found a church. Whichever method was used, there was thought to be no need to ask for help or guidance or permission from a neighboring church, and so none was.

Eventually, as rationalism came to dominate Unitarian congregations, an expectation of an ecstatic spiritual experience fell out of favor. The idea that over time, in developmental stages, a person could come to a deeper understanding of, and commitment to, Unitarian faith led to an assumption that the spirit of love on which the churches were founded would come about automatically, evolve on its own, naturally, without a lot of effort – which undermined the idea that the spirit of love would need the attention and care and work that covenant calls for.

The final nail in the coffin of covenantal relationships between congregations, according to Alice Blair Wesley, was the rise of the model of non-profit corporations in the early 1800s, such as for the distribution of Bibles. These groups were separate from the churches, and were set up hierarchically, with executive officers and boards, often in competition with other similar corporations. From the founding of the American Unitarian Association in 1825, Unitarian churches began to organize themselves in the exact same way. As corporations, whether non-profit or for-profit, do not often cooperate but compete with each other, so it also was with many, if not most, Unitarian churches. For all these reasons, the councils of Unitarian churches virtually vanished.

I have to point out a local anomaly. Since Katrina, we have been involved in a new, close, cooperative relationship with the 2 other UU churches of the New Orleans metro area, Community Church and North Shore, in the Greater New Orleans UU cluster. There are not many UU churches that are engaged in similar relationships, and that is a shame. It should be a point of pride to us that we 3 congregations have been working on this relationship over these 4 years since the Storm – but it must also be admitted that it’s not likely this would have happened if it hadn’t been for the disaster, and for the strong encouragement (some might even say pressure) from the UUA. Whatever the motivation that got GNOUU started, I think we are doing the right thing. And should it come to pass that GNOUU raises all the funds that all 3 churches are seeking in the campaign, I would still urge us to remain in close relationship. It is not only helpful for us now, in our recovery, and an important part of our history – it is good for our future for us to be together.

We close this morning with words from Alice Blair Wesley:

We’ve come a long way in many ways since the founding of our oldest churches in the 1630s. The spirit of mutual love is yet that reality most worthy of our ultimate loyalty…. Our love, though seldom of the ecstatic variety, is warm and steady, deep and powerful to redeem and to enhance our own lives and…lives in our larger world. We might yet enter a covenant to walk together in this spirit as an Association of free Congregations, without hierarchy, with many well used lateral patterns of engagement, in which we respect each other’s independence and our interdependence in the interdependent web of existence of which it is our blessed privilege to be a part. I pray we may yet do so.

So might this be! AMEN – ASHÉ – SHALOM – SALAAM – NAMASTE – BLESSED BE!

“Thus Do We Covenant”

Part 2 of 6 Sermons
Based on 2000-01 Minns Lectures by Rev. Alice Blair Wesley
The Rev. Melanie Morel-Ensminger
First Unitarian Universalist Church of New Orleans
Sunday, October 25, 2009

A few weeks ago, in the first sermon in this series based on the Minns Lectures by my colleague and friend Alice Blair Wesley, we saw how our religious ancestors in Dedham, Massachusetts in 1637, worked up to founding what is now First Church and Parish, Unitarian Universalist (pictured on the front of your Orders of Service), by meeting weekly in each other’s homes and lovingly discussing together what kind of church they wanted and what its focus would be. While assuming a basis in Christianity (which we’ll look at in a future sermon in this series), their first concerns were “questions as pertained to the just, peaceable, & comfortable proceeding in the civil society.”

This was a revolutionary act, never before attempted in the history of religion – that a soon-to-be congregation would concern itself with the conditions of the society around it. Without precedent, the people of Dedham – our forebears – realized that a free church could only function in a free society. They also decided that everything in their church would be firmly based in a spirit of mutual love.

After today’s service, we will, as countless UU congregations have done in the 372 years since the founding of the Dedham church, follow the example of our ancestors in Dedham by gathering to listen and learn from each other on a particular announced topic, in our case, about the Gordon sisters and the window that was made in their honor and recently reinstalled in our church. We will follow a format similar to theirs, of taking turns to speak from our hearts and consciences, maintaining throughout a spirit of love for each other and for this church, hoping to be, as they would say, “edified.” As food for thought for this sermon and for the Town Meeting to come, let me quote Alice Blair Wesley:

I don’t claim these 17th century ancestors of ours got everything right. I subscribe to the blind-spot theory of human nature, that all of us make mistakes we can’t see as mistakes at the time. But I think our understanding of our own beginnings is distorted [if] we focus too single-mindedly on their mistakes.

It’s important when we look back at the folks of Dedham to realize that while they were inventing a new kind of church organization, it didn’t arise in a vacuum. They were reacting against what they had experienced in England – legally enforced church attendance (you were fined or worse for not going) at stultifying, dull, uneducated, irrelevant services. At same time, as part of the spreading Protestant Reformation, lay people who were literate were able to read the Bible in their own language, and some university students and teachers were seriously studying the Bible and publicly preaching about the earliest days of Christianity, when things were vastly different.

Lay people went to hear these exciting new preachers and were discussing what they heard. The bishops of the Church of England, as Alice says, “went bananas” over all this running around to hear new preachers and all this discussing. They ordered people to stay home, and they removed from pulpits any preachers in the new style. To get around the ruling, lectures were started on market days in the public square, but when the bishops got wind of these, they were shut down as well. The people’s talking was dangerous, not just for bishops, but for the government as well. As King James I was fond of saying, “No bishops, no king.” (And he was right, too, wasn’t he?)

But the spirit of love could not then nor ever can be contained. Frustrated and threatened by life in England, people in search of freedom emigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Here they set up congregations as they wished – with learned clergy (as opposed to the ignorant curates back in England) and with no bishops over them. But the colonists were always aware that they were dependent on the charter granted by the king, and that at any time, for any reason, the king’s armed ships could arrive and take away everything they had wrought. This is at least in part why the people of Dedham were so concerned with having an orderly society – legal disputes and scandals might end up in the English court system and thus bring the unwanted attention of the king to their experiments. Despite their professed adherence to the spirit of love, a perhaps understandable spirit of anxiety pervaded the early colony (which might help explain such drastic errors as the exiling of Anne Hutchinson and the Witch Trials).

In their new home in the “wilderness,” the colonists continued their habit of running around to hear different preachers, and ministers of different churches in different neighboring villages would lecture on weekday afternoons, with discussions going on well into the night. The governor of the Mass Bay Colony, worried that people would be too tired to do the hard work of clearing the land, farming, and building new houses and villages, tried to ban the lectures, but was swiftly brought up short. Folks said, in effect, we didn’t come all this way for you to act like a bishop. Governor Winthrop and the churches worked out a compromise: lectures and the after-discussions would be held on Thursdays afternoons only, thus freeing people up for work on the other days of the week. (Interestingly, the tradition of Thursday lectures continued in New England Unitarian churches until late in the 19th century!)

And so, out of their experiences in England and with their understanding of how early Christianity had been organized and practiced, gained from reading and interpreting the Bible for themselves, our religious ancestors in Dedham – and in other New England free churches, where we don’t have such a clear and explicit written record – put their primary religious loyalty in the spirit of love at work in their midst, and made sacred promises to each other about how they would be. Thus they covenanted with each other and with God as they understood God.

What was that covenant? What else did they promise? Alice identifies these in her “8 key points” – that they would be faithful to the spirit of love; that they would have no outside authority; that they would reason together to discover truth as best they could; that they would discipline themselves and each other when needing to be reminded of their promises; that membership would be open, and that it would be intentional, not automatic; that remaining a member would not mean believing any particular thing, but acting within the covenant; and finally they understood that there was no contradiction between common sense and their religion. (Other parts of that original covenant will be covered in future sermons in this series.)

It all sounds so normal and familiar now, it’s hard to think back and cast ourselves into their place, and realize how strange and dangerous and revolutionary this all was. Even today, in churches with episcopal or presbyterian polity, decisions by lay people, however much in the spirit of love and however well reasoned and however arrived democratically, can be overruled by bishops or presbyteries. (One recent local example comes to mind: there is absolutely nothing the UUA can do to close this church if the lay members don’t vote to close it.) Even today, there are sincere religious people who argue that you cannot be a “real church” without a set list of creeds and doctrines to adhere to. There are religions that people are born into – and while we sometimes casually speak of “birthright UUs” the truth is, you can’t be born a UU, you can only choose to be one, by signing a Membership Book of your own free will.

Back to our ancestors in Dedham, they did yet another thing that was radical. They opened church membership to any person willing to be bound by the covenant. Once the church was established, they welcomed into equal membership the richest people in the village and their servants, men and women, young apprentices and the elderly, people of every occupation. “Whatever their status in the civil society, in the church all members took part in the discussions and every member had one vote.” (ABW, Lecture 2)
The original Dedham church covenant is long, too long to be memorized and certainly too long to be included here. But of a similar vintage is the covenant of their older sister church in Salem, Massachusetts, written in 1629, and it’s emblematic of covenants by other New England free churches:

We covenant with the Lord and with one another, and do bind ourselves in the presence of God, to walk together in all his ways, according as he is pleased to reveal himself unto us in his blessed word of truth.

Today’s Unitarian Universalist churches ought to learn from the processes that brought about those old covenants. We should periodically come together to ask ourselves the deepest questions, such as “What are the realities of our lives to which we really want to be faithful? What would such loyalty look like in the real world? What might happen if everyone in our society had these priorities? Whose need for mutual love would be fulfilled, whose would be left out?” And from the answers we would craft and renew our covenant with the Divine, with each other – and with our ancestors in the free church. Whatever words we would come up with, in the end, I’m sure, with Alice Blair Wesley, that one thing would be obvious: We belong to, and at our best want passionately to be, loyal to our long free church tradition and to keep it love and strong in our time.

We are able to study the founding of the Dedham church and learn from its deliberations only because they kept such meticulous records of their meetings. They did this as a gift to us, as it says in Book I of the records:

for future ages to make use of in any case that may occur where in light may be fetched from any examples of things past, no way intending to bind the conscience of any to walk by this pattern…

As Alice says, “How’s that for a liberal understanding of the proper use of any history?” They wanted us, their heirs, to learn from their example, but not to feel constrained or oppressed by it. They bequeathed to us our interest and vital concern in the civil society around us, they showed us how to organize a church in the spirit of love, and they modeled for us the vital importance of sacred promises in the things that really matter. All we can say is, “Thank you.”


BENEDICTION (adapted from the Pilgrims’ Covenant)
Let us pledge to walk together
in the ways of truth and affection
As best we understand then now or may learn them in days to come,
That we and our children might be fulfilled,
And that we might speak to the world
in words and actions of peace and good will.

"First You Make a Roux" A Sermon for Commitment Sunday

First Unitarian Universalist Church
Sunday, October 11, 2009

In the Living section of this week’s Times-Picayune, there was an article that explained that professional chefs and amateur cooks outside of New Orleans are almost always shocked at the dark color of our roux. Most of these serious cooks had no idea that in South Louisiana we cook a roux so long to get that rich deep brown, almost-black, hue. Of course, no one from here or who has lived here long would be surprised – to us, it’s normal.

We know it takes both courage and care to let a roux go that dark, to come that close to burning. (In fact, that’s the reason why my mother used to joke that her Louisiana recipes actually started with, “First, you burn the roux.”) You have to stay close by, stirring a lot if not constantly, being willing to get spattered a bit with the hot mixture -- which is why Mrs. Leah Chase’s stirring arm is dotted with old burn scars. You have to let go of your anxiety that it’s getting too dark, and watch carefully and patiently as the roux grows to be the color of coffee with just a touch of cream, right before you throw in the chopped "holy trinity" of onion, celery, and bell pepper to stop the browning. You have to stay present and pay attention, and you can’t be trying to do too many things at one time (which is why my Mama’s roux burned so often).

It’s easy to see why our Annual Budget Drive Committee chose “First You Make a Roux” as the theme for this year’s campaign. Making a proper roux takes attention, patience, care, courage, and dedication – and maybe even a willingness to suffer a little. Once the roux is properly prepared, you have the basis for almost anything you want to do in South Louisiana cooking. In the same way, putting together the budget of a UU church and seeking the support of its members and friends also requires attention, patience, care, courage, and dedication – and maybe even a willingness to suffer just a little bit.

Maybe “suffer” is the wrong word. Many of us left our previous religious faiths that expected us to “suffer” perhaps a little too much. But it’s also true that a faith that asks little or nothing of its adherents can expect to get exactly that.

Here’s what Unitarian Universalism and First Church expect of you: your very best. Whatever is your best effort, that is what we expect – the best of your giving in the circumstances and context of your present life. The best you can do, the best you can give. For some of us, that might be a gift above $5,000 per year; for a few others, it might be $1 per week, or even less. For many of us, it will be somewhere in the middle between those two extremes.

I gave a lot of thought to my gift this year, and I made a decision that required a little sacrifice. I plan to double my gift to the church, putting myself in the beginning stages of the UUA Giving Guide for my level of income. I have a personal goal in years to come of moving myself along the Giving chart, to eventually become a full Tither. I’m not there yet, but I want to get there. The gift I’m planning would require skipping some movies and popcorn, and eating-in a little more often. But for right now, in the context of Eric and my life, this gift feels good. We’re giving til it feels good. I hope that all of you who have not yet made your gift will think in those terms, that you will do the best you can, that you too will give til it feels good.

While it might be a good fantasy to dream about a church that didn’t need to raise money, in the world we live in it doesn’t happen very often. (And in those few churches I know about that have no money challenges, the level of interpersonal conflict is sadly very high. be careful what you wish for!) No matter how you look at it, money is the roux that makes everything happen in a church – the building, the worship, the religious education, the music, the interfaith connections, the programs for the folks inside the church and the ministries that benefit the wider community. Everything we do as a church, and everything we hope to so, takes regular applications of money, coming in at predictable, expected intervals.

Folks outside of New Orleans and South Louisiana can’t understand why we cook the way we do, and it’s likely that outside of Unitarian Universalism there may be religious folks who can’t understand the way we govern ourselves and how we make important decisions. But this is the way things are done in the free church – the members decide for themselves where money is to be spent, to what purpose, and in what amounts, and then they raise the bulk of that money from among themselves. And so, here we are, once again engaged in the holy effort of pledging ourselves to support the faith and church we love.

Yesterday and Friday, I spent hours on my gumbo contribution to last night’s Gumbo Celebration Dinner. Stirring the pot as the roux slowly browned to the right color, getting spattered by the hot flour and oil mixture, sweating bullets in my hot kitchen, I was thinking about the dinner and this morning’s service and this sermon. And I thought about how much fun we would have as a community, eating and talking and joking together. I knew in advance that Jyaphia’s gumbo would beat my gumbo, and I knew I didn’t care. I knew it would be worth it, and I was glad to do it. It felt good to contribute.

When first you make a roux, you can use it to create any number of delicious dishes. When you put together an Annual Budget Drive in a UU church, you can use the funds raised in any number of creative ways to further the mission of the church. Let’s make this roux rich and dark and smoky; let’s make something strong to put the church on a firm and strong foundation. Let’s do this together. AMEN – ASHE – SHALOM – SALAAM – NAMASTE – BLESSED BE!

Covenant Sermon Series, Part 1 of 6

Based on 2000-01 Minns Lectures by Rev. Alice Blair Wesley:
“Love is The Doctrine of This Church”
The Rev. Melanie Morel-Ensminger
First Unitarian Universalist Church of New Orleans
Sunday, October 4, 2009

In 1941, Susan Minns, a dedicated Unitarian and member of King's Chapel in Boston, established in her will a bequest to fund a series of lectures in honor of her brother, Thomas Minns. As stated in the document, Miss Minns wished for 6 lectures to be given annually by a Unitarian Universalist minister “in good standing” on a topic of general religious interest. A committee was set up, consisting of the ministers and selected members of King's Chapel and First Church, also of Boston, to select lecturers from suggestions made by Unitarian ministers. (Nowadays, the committee accepts proposals directly from would-be lecturers.)

The inaugural series of Minns Lectures was given in 1942 by Walton E. Cole, and was entitled “Realistic Courage;” former lecturers have included such distinguished and well-known ministers as A. Powell Davies of All Souls Church in Washington, DC; Arthur Foote, who was the son of Henry Wilder Foote who served First Church New Orleans 1902-1906; James Luther Adams, theologian who taught generations of UU ministers at Harvard University; and Dana MacLean Greely, who served as one of the first Presidents of the Unitarian Universalist Association following merger.

You may note in this list an absence of women lecturers. It took fully 20 years for the Minns Committee to select a female minister; the honor for that went to Dorothy Spoerl in 1962. Another 15 years went by before the second woman was chosen, Doris Hunter, in 1977. Sadly, fully 19 years passed before the next, Laurie Bushbaum in 1996. Fortunately, women have been chosen more often after that: in 2000-01, minister and historian Alice Blair Wesley, author of the lectures this sermon series is based on, entitled “The Spirit & The Promise of Our Covenant”; and our friend and post-Katrina partner Kim Crawford-Harvie was asked to give a lecture on the history of Arlington Street Church in 2003. This year’s Minns Lecture will be given by Susan Ritchie. It is to be hoped that future selections will be more gender balanced; however, as near as I can tell, there has never been a lecturer of color – an omission I expect will be rectified soon.

My colleague and mentor Alice Blair Wesley, who I first met when she taught UU history at Leadership School at The Mountain in the late 1980s, calls herself only a “lay” historian, because, she says, she has only been able to do her research haphazardly, in between serving UU churches and being a wife and mother. Alice is too modest by half. Her book, Myths of Time and History, has been used extensively by UU schools, congregations, and ministers as a primer on how our Unitarian Universalist theology is influenced by our history. Alice is passionate our history, believing that present-day UUs need to know about our past in order to be fully a part of Unitarian Universalism today.

I agree with Alice, and it is also true that the Worship Team has received requests from church members to have more services on UU history. For both of those reasons, I have chosen her 2000-01 Minns Lectures as the basis for a series of 6 sermons on the theme of covenant in the UU context, how it came to be, and what it means for us today. The sermon series will be interspersed throughout this worship year; I hope you will find them useful to your spiritual journey.

The story of the understanding of covenant within Unitarian Universalism begins with the historic church pictured on the front of your Orders of Service. In fact, this church’s story is so foundational to the idea of covenant for UUs, that Alice Blair Wesley requested that the Minns Committee shift the venue for the first lecture to what is formally known as First Church and Parish, Unitarian Universalist, in Dedham, Massachusetts. It is an interesting tale, and Alice tells it well.

In 1637, a small group of English colonists, about 30 families, petitioned and received permission to take over a parcel of land in the “wilderness” 9-10 miles south and west of the New England colonial center of Boston. There they founded the new village of Dedham, designing first a system of governing themselves. Having then, as Alice says, “pens built for animals, initial crops seen to, houses [built], furniture unpacked or freshly pegged together and so on,” they turned their minds to religious matters. They would need a church.

But what kind of church, and how would they do it? Thrown together, of differing tenures in the colony, from different places in England, and with a lot of work to accomplish in order to establish themselves in this new place, the folks of Dedham didn’t know each other. In order to make decisions about the kind of church they would start, they did something that was both revolutionary and radical, and terribly simple and neighborly – they set up a series of Thursday meetings at each other’s homes for the purpose of (and here I quote from the records of First Church, Book I, now kept in the archives of the Dedham Historical Society): “lovingly to discourse and consult together…and prepare for spiritual communion in a church society, that we might be further acquainted with the tempers and gifts of one another.”

To facilitate these meetings, they adopted some simple rules. They would decide before leaving each meeting what question would be discussed the next week; that way the participants would have ample opportunity to thoughtfully consider the issues at hand. At each meeting, the host would begin the session, speaking to the agreed-upon question. Each person present could, as they chose, speak to the issue, raise a closely related question, or state any objections or doubts they might have about what anyone said, in a manner “humbly & with a teachable heart, not with any mind of caviling or contradicting.” The records show that all their “reasonings” were “very peaceable, loving, & tender, much to edification.”

This is an amazing thing. Our religious ancestors, on their own, and for all we know for the first time in religious history, came together, evolved rules for how they would meet together in order to invent a new church. And the rules that they made up sound incredibly familiar, because they are precisely how UU congregations make big (and little) decisions today. How many of us here have sat through numberless meetings of this kind, before and after Katrina, for momentous issues and trivial ones? As a UU minister, I feel like I’ve been to thousands!

The people of Dedham continued to meet in this fashion from the winter of 1637 until some time after the church was officially founded in November 1638. It is extremely telling that although all the folks meeting in Dedham were Christian of some kind, the first topic of discussion was NOT Christ or God or the Bible. It was instead, quote:

For the subject of this disputes or conferences, diverse meetings at first were spent about questions as pertained to the just, peaceable and comfortable proceeding in the civil society.

This means, as Alice points out, a foundational concern of a free church is the justice, peace, laws and regulations – the conditions of – any healthy, free society. Out in the wilderness, out of the anguish of European society in the 1600s, with no direction save their own minds and consciences, these good plain folks – our religious ancestors – knew there could be no peaceably functioning free church if it were not set within a larger society wherein concerns for justice, peace, and reasonable laws can be freely and effectively voiced, without coercion or suppression. Thus we can see from the very beginning that the people of the free church would have as a foundational concern the health of the larger society.

The people of Dedham, with no example to guide them from Mother England, had figured out that the task of the free church was to love God and one another so well that in their study and discussion, dispute and conference, prayer, consultation and more discussion, the members might learn together the divine will of the loving God for the whole society, in terms of justice, peace, and reasonable laws. And so, the members would feel called, compelled, bound to proclaim it and try to bring it about in their whole society.

Not only was there no precedent back in England, discussing such matters, whether in church or in the marketplace, had been grounds for fines, imprisonment, exile, beatings and even hangings. Our religious ancestors, by choosing to do this new thing, were brave in the extreme. (Indeed, no written records were kept of the discussion on civil society, as if even now, 3,000 miles from England, they had been afraid that somehow an agent of the king would find out what they were doing.)

When they moved on to discussing and consulting and disputing, “humbly and with a teachable heart, not with any mind of caviling or contradicting” about the church they wanted, they were in agreement that they wanted a church founded in genuinely deep, religious love (which was, for them, grounded in a union with Christ, something else we’ll look at in a future sermon). The conclusion they came to was this: Members of their new free church should be joined in a covenant of religious loyalty to the spirit of love.

Once the members were joined in a covenant of their own devising, the member’s loyalty in the church should only be to the spirit of love, working in their hearts and minds. No one, whether inside or outside the church, would have any authority over them. Seek and consider counsel from other churches, yes (as we’ll see in another future sermon in this series), but accept rulings or commands contrary to their own consciences, never.

In case you’re laboring under the misapprehension that all religious people of the past cared about (even our religious ancestors) were things like original sin, predestination, and hellfire, not one of those topics arose in the records of the founding of the Dedham Church. Words that occur a lot are: reason and reasoning, deliberation, encouragement, advice counsel, agree and agreement, liberties, and promises.

By far the most commonly used words in the notes made of the 1637-1638 meetings of the people of Dedham in founding their church are: affection, affectionately, embrace, love, loving, lovingly. In the first 24 pages, Alice counted 32 uses of the words affection and love. Why? Because then as now and for as long as human history endures, the integrity of the free church comes down to our loyalty to the spirit of love at work in the hearts and minds of the local church members.

And that is why so many Unitarian Universalist congregations share at one time or another one of the most commonly used readings in our hymnal, the words that we shared for our Chalice Lighting. Let us share them again, remembering our courageous forebears in the Dedham church, and the spirit of love we share with them:

Love is the doctrine of this church,
The quest of truth is its sacrament,
And service is its prayer.
To dwell together in peace,
To seek knowledge in freedom,
To serve human need,
To the end that all souls shall grow into harmony with the Divine –
Thus do we covenant with each other and with God.

Stained Glass Windows Dedication Service

Sunday, September 20, 2009

WORDS OF DEDICATION FOR THE GORDON WINDOW
(In honor of Kate Mary, Jean, and Frances Gordon)

Three women born into privilege, three women who could have dedicated their time solely to travel, concerts, and social events, turned their energies instead to issues of social justice.

Appalled by children forced to work in inhumane conditions, they lobbied strenuously for a change in Louisiana’s laws to protect them.

Motivated by unsafe working conditions in local factories, they vigorously campaigned for factory inspectors and ensured that women for the first time could serve in that capacity. Jean Gordon herself was named one of the first.

Stifled by the lack of women’s voice and vote in political affairs, they devoted time, energy, and money to women’s suffrage, achieving votes for women property-owners, a precursor to women’s general suffrage.

Moved by the official neglect toward the children of poor working mothers, though childless themselves, they helped establish the city's first day nursery at Kingsley House.

Becoming aware of the neglect of mentally retarded and neglected and abused children, they took the lead in changing the concept of a local orphanage into a training school, leading to the foundation of the Milne Homes for Girls and Boys.

Fearing for the health and safety of the drinking water in the city, they lobbied successfully to get a new tax and bond issue on the ballot to get the Sewerage and Water Board started.

Emotionally affected by the plight of helpless animals, both working animals and abandoned pets, they expended efforts that eventually became the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

The Gordon Sisters worked tirelessly all their adult lives to improve the lives of all the inhabitants of New Orleans, both human and animals, especially those less fortunate than themselves.

Inspired by the lives and works of Jean, Kate, and Frances Gordon, realizing that they were flawed as we are flawed, let us dedicate ourselves to devoting our time, talents, and treasure as best we can to making our corner of the world a better place.

Realizing that this window lay in fallow form, closed in a box, for close to 50 years, and that the frame of this window is repurposed from the wood of the ruined pews of this church, let us dedicate ourselves to using our talents to our utmost, never failing to do what we are able to do, and let us be determined to salvage what we can from the Storms of our lives.

Congregational Response: Let us be so dedicated.

WORDS OF DEDICATION FOR THE KATRINA WINDOWS

As liberal religion has stood firm in the Crescent City since 1833, let us be dedicated to carrying our heritage forward into the future.

As the Storm winds of change and turmoil blow about, let us take courage and withstand whatever comes toward us.

As the dirty Floodwaters rushed over the city and changed our lives, our church, and our city forever, and the congregation regathered away from the waters, using land-line telephones and cell phones and computers, we were reminded that the church is the people, not a building, not even a location. Let us resolve never to forget that important lesson.

As we work to rebuild and recover, to remake our church, our city, and our lives, we rely on our faith tradition and our knowledge of history to remind us of return and renaissance. Let us draw strength from this knowledge and be rebuilders of our Unitarian Universalist faith.

As the old yellow glass was reused in these panels, to tell the story of Hurricane Katrina, how we suffered and how we are reborn, let us dedicate ourselves to retelling the story of renewal and restoration, and to being a part of that process, for each other, for the church, and for our beloved city.

Congregational Response: Let us be so dedicated.