"My Life in Church"

Nearly every Sunday as I welcome you to our service, I speak the words of James Luther Adams, "Church is where we get to practice what it means to be human." Adams was a Unitarian Universalist theological school professor and minister, a social ethicist and a social activist. He died in 1994. His long and influential career spanned a good part of the twentieth century and helped to shape what Unitarian Universalism is today. I knew him at Divinity School and I can tell you he was good company. Keeping his spirit and message alive by mentioning him each Sunday is my way of honoring his work.

Adams wrote extensively about the social evils of his time and the role of the church in overcoming them. He believed that people of faith must use our institutional and moral power in the struggle for justice. He spoke from personal experience as an engaged Unitarian Universalist, familiar not only with our organization and values, but with our people, our foibles, and our traditions. In an essay titled "By Their Groups Shall You Know Them," Adams wrote, "The groups to which we belong largely determine the quality and the relevance of our sensitivities and commitments in the facing of the changing community." The group experience is more than an individual one. "It is through group participation," he wrote, "that sensitivity and commitment to values are given institutional expression. It is through groups that social power is organized. It is through groups that community needs are brought to the focus that affects public policy. It is through groups that the cultural atmosphere of a community and a nation is created."

Groups are powerful in creating societies. They are also powerful in shaping individuals. The longer our association with them, the greater the incorporation of their values and ideals into our daily lives. I have spent nearly my whole life belonging to the Unitarian Universalist group. How have I been shaped by this experience, not in my professional role as a minister, but as member of this community? What have I, a creature of the church, learned from it about what it means to be human?

Adams doesn't speak of the church as a family, although for me - and for many of you - it is part of family life. I have told often how my parents chose Unitarian Universalism because they wanted a religious community that would accept them, their Jewish-Christian interfaith marriage, and their children. My first church, a small, struggling congregation in the suburbs of Newark, New Jersey, taught me much about belonging. The congregation was as diverse as the neighborhood - black and white, Christian and Jewish, rich and poor. Anybody could feel at home there, and we did. Especially me.

I was an anxious child, worried about nuclear war. Our humble sanctuary was the one place, the only place, where I felt safe. I thought it was a sacred place. Looking back today, I suspect I felt safe because of the people who were gathered around me.

These were formative experiences, which taught me a lot about belonging. I can walk into a Unitarian Universalist church anywhere and feel at home. Church also carries with it a certain familial quality, which connects me to my past in a positive way.

My New Jersey church remained home for me until I became a young adult. Even though I no longer lived there, I did not look for another for several years. I was in my mid-twenties and working at the world's smallest daily newspaper in Central Massachusetts when a co-worker learned I was Unitarian Universalist too. She invited me to her church and after just one visit, I was leading the high school group. They were a small, desperate congregation, with a few surly teenagers and no one else under the age of 50.

My first foray away from my home church taught me something else about belonging. It isn't automatic. You can show up, work hard, and still not know what is going on. Everything was going well with the high school group until I returned to church in January after the holiday break. I had the strange feeling I had done something wrong but had no idea what it was. My co-worker at the newspaper had to take me aside and tell me.

The church had a tradition of holding a holiday party at which all the Sunday School teachers gave gifts to the children in their classes. I knew nothing about the party or what I was supposed to do. Consequently my group of high school students had gone home empty-handed. I felt terrible about it, but it was an important lesson.

Community leaders need to explain to newcomers what is expected of them. The failure to do so results in excluding people just when they are trying to belong. Whenever we make the assumption that everyone knows what we are doing we are letting those who don't know feel left out. That is why I always explain what is going on in the service each Sunday. Yes, most of you have heard it all before. But for the one person who hasn't, it is an important message that tells who we are and how we help others belong too.

The church is the crucible in which the experience of belonging takes place. Powerful sensitivities are cultivated here. They have the power to heal, to lead, and to inspire action - in other words, to do the work of the church. They generate loyalties, give direction to lives, and lead to meaningful commitments. That has certainly been true for me.

James Luther Adams wrote, "It is through group participation, that sensitivity and commitment to values are given institutional expression." To fulfill ourselves as human beings, we must affiliate with one another in communities. Not just for the purpose of overcoming our own loneliness or meeting our own needs, but for creating the social power to bring about positive change. This is also what it means to be human.

I am not at all sure I would have found any of this out on my own. All the habits of belonging - going to church on Sunday mornings, getting to know each other, devoting time to service, sustaining the commitment over a long period of time - are not habits that come naturally. They are patterns we acquire early in life, or develop intentionally as adults.

One very real consequence of having spent my life in church is that I can't really do anything else on Sunday morning. I try, on the occasional Sunday off. But I never feel quite right anywhere else. I feel I should be in church, to see what is going on. It's a little compulsive, but mostly it's a habit of the heart, a need to get pulled back into that experience of being part of something larger than myself.

That something larger than myself is a group of people. You. Other congregations I have known. People who are different from each other in many ways, brought together by the act of belonging. It is a powerful reality. Sometimes we get on each other's nerves. We don't always live up to our professed ideals. We are imperfect, at best an approximation of who we are trying to be. And yet somehow in this act of making a place for each other to belong, we create something that is better than any one of us could be on our own.

James Luther Adams's words, "church is where we get to practice what it means to be human," may mean something different to each of us. What they mean to me is that this experience of belonging to a faith community, which reminds me constantly that I am part of something larger than myself, is also the experience of fulfilling my potential, as a human being in relation to others. There is power in that relationship. And as Adams saw it, that power is to put our values into action. Because that is the work of the church.

My life in church has brought me much fulfillment: the sense of continuity throughout the years, the familiarity and intimacy of relationship, the challenging work of ministry, and the even more challenging work of membership. This experience has helped me know my humanity and the humanity of others. But that is not all. There is something about church that is greater and more powerful than any of us, activated by the experience of belonging and realized in the collective power we share, that calls us to work together for the fulfillment of all humanity. I hope that someday my life in church will have made a difference in this work. And that, more than anything, is why I am grateful to be part of it: this very human community and all that we aspire to be.

The source for this sermon is "The Essential James Luther Adams, Selected Essays and Addresses," edited by George Kimmich Beach (Boston: Skinner House Books, 1998).