"Tomorrow's Church Today"

READING

Jim Wallis, founder of Sojourners, a nationwide network for progressive Christians working for justice and peace, has written an important new book titled God's Politics. Remembering Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as "America's greatest religious leader," who brought "religion into public life," Jim Wallis calls upon people of faith today to "help a divided nation find common ground by moving to higher ground." This book deserves serious consideration by Unitarian Universalists too and we will return to it one Sunday soon. For today's reading, I have selected a story Wallis tells about someone who taught him an important lesson about the future.

"One of the best street organizers I ever met was Lisa Sullivan. Lisa was a young African American woman who earned the trust of urban youth in Washington, D.C., and around the country. Lisa was from D.C., a smart kid from a working-class family who went to Yale and earned a PhD. With early jobs in major national foundations and nonprofit organizations, Lisa felt called back to the streets and the forgotten children of color who had won her heart. With unusual intelligence and entrepreneurial skills, she was in the process of creating a new network and infrastructure of support for the best youth-organizing projects up and down the East Coast. But at the age of forty, Lisa died suddenly of a rare heart ailment. At her graveside . . . [I] wept for the loss of one of the most promising leaders of her generation . . .

"Lisa's legacy is continuing through countless young people whom she inspired, challenged, and mentored. But there is one thing she often said to them and to all of us that has stayed with me since Lisa died. When people would complain, as they often do, that we don't have any leaders today or would ask where the Martin Luther Kings are now, Lisa would get angry. 'We are the ones we have been waiting for!' she would declare. Lisa was a person of faith. And hers was a powerful call to leadership and responsibility and a deep affirmation of hope.

"It's a calling the prophets knew and a lesson learned by every person of faith and conscience who has been used to build movements of spiritual and social change. It's a calling that is quite consistent with the virtue of humility because it is not about taking ourselves too seriously. It's a commission that can only be fulfilled by very human beings, but people who, because of faith and hope, believe that the world can be changed. And it is that very belief that changes the world. And if not us, who will believe? After all, we are the ones we have been waiting for."

SERMON

Of the many reasons any one of us might have for joining a church at any given time in our lives, there is one reason we all share. It is not always obvious at first. It grows in meaning over time. It remains a reason when all other reasons have lost their urgency. It is the desire to belong to a community that lives beyond us, that carries our values and ideals forward into what we hope will be a better world. We want to help shape that future, leave our imprint, something that says we were here, and our lives made a difference.

To join a church is to build a relationship to something that goes beyond who we are on our own. We need this transcendent connection, as much as we need each other. It gives us a collective strength and power. It lifts us out of ourselves, overrides our limitations. It makes us better people.

To become part of a religious community is to experience first-hand the transformation that can take place when we set our sights on something greater than ourselves. We change. And we also change the world.

Our sense of the future is implicit in everything we do as a church. Yet we rarely express how much this means or acknowledge its power to affect who we are every day. Our vision determines what we become.

You heard earlier in the story Catherine told how the king brings prosperity to his struggling kingdom with a spyglass that shows what the future could be. The vision gives them faith. With faith in the future, they work together to make it so. And it is so, the story says.

With this simple truth in mind, we look at our own future as a church. Where will we be in five years - or in another seventy-five? We have as many different ideas on any given topic as we have people in our community. This requires a lot of time and much discussion before we can make meaningful decisions that everyone will support. And that's all right. We are patient; we are faithful to a democratic process that leaves a lot of room for individual self-expression. We can veer off in many different directions and come back together again to move on, if our vision is clear enough.

What is our vision? Our vision is the sense of wholeness that keeps us together, when we might otherwise fly apart. We cannot move forward together without it. Our vision shows us our future. It is also our survival. Without vision, as it says in Proverbs, we people perish.

Michael Durall, a Unitarian Universalist stewardship consultant, has recently written a provocative book titled "The Almost Church." In it he delivers a critique of contemporary Unitarian Universalism and some provocative suggestions about how to enlarge our vision. Our future, he says, depends on our realization "that the mission of the church . . . is to change people's lives in some fundamental way." We have for too long assumed that our purpose was "to promote the autonomy of the individual and to seek truth." These aspirations fall short of our potential and fail to invoke a vision that moves us to action.

A vision calls people to something larger than themselves and their individual differences. The vision for our future, Durall says, "is a deeper spirituality through service." The time has come, he writes, to "break the current cycle of those whose dominant image is being served, rather than to serve." The church of the future will focus its "efforts on a single cause - the least fortunate among us."

This vision lifts us out of ourselves and into relationship with powerful and life-changing realities that we experience by giving generously of ourselves. We discover, as we shift our orientation away from own needs and towards those who need us, that we want to give more to make these good changes happen. As we give, we grow, as individuals and as an institution. Our church reflects our confidence and our faith.

This vision of the church of the future calls us away from lives of self-examination and consumption and towards lives of service and giving. It is not afraid to place high expectations on membership or to place a high value on the ideas we cherish. We find ourselves less diverted by our differences because we walk a common path.

A collective vision like this one can take us a long way towards our future. It confirms that we live, as individuals and as an institution, for something greater than ourselves. Our claim to religious community rests on our connection to transcendent values, not simply common interests, like music or golf. It is time to act on those transcendent values.

In many ways, we already do. We already place a high value on reaching out in service to our larger community. We are always looking for new opportunities to build on the collective energy of our community to do good things in the world.

Last year, when we went before the Santa Monica Planning Commission with our proposal to expand our buildings, we learned how much the larger community appreciated our tradition of service. One Santa Monica resident, respected activist Vivian Rothstein, told the Commission, "This church has given so much to the community, it's time for the community to give something back to the church." I hope our reputation serves us as well this year as it did then. I've already asked Vivian to come back and she said she would.

There is much more we can do. There is fresh energy in our congregation to carry on this tradition of service, to renew our commitment to something larger than ourselves, to call ourselves to a fuller vision that engages us more fully too. Let's build on these strengths and become the church we hope to be, beginning here and now.

Jim Wallis's recollection of the young woman who decided to put her talent and her training to use on the streets working with urban youth, is a good example of how the future always begins with the present. Lisa Sullivan's response to those who complained about lack of leadership or people to carry the vision forward was to say to them, "We are the ones we have been waiting for!" She was, and that is why she is missed.

Our congregation is active and caring, with a strong tradition behind us and good plans for the future. But we want to do more; we want to see lives change and the world a better place. We hope for healing work, saving the earth, helping others. We see our church mobilizing these yearnings and finding the resources to make things happen.

The church of our future can do all this, if we begin here and now. The future we envision will come to be only if we begin today; waiting and wishing no longer but working together on what makes us whole. It's greater than any of us could be on our own. Isn't that what each of us really wants?

Stop waiting. Start doing what our vision calls us to do, right now. Become the church we are waiting to be. The future will be here soon enough and we will be ready for it.

References used to prepare this sermon include "God's Politics," by Jim Wallis (HarperSanFrancisco, 2005) and "The Almost Church," by Michael Durall (Tulsa, Oklahoma: Jenkin Lloyd Jones Press, 2004.