"We Gather Together"

READINGS

Jon Krakauer's latest book, Under the Banner of Heaven, explores religious violence in Mormon fundamentalism. That's a topic for another service. At the end of the book, however, Krakrauer slips in a short credo. It explains how far he is theologically from Mormonism, but also, it occurred to me, how close he is to many of us. It makes a good reading for today. Here it is.

"I don't know what God is, or what God had in mind when the universe was set in motion. In fact, I don't know if God even exists, although I confess that I sometimes find myself praying in times of great fear, or despair, or astonishment at a display of unexpected beauty.

"There are some ten thousand extant religious sects - each with its own cosmology, each with its own answers for the meaning of life and death. Most assert that the other 9,999 not only have it completely wrong but are instruments of evil, besides. None of the ten thousand has yet persuaded me to make the requisite leap of faith. In the absence of conviction, I've come to terms with the fact that uncertainty is an inescapable corollary of life - which doesn't strike me as something to lament. Accepting the essential inscrutability of existence, in any case, is surely preferable to its opposite: capitulating to the tyranny of intransigent belief.

And if I remain in the dark about our purpose here, and the meaning of eternity, I have nevertheless arrived at an understanding of a few more modest truths: Most of us fear death. Most of us yearn to comprehend how we got here, and why - which is to say, most of us ache to know the love of our creator. And we will no doubt feel that ache, most of us, for as long as we happen to be alive."

The next reading comes from a Christian theological school professor, M. Craig Barnes, about what it means to come to church.

"When people come to worship, I don't tell them 'Welcome home!' That's what they went to hear, and why they rush to the sanctuary in times of disaster. Some preachers tell their congregation that their new home is with the new family, the church. More accurately what we should say is that in the church you have found long-lost brothers and sisters who are as confused about home as you are.

"As one who spends an unforgivable amount of time in churches, trust me on this - if church is the home we have been looking for, we're in bigger trouble than we thought.

"Worship is the means by which we renew our longing for the true home. Good worship has to confess both how much we long for home and how lost we have become in our search for it. Thus the point of worship is not to find home but to become clearer about exactly what home it is we are yearning to find."

SERMON

The way to start a day, according to our children's story, is to greet the sun with a ritual. This is what people have always done, adds the author, Byrd Baylor. It's when "all the power of life is in the sky." There is magic to work then. So set aside the time to give the sun a good welcome. Then go off and do something in the world to make the sun's day with us a happy one.

The human yearning for ritual has produced countless variations on ways to start the day. Our Unitarian Universalist version may start later and look different, but in its own way it has magic too. On any given Sunday morning, our church - and over a thousand others like ours - fill with people seeking a worship experience that is grounded in our values and community. What happens in this space is both new and strange for some and old and familiar for others. Each week people join us for the first time, adding a presence that is quietly momentous. One of the reasons why I always explain who we are and what we are doing - whether it is lighting the chalice or taking up the offering for the Westside Food Bank - is to make this experience as meaningful to our guests as I possibly can. The goal is to help everyone feel included.

Others present among us have been coming so long that they can detect even the slightest change in the simple rituals we undertake together. Actually, it doesn't take long at all. Once, several years ago, we tried a new song for the children's recessional. We received nearly instant protest from the children, who were all very upset and unhappy with the change. Back to the old song.

Rituals comfort us with their familiarity. They offer a touchstone by which we can weigh the changes in our lives. They give us a collective experience that brings us closer together as a community. And they provide a foundation for spiritual growth to take place in each of us.

The Sunday morning service is central to our spiritual life together - and not necessarily because of anything that happens up here on the chancel. Rather, our spiritual practice as Unitarian Universalists comes out of our regular gathering in community. This is where we learn and grow as people of faith. Our religious values are relational: tolerance, mutual respect, service, even the search for truth - all depend on interaction with others.

Although some of us also pursue solitary spiritual disciplines such as meditation, yoga, or contemplative prayer, we all realize that we need community to be whole. And we need more than simply being in the same room with other people. We need to experience each other in ways that help us to grow.

Our gathering on Sunday morning gives us a ritual space and time to celebrate our community. Community sustains us and teaches us about what it means to be alive. All the customs involved in coming together, from greeting each other, to singing and enjoying music together, to listening to each other speak, are ways to know our humanity more fully and compassionately, over the passage of time. For this reason we approach this time with respect, even reverence.

Most of us come to this experience without many formal religious beliefs. We may identify with Jon Krakauer, who writes that he doesn't know what God is, or what purpose we have on earth. He chooses to accept the mystery and ambiguity of existence rather than capitulate, as he says, "to the tyranny of intransigent belief." And yet he feels a yearning "to comprehend how we got here, and why . . . ." We all have "an ache to know the love of our creator."

That yearning is what draws many of us to this gathering each week, just as it draws people to religious life everywhere. We also feel the need for the company of others in a place where it is safe to express our hopes and fears. It's what M. Craig Barnes calls "the longing for true home."

Barnes wisely adds, however, that no church can ever really be the home we seek. We will be disappointed if that is what we expect. Rather, this is where we allow ourselves to feel our longing, to learn its contours and its texture.

Religious community emerges out of the common experience of yearning for our true home. It is, as Barnes writes, to find "long-lost brothers and sisters who are as confused about home as you are." Here is where we experience ourselves as seekers, each following our own path, and needing each other to find our way. And though we have few answers, and much longing, we find that something good happens to us here anyway. We learn that church is "where we get to practice what it means to be human." Our spiritual discipline is each other.

Meditation teacher and writer Jack Kornfield tells an insightful story about his early experience as a Buddhist monk in a forest monastery in Thailand. "I had to learn how to bow," he writes. "It was awkward at first . . . a practice of reverence and mindfulness, a way of honoring with a bodily gesture our commitment to the monk's path of simplicity, compassion, and awareness. After I had been in the monastery for a week or two, one of the senior monks pulled me aside for further instruction. 'In this monastery you must not only bow when entering the meditation hall and receiving teachings from the master,' [he told me], 'but also when you meet your elders.'

"I asked who my elders were." [Apparently everyone who had been there longer than he had.] "So I began to bow to them. Sometimes it was just fine - there were quite a few wise and worthy elders in our community. But sometimes it felt ridiculous. I would encounter some twenty-one-year-old monk, full of hubris, who was there only to please his parents or to eat better food than he could at home, and I had to bow because he had been ordained the week before me. Or I had to bow to a sloppy old rice farmer who had come to the monastery the season before on the farmers' retirement plan, who chewed betel nut constantly and had never meditated a day in his life. It was hard to pay reverence to these fellow forest dwellers as if they were great masters.

"Yet there I was bowing," Kornfield continues, "and because I was in conflict, I sought a way to make it work. Finally, as I prepared yet again for a day of bowing to my 'elders,' I began to look for some worthy aspect of each person I bowed to. I bowed to the wrinkles around the retired farmer's eyes, for all the difficulties he had seen and suffered through and triumphed over. I bowed to the vitality and playfulness in the young monks, in the incredible possibilities each of their lives held yet ahead of them.

"I began to enjoy bowing," Kornfield concludes. The practice of bowing became the way in which he grew in compassion and respect for others, even those for whom he felt little affinity at first. In this way, his time in the forest monastery taught him more than the practice of meditation.

Kornfield's experience applies to us as well. How our relationship to each other develops over time is an integral aspect of our spiritual life. This is how we grow spiritually, by noticing our changes in relation to each other, by learning that everyone deserves our respect, and by searching and sometimes even struggling to treat each other as if this were so.

It may seem to you that what I am describing can only happen if people live together, like monks in a monastery. It takes time to go from a weekly practice of coming to church to a transforming experience of community. But it happens - and faster than you may realize.

The Sunday service is the ritual, the place where we celebrate the ideals and hopes of our faith tradition. It is the starting point of our spiritual practice. As we become more involved in the life of this community, we can go deeper into the challenge of being together. Plunging into the work of the church, building friendships, guiding our children through religious education, all carry us into the spiritual life. And we gather together regularly to recall our vision and celebrate our faith.

Jack Kornfield notes that there are real difficulties in every religious community. "If we expect community relationships to be ideal, spiritual, friendly, and enlightened," he writes, "we are seeking what we can't even expect of our own minds. To want the company of others without suffering is unrealistic. But if we avoid close relationships, we will also suffer. In a wise spiritual community we acknowledge our differences and choose to help one another anyway."

Transformational relationships are not mysterious. They are the result of real interaction, occasional conflict and disappointment, forgiveness, acceptance and humor. Kornfield recalls an image offered by a Korean Zen master, who told students "that their communal practice was like putting potatoes in a pot and spinning them around together long enough to rub off all the peels." That's a good description of a church community too.

The Sunday service helps us to remember these basic truths about community. Far from promoting inflated expectations about coming home or finding God, we celebrate the wonder of what can happen simply because we have gathered together. It's a good way to start the day - or the week. Make a ritual of it, just as people have done everywhere and in every time.

Yes, the sun will rise whether we notice it or not. But only we can make it a good day. Here is one way to begin.

References used to prepare this sermon include: "After the Ecstasy, the Laundry: How the Heart Grows Wise on the Spiritual Path, "by Jack Kornfield (Bantam Books, 2000); "The Way to Start a Day," by Byrd Baylor (Aladdin Paperbacks, 1986); "Under the Banner of Heaven," by Jon Krakauer (Doubleday, 2003); "Homestretch," by M. Craig Barnes, in "Christian Century," September 20, 2003.