"What I Learned in Sunday School"

Orange, New Jersey is a struggling city on the edge of Newark,

        racially diverse, 

                poor 

                        and surrounded by much wealthier towns.

The Unitarian Universalist church there reflects its environment.

The small congregation of a hundred members

        represents every ethnic and socioeconomic group

                to be found in the area.

When I was growing up there, 

        my interfaith Christian Jewish parents,

                two brothers and I,

                        fit right in.

Every Sunday we drove from our home in Maplewood

        to our humble church,

                which despite the effects of deferred maintenance,

                        occasional vandalism,

                                and the lack of a regular sexton,

                                        still managed to be a welcoming place

                                                and an enlightened community.

My parents thrived there

        and became church leaders.

I went to Sunday school.

 

I had the full Unitarian Universalist experience as a youth.

In addition to religious education,

        I learned sacred dance – this was the sixties – from the minister's wife,

attended Liberal Religious Youth conferences,

        and suffered through our local youth group meetings,

                which were led by my parents.

I even spent a summer at a work camp in North Carolina

        that was sponsored by the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee.

And when I outgrew the religious education program,

        I attended services with my mother and father.

 

Obviously, this experience had a formative influence on me.

Perhaps the greatest and most lasting 

        was the realization that this odd little church,

                so different from the large and imposing churches and temples

                        my friends attended,

                                was the only place where my family

                                        could feel entirely at home.

My mother and father simply had no other way 

        to bridge their Christian Jewish differences.

In Unitarian Universalism they found the freedom 

        to worship together,

                and to build a religious identity as a family.

Sensing that no one else would have us,

        we developed an institutional loyalty

                that is still the wellspring of my ministry today.

 

The experience of belonging gave me a feeling of security.

I was an anxious child,

        harboring morbid thoughts about nuclear war

                and obsessing about finitude.

The church sanctuary seemed to be the only place

        I was free of these fears –

                a welcome relief, even if it was magical thinking.

But the sanctuary seemed safe to me 

        not because of anything about the space.

Rather it felt safe 

        because the minister talked about life

                in a way that I could understand.

I remember the first sermon I heard there.

It was titled,

        "Are You Still Afraid of the Dark?"

I was.

 

Our religious education program was small,

        like the rest of the church,

                but we used the standard Unitarian Universalist curriculum.

One year we did nothing 

        but visit other churches and temples.

Another year we studied Jesus.

I wish I could tell you more 

        about what we studied,

                but the truth is,

                        it's the one thing I don't remember.

 

This gap in my religious education background

        proved to be a minor deficit

                when I entered divinity school.

Other ministry students were already proficient

        in exegeting passages from the New Testament

                and recounting the history in the Hebrew Bible.

All I had was nothing to lose:

        studying religion brought 

                no shattering revelations about my tradition,

                        or doubts about my faith.

An open mind and an unformed theology

        are actually a good place to begin in ministry,

                and in life.

 

In the years since I went to Sunday school,

        Unitarian Universalist religious education has gone through many revisions.

Correcting for the apparent lack of content

        in the curriculum my generation was taught,

                religious educators created ambitious, academic programs

                        that taught children a lot about everything

                                except how to be a Unitarian Universalist.

Now we search for the correct balance

        between content and experience,

                recognizing that a didactic classroom lesson

                        cannot convey the depth of spirituality

                                or the wonder of life.

We want children to learn something they will remember,

        that will help them be informed and tolerant 

                in our pluralistic world

                        and grounded in a tradition 

                                where they feel they belong.

We want them to understand 

        what it means to be a Unitarian Universalist.

 

When I think back to what I remember,

        it has little to do with curriculum or content.

I remember the experience of belonging to a community.

I remember the people.

I remember what my parents taught me

        about what this community meant to us.

 

In the story that Susanne read to the children this morning,

        the wise father teaches his son an important lesson about God.

God is like a lump of salt,

        dissolved in water.

You cannot see it,

        but it is everywhere.

My religious education experience 

        gave me something that is as elemental as salt

                and as universal as water.

I received it as a way of life,

        not as a body of knowledge.

I carry it with me 

        in the form of memories about people

                and the experiences we shared.

 

I look back now and understand 

        how parents give a religious tradition to their children.

In the story from India,

        the child goes off to learn on his own,

                but his father teaches him essential spiritual lessons. 

It is the same for us. 

I learned my love for our church        

        from my mother's and father's commitment to it,

                from the importance they gave to attending regularly,

                        and from the way they were nurtured by it.

 

My brothers and I were capable of the occasional critique

        of all this church-going.

We made fun of the vagueness of Unitarian Universalism,

        epitomized by a sixties-era public relations campaign

                that ran in our local newspaper:

"You may be a Unitarian Universalist and not know it!" 

        the ad declared,

                in a Zen-like koan I am still trying to understand.

The concept of not knowing you could be something

        that was too vague to define anyway

                seemed hilarious to us adolescent cynics.

 

And there was the spring I dropped out of Unitarian Universalism

        in order to observe a proper lent 

                at the Methodist church down the street.

They had all the trappings conducive to the religious experience

        my sixth-grade imagination was seeking:

                big, booming organ, 

                        cavernous gothic sanctuary,

                                formal rituals and rules for spiritual discipline.

I gave up listening to the radio that year for lent.

It was hard, 

        sitting up in my room after school doing my homework,

                not being able to listen to my favorite AM station.

I missed Cousin Brucie, 

        my favorite disc jockey,

                as if he truly were a member of the family.

No one in my family understood what I was doing.

But I proved to myself that I could observe lent,

        attended all three hours of the Methodist Good Friday service,

                and celebrated Easter by turning my radio back on.

 

I returned to our church after that,

        lapsing again during college.

Now I'm sorry I never checked out 

        the large Unitarian Universalist church nearby.

But I did go back shortly after, 

        as my interest in my tradition  resurfaced

                as a career in the ministry.

When I thought of being a minister,

        I imagined myself in the pulpit in Orange, New Jersey.

 

I have had the opportunity to thank the congregation in Orange

        for the formative experiences they gave me.

They invited me back to preach for their hundredth anniversary celebration.

I told them about the experience of belonging,

        the feeling of safety in the sanctuary

                and the vocation for ministry 

                        I received while I was there.

 

What I should have told them –

        and instead now tell you –

                is that I carry them with me everywhere I go.

I remember them by name.

I have a sense of who they were as people –

        something that amazes me now,

                thinking about the children in our congregation.

They know more about us than we realize.

 

As a child, my relationships were well defined and circumscribed:

        family, peers, teachers.

I only knew my parents' friends 

        as extensions of my parents

                and the things they did without us.

The easy, intergenerational gatherings 

        so many of you enjoy

                were not part of my childhood.

Only at church did I have the opportunity

        to learn from adults by knowing them as people,

                with distinct talents and interests to share.

From the church I gathered information 

        about what it meant to grow up

                and to be an adult.

The joys and sorrows of this community taught me life lessons

        about coping with adversity

                and growing in character.

 

I remember our religious education director and organist,

        each of the three ministers who came and went,

                the husband and wife who played the recorder

                        and performed dramatic readings,

                                the five kids my own age,

                                        the couples who married or divorced,

                                                the girl who grew up to become a doctor,

                                                        the woman who married the sexton.

And though some of my memories are idealized,

        many of them recall the very real struggles 

                these people had.

Many of them are long gone,

        but I still think of them with feeling.

 

What I learned in Sunday School is that church 

        is the experience of relatedness.

We adults may come here thinking we don’t participate 

        in the religious education program,

                but in fact, we already do.

The children know us 

        and learn from who we are.

Each of us has a lot to give,

        simply by being ourselves,

                by being open enough for others to know us

                        and to learn about life from our lives.

 

Some of the new ideas 

        our Religious Education program is generating

                will build on that sense of relatedness.

That can only be good for all of us.

The closer we can come to creating a program

        that reflects the reality of what community is

                and what it can teach us,

                        the better our whole church will be.

 

I am grateful for my Sunday school,

        whatever its quirks and omissions,

                for my first church,

                        with all its characters and stories,

                                and for my parents,

                                        who introduced me 

                                                to my one and only church home.

I am mindful that we have the opportunity, 

        here and now,

                to give the next generation that sense of gratitude

                        by the experiences we make available to them.

I am hopeful that wherever we take these next steps,

        they will lead us to the wholeness we seek,     

                as people joined together in community.