October 7, 2007 Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost, World
Communion and CROPWalk Sunday
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Psalm 36: I Corinthians 12:12-27
I am black. Almost everything about this church is white. Am I welcome
here? Am I included?
I am a woman from a Southern Baptist church. I believe homosexuality is
a sin. I find myself sitting in a progressive, Open and Affirming United Church of
Christ Congregation. Am I welcome here? How can we even relate?
I am on welfare. I am very rich. I work a job like no one else’s. I stay
home with the children. Am I welcome here?
I am a lesbian. Am I welcome?
I am in a wheelchair. I am from another country. I am not sure I believe
everything they say here. I am not sure what I believe. Am I welcome here?
And if people knew the truth of who I am, and what I have done and
thought and felt, would I still be welcome here?
It is one thing to celebrate our global unity on World Communion Sunday
or to express our solidarity with suffering people of other races and cultures by
participating in the CROPWalk—it is one thing to look beyond these walls and
think that we love them all—but it is quite another thing to create a world within
these walls where all feel welcomed and affirmed and embraced. That is far more
difficult, and yet it is what God calls us to do, and it is what our strategic planning
process and small group gatherings are indicating that we feel called to do.
Psalm 36 talks about how all-encompassing God’s steadfast love and
justice and hospitality are. They are as high as the mountains, as deep as the sea.
They include humans and animals alike. “All people may take refuge in the
shadow of our wings,” the Psalm says, with that wonderful image of God as a
great mother hen. “They feast on the abundance of your house.” God’s hospitality
is extravagant and unconditional.
The Psalm says, “In your light we see light.” When we know ourselves to
be included in the light of God’s love, we come to see as God sees. We come to
see that God calls us to love as God loves.
Jesus said, “Follow me.” Our lives and our church need to be modeled on
God’s unconditional love and extravagant welcome, as we see it in Jesus, so that
we can be models of God’s realm for the world to see—so that in our light all may
see God’s light.
The Apostle Paul was a pastor and a pastor’s pastor, and so he was very
practical about what it meant to follow Christ and emulate God’s ways. He said
that the church is like a body, and we are all members of it. Every one of us is
indispensable and worthy of honor and respect. Some of us are big toes and some
of us are earlobes—we have different traits and roles and abilities that the society
outside these walls values more or less or even rejects, but within these walls, we
need to honor and affirm all equally.
The United Church of Christ has evolved five essential ways of expressing
this calling to model ourselves on God’s love. The UCC feels called to be an open
and affirming church, a church accessible to all, a just peace church, a united and
uniting church and a multiracial and multicultural church.
I hope someday this congregation will consider formally identifying itself
with all five of these. We already have become Open and Affirming. We have
also gone to great lengths to be accessible to all. We have a history of working for
justice and peace. But what about those last two—being united and uniting and
being multiracial and multicultural? Why should we consider identifying with
those positions of the national United Church of Christ?
One reason is to follow Christ and model ourselves on God’s love and to be
a model of it to the world. If you look at the history of God’s love in the Bible,
you see that God made covenant after covenant with humans trying to hold them
together with God and neighbor.
Our own church covenant is designed to do the same for us. We pledge to
walk together in God’s Holy ways and to love and support one another wherever
our paths may lead. We may differ, we may disagree, our paths toward God may
seem to diverge, but we promise to keep walking them together.
To be a united and uniting church means to be willing to be in relationship
with all, and to be looking for ways in which we can be one. We may never be
able to worship happily in the same place and time as conservative
fundamentalists. We may not provide the liturgy that a Greek Orthodox person
needs in order to feel at home, but if we are to love as God loves, and be one as
Christ calls us to be, we need to prepare ourselves so as not to miss an opportunity
to make visitors from other cultures feel welcomed and loved as they are.
Perhaps the hardest of the five UCC commitments to imagine here is to be a
multiracial and multicultural church. Why should we do that, and how could we
do that in a town and state that are so overwhelmingly white?
Well, for one thing, we could be aware that we are not all white. Recently
members of the Unitarian Universalist Church who are not white raised angry
voices at the U.U. national convention. They felt that the church had treated them
as if they were white. In its efforts to treat everyone equally, it failed to
acknowledge and celebrate the truth of the difference in these Asian, Latino and
African-American people who had been adopted and raised in their midst. As a
result they felt a shock and a sense of alienation, inferiority and insecurity when
they grew up and realized that the world did not view them as white. They felt
uncomfortable in their own skin. They felt as if they did not fit in to any culture.
Not only are we not all white here, the truth is that we are not as much the
same as we may think. We have many different immigration histories. Some of
us have Native American blood in our veins. We were born and raised in many
different parts of this country and some of us were born or lived our lives in other
countries. We have different backgrounds and life experiences, different
education and work, different gifts, abilities and resources. We are of different
ages, both genders, different sexual orientations. We have different tastes and
temperaments, and we have different cultures or subcultures that we identify with
as well—academic intellectuals, farmers, alternative culture semi-farmers and
more.
At the strategic planning small group gathering yesterday at Lilla Willey’s
there was a call for greater diversity in our congregation, just as there had been on
Vision Sunday in June. The fact is in many ways we already have great diversity
here, though we can easily fail to see it or choose to pretend we are all the same.
But it is important that we not pretend. It is important that we see and celebrate
not only our true unity, but our existing diversity.
This is important for several reasons. Always the highest reason is because
it is what God does. As Bill Coffin used to say, if God didn’t love diversity, she
wouldn’t have made us all so different.
But there are other practical reasons why identifying as multiracial and
multicultural is a good idea even now as we are. If we consciously affirm being
so, we will be sure that those who come here or grow up here who identify
themselves with other races and cultures will feel welcome. We will be teaching
our children not only how to live in a multiracial and multicultural society, but
also how to love and honor and affirm their own ways of being different as well as
those of others.
What is more, we will be laying the groundwork for a nonviolent world,
because once we see that we are one with people who seem different, and once we
celebrate their difference, it becomes much harder to oppress or kill them.
Declaring ourselves to be multiracial and multicultural reminds us that no one race
or culture makes up the whole truth or possesses the whole extent of God’s love
and light. It humbles us and tells us that we need to listen to and learn from
others.
These are some of the benefits of living world communion and not just
celebrating it once a year, but how can we be multiracial and multicultural in our
little corner of the whitest state of the union? We are blessed in this church to have
two people who spend much of their time thinking about that question. Eleanor
Zue and Helen Mac Lam both serve on the Uprooting Racism Task Force of the
Vermont Conference of the United Church of Christ.
Helen made a suggestion recently to our Deacons and Pastoral Relations
Board. When I am away for much of the summer, as I will be next year on
sabbatical, why not actively seek a seminary student of another race and culture to
fill in while I am gone? This is not an entirely original idea. It came from the Rev.
Arnold Thomas, the African American former Conference Minister in Vermont.
He felt that for the Vermont Conference to become multiracial and multicultural, a
good place to start would be to recruit ministers of color to serve here.
There are many other ways we can live out the all-embracing love of God.
When people of other races or cultures come to our church, we can first of all be
sure to welcome and surround them with love; but even more importantly, we can
get to know them. We can ask Christians of color in the Upper Valley who do not
come here what it would take to make them comfortable in a church like ours. We
can be willing to make those changes. We can go with our youth to visit or work
with churches of other races and cultures, like the southern black churches our
youth have helped rebuild.
But there is something else we could do every Sunday, something we can
do today. We can practice being a place where “all people may take refuge.” We
can cultivate the courage it takes to reach across racial or cultural differences by
having the courage to reach across differences of age or background or point of
view today. We can practice the courage of offering the complete stranger our
extravagant welcome. Yesterday I heard of someone who came here for a year
before anyone befriended them. A first step toward greater diversity is for each of
us to take on the responsibility of extending ourselves to every person here whom
we do not know, starting with those who seem most different from us. And a
second step is to learn what it means to love and support one another wherever our
paths may lead, learning how we can still walk together even when we differ or
disagree.
We can do all that today. We can be a model of God’s love today. We can
take that model with us today into a world that is suffering terrible violence and
injustice for the lack of such unconditional all-embracing love.
Let us pray in silence, aware that every person here is loved by God and
resting in the shadow of God’s wings. Let us pray asking God to teach us how to
love more.
Let us pray…
Sermon 10/07/2007