An Epistle From Turley

Hi all. We are starting our Week of Serving, Mar. 12-16, see below if you want to skip to it, aided in our community projects with a group coming back to Turley and North Tulsa from Wildflower Church in Austin, Texas; come join with us and them and others in our community for many renewal transformations in our area. We will be hosting them in our community center Sunday night to Sat. morning. If you can help with food for potlucks or can make a donation for the week's work, let me know or contribute online at www.turleyok.blogspot.com. Thanks.

Before we get to the exciting week ahead of us here in the 74126 next week during our Week of Serving (see the schedule for the week at http://www.turleyok.blogspot.com/2012/03/join-our-community-service-week-mar-12.html), let me begin with the amazing things we have been participating in during the past month. But be on the lookout for an article on our week ahead that may be published in the Saturday Tulsa World Religion Section. Next week we will feature a Tour, free meals, hands-on projects at the Center, partnering with a librarian, with crafts and sewing people, with carpenters and others, hands-on projects at the GardenPark to transform it and finish our work for which we received last summer a home loan bank grant, classic country music concert and classic Rock concert, parties, movie of The Way and discussion of it by one who recently walked the Camino de Santiago, projects in the community with our partners, and more in the week ahead. Come join us. See that link above for details. Share and come celebrate next week with us.

On Saturday, Feb. 18 we were part of a Board Retreat for McLain School Foundation and on Sunday, Feb. 19, we had the privilege to be one of the featured food justice groups at the Interfaith Trialogue Series Food For Thought sponsored by the Oklahoma Center for Community and Justice; we introduced our work here in the 74126, our great needs, and the many opportunities people have for connecting with us especially in our community gardenpark and blight to beauty projects. We have been working clearing our park site and planting for the season ahead already. We are beginning to work with the local women's correctional facility on a gardening project too.

On Tuesday, Feb. 21, we showed the documentary and had a deep discussion of Dr. Cornel West and others in "Stubborn as a Mule" on the need for reparations and the history of injustices toward African Americans past and present, and about our calling for joining in the struggle in the ways small and large that the work still presents itself for us everyday here. On Wednesday, Feb. 22 we joined with Turley United Methodist Church for Ash Wednesday Service.

On Feb. 29, we were honored to travel to Houston to receive an Award from the Southwest Regional Network of the National Recreation and Parks Association for our work in creating our community garden park and supporting public parks in our area; this was after receiving the statewide parks award; we may be nominated for the award on the national level, so stay tuned. What I say in talking about our work particularly in food justice is that it illustrates the point Jim Wallis of Sojourners in D.C. and others make about the necessity of combining individual and private and non-profit and governmental funding and cooperation to attack the roots of poverty and hunger. Our park site is a prime example of how that is taking root here. And we hope to see it bear fruit not only at the park but also through our work at the community center and out in the community with partners. You can see the award citation information about us at this link: http://turleyok.blogspot.com/2012/03/our-turleynorthtulsa-park-receives.html. Plan now to join with us for our Park Dedication and Celebration Saturday, May 12, from 10 am to 2 pm, with ceremonies beginning at 11 am. and a party the whole time, especially for all of you who have helped in those hot summer days last year. It is great to see the beautiful blossoms on the trees of the orchard.

 

We also last month had the first of our two part volunteer training workshop; stay tuned for the scheduling of the next session this month; you don't have to take the sessions in order, but you do have to take both.

Recently we have begun work with local leaders in senior nutrition and senior living on revitalizing a foundation and the hopes of creating more free senior nutrition sites in our area; the only one is some five miles away and it has already reached its maximum capacity and can't take any more seniors. And we are trying to find a way, now that Cherokee School has been closed, to still provide the summer feeding program for all under 18 years old that we have been doing all summer long for the past three years, feeding more than at any other site in Tulsa; stay tuned as we hope we can actually work out a temporary lease to continue to use the closed school facility for all of our healthy food justice projects and more community renewal work. And our Food Pantry continues to serve more and more families; at the end of April we will again host the Mobile Food Van as we did in January when we gave out 11,000 pounds of food to those in our zips.

We are looking for a commercial refrigerator to help us be able to offer a site for feeding the children and youth; and we are looking for donations for a new hot water heater, and plumbing assistance to install showers at the community center, and creating our own kitchen space at the Center.

We have been having meaningful weekly Thursday Lenten Vespers services at 6 pm incorporating reflections from Father John Dear's book The Questions of Jesus, and plan to see him when he speaks in Tulsa Wed. Mar. 28 at 7 pm at Fellowship Congregational Church. We traveled to Stillwater on Sunday, Mar. 4 to preach on how transforming the world requires us to transform our approach to faith itself; to adopt a new theology of the cross for progressives; the sermon "Bless This Mess" available at http://www.progressivechurchplanting.blogspot.com/2012/03/bless-this-mess-transforming-faith-and.html. I am going to be travelling to Washington, D.C. later this month to coordinate the progressive Christian Revival, see www.uuchristian.org/revival and then will be in Midland, Texas Mar. 25 to preach the installation sermon "The Possible Church" for the Rev. Thomas Schmidt. Looking ahead, On May 5 I will be preaching the theme sermon in the Boston area for the Ballou-Channing District at Fairhaven, Mass. Title is "ReShaping The World: church in the likeness to a different God" and the subject is how the hurting world needs both missional church and progressive church to combine and be transformed by one another in order to be the kind of leaven in the world that the radically subversive God requires. We invite all to join with us in our small missional community worship services on Sundays between 9:30 am and 1 pm including common meal, and also check out our daily morning and evening prayer communities online at the Facebook site above.

We continue to host and coordinate the Future of Turley meetings, and held one recently where we advanced our plans to work on disaster response networking, incorporation, post office, school support for the new public charter school The LightHouse Academy going in where the Greeley School is now (we have been helping the new school spread the word and attract applicants and we will become a main community partner for their program which will eventually offer K-12 school nearby, even as we deepen our commitment to help the other public schools such as McLain). We have also been studying the new census and demographic and ethnographic material about our area which in the past decade has lost another almost 15 percent of its population (and that is just in the unincorporated side of our service area), the second highest percentage drop in the communities in the Tulsa area; while health data keeps getting worse for those who move here or remain.

Looking ahead to next month: We will be a part of an April 17 presentation and discussion on issues of homelessness and immigration sponsored by Phillips Theological Seminary and featuring the Rev. Lorenza Andrade Smith. More will be coming soon on this event.

In acts of one to one service, in working on larger justice issues, in connecting people who want to make a difference in this abandoned place of the American Marketplace Empire, in sowing seeds of hope, we live out our mission to grow healthy lives and neighborhoods by empowering residents, and in all we do to seek to make visible in the world the loving and liberating and radical hospitable to all presence of Jesus.

blessings, Ron

ps if you don't want to go to the link on next week's highlights, here they are:

Join In Our Week of Serving Turley & Area

Mon. Mar 12 – Fri. Mar. 16

Monday:

10 am to 2 pm: Tour of Area and Discussion of Issues and Projects. Free Lunch included. Meet at the Welcome Table Community Center, 5920 N. Owasso Ave.

2-5 PM Service Projects at the Center and new Community KitchenGardenPark and Orchard, 6005 N. Johnstown Ave., and in the community

5:30 pm at the Center Free Dinner Movie and Discussion of “The Way” with presentation by the Rev. Jonalu Johnstone of First Unitarian Church in Oklahoma City who recently took the pilgrimmage.

Tuesday:

9 am to 6 pm Various Community Projects for all ages; 3 to 6 pm Food Pantry; gather at 2:30 for a quick prayer and blessing service for the work of the food pantry and the lives touched through it.

Wednesday:

9 am to 6 pm Community Projects; 11:30 am free lunch for helpers at Turley United Methodist Church, 6050 N. Johnstown Ave., 6 pm Classic Country Concert with Johnny and The Oklahomans, and 6:30 pm free dinner for helpers at the Welcome Table Center.

Thursday:

9 am to 6 pm Various Community Projects for all ages; Food Pantry 3 to 6 pm; gather at 2:30 pm for a quick prayer and blessing service for the work of the food pantry and the lives touched through it.

Lenten Prayer Service 6 to 6:30 pm, Welcome Table Missional Community

Friday

9 am to 6 pm Various Community Projects

3 to 7 pm Turley area Litter Pickup Event and Jupiter Jump and Party at The Welcome Table Community Center

7 to 9 pm Live Rock Music, featuring the band “Built For Comfort”

For more information, or to sign up to help, contact Ron Robinson, Executive Director, A Third Place Community Foundation at 918-691-3223, or see www.turleyok.blogspot.com

Join Us For Lenten Vespers: F2F or Online

Each Thursday during Lent, we gather at 6 pm for this Vespers Service, at The Welcome Table Community Center, 5920 N. Owasso Ave.. You are welcome to join us, face to face, or if you are encountering this online, by participating and sharing prayers in the comment section and using the liturgy as a daily or weekly evening time of prayer and meditation and study.

The Welcome Table
A Free Universalist Christian Missional Community

Following the radical Jesus in deeds not creeds. Join us in service to our community throughout the week. Our Welcome Table of Worship is open to all who welcome all, regardless of belief or denomination, race, gender, sexual orientation, age, physical abilities, economic status, or political affiliations. We don’t think Jesus would have it any other way. Free because we are non-creedal. We don’t give theological tests for admission, but encourage you to test us and try us to see if this way is for you. Universalist because we believe God is Love and All who abide in Love abide in God for all time. Christian because the generous compassionate way and story of Jesus, while not exclusively so, is our primary pathway opening up to God. Missional because we are sent to serve others more than ourselves. Community because we are made not to be autonomous individuals but to be a people of God.

Lenten Vespers

Invocation
Today is the day which God has made: Let us rejoice and be glad therein.
What does the Eternal require of us? To live justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God.

Chalice Lighting Covenant
This is our covenant as we walk together in life together or apart, in ways of God known or to be made known, as a people of God striving to make Jesus visible in the world: In the light of truth, and the loving and liberating spirit of Jesus, we gather in freedom, to worship God, and serve all.

Evening Response

Now as we come to the setting of the sun and our eyes behold the evening light, we sing your praises, O God, for the blessings of the day, and we seek your presence as we face the night, finding your spirit there, waiting.

Song #46, Singing The Living Tradition, first verse, followed by humming the tune: Now The Day Is Over, Night Is Drawing Nigh, Shadows of the Evening, Steal Across the Sky

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVR3HoRJfLA&feature=related

Prayer of Confession:

Gracious and Loving God, we have erred and strayed from thy ways. We have followed too much the desires and devices of our own hearts. We have left undone those things we ought to have done, and done those things we ought not to have done. But, Thou, O God, have mercy upon us, You Restore Us with a pure heart and a gentle voice, and turn our lives to You, in service to others, especially those in affliction and oppression and those in need. Amen.

 Prayers interspersed with Silent Meditation

Embrace our darkness, we beg you, O Lord, and by your great mercy be with us in the midst of all perils and dangers. (You are invited to speak names of those for prayer each followed by unison response Hear our prayer. Please share your prayer requests, and blessings, in the comment section below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GV3sV3e-2a8 I lie down this night with God, gaelic night prayer meditation

The Lord's Prayer

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven, give us this day, our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us, lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever and ever.Amen.

Reading and Conversation: We have been discussing selections from Father John Dear's book The Questions of Jesus. http://www.johndear.org/articles/theQuestionofJesus.htm

http://www.johndear.org/books/questionsofjesus2.htm

Responsive Reading #637, A Litany of Atonement

For remaining silent when a single voice wold have made a difference

We forgive ourselves and each other, we begin again in love.
For each time our fears have made us rigid and inaccessible.

We forgive ourselves and each other, we begin again in love.
For each time that we have struck out in anger without just cause

We forgive ourselves and each other, we begin again in love.

For each time that our greed has blinded us to the needs of others

We forgive ourselves and each other, we begin again in love.

For falling short of the admonitions of the spirit

We forgive ourselves and each other, we begin again in love.
For losing sight of our unity

We forgive ourselves and each other, we begin again in love.
For those and for so many acts both evident and subtle which have
fueled the illusion of separateness

We forgive ourselves and each other, we begin again in love.
--Robert Eller-Isaacs

Hymn 101 Abide With Me

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5nbq_VEea0

Responsive Reading 642, Psalm 23

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. 2 He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. 3 He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake. 4 Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. 5 Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over. 6 Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.

http://theory.stanford.edu/~oldham/church/ps23-translations-2006Feb22/ps23-translations-2006Feb22.pdf For a variety of translations of this Psalm

Benediction:

May the peace of God go with you, wherever you are sent; may God guide you through the wilderness, protect you through the storm; may God bring you home rejoicing, at the wonders you have seen; may God bring you home rejoicing, once again into our doors.

 

Our Week of Mission Work Here, Welcome Wildflower UU Church of Austin, Texas. Come help, party, partner, worship, spread the word about our community

 

Join In Our Week of Serving Turley & Area

Mon. Mar 12 – Fri. Mar. 16

A Third Place Foundation: local grassroots group

Growing healthy lives and neighborhoods

Monday:

10 am to 2 pm: Tour of Area and Discussion of Issues and Projects. Free Lunch included. Meet at the Welcome Table Community Center, 5920 N. Owasso Ave.

2-5 PM Service Projects at the Center and new Community  KitchenGardenPark and Orchard, 6005 N. Johnstown Ave., and in the community

5:30 pm at the Center Free Dinner Movie and Discussion of “The Way”

Tuesday:

9 am to 6 pm Various Community Projects for all ages; 3 to 6 pm Food Pantry

Wednesday:

9 am to 6 pm Community Projects; 11:30 am free lunch for helpers at Turley United Methodist Church, 6050 N. Johnstown Ave., 6 pm Classic Country Concert with Johnny and The Oklahomans, and 6:30 pm free dinner for helpers at the Welcome Table Center.

Thursday:

9 am to 6 pm Various Community Projects for all ages; Food Pantry 3 to 6 pm

Lenten Prayer Service 6 to 6:30 pm, Welcome Table Missional Community

Friday

9 am to 6 pm Various Community Projects

3 to 7 pm Turley area Litter Pickup Event and Jupiter Jump and Party at The Welcome Table Community Center

7 to 9 pm Live Rock Music, featuring the band “Built For Comfort”

For more information, or to sign up to help, contact Ron Robinson, Executive Director, A Third Place Community Foundation at 918-691-3223, or see www.turleyok.blogspot.com

 

Bless This Mess: Transforming Faith and Church and World

Bless This Mess: Transforming Faith/Transforming Church


Rev. Ron Robinson Stillwater UU Church, March 4, 2012



Hymns: Love Will Guide Us and Amazing Grace
Responsive Reading Psalm 23 from Singing The Living Tradition hymnalText: from Mark 8


34He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.35For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.36For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?”


Reading: From Proverbs of Ashes: Violence, Redemptive Suffering, and the search for what saves us, by Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker


Rebecca Parker, UU seminary president, tells how she, a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, stopped doing and going to communion because of how it had become only a story of suffering and acceptance of pain in order to draw close to God; in the book she goes on to say how she as a young minister preaching the same thing as part of communion liturgy had one of those come to Jesus moments when a victim of domestic violence sought her counsel and spoke of needing to accept her own situation, for didn’t Jesus accept his on the cross? It started her journey to a renewed understanding of suffering and God. One where she refused to be in worship services with communion when they preached Jesus as a sacrifice.






But then, she writes, she was in a recovery group for those struggling with the effects of alcohol on those they loved, and there was a fellow traveler who himself had once been the abuser of his children, and who was learning to live with all he’d done, without it spinning him into a shame cycle that would lead to more abuse, and there she began to experience a different kind of community, one that lifts up lamentation, solidarity, struggle, the telling of truth, accountability, and possibilities of new life. She experienced a new kind of people. It only happened because she was able, in this new setting, to sit close together with one whose experience reminded her, in ways, of her own abuser, and yet because of being a people together in a community of truth she began to see both him and herself differently.


“At first, I wanted to flee from the group. I was sitting knee to knee with a sexual abuser. But then I remembered that he and I were there for the same reason. We were trying to recover from living a lie, living under the weight of denials, splits, avoidance, absence. We were there for each other, all of us in the group, and we told the truth about our lives because telling the truth restored us to the human community. It brought us back from the dead. It was a way of showing up. Of coming back, alive. It made us free. “






And Soon after that she was at a worship service led by a woman she knew and trusted. Still, when it came time for communion, she thought of slipping out again. But this time instead she risked staying, and the service was more about being present with suffering, about being a feast amid famine and funeral, about life and finding food for the soul there, and all people being welcome at the table in peace. That night when, as a part of the small group, she received the plate and the cup from another, she had a liberating vision of receiving it from, and giving it to, the one who had abused and betrayed her.


“Somewhere deep inside me a noise that had been roaring for years became silent. An old ache, like a stone, began to fall. I returned to normal consciousness. Around me were the quiet voices of familiar friends. I knew that in the end all there is, is mercy. The promise was true. Weeping may endure for the night, buy joy comes in the morning.”






A people, not ashamed of their pain, able to see it in others; and, being seen, becoming more than they had been.


















Sermon:


The world is undergoing some revolutionary, not evolutionary, transformations, again, as it did after the invention of the print culture. That’s a sermon in itself. The church, IF it wants to be an agent for change in its transforming world, must also become transformed and transforming (though not always changed in the same manner as the world, of course, for often the way to transform the world is to go against its grain). And That too is a sermon in itself. When I was here this past August, I preached about the ways the church as church is changing in order to be a force for hope and justice in the world. But still left is the sermon on what change has to happen in us for the church, which is made up of us, to change so the world will be changed. That’s today’s sermon.


I believe the change is not in what votes we take on what decisions, or what programs we start, or what we say from the pulpit or teach in the class; I believe it is not in what money we raise or buildings we build or maintain; or what bylaws or mission and vision statements we write. All of that will come, or not, as needed, when we focus on why we are here, what calls us together and sends us out together.


I believe in order to transform the church so it can engage in the transforming of the world, even and especially the world right around us, with our values and beliefs, we must first transform our own personal understandings and commitments of what it means to be a faithful people, a people full of ultimate trust, and what is required to create a community of such faithfulness, trustworthiness, and transformation.


When Ghandi said be the change you seek in the world, when Jesus said God’s kind of upside down inside out transforming Empire, not Caeser’s status quo power Empire, is already within you, they are showing us where all change begins. People who change our neighborhoods into places of abundant life and justice usually have experienced or are experiencing a change in where they find meaning in life; they are not saints, fully arrived non anxious holy ones; they can be pained and a pain, and are always in process, but they have a longing and hunger for change within and without. This is why we are now finding such depth in partnering personal spiritual direction with community missional ministry, going inward and outward at the same time, letting each part of our life transform the other. Imagine a church where that is the rhythm.


And one of the things I think needs to be changed about us is that we don’t often think we need to be changed; when that is the case we can’t do much about real change in the world, I believe. Of course, we come by this almost inherently. We have historically what you call a high anthropology, or estimation of human nature, at least out of our Unitarian side of the heritage. Remember that saying that the Unitarians thought people were too good to be damned, and the Universalists thought God was too good to damn anyone? A lot of truth in it. Many of the early Universalists actually became Universalists out of a strong conviction in original sin coupled with their notion of God’s even stronger Love; they thought wow if God has saved us, even us, then it is true everyone will be saved. But mostly we came to stake our theology on having a high opinion of human nature, and that got morphed into creating church communities where we focused on how good we were, how we don’t need saving, or changing, and it is the world out there that needs changing, not us, thank you, we are fine, everything’s fine, and we tell each other how fine our lives are.


I was at a conference recently where the Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber was telling her life and faith journey. She had been quite an angry rebellious self-destructive youth who had been active in church as a child but grew into a life of drugs and alcohol and the punk culture; her eventual recovery took her to the support groups in basement of churches where she said she learned more about God than in the sanctuaries. For about ten years she was unchurched. During this time she discovered a truth that she had both a capacity for hurting herself and others and a capacity for compassion. Part of her journey during this time she tried to be a Unitarian; she worked for five years as a counselor at Unitarian youth camp; but she says she didn’t find it a fit because she felt the Unitarians had too high an opinion of humanity so that it didn’t square with her reality; she said it was as if we don’t read the newspaper. There was no room in our churches of light for the darkness she knew was part of her and she didn’t believe she could by herself live out an all goodness within her. She ended up getting married, going to seminary, and becoming an author and prominent emergent church leader in the progressive Evangelical Lutheran Church of America in Denver where she founded a church called House For All Sinners and Saints which was started in and for the punk and queer inclusive culture but now includes members from all walks of life.


She admits her experience with us was limited and she is making general conclusions, but it is a critique many have made, both those who have grown up among us and left, and those who have come in and then left, and those who have come and stayed. Each religious tradition has its shadow side, and ours might be to know there is a shadow side. Each tradition’s strength, taken to an extreme, becomes perverted into an idol and can threaten to undo the strength it offers to the world. We are no exception. Former UUA President John Buehrens has written about a common experience he encountered during his travels and preaching; that when some people found out that he was married to an Episcopalian priest, they would say something like, “It must be nice to have a religion as a crutch” to which he learned to respond: “well, at least some people know they are limping.”


Maybe it is in part because we have such a high opinion of human nature that we have made church membership so easy and painless, and that seems to carry over into having so little demands or expectations about growing our spiritual life . We aren’t alone in this, however, but, it is very different from how our founding church ancestors treated the matter. Those early Puritans had to be able to show how their spirit had been regenerated, their life changed, in order for them to get the full benefits of membership and to be a part of that movement that journeyed to a new land and sought to create a “city upon a hill.” Their own failings and hubris and cultural near-sightedness often betrayed them and their God of love, but they were a changed people who changed the world and left us a legacy for good and bad with which we are still entrusted.


They themselves found this a hard path to hand down to others, though, and so 350 years ago this very year they approved what is known as the Half Way Covenant to allow children to be baptized even if their parents weren’t full members of the church because they hadn’t been able to express publicly that they had been changed spiritually. This goes to show though the strong faith our ancestors did have in the church covenants because they weren’t willing to lie about an inward experience just to fit in with others. And before too long the sacraments of baptism and communion were opened up to all in the Puritan based churches for the very purpose of helping people to be changed.


Fast forward though to the North American church that came out of The Great Depression and World War Two. It was like the dominant culture that came out of that experience. There was a desire to be settled, there was an emphasis on domesticity, fueled societally by the rise of Madison Avenue advertising and new television technology, and even government funding. The path became: Find a job for life, find a spouse for life, find a house and home for life, and find a church for life, most probably one you inherited and was nearby. That was the American Dream; if there was change it was supposed to be upwards in mobility, upwards and onwards for ever, to a bigger company, bigger house, bigger car, where you would feel even more settled and secure. Change in degree but not in kind. Church in what was called the dominant mainstream church was a reflection that you had made it in the American Dream.


The faithfulness of someone in this particular church default mode, one that cut across denominations, was a faith ultimately in the institutions supporting us and keeping us settled. If you were unsettled, despite it all, maybe because of it all, you kept it to yourself because that was the ultimate heresy, an excommunication for not being good enough, saved enough, to keep job, home, community, spouse, children all in line and settled.


We Baby Boomers, the children of these Settlers, then came into our own and had our own kind of Half Way Covenant with society and its institutions. We unsettled society, but settled into our perpetual rebellion; where we kept our attachment to the cultural institutions, and we have been more attached than our own children have been to them, we still kept these institutions---job, family, church, civic group---unsettled, neither rejecting them totally or committing to them totally. We made society and church about us, in our image, rather than making ourselves into the image of the institutions as those original builders and settlers of the church had done. We created or made over communities of faith that enshrined our own rebellion, our own individualism; our main needs. Where the earlier generations needs were to be settled; ours was to remain on that adolescent cusp where we couldn’t leave but we wanted to, couldn’t wait to leave but couldn’t support ourselves, where everything was about us and our wants and feelings.


And, just like those adolescents, we wanted to make what was wrong with the world, and oh there was always so much wrong with the world, we wanted to make it not really about us, not about our own problems and consumptions: Who, me? As one of our favorite icons had it? What, me worry? Let’s go consume more. And we wrote the book, literally, on burnout, on narcissism. If we did look inward, we got lost there, and not in facing our struggles of soul but in assuring ourselves that we would never have to face them, embrace them, transform them, if we just thought and felt the right way and surrounded ourselves with an echo chamber of people who would help us do that. Theology of prosperity mega-churches have been the landmark for this kind of faithful discipleship to self and culture. But it has infected churches of all sizes and theologies. Perhaps it is both a blessing and a scary thing, as we look around our churches and institutions, that they aren’t making anymore of us, Baby Boomers.


In our new hinge of history, what it means to be faithful is like everything else being transformed. No more the Church of the Divine Settled Ones. No more the Church of The Perpetual Rebellion. No More the Church of the Self Messiah. Now to find faith is to unsettle yourself, to go on an adventure, a quest, with others for others, and while doing so facing your fears, voicing your vulnerability, relinquishing all the material and emotional possessions that possess you, seeking to be changed, holding together our original blessedness and our original brokenness, letting both bleed together you might say as we seek out the bleeding and broken and blessed places and people of our world, because that is where and how we will be transformed into a people and a Spirit capable of amazing acts of love and justice.


Jedis and Hobbits are stories of this new kind of faithfulness and spiritual community and so are the reclaimed stories of Disciples of a State Executed Rabbi from 2000 years ago who found themselves, having lost themselves, changed into a people, found themselves a changed people, found themselves on missions of changing the world.


Before the cross became a symbol of the Emperor’s sword, before it became a strategy to keep those in power through violence in power through violence, before it became a means to silence the sufferers, the cross had been a sign of this kind of faith journey, a resistance to the Empire and a sign of solidarity with those most threatened and vulnerable, and a sign that if you were a follower of that sign you yourself would be threatened and vulnerable, but never ultimately alone. Sociologist of Religion Rodney Starks writes that the early Jesus followers from their outcast marginal space grew in great numbers over the first three hundred years after Jesus’ life, his death on the cross, and after the belief took hold that the cross did not hold the last truth but in fact love and justice held the last truth, they grew all because in order to fully experience and live in that truth themselves they were to re-enact it and re-embody it by nursing the sick and dying during plagues when others fled, by including women when others did not, by honoring children when others treated them as slaves, by including slaves and people of all ethnicities when others ate only with their own kind, by refusing to serve in the Emperor’s military and to kill others, by staying in and with the urban poor in the worst conditions possible.


That is what it meant once upon a time, and can mean again today, regardless of your faith label, to pick up your cross, deny your selfishness, and gain real life, true self, and grow the soul of the world. To be clear about this: it is not good that Jesus was killed by the Empire; violence and suffering is not something to be willed, and I don’t believe God willed it then or now; it is to be resisted against. When the early followers of Jesus transformed the symbol of the cross by owning it instead of being shamed by it, by making it a sign of faith in something more powerful than the cross itself and what it represented to so many then, they were using it as a liberative symbol, as a story, as a counter reality against the world’s oppressive use of it. Evil is not good; good can emerge in the response to the aftermath of Evil. One way that happens is by not trying to pretend there are no crosses still lining the roads of our lives, our churches, our world, the crosses that seek to convince us that change is not possible, but trusting good can emerge by facing the crosses, emptying them of what Empire has claimed them to be, and embracing them not as a sign of that past but as a sign of a different future.


The church that is dawning, or returning to us, is one where part of our reason for being is the sharing of such stories, about ours and our community’s crosses, and joining in the struggles of transformation of them. We do so then not to root ourselves in the cross, in suffering, in that which calls out to us from the deepest part of us to be changed, but root ourselves in the trust, the faithfulness that it will happen, is happening, even when we can’t see it, or feel it, and believe it never will. Root ourselves in that spirit which has been called sacred Presence, grace, even called resurrection, a spirit of change which forms us into agents of change. Which faces us forward. We can then come as persons seeking to be changed, come into communities full of blessed and broken people who will break our hearts as we will break theirs, and go out a little more healed and whole into wider community of broken and blessed hearts waiting for our presence.


There is a theological word for change; it is called Repentance. It comes from the Greek word metanoia, to literally go beyond in one’s understanding, to have a change of heart and insight. It gets emphasized a lot during this season of Lent. We think of our past struggles and we commit to living in the present as if we were already living in a future without them. I wonder what our churches would be like if we took this season seriously all year long and got beyond our own understandings of ourselves and others and the world and came to church not to celebrate our having arrived at mutual understandings and what we know, but came because we experienced ourselves to be people who are in need of being changed, and that we can’t do it alone, in need of what others know, especially those who will never come to us on their own.


Maybe we need to repent of our not being repentance people. I like what author Frederich Buechner says about Repentance when he writes; To repent is to come to your senses. It is not so much something you do as something that happens. True repentance spends less time looking at the past and saying “I’m sorry” then to the future and saying “Wow.”” That Wow opens up a future we thought the past had closed, and the more we practice it the more it guides us through our hard nights.


The Psalms, like the famous one we recited earlier, have traditionally been a source for strength during times of stress because they are little nuggets of repentance and change and transformation even within themselves. They have a three-fold movement from expressions of orientation, praise for the order of things, to expressions of dis-orientation, lament, anger, fear and loss for the ways things are, to finally expressions of re-orientation, praise for the hope of how they will be. Past present and future folded in together.


Poet and Author Kathleen Norris in her book Amazing Grace uses a contemporary story of contemporary psalm writing that is an example I think of what contemporary faithfulness might mean again in our lives, and communities, if we start out together from a place of pain and power and potential. She wrote:


“When I’m working as an artist in residence at parochial schools, I like to read the psalms out loud to inspire the students, who are usually not aware tht the snippets they sing at mass are among the greatest poems in the world. But I have found that when I have asked children to write their own psalms, their poems often have an emotional directness that is similar to that of the biblical psalter. They know what it’s like to be small in a world designed for big people, to feel lost and abandoned. Children are frequently astonished to discover that the psalmists so freely express the more unacceptable emotions, sadness and even anger, even anger at God, and that all of this is in the Bible that they have read in church on Sunday mornings…..Children who are picked on by their big brothers and sisters can be remarkably adept when it comes to writing cursing psalms, and I believe that the writing process offers them a safe haven in which to work through the desires for vengeance in a healthy way. Once a little boy wrote a poem called The Monster Who Was Sorry. He began by admitting that he hates it when his father yells at him; his response in the poem is to throw his sister down the stairs, and then to wreck his room, and finally to wreck the whole town. The poem concludes: “Then I sit in my messy house and say to myself, “I shouldn’t have done that.” My messy house says it all, with more honesty than most adults could have mustered, the boy made a metaphor for himself that admitted the depth of his rage and also gave him a way out. If that boy had been a novice in the fourth century monastic desert, his elders might have told him that he was well on the way toward repentance, not such a monster after all, but only human. If the house is messy, they might have said, why not clean it up, why not make it into a place where God might wish to dwell?”


I know you are about to launch a campaign to gather commitments for the life and future of this church. Normally kick off sermons for such drives are full of great vision and memories of all that has been accomplished and optimistic calls for being all you can be. This sermon about messy houses probably doesn’t follow that model. But I hope you have caught glimmers of a vision of a Possible Church for a new era, one that is truly worthy of our deepest giving, of our grandest adventures in life, because here we have been touched by that Spirit that allows us to bless this mess, even this mess, to embrace our suckiness, to risk and fail our way all the way to great change, deep mercy, new life. We have nothing to lose that won’t be lost anyway, and the faith, hope and love we have to gain is indeed Eternal.

Feeding The Common Life in Turley/NorthTulsa

Hi all.

Here on the northern edge of Tulsa, in the one month just past, we redistributed for free 11,000 pounds of food, and 7,500 pounds of that was given out in one hour thanks to the visit we coordinated from the mobile food van of the Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma, and thanks to all our volunteers who mobilized to give the food to neighbors first and then themselves. Almost all of our volunteers use the food pantry here themselves..

I am humbled to think that all we do now, and even more to come, wouldn't have happened without the action just nine years ago in January when we began our first failing attempts at church that led to our amazing missional community; we wouldn't be here without the first support of the folks there in the suburbs and then during the time of our move to Turley/NorthTulsa, and without even those many not with us any longer, and without the support of you all from far from us and all the students who have worked with us in the ensuing years, and the groups that have helped us with donations and grants, all of you have inspired us and our neighbors here; and so that food event that literally stopped traffic on North Peoria to see what was going on in the abandoned Cherokee School parking lot would not have happened without you. But, it is a sign of things to come, even greater, and even more surprising. Maybe our related motto to "That's soooo Turley" should be something we say a lot of here, and hear from others, "Wow!", especially when it sinks in how few of the usual resources we have.

Giving out food in January was one of our signature events, but we do so on a regular, ongoing basis, as well as organizing common meals, and working with our partners on the deeper social issues that have created so much need especially in our zipcode. Here, as often as we can and as best we can but never as we could, though always in the spirit of abundance, we feed the hungry, we clothe, we give out hope that change can happen, we create connections for relationships, we create events for justice, and for celebrating life itself, and we seek to partner with all who want to connect their mission with ours. A lot that never makes it into our list of coming events is all part of this work.

In the next two months, in very common and diverse ways, the Sacred will be present here growing healthier lives and neighborhoods. Behind each of the things you read about below, there are a few struggling lives of people who, in partnership with the Higher Life, make it happen. In the church year now, this is the season of Epiphany, when we lift up the ways God is made visible in the common creation and common life, illuminating for us the path to follow, especially giving us examples to adopt as soon we enter into that time of narrowing our path during Lent to focus our attention on deepening our connection with the Sacred. So come join with us as we serve the world in the days ahead; be amazed at what a very small group of committed citizens can do, with a big vision and a full to overflowing heart:

Saturday, Feb. 11, eat with us at the Turley Odd Fellows Lodge, 6227 N. Quincy Ave., 8 to 10 am, $5 suggested donation; proceeds are used to benefit the community. Because of the forecasted bad wintry weather this weekend, the Garden Day kickoff has been postponed until the following Saturday, Feb. 18 at 10 am at our Welcome Table KitchenGardenPark, 6005 N. Johnstown Ave. and every good weather day after that on Saturdays. At 5:30 and 7:30 pm weather permitting each Saturday our Recovery 12 step groups meet at our community center, 5920 N. Owasso Ave...Also on Saturdays, Feb. 11 and Feb. 18, there is the registration and workout for the renewed and vitally important for our neighborhoods North Tulsa Youth Baseball, and Softball, for those 4-14 years old, 11 am-2 pm at O'Brien Park. Years ago some of the best youth sports was organized in North Tulsa, but for years the facilities here were used mainly by those bringing in their childrens' teams from the suburbs; it is great to have a locally produced organization now in its second year rebuilding on the legacy.

Sunday, Feb. 12, 9:30 am, study based on the latest biblical and theological scholarship through the "Saving Jesus (from the radical right and the secular left)" DVD, followed by our common liturgy and communion, common meal, and then join us from 2-5 pm at the Peace Academy, 4620 S. Irvington Ave., for the second session of the Interfaith Trialogue Series, this year on Food, Religion and Community, and after which there will be a planning session for the Marketplace of Ideas event that we will be a part of to help conclude the series (see below).

Tuesday and Thursday each week, 3 to 6 pm, Food Pantry and Clothing Pantry and Computer Center and Library open.

Thursday, Feb. 16, noon, first part of Volunteer Orientation for our various projects. Free lunch. First session focuses on Mission, Vision, Values, and Relationship Skills.

Friday, Feb. 17, 5:30 pm, community townhall featuring a presentation by the State director of the Dept. of Human Services at Tulsa Community College Northeast Campus, room 617, Apache and Harvard, and networking with other groups in State Rep. Seneca Scott's district.

Sat. Feb. 18, 10 am. the Garden Day Kickoff at the park and orchard, 6005 N. Johnstown Ave., one of our first miracle among the ruins projects...also that day representing our group I will be at our McLain High School Foundation Board Retreat as we grow our plans for helping the students, families, staff, and partners continue transforming our region's junior and senior high school.

(We had a great community meeting to hear from the representatives for The Lighthouse Charter School that will most likely be going into our neighborhood Horace Greeley School which is soon to be closed, we suspect; Greeley is the school the students transferred to this year near us after the Cherokee School on North Peoria right across from us was closed. We are also working actively on plans to bring community organizations into the now abandoned Cherokee School; by the way, we did hold our recent worship service in the gardens we created at Cherokee after burying the dead dog that had lain unattended in the parking lot for more than a week; and we are working on some way to keep our summer feeding program going this coming summer at Cherokee School if at all possible where we fed more children and youth 18 and under than at any other site as we kept it going throughout the summer and not just during summer school like so many sites that relied on school staff.)

Sunday, Feb. 19, after our study, our worship, our common meal, we will go to Boston Avenue Methodist Church for the final session of the Food, Religion, and Community program and we will be a participant in the Marketplace of Ideas that follows highlighting the food justice programs of area groups. See more at www.occjok.org.

Tuesday, Feb. 21, 6:30 pm in honor of Black History Month and our ongoing mission that includes reconciliation, we will have a free meal and showing of the recent documentary on the struggle for reparations for African Americans, featuring Tulsa native and professor Dr. Cornel West and others, called "Stubborn as a Mule." (I am sure for our meal we can work in a little Mardi Gras theme).

Wednesday, Feb. 22, Ash Wednesday Service. Contact me for details as I suspect we will be again joining our partners at the Turley United Methodist Church for their evening service beginning Lent.

Thursday, Feb. 23, at 6 pm we will hold our first Weekly Lenten Vespers Service, then at 6:30 pm is the Neighborhood Safety Group meeting.

Tuesday, Feb. 28, 7 pm, join us for community townhall and organizing at the Community Association meeting at O'Brien Park.

Thursday, March 1, 3:30 pm, join us at the center for our Future of Turley Partnership Planning Meeting; at the past meeting besides our organizing work, and besides the charter school presentation, we hosted a presentation by Reggie Ivey, director of the Tulsa Health Department about the new Wellness Center and its programs being built in our area.

Sunday, March 4, join us at 10:30 am at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Stillwater as I preach a Lenten word based on Mark 8:31-38, "A Theology of the Cross for Unitarian Universalists"

Looking Ahead: Come serve with us as we transform our area during our Second Annual Week of Service, March 11-16, volunteering with us and our partners, and helping us host Wildflower Church again from Austin, Texas. As part of that we will have our Monday, March 12, Tour and Orientation of our Service Area of TulsaNorth/Turley, and that evening at 5:30 pm we will host a free meal for all, and have a 6 pm showing of the new movie "The Way" starring Martin Sheen, about the pilgrimmage along the Camino de Santiago, the way of St. James, in Spain, http://theway-themovie.com/. This is a movie with missional community values and themes, about forming community along the road of life, not organizing it first and then taking the walk, and about the challenges and surprises of transformation along the way, especially in the common life act of walking. We will also have a discussion afterwards and presentation by the Rev. Jonalu Johnstone, of First Unitarian Church in Oklahoma City, who recently journeyed on the walk.

And come to the national Revival of the UU Christian Fellowship, March 22-25, in Fairfax, VA in the Washington, D.C. area; see all the information at www.uuchristian.org/revival.

Finally, a few quotes to cast the above in its deeper meaning:

"Any religion that professes to be about the souls of people, and is not concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them, and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religion." Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Every spiritual master in every tradition talks about the significance of small things in a complex world. Small actions in social life; small efforts in the spiritual life; small moments in the personal life. All of them become great in the long run, the mystics say, but all of them look like little or nothing in themselves." Sister Joan Chittister.

(We have a short hand for that: It is soooo Turley.).

blessings, and thanks, and more soon,

Ron Robinson

www.progressivechurchplanting.blogspot.com www.missionalprogressives.blogspot.com www.turleyok.blogspot.com www.uuchristian.org www.ptstulsa.edu

Freely Following Jesus, a sermon preached in Austin, TX Wildflower Church

Freely Following Jesus

Wildflower Church Austin TX Jan. 22, 2012

The reading from Mark 1:14-20…a part of the weekly lectionary, a way churches of different traditions all read and comment on the same biblical passages each week; the UU Christian Fellowship was one of the founding organizations who set up the current revised common lectionary; www.commontexts.org.

Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God,¹⁵and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”¹⁶As Jesus passed along the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the sea—for they were fishermen.¹⁷And Jesus said to them, “Follow me and I will make you fish for people.”¹⁸And immediately they left their nets and followed him.¹⁹As he went a little farther, he saw James son of Zebedee and his brother John, who were in their boat mending the nets.²⁰Immediately he called them; and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired men, and followed him.”

Contemporary reading from “Christian Voices within Unitarian Universalism”

Sermon

Let’s begin with a round of a few different voices from Unitarian Universalists, lay and clergy, who are in the UU Christian Fellowship. I hope it telescopes right away just a bit of the wide bandwidth of what it means to freely follow Jesus among our faith community’s tradition, but let me say upfront that even these selected voices present too limited a picture, as you will see. Still, they reveal encounters of the heart and the hands as well as from the mind.

From Dave Dawson: --“I share a desire for the freedom to test the outer limits of my Christian faith. Within my church I am not told I am wrong, just looked at quizzically when I say I have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ…I remain a UU Christian as a witness to those in mainline Christianity that, yes, universal salvation is alive and well, and it is a beautiful option for those people mired in shame-based churches.

 From Anita Farber-Robertson: --“It was not, however, going to be enough to want Jesus in my life. I was going to have to claim him, and let him claim me. I was going to have to say, “Yes, this is my path. You are my guide, my teacher, and my savior, for without you my soul would get brittle, my mouth grow bitter, my heart hard.”

 From Terry Burke: --“My baptism remains central to my religious self-understanding. As part of the confession of faith that Carl Scovel had me write, I said, “I believe that God seeks a loving, dialogical relationship with humanity, and that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ calls us to reflect that sacrificial love in our lives. The cross and the faithful community proclaim that it is more important to love than to survive and that love is stronger than death.”

From Robert Fabre: --“So Unitarian Universalism was, for me, the pathway back to Christianity. No doubt I wouldn’t be where I am today, wouldn’t be the person I am today, without it. Ironically, the longer I’ve been associated with this liberal religious community, the more conservative I’ve become on a personal level. So now I can say, I believe that Jesus was the son of God (not God but the son of God); I believe in the resurrection (not the resuscitation of a dead body but the resurrection); and I believe that I am saved by grace (not because I accept Jesus as my personal savior but because, despite my confusion and my unbelief, despite my shortcomings and mistakes, in a mysterious way, beyond my comprehension and explanation, God accepts me).

 From Victoria Weinstein: --“Who is Jesus Christ to me? He is both a teacher of the Way, and the Way itself. For one who has always had a hard time grasping the concept of God, let alone developing a working definition of God, Jesus both points me toward a definition of God and then lives that definition. Jesus Christ is the freedom that laughs uproariously at the things of this world, while loving me dearly for being human enough to lust after them. He is my soul’s safety from all harm. He is the avatar of aloneness, a compassionate and unsentimental narrator of the soul’s exile on earth, and proof of the soul’s triumphant homecoming at the end of the incarnational struggle. He is not afraid to put his hands anywhere to affect healing. He mourns, and weeps, and scolds, and invites. He is life more abundant and conqueror of the existential condition of fear.”

And From the late Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley: Today, Jesus remains a central figure of my religious identity. And yet I don’t often call myself a Christian because there is no agreement on what the term Christian means, either within Unitarian Universalism or without…There are conservative and liberal understandings of the Jesus story and Christian witness, and none of these has any exclusive claim on Jesus or those who seek to follow him. In my Christian witness, no one’s soul (or spiritual salvation) is dependent on a particular ritual, obligation, or statement of belief. There is no giant cop up in the sky dictating who will go up and who will go down. And yet I have been moved to tears by liturgical expressions of the story of Jesus and his work as a mystical teacher. It’s most accurate to say that I am a nominal Christian who has also found truth and wisdom in pre-Christian and mystical religions, earth-centered spiritualities, religious humanism, womanism, and other theologies of liberation. I have embraced the spiritual practice of Thai Chi and the wisdom of Buddhist philosophy. I am a Unitarian Universalist because I do not exclude any particular theology. As the spiritual says, there is “plenty of good room” at the banquet table.

I would also include the voices of the non-Christian UUs who are a part of the UU Christian Fellowship but who love to learn with us and even worship with us. These include atheists and agnostics and many others who do not claim to freely follow Jesus, but who find their own spiritual lives deepened by being around those who do; and I would include the progressive Christians who are not UUs who are a part of us too, who like what we bring to the Christian table and are sometimes amazed to find that what they think have been new discoveries in biblical and theological studies have actually existed for centuries, among us.

The religious landscape in America has changed vastly since 1945 when the UUCF began. In UUism, in Christianity, and in UU Christianity. These UU Christian voices now are more diverse than you would have found when the UUCF began. Surprise, surprise, they are still changing. For a faith that roots itself in the theological belief that revelation is not sealed and cannot be sealed, we do seem to still resist change. I once had a church member in another congregation say “When I joined this church I guess I thought it had always been the way it was when I joined, and would always stay that way.” On the other hand, when we talk about ongoing revelation as a core value of our tradition, it doesn’t mean continually throwing the baby out with the bathwater in every successive generation, as if that is the mark of a progressive faith. Sometimes, often, ongoing revelation means returning to our touchstones and knowing them more fully because of where we have been, and being touched and supported by them even more deeply and strongly because of it.

There are four words that I think sum up the relationship between Christianity and Unitarian Universalism—in terms of our history and still at work now. They are: Commonplace. Contradiction. Conundrum. And Convergence. (I have borrowed the first three words and ideas from the Rev. Earl Holt.  I updated to add the fourth, convergence.)

Once upon a time, to speak of Christian voices in our movement would have been a commonplace thing, as redundant as saying Methodist or Baptist Christian. It hasn’t been all that long ago, relative to our history. In a 1936 national survey of Unitarians only, some 92 percent of the respondents said they considered their local church to be a Christian church. Now, of course, there were many in the so-called Christian church then who would have argued against that. As there are today. But, I don’t think it is spiritually healthy to let others define you, and what is interesting is how the Unitarians saw themselves. For the Universalists, by and large, they didn’t consider it then an issue to be surveyed about, so integral was Christianity to their identity even though there were movements within Universalism already working to change that.

But if we want to really grasp the notion of how commonplace Christian is in our roots, we should look at the statement of belief approved in 1853 by the American Unitarian Association.

 “WE BELIEVE in Jesus Christ, the everlasting Son of God, the express image of the Father, in whom dwelt all the fullness of the God-head bodily, and who to us is the Way and the Truth and the Life. WE BELIEVE in the Holy Spirit, proceeding from the Father and the Son, the teacher, renewer, and guide of mankind. WE BELIEVE in the Holy Catholic Church as the body and form of the Holy Spirit, and the presence of Christ in all ages. WE BELIEVE in the Regeneration of the human heart, which, being created upright, but corrupted by sin, is renewed and restored by the power of Christian truth. WE BELIEVE in the constant Atonement whereby God in Christ is reconciling the world to himself. WE BELIEVE in the Resurrection from mortal to immortality, in a future judgment and Eternal Life. WE BELIEVE in the coming of the Kingdom of God, and the final triumph of Christian Truth.

And that was from the heretical Unitarian Liberal Christians of their time, and after Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker had preached their famous sermons and Transcendentalism was rising. You might say it was approved because of those sermons and the theological changes underway.

A couple of points to know, though: one, there may be some among us, maybe the Trinitarian Universalists, like myself, whom have always been a part of who we are, who resonate with that language and those theological expressions today still; it is good to remember we never voted not to believe that statement, or another, but we only voted here and there new expressions for new times, not as official replacements that negated what came before; and second, Christians helped to create a faith community that, even if unconsciously in some ways, was open to others different from them; in large measure because of the kind of Christians they were, they helped form an association where they could, and would be, in the minority.  It is not a bad cultural place for a follower of Jesus to be.  

On the Universalist side, in the mid 1930s, they affirmed the following statement: “The bond of fellowship in this Convention shall be a common purpose to do the will of God as Jesus revealed it and to co-operate in establishing the kingdom for which he lived and died. To that end, we avow our faith in God as Eternal and All-conquering Love, in the spiritual leadership of Jesus, in the supreme worth of every human personality, in the authority of truth known or to be known, and in the power of men of goodwill and sacrificial spirit to overcome evil and progressively establish the Kingdom of God.”

But by 1945, coming out of the end of the second world war and wanting to cast a vision of a new kind of faith for a new kind of world, the Unitarians began to create common language of purpose that did not specifically lift up God, much less anymore Christ. In reaction to that and to preserve and promote their faith within and without their own ranks, the Unitarian Christians, including the first president of the later created UUA, created a national fellowship. From 1945 to 2004, the fellowship was in Massachusetts, once having its own building in downtown Boston.  A year after hiring me, we moved the UUCF from The First Church of Christ, Unitarian, in Lancaster, Mass, to our church in Turley.

            After 1945 in many places, especially in new lay led fellowships, Unitarian Universalism became the opposite of Christianity, and it was considered a contradiction to be a UU Christian. Over time as Christianity liberalized in many of its denominations, and as more and more UUs began to see how they were a more than tradition, rather than an anti this or that tradition, people began to see UU Christians as conundrums, puzzles. That meant we got a lot of questions like “If you are a Christian and a UU, do you believe in the Trinity, in the divinity of Jesus, in Hell and Heaven, etc etc? And especially the question, wouldn’t you be more comfortable in a Christian denomination like x, y, or z?”

Quick answers to those conundrum questions:  Christians have always believed many things about the nature of God and Jesus and the afterlife; UU Christians do as well. The interesting new development in UU Christianity is that a great number of our members have been non-Christian UUs first, and that it has been through Unitarian Universalism that they have become Christians or Jesus followers for either the first time ever, or as adults, so the thought of leaving for another church doesn’t appeal.  

What we have morphed into then is a UU Christianity where some places it is still commonplace to think of UU and Christian in the same way, and where some places it is seen as a contradiction, and where it is to many a conundrum, in large measure because we now have the Convergent UU Christians. These fall into two categories. One kind are those who converge different ways of primarily following Jesus or practicing their Christian faith. We have classic UU Christians who see Jesus as a teacher, who seek to follow his lessons. We have small c catholic UU Christians who experience Jesus in the traditions and rituals of the church over the centuries. And we have liberationist UU Christians who know Jesus in the actions of healing and liberating and being with the oppressed and marginalized and suffering. (You can read more about these types in the pamphlet Who Are The UU Christians by the Rev. Tom Wintle on our website). More and more UU Christians are converging these different ways of expressing their faith. But we also now have UU Christians who are converging their Christian faith with say Buddhism, or neo-paganism, humanism, Jewish roots, mysticism, and also among us are those who converge the UU part of their faith with their regular attendance and membership in a Christian community. And, to top it all off, we do have UU Christian churches who are also affiliated with other denominations the same as they are with the UUA. The spirit of convergence is alive and well. And, as we often say, we don’t think Jesus, or the radical inclusivist Paul and other early Jewish followers of Jesus, would have it any other way.  In fact UU Christianity is like a living embodied parable told by Jesus.

Which brings me to the final part of this sermon, tying a first century life together with our 21^st centuries lives: what is it about Jesus that keeps causing otherwise sane people to do crazy things in their life, still, whether it be leaving their livelihoods and putting down their fishing nets, their careers,  and following someone who asks nothing of them other then everything, who doesn’t say come follow me only if you are good, and believe this or that, but who says come and together, in freedom, we will do something unheard of, be fishers of people, especially the drowning and the lost and the left behind, rebuilders of abandoned places and people, come and we will live in a way and in a place that will be both draining and fulfilling at the same time, where you will be asked not to hide from the crosses the Roman Empire has erected to scare you into submission to its unjust ways but you will be asked to pick up that cross and transform it from fear to love, to risk your very life, in order to show the world that another way of life is possible, in fact can be glimpsed here, now, in what we are doing, and someday will be here for all?

            Jesus’ parables reveal perhaps the clearest picture we have of who he was and why he was so revolutionary that he was killed; they show the kind of Jesus we are trying to make visible in the world through our missional community back in Oklahoma in an area of great suffering and abandonment where we are guided by the 3Rs of relocation, redistribution, and reconciliation.  So, as I began with the words of some of his followers, to close let me end with Jesus’ words.

A favorite parable is when Jesus said, my translation, the kingdom of God is like a woman who stole leaven and put it into three measures of flour, until it was all corrupted. End of parable. But those few words are about the radical fact of God changing sides, as my seminary professor Brandon Scott puts it. Of God’s Relocation, redistribution, reconciliation. Follow Jesus and experience God changing sides.

Jesus’ phrase “kingdom of God”, was itself a kind of internal parable, for the kingdom, the world, the Empire as everyone knew, was Caeser’s. The evidence was everywhere; if you needed reminders just look at your coins or your crosses lining the roads. Caeser was Lord and Savior and was called that and the Son of God, and what was divine, then and now, was power and honor and property and propriety and security, being cool, popular, successful, accomplished, affluent, and with an appealing appearance. Jesus immediately challenges those assumptions by claiming kingdom is not Caeser’s but that of the God who is in relationship with the poor and the conquered.  Today instead of the Kingdom of God, we in the U.S. might say the Consumer Marketplace Entertainment Empire, or just the Empire of Me or Our Kind

In this world changing parable you see Jesus goes on to link God with leaven, something very ordinary, but also something considered unholy, not like the purity of the unleavened bread, rather something moldy that was to be kept separate and apart while preparing your meal. God, Jesus is saying, is in what others seek to shame and silence. And the main player in this God story is a woman, and as if that isn’t bad enough in the eyes of the world, she is a woman who sneaks or steals this leaven, and then foolishly puts it into enough flour to feed a feast, and what happens? It all goes bad, all becomes, in the eyes of the world, useless, to be abandoned. And that’s where the parable ends. And where it really begins to take off.
The God of this parable, as Jesus’ ministry and life also revealed, has relocated…from holiness to unholiness, from power and privilege and public status and acts to what happens in the home, out of sight is no longer out of mind, at least in God’s mind and sight; the everlasting has relocated from fullness and contentment to times and places and people of emptiness and what others see as waste; also God here even changes from being A Static Being to becoming a process, to a movement that changes and corrupts from within the dominant culture’s status quo and beliefs in what is worthy and respectable.

As Jesus challenged the authorities of his time, so this parable challenges us today, to also pick sides, to relocate, to go experience God, and help make God visible, where the powerful and the privileged won’t go, making visible what they seek to keep hidden in hopes of keeping the status quo intact.

Jesus expresses the life and depth of a real freedom, a freedom known as empowering both persons and the communities that nurture those very persons, a freedom whose other name is responsibility, a freedom that is the opposite of license to do what one wills, a freedom that has been the hallmark of the free church tradition of Unitarian Universalism from its origins in radical congregationalism that found a home on this continent. A kind of freedom that in this world today needs to be shouted from the mountaintops and lived in the abandoned places, especially when so many little Emperors seek to misuse the word freedom, just as they misuse Jesus as well.

In freely following Jesus today, we can, we hope, continue, just as the parables did and call us to, to turn our lives and the world upside down, and inside out, and during it all marvel, in amazing grace, at what happens next.