Plotting the Course
SERMON GIVEN BY REV LINDA HART AT RICHMOND & PUTNEY UNITARIAN CHURCH
It was sometime in 2004 – August, according to the logs – that my beloved cousins Andy and Chris took Peter, Claire and me on our first geocache. They had brought along some pages printed out from a website that described where there were some small boxes hidden out in a park nearby our house. Using the same sort of hand held device that Lawrence Kushner described, we headed off in the direction of the coordinates that were listed on the website. We entered a familiar park and searched around a few old trees to see if we could find the hidden treasure. We located the small film container that held inside it a strip of photos of ferns and another set of coordinates. We marked the new latitude and longitude in the global positioning satellite reader, and headed out to see if we could find the final treasure. Andy led the way with the reader in his hand, we stalked through the woods and found the likely spot. Reading the words of others who had searched out this spot, we resorted to the poke and prod method. That is, we picked up sticks and poked around in the ferns underneath the tree that had been pecked out by woodpeckers.
A metallic sound told us we had found our treasure. We pulled out an old ammunition box, popped open the latches and lifted the top. There were a collection of pins inside, and we put a few in and took a few out. We had found our first geocache.
Over the next few days of our visit together, we found one or two more, and thought that it was a very fun game. Now, just in case you don’t quite get what this game is, it is a hide and seek sort of event. You go to this website, geocaching.com, and there you can find out where there are these secret caches. The web site offers you pages that have particular coordinates, latitude and longitude. Once you’ve gotten the coordinates and the hints and clues that the person who hid the cache cares to share, then you take your GPS reader, and head out. Kushner was likely right for his particular time in that the GPS device could get him within a football pitch length. The technology is such that now you can get within metres of the place. At the coordinates, there is a hidden treasure: a box of some sort that holds a small log, a variety of tokens left by other searchers. Once you’ve found it, you sign the log, exchange one of your tokens for one in the box, and then you go back home, log on to the computer and record that you’ve found it.
At Christmas of 2004, we bought a GPS reader as a gift to the whole family, and we have had fun finding caches on our various travels as well as close to home. We discovered that there is a cache in the Old Deer Park, quite close to our home, and one that’s somewhere near the Richmond Green. We’ve not yet found either of them, but we will as we find time to go out and explore more.
There is something quite comforting about being able to know just exactly where on the planet you are. It’s similar to the tee-shirt that there was some years ago which had a picture of the Milky Way with a line drawn to a certain spot with the words “You are here” blazoned above. There’s something comforting about know quite where one is.
But the fun starts – in geocaching and in life, I think – when you have your sights set on some destination, when you have entered in the coordinates of something, and you take a few paces so that the reader can determine which way you need to go, and you can set off in the right direction. Because Rabbi Kushner is right about that. In order to get somewhere, you need to know where you are, where you want to go, and one other fixed point, like the direction north. The metaphor is perhaps too easy and too plain here, but it is an important one for us to consider. On this the day after my formal induction here at the Richmond and Putney Unitarian Church, I want us to reflect together on our destination, focus on where it is that we are going together. We don’t need a whole lot of precision here, but we do need some vision, some idea of where it is we would like to go get to.
We need to know this for a variety of good reasons. Firstly, it will give us a focus. I think it was Seneca who said that a sailor without a destination cannot tell a good wind from an ill wind. Knowing where we are heading, what our vision is for the future allows us to see what helps us and what might hinder us on our way. Secondly, knowing where we are going – or at least, where we hope to go – enables us to be fully intentional, to make choices wisely.
So, I want to suggest some notes as we begin to plot our course, and a few directions that I’ve been thinking of for us as a community, and over the coming months, I hope that we can as a wider community begin to focus on where it is we are going and make some plans for how to get there.
Annie Dillard has a way of capturing churches and church life, I think. The idea that church is, in fact, a dangerous place holds some appeal for me. I think she is quite accurate in this: we don’t often enough recognize the power of what it is we are doing here, as we sing together, as we pray together. So much of what happens in church is just so ordinary, isn’t it? Yet, if we are doing it well and right, there is nothing ordinary about it. I have to remind myself constantly that common sense isn’t so common, that the things that we prize in this community aren’t what is most beloved out there in the world by and large. We invoke the power of love routinely, we invoke the blessing of freedom, we use the words justice and peace and truth as if there was something simple and plain about them. Yet, when we pause to remember and consider these values, these ideas, we cannot help but know that they are complex, there is nothing ordinary about them. We should, as Annie Dillard suggests, lash ourselves to our seats, get out our crash helmets and get ready for a rough ride when we speak of such things.
There’s the first note along the path: let us take very seriously what we do here and what we hope for. Church life, when done well and right, is quite literally about life and death. It is about whether or not we live with depth, whether we have life in its fullness, whether we are awake to the world, and ourselves and our companions. To lose that sight of that is to allow a spiritual death. All that we do here contributes to that end: be it making tea, or helping to wash up afterwards, be it sitting through meetings, or coming to services on Sunday. What we are doing here is quite serious, it is about life and death, and we need to be ever mindful of that.
And there’s something more about danger as we plot our course. In an article written a few years ago by Bill Sinkford, the current president of the Unitarian Universalist Association he tells this story:
When we held our General Assembly in Salt Lake City in 1999, the Rev. Stefan Jonasson, now the UUA's coordinator of services to large congregations, met with the head of missionary work for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Knowing that several thousand of us were coming to town, this Mormon official had done his homework, and he told Stefan something interesting: Proportionate to our size, he said, Unitarian Universalists do a better job of attracting visitors than do the Mormons. But, he added, we do a terrible job keeping them. "If your churches were half as successful at integrating and retaining members as we Mormons are," he concluded, "then Unitarian Universalism would be the most dangerous church in America."
It’s an interesting idea, isn’t it? This possibility of becoming the a dangerous church? Might we as Unitarians here in the UK become a dangerous church? Quite honestly, I rather like the idea:
dangerous because our message of freedom, tolerance and reason would become more broadly known in the world;
dangerous because as more people live into love, live into peace, live into justice the world itself would be changed;
dangerous because we would have the power to make changes, to influence those who make decisions that affect the world;
dangerous because people who are awake and alive in the world speak truth, work for justice, practice compassion, embody love.
We can become more and more deeply those people, we can become a dangerous community.
That Mormon official suggested the way – or surely one way – to become dangerous: to learn to welcome and integrate people into our congregations. It is to become even better at the art of hospitality, of welcoming the stranger.
Here’s another note along the way: what we need to do on our way to our destination is not strenuous and arduous. As my friend and colleague David Usher pointed out yesterday, church isn’t work: it is what we do. What we need to do along the way to our destination is fairly plain and simple: inviting people in, creating a true sense of welcome, listening well to each other, living what we say we believe. There are no real tricks here: it is easy to discern what needs doing along the way once we know where we’re going, and the tasks will be ordinary, plain.
A destination that is often noted is that of growth, usually meaning that we wish to grow in numbers. Clearly, in thinking about becoming a dangerous church appears to be mainly about adding people to our numbers. But, there’s something more to it. It’s not about those people out there that we wish to invite in. It’s also about us in here. My colleague Robert Karnan captured this well:
Our task as a religious society is not to idolize and love God, it is to love one another in just relationship so that we make the love of God a reality and not a desperate dream or a painful despair. The love of God that is in the yearnings of our hearts is that which we deserve, that is justified by the vision we hold and the love we give away and the courage we hold fiercely within. It is in our ability to be a human community of peace and to do what is good and right.
Growth isn’t only about building those numbers, it is also about building our beloved community here. When I was here applying to become your minister, I shared more of Bob Karnan’s words and I use them here again because they speak well to this possible destination. He says:
The quality of love and goodness we expose from our sometimes reluctant hearts will change the world. Our task is not to make more Unitarians or to make bigger congregations or to raise great gobs of money. It is to heal and to inspire, to open and to remake, and thus change what is sorry to what is a joy. It is why we gather in the spirit of love and justice. It is why I give my life in service to what can only be described as invisible and intangible but which is also the most powerful force of all: our all too human, sometimes faltering, sometimes complete, sometimes painful and sad, sometimes serene and laughing love – that speaks, if anything at all does, with the voice of God.
That destination of growth is not only the gathering in of those who are in need of us, but also the weaving of the bonds between us all, growing and deepening in our ability to be together and be real and be whole and be attentive and intentional in all our life. If this is where we wish to go, as with becoming dangerous, the tasks are simple and mostly ordinary: creating those opportunities for us to know one another more deeply; learning how to be present to one another in all of life’s joys and in all of life’s distress.
So, for today let this be a place we can start. We can mark our location: here, this day, this place. And together over the next months we can discern more clearly what our destination is: the future, yes, and perhaps more dangerous in the world, or perhaps grown in our ability to be a community of depth and connection. It may well be that both destinations will take us the same way, along the same path, that is for time and our intentions to tell.
Plotting the course is firstly taking seriously what it is we do here, and proceeding with care and attention. And secondly, the course we plot will be through that which is plain and simple: hospitality, care, compassion and love. It is likely that it won’t be easy, but we’ll find our way together.