The Sermon on the Amount
Rev. Fayre Stephenson
This is the season when most Unitarian Universalist Churches across the country, begin their canvass drives. They all have some sort of kick off event like our talent show or a sumptuous dinner or breakfast, they pass out the pledge cards, and hope that people will be generous in their pledges to donate to the church. Some churches have canvass committees who visit members’ homes and put the squeeze on – I mean ask for donations.
The Watertown, Massachusetts, UU church where I was an intern used to have a five course dinner followed by a very big talent show. It was quite a production. Then on Sunday, just before joys and concerns, they would have a canvass related skit. As a two year part time intern, I saw only two of these skits.
One of them we have done at our talent show and involves a person’s coolness factor and how, if a person pledges, their coolness factor is immensely improved. In the other skit, we see a family sitting around their living room when there is a knock on the door. They look out the window and see it is the canvass committee. They all scream, “OH, no, it’s the canvass committee!” and then they hide in a big box that for some unknown reason is there in their living room. The canvass committee comes into the living room, the family realizes that the canvass committee is their dear and kind friends from church and somehow the family decides to pledge to the church. The skit was pretty funny at the time but it may be fortunate that I actually could not remember enough of it to recreate it.
The point of those Watertown skits was to get people thinking about the church – why we give and how much we personally can give. I will tell you one more thing about Watertown.
In the 1970s their membership plummeted. This happened in many UU churches. People, angered over the church’s anti-Vietnam stand, left in droves. Watertown was down to less than twenty members. They owned two big buildings – an enormous wooden church that could accommodate hundreds and a big parish hall with an auditorium big enough for a couple hundred people and Sunday School rooms downstairs.
As it turned out Watertown Savings Bank was looking for a site for a building with a drive-thru window. They didn’t have room for such a facility at their Main Street site. Wrenching as it must have been, the remaining parishioners voted to turn the parish hall into their church and to tear down the old wooden church building. Today, where the church stood is a Watertown Savings building with a drive-thru window. Watertown Savings pays the church around $7000 a month to lease the land. I think we could limp along on that. The Watertown church also rents out the Sunday school rooms weekdays to a daycare center. They still have a pledge drive but they are of course in very good shape financially. Watertown has about 125 members now – small enough so that you can know everyone’s name and big enough not to be stretched for volunteer help.
I tell you this story because I think we may find a way to think outside the box the way the Watertown folks did. We are not in the dyer straits Watertown was in. We are far more vital than they were at that low point in the 1970s. All I am saying is that an opportunity may emerge for us if we are open to it.
In the meantime, we need to consider how much we will give to this sacred home – our church community. This morning I will tell you why I pledge. Another year I will ask some of you if you would be willing to say why you pledge – what our church community means to you. I am going to start with the least important reasons I give and work my way to what means the most to me about our church.
To start at the top though least important to me, I love our belfry. It is an icon on the Norway skyline. It appears in countless photographs and paintings of Norway. And I consider the belfry itself to be a work of art. I have learned that the most peaceful societies throughout history have valued and produced and preserved art. I believe in caring for the art that has been entrusted to us.
I do not believe that saving the belfry will drag us down. The Capital Campaign committee has been working behind the scenes since I got here. So far they have raised enough money to pay for our new heating system, the hood over the stove in the kitchen, and to stabilize the belfry in addition to engineering studies and the like. Noting that the belfry project is way too expensive for us to fund, the Capital Campaign committee has morphed into a town committee called Save the Belfry. We will become part of revitalizing Main Street and our friends and neighbors will help us raise the money through grants and gifts. This project has not and will not suck energy away from our church community. If anything it will draw attention to us and all the good we do.
For me, if the belfry is a work of art, this sanctuary is a sacred place. I honor the labor of those who built it. In the more than two hundred years a church building has stood on this land, Universalists and then Unitarian Universalists have gathered for at least 10,000 Sundays to pray, to sing, and to consider the Ultimate Questions Gary Kowalski wrote about in today’s reading. For me, if you do this enough in one place, that place becomes sanctified. I know this is a little woo woo for our humanist hearts but I believe it. Sometimes I come into the empty church and even when it is dark I don’t feel afraid. I think of all those souls who came here before me.
But it is not just the past that makes this place sacred to me. It is what happens here now. Each week hundreds of people use this building. At least twenty or more AA members meet every morning but Sunday. A group called Safe Voices for violent men learning to be non-violent meets once a week. The Mollyockett Chorus meets on Tuesdays, Community Sing meets on Wednesdays, the Oxford Hills Ukulele Group meets on Mondays, and of course at least 100 come for the free Community Lunch every Wednesday.
Community Lunch is in its 26th year. According to our church history written for our 200th anniversary, no other church would host Community Lunch. The others said they didn’t want those people in their churches. But we did and for me our bond with Community Lunch is a sacred trust.
When the church was jacked up and the Concert Hall built underneath in 1866, church members vowed that the new space was to be a community space. For many years Town Meetings were held in the Concert Hall. And in 1894 when most of Main Street burned down, townspeople met in our Concert Hall to plan how to rebuild.
This church and its Concert Hall are entwined with Norway history and continue to be entwined with today’s Norway community. I am going to pledge to the church to continue this sacred bond.
If asked for the most meaningful reason I give to this church, I would say it is the bond we have with each other within our religious community. This is the place where we find our treasured friends. This is the community that will care for us. Whether we are sick and could use a casserole or sad and could use a hug, over and over we find loving care here.
This is the place where our friends share our liberal values. When we feel tremendously down because local, state, or national leaders are proposing and enacting hateful policies, we can come to this place, this church, and find solace. This is where we find others who feel as we do and just knowing this raises our spirits.
Years ago, in my old town of Medfield, our Town Meeting voted against a program called METCO that would have allowed us to invite inner city kids to come to school in Medfield. This was a state program that allowed more affluent towns to pay for kids in poorer schools to come for a better education if they chose to. It was an imperfect solution to unequal education funding but it seemed as though at least we would be doing something and many towns opted to join the program. In Medfield, people said racist things at Town Meeting. One man said he hadn’t moved to Medfield to pay for black kids to come to our schools. He had moved to Medfield from Dorchester to get away from black people.
This was the most disheartening Town Meeting I have ever attended. I thought about moving to some other town but didn’t because I had my UU church. That is the first time I knew how much I valued my UU church community. I think I really would have moved if I hadn’t know that at least 56 people (that’s how many members we had) shared my values and were as horrified by the racism as I had been.
In recent months I have felt that way again. We’ve heard some horrible racist, homophobic, anti-Muslim, misogynist statements from our national and state leaders. I have treasured the Sundays and the days in between when I have known I would be with some of you and you would share my outrage. What comfort there is in knowing you are not alone.
I know that I can come here and it is a safe place. Nearly every Sunday during joys and concerns, I am thankful that we have this safe place to say out loud those things that have saddened us or made us happy. Each week we have this safe place to voice our gratitude for community support, our grief when someone we love dies or is ill, and our joy when we witness a remarkable recovery. For me joys and concerns is truly a sacred time. It is a holy prayer.
In his essay, “Graduation,” Gary Kowalski writes, “We have one lifetime (that we know about) and no make-ups are allowed. Is it any wonder we are all tossing and turning in our sleep? By the time morning comes, we have to be ready to give some account of ourselves. Sooner or later, we have to answer for how we choose to spend our lives.”
I believe that we in this church have chosen to spend our lives nurturing each other and the values of this church. I choose to give my money to this church where we care for each other and where we work for peace and justice.
You may wonder where the monarch butterflies from our reading come into play in this Sermon on the Amount. After I read Jane Mauldin’s essay, I realized that for me this church, symbolically, is a monarch butterfly and I want to keep it alive. If we don’t continue supporting this church and all that it means to us, we don’t know what the ramifications will be. We don’t know what the world would be like without this church community.
As Jane Mauldin said, “Our actions echo through history. We will not always know the ramifications of our deeds, but they are there. We are surely connected, one to another, and each of us to the greater world of monarchs and mystery.”
I think I just convinced myself to increase my pledge. Here ends our sermon for this morning.
Amen and Blessed Be.