Take Courage

Sermon | May 16, 2021 |Rev. Julie Lombard

We have much to celebrate today at UU Church of Midland: a dedicated staff and lay-leadership, an oasis in the desert in which to worship, and an abiding liberal faith that shines as a beacon to the wider world. With all this, why do we need to come to together to consider this month’s worship theme: transcendence? Haven’t we already received its blessing!  

Transcendence’s definition leads us to understanding that it is the state of excelling, or surpassing, or going beyond usual limits. It’s also understood as a state of being, or existence above and beyond the limits of material experience.¹http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/transcendentalism, April 28, 2021  

When you achieve transcendence, you have gone beyond our ordinary limitations. The word is often used to describe a spiritual, religious state, or a condition of moving beyond physical needs and realities²https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/transcendence, April 28, 2021. We might imagine that Mahatma Gandhi achieved spiritual transcendence after fasting for a long time. He proved that earthly and material matters lie far below a spiritually informed existence.  

All this talk of going ‘beyond usual limits’ brings me back to my earlier question or should I say blessing? This thing that we do here, this gathering, this coming together, welcoming new faces, this act of joining with others in faith is just that- it’s a transcending experience.  

Whether it be last Sunday for our Mother’s Day Celebration or any Celebration of the Life of one of our own: this gathering together as one, as a holy family connected by faith, truth, and freedom (rather than blood), symbolizes our communal transcendence. Our common mission and vision is to serve our wider community by sharing our values and ideals. Each in our own ways, being leaders- this is an example of going beyond the usual.  

Sure, there are faithful people that gather all over and not only on Sundays, but this is no longer the usual practice of our day. This here, it’s pretty darn special and something worthy of celebrating. And among all the various traditions that gather, even fewer gather like this one.  

Every year we celebrate our polity and love for democracy by attending an Annual Meeting. In this particular event, we transcend our typical post worship time as we gather our beloved people to make important decisions for this church. The power is with the people, not in some hierarchical system or any one individual. You are the church and are engendered with the power to be. Here lays your path to go beyond, while we climb to reach a higher aim.  

This makes me think of a reading from the hymnal: A Place of Meeting. The reading is intended to be used for a new building dedication. I believe it would be a shame to use it only once in a church’s history, when a new church opens its doors for the first time. To me, it could be a re-dedication reading that read each year when we gather for our Annual Meeting Sunday, at least maybe even when we re-open after the pandimic. We come to do the important work we are called to do here. We choose among us those who will lead us; we also honor the ones who have worked so hard to keep this place running strong; and celebrate the newest faces among us.  

Out of wood and stone, out of dreams and sacrifice, the People build a home. The reading is talking about us- here and now. May this house be truly a place of Meeting- meeting one another in warmth and joy and openness; meeting one another in courage and love and trust.  

Deep down in my heart, I know this to be true. I remember my first day with you. You welcomed me into this online sanctuary as if I had always belonged here. You lit your chalices, listed your location, and warmly waved to one another as I was witness to a spiritual event- your arrival to your beloved faith community. This place is more than a meeting place, it a sanctuary full of love and trust.   

It is also a place full of courage. It takes guts to do what you do. To stand outside the norm and say we believe what we are do here matters. You could go to another church or no church at all- stay in bed, warm between the covers on yet another Sunday morning, but no, not you.  

You are not that type; you have both courage and commitment to a higher purpose. You return, again and again. You come when you are in love, in pain, in indifference, and in seeking courage to face the harsh realities that this world offers us.  

You come to side of love and justice, seeking courage to face oppression that seems to never end. You come to learn about various faith traditions, seeking the courage to face learning about yourself and reconnect with your own spiritual journey. You are a courageous crowd, willing to stretch and take risks, and to rise above!  

I cannot help to think of our theme: transcendence without thinking of another courageous crowd- those who called themselves “The Transcendentalists”. Names like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Henry Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, and Theodore Parker may come to mind when speaking of Transcendentalism. A blast from out Unitarian and Universalist past, more than a century ago, we return to the memory of another group that went beyond the usual limits in most everything they did.  

Jone Johnson Lewis, Leader of the Society for Ethical Culture, reminds us that- the Transcendentalists must be understood in context — by what they were rebelling against, what they saw as the current situation, and in others from whom they differed.  

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They were well educated people who lived in the decades before the American Civil War. They lived during national division that they both reflected and helped to create.  

These people, mostly New Englanders living near Boston, were attempting to create a uniquely American body of literature. It was decades since the Americans had won independence. And, these people believed it was time for literary independence. They deliberately went about creating all kinds of literature: essays, novels, philosophy, and poetry that were distinctly different from those of authors in European nations.  

The Transcendentalists were a people struggling to define spirituality and religion in a way that took into account the new understandings their age made available. Using things like the new Biblical Criticism from Germany and by reviewing Christian and Jewish scriptures through the eyes of literary analysis made them raise questions about the old assumptions of religion. This is our heritage.  

During the previous era of the Enlightenment, folks had come to new rational conclusions about the natural world, mostly based on experimentation and logical thinking. Then the pendulum swung the other way toward a more Romantic way of thinking — less rational, more intuitive and in touch with ones senses; those rational conclusions had raised important questions, but were no longer enough.  

The Transcendentalists looked at the previous generation’s rebellions of the early 19th century Unitarians and Universalists versus traditional Trinitarianism and against Calvinist ideals. They decided that the revolutions had not gone far enough; they had stayed too long in the rational mode.  

Emerson called the previous generation of rational religion “Corpse-cold”. This was during a spiritual hunger in an age that also gave rise to a new evangelical Christianity that spread like wildfire. The thought of the day was, “God gave humankind the gift of intuition, the gift of insight, the gift of inspiration. Why waste such a gift?”  

Added to this, the scriptures of non-Western cultures were discovered by these same westerners. Emerson and others began to read Hindu and Buddhist scriptures; they examined their own religious assumptions alongside these foreign scriptures. They concluded that a loving God would not have led so much of humanity astray; there must also be truth in these scriptures.  

Transcendentalism was born and caught on quickly. In the adapted words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, “We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds… A nation of beings will for the first time exist, because each believes they are inspired by the Divine Soul which inspires all beings.”  

The Transcendentalists were involved in many social reform movements, especially anti-slavery and women’s rights. Why were they called to respond to social reform? Because the Transcendentalists believed that at the level of the human soul, all people had access to divine inspiration and sought and loved freedom, knowledge,e and truth.  

Thus, any societal institutions, which fostered vast differences in the ability to be educated and to be self-directed, were deemed by the Transcendentalist as institutions in need of reforming. They believed that women and African-descended slaves were human beings who deserved to be educated and to fulfill their human potential. So they worked for freedom of the slaves and for women’s right to vote.³http://www.transcendentalists.com/what.htm, April 28, 2021.  

Today, we’re still fighting that fight. Our faith calls us to believe that we ought to Side of Love every chance we get, that Black Lives Matter, and all should have the right to marry whomever they love or use any damn bathroom they would like to. We are a Welcoming Congregation that feels that Black Lives Matter along with the new 8 ^th Principle.  

We take courage. We dare to share the deep fires that burn into anger as much as the sweet springwaters that swell into laughter. We desire that these rafters hear the voices of children and know that all are as holy as the shouts of a million stars⁴Singing the Living Tradition, #733 A Place of Meeting by Eileen Karpeles. We transcend the everyday way of being, with our values and principles.  

Spiritual siblings, I leave you with the wise words of Gilda Radner: “I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious Ambiguity.”  

May it be so. Amen.      

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