This sermon was presented at Stevens Chapel on June 17, 2002 by Rev. Judith Campbell.

Why Join a Liberal Church?

I mean…if there are no rules, and there is no entrance exam, and there are no qualifications other than you would rather help your fellow sisters and brothers than harm them and you prefer questions to answers, and you realize that the search for truth is a lifelong process and that revelation is continuous……why bother? (I may have just have answered all of your questions.)

And what do you get if you DO join? Its gonna cost you money. Its gonna aggravate you, or you will aggravate someone else. Everybody’s got an opinion and feels free to expound upon it….. at length. Trying to get us all together at any one time or in any one place is rather like herding cats….you’ve heard that one before – the hymns have all changed their words, and as far as I’m concerned, it’s the best show in town…and it isn’t for everybody! But it isn’t an exclusive country club either!

Garrison Keillor takes wonderful and very accurate pot shots at us. There are many who don’t consider us a religion at all…indeed, here in this congregation, we call ourselves a "society" and I for one am very comfortable with that terminology…but I wouldn’t have a coronary if we voted to call ourselves a fellowship or even… God forbid…a church!

There are some that would go so far as to think of us as the "anti-Christ"! Now that’s a bit much, because anyone who takes the time to learn about us, will quickly learn, that we embrace the wisdom of many traditions and try to learn from them. Our roots are primarily in Protestant Congregational polity and Trinitarian Christianity, but our principles and purposes are very akin to the charter of Reform Judaism.

So if you can’t really define it….why join it? One dear friend from the Norwell church, another British Chris, put it very succinctly when he said, "I came for the kid.

And after he grew up, I stayed on for myself…and of course the coffee!" We can’t even say that here…we haven’t figured out a way to have coffee in a timely manner… in a kitchen-less church….but who knows, …someday…I for one, believe in miracles!

I became a official Unitarian Universalist in the late 60’s, right after the merger of the intellectual rational Unitarians and the spirited more emotional and more Christian Universalists. I joined because I had started attending a rather controversial discussion group innocently enough "coffee and conversation" that was held on Tuesday nights at Braintree parsonage. I mean, these people talked about ANYTHING!!! That was new for this drifted away Episcopalian. I liked that I could ask anything, say almost anything, and be listened to…and in turn…listen respectfully to others. We covered everything from the Vietnam war to the value of allowing "Massage parlors" with scantily clad masseuses, in a quiet little suburban town…to would your believe… religion!

Well I came for the coffee….and stayed on for the religion. When I started attending Sunday Services, I found a worship format that was similar to what I was used to…the basic three hymn sandwich…but differed significantly in that the sermon or the message could be on anything under the sun…and that the people who come to these services were also out in the street protesting the war, starting a day care center for working mothers, having babies and raising children and the people who continued to welcome me after I divorced the father of my children…in fact offered me the support that got me through an awful period in my life. They didn’t do to me what happened to a friend in another more fundamental church when he divorced his wife, ask me to leave because I broke "God’s law"…or even worse, to submit to my husband!

What I found in Braintree, and in Unitarian Universalism was a religious and intellectual freedom that had been missing for me all of my life. From my very earliest years, I have been interested in Religion. As a young teen I read extensively on the religious life and practice of all denominations. A religious or spiritual practice is something that I sought after, but didn’t necessarily want all of the questions and answers spelled out for me like a catechism to be memorized and regurgitated on demand. I think I have always believed there is something beyond my understanding that somehow connects us to everything…including that something beyond, whatever we choose to call it or NOT call it…but I really didn’t want it defined for me. I wanted to undertake that search for myself…and for the record, I’m still on it and plan to be for the rest of my life.

But what about the Christian with a small or even a large "C",, or the individual who finds ANY organized religion too confining…or even "God forbid" the atheist? Is everyone and anyone welcome at this table? The quick answer is…"well almost". And the almost refers not to personal theological persuasions or convictions, but the ability to respect the beliefs and persuasions of the others at the table.

When I joined that Church in Braintree, there was a man, a photographer, a sardonic social critic, badly crippled from childhood polio, who was a loudly avowed emphatic atheist, who would not set foot inside the "sanctuary" of the church, but never missed a Sunday morning. He sat in the parish house and guarded the coffee pot, and held forth after the service. He was a member in good standing, and he was warmly accepted by all who came…even if his acerbic, opinionated rhetoric occasionally got on people’s nerves…he was part of the picture. He came for the community…and sometimes I think he came just to aggravate the community….but we loved him, and genuinely grieved his loss when his poor injured body could no longer sustain his life.

From the Braintree church, I was introduced to and became a regular attendee and then long time staff at the Ferry Beach Conference center in Saco, Maine. It was there I learned about another side of religion and indeed ministry…the religious conference.

Ferry Beach was an old Universalist Conference center that was incorporated in 1901. Its beginnings were very much like the Methodist Campground here on the Island. And, the old photos of ladies in white dresses and big hats sitting formally in front of huge canvas tents in the camping "Grove" tell a very similar story. The Universalist movement in our history spread across the country in the mid to late 1800’s in a growing number of highly emotional, camp meetings and revival meetings. The "good news" was universal salvation….everybody, even non-Christians – rather than a select "elect" were God’s chosen people. Jesus was a good guy, but he was not the only show in town.

At Ferry Beach, I met Unitarian Universalists from all over the country….and they were all alike in their differences…Now this was revolutionary….Straight men hugged each other, we all danced – clothed – in the woods one night to the second movement of Beethoven’s seventh Symphony, and in the 70’s Ferry beach was the first religious conference center to establish a summer conference for exclusively Gay men in America….and possibly the world. Two years later, the "Sisters of Sappho" a lesbian women conference was established as well. Here, and in other UU conference centers Liberal religious people come together to share their search for truth, and their spiritual journey outside of a church building…but in larger community. It is a powerful experience, and one I recommend. Information about Religious conference centers and summer conferences is available on our national web site. It’s worth a look.

Anyway….what I learned at Ferry Beach was that ours really is a religion that goes anywhere, takes many forms, and holds many hands. It was at the time I was at Ferry beach that I got my call to ministry….but not to parish ministry, but to community ministry, where I could lead spiritual and religious conferences…because I really loved the synergy that happens when bright, curious, feisty, creative, sensitive, talented, mavericky people get together. I decided to make a life of it. I was not able to answer that call for another 20 years….and for my first years of ordained ministry, I did just that, conferences and workshops on creativity and the spirit here and in England.

And then, one day a doctoral student offered to sell me her little house on Martha’s vineyard…and the rest is history! But my history is all of our history.

A number of people come through these doors because they have been really burned by more dogmatic religions. Women, disenfranchised and angered by the idea that they could not be priests, that GOD was MALE, and women were ordained by that MALE GOD always to be second class citizens. For a long time during the late 60’s and 70’s, the word GOD and use of the Hebrew and Christian bible was actually forbidden in some Unitarian Universalist churches and fellowships. I think that was overkill…and I thought so then….It seemed to me to be as close minded and dogmatic as the traditions they were protesting.

Others have come to us deeply wounded by a sense of guilt and self-loathing that comes from a tradition that says we are all rotten, most miserable sinners and there is no health in us. (I memorized that as a child from the general confession in the Anglican book of prayer). What a way to go through life. Doomed from the beginning, and perpetually on the edge. It is no wonder that people who come from a "salvation" tradition have a major problem with anything that looks or feels like what they have escaped from. The wounds are deep and the shame almost crippling.

And then there are the "born-to" Unitarian Universalists. Not too many of those….but even those folks who were born into our liberal tradition have to choose to stay….and believe it or not, some don’t! We are a religion of choices. We are a religion of chances and second chances…of self esteem, of social action, and of meaning through making a difference! And by making meaning of our lives in our own eyes…and not through someone else’s formula. We don’t have to believe alike to work along side one another.

From my position behind the lectern, I am in a position to see things that others don’t. The increase in numbers is evident. Anyone can see that. But in the past, it was clear that many people came most for the speaker or the subject or the music, and if that didn’t grab them, they stayed home and worshipped St. Mattress!. Now people come for each other…as well as the speaker and the subject and the music….and sometimes, despite the speaker or the subject. What is growing here is the sense of community. The coffee-less hour, the social hour after the service is getting longer and longer. I used to be able to count on being home by quarter of one at the latest! That’s history…and very welcome history. Remember what I said a few sermons back, All minister’s are interims. Some of us will have longer interims than others, but we are the transients. YOU are continuing thread of the fabric of this church. And the weave is getting tighter and tighter.

So why join a liberal Church? Why Support a liberal church? (And this is not officially a canvass sermon…but it "voidn’t hoit" to think about that as well, because joining a church, means supporting what that church does…and here, we determine what that /this church will be doing over the next year, and over the next ten years.

The liberal voice is not necessarily the best voice, although many of us would say it is. The liberal voice is the yang to the conservative yin. It provides a balance, and oftimes it is a prick in the conscience of those grown too comfortable with the status quo. We are certainly the ones who are most loudly and actively concerned with issues surrounding social and economic justice, and together, as a group, as a society, or a fellowship…or even…God forbid…a church, we can get more done and more done faster, than we ever could do alone. Jesus said, "whatever you shall do for the least of these, you will have done to me." Those are good words…whether or not you believe in the incarnate divinity of Jesus, but rather that we are all interconnected, that we are our brother and our sister’s keeper, and the web of all existence is our individual and collective responsibility. "What ever you do to the least of these, you do unto me….ME!" And if we believe that the miracles revealed to us through science and research are and will be continuous, and that there will always be some things we will never understand…like the power of love, and the gift of life…

Well… Maybe that’s why you are here!

Welcome, and Blessed Be!