Let Our Service Begin

Rev. Douglas Taylor

9-17-23

In the recent past, we did our Joys and Sorrows ritual differently because of the pandemic. Because we were online and then multi-platform, we were collecting the written ‘Joys and Sorrows’ and prayer requests throughout the service in the zoom chat and on cards. Then at the end of the service, after the postlude, one of the ushers – usually K.T. – would come to a microphone and read them out to everyone.

Eventually, K.T. shared that it was a little uncomfortable to finish the ritual but not have a closing benediction. It felt odd to just stare out at everyone and say, “and that’s all we have.” The Worship Committee talked about it and decided a fitting tagline was this old chestnut: “Our service has ended, let our service begin.”

Thus, for a few years, that was our parting benediction together. “Our worship service is over, now let us go serve others.” But then we didn’t.

I’m going to let us off the hook a little in acknowledging the pandemic. It has been hard to find ways to serve people in need in the midst of a global pandemic when everything was shut down. We are not the only congregation to experience a decline in our service, our social actions, and justice-making events.

I have said many times that our current experience, coming up out of this pandemic, puts us at square one for many of the kinds of things we used to take for granted as a community. We had to relearn how to do coffee hour together. We’ve had to rebuild our children’s Sunday School program from scratch. It took us a minute to remember how to host a Christmas Eve service in person. It stands to reason; we need to rebuild the ways to engage in meaningful service.

Let us start at the beginning. I am working from the framework that people have certain needs they are trying to meet when they become part of a congregation such as ours. People need intimacy, ultimacy, and agency. People need to make connections, make meaning, and make a difference. Today I am focusing on the agency portion of that framework – the need to make a difference, to be part of something larger and serve needs greater than our own, to have an authentic experience of impact.

The Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore wrote, “I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.” I have certainly felt this at different times. I have dreamt of joy and happiness in the midst of difficulty, I have awoken to hardship, to busyness, and have wondered how I might eek out a modicum of simple pleasure amidst the constant and frenetic pace of living. It is an enticing idea Tagore offers – that our joy and our service can be entwined.

When I was still in seminary, I was given a book that touches on this topic. Transforming Liberal Congregation for the new millennium, (1996) by my colleague Roy Phillips. Phillips presents the argument that people do not come to congregations to join committees. We come instead as seekers looking for deeper meaning and richer connections. Phillips says “People come to our congregations looking for bread. We give them the stones of busyness and pseudo-power.” (p 6)

This book was written back in the mid-1990. But we are still struggling to break out of the old model of how to do church from the 1950’s. Phillips called us to stop thinking about being members and start thinking about being ministers – to think of what we each do around here as ministries that we all take part in. Rev. Phillips was not the first, nor the last to issue this call to liberal congregations. The point is not merely to serve. The point is to find the way that also nourishes you as you serve needs greater than your own.

In a slightly more recent book, another UU minister Erik Wikstrom writes, “Just getting involved is not enough.” On the first page of the introduction of his new book, Serving with Grace: Lay Leadership as a Spiritual Practice, (2010) Wikstrom writes:

Common wisdom holds that people come to church for a sense of belonging, and that getting involved with a committee or task force is a great way to meet people and feel more connected. You do meet people while serving on a committee, and, yes, working together in common purpose can create these bonds. But perhaps this is not really why people come to church. Though this is often why they say they come, I think there is an even deeper reason – to have their lives transformed.

We are called to serve. “I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.”

Service as a means toward transformation. That’s big. And I’ll let us off the hook again, just a little. Not everyone is here seeking the same thing. Different people are yearning for different experiences, arriving with different needs. You might find transformation in another aspect of our congregation’s life. Social Actions and Justice-making may not be where you are going to spend a lot of your energy. But we all want to be part of a congregation that does have this justice-making aspect among us.

My point is less that everyone needs to get busy doing social actions and getting transformed, and more that those of us working for justice here do well to also attend to our spirits. The work of justice-making is not merely work. The way of service is not merely to deal with some tasks. We want to be also nourished in our service.

I remember sweeping sand off the front bricks leading up the main door of the lodge at camp Unirondack. This was a number of years back now, when I was working up there for a summer. We were preparing for the next session of campers and I was sweeping the sand off the front bricks. There is sand all over that hill where the lodge sits. Within a matter of a few hours those bricks would be covered with sand again.

The director of the camp noticed this and commented to me about it. By the end of our conversation, we agreed that I was not doing a task. I was performing a spiritual exercise. Any small activity you do can be done in this way. As you work consider for whom you are doing it, consider it metaphorically if that fits, consider it as an offering of yourself in some small way.

With such small examples, can it not be true for larger activities as well? Teaching Sunday school, helping cook a meal for the hungry, tending a community garden: consider for whom you are doing it, consider it metaphorically if that fits, consider it as an offering of yourself. And we begin to see that the task itself is not the point. It is the connections and the meaning found in serving in this way that matters. Service can be a spiritual practice, a way of deepening yourself, of learning about yourself, of opening yourself to transformation.

Now, you might be saying, “Whoa! I just want to bring some cookies I baked for coffee hour – I didn’t sign up for transformation.” To which I would say: perhaps it is more important that you brought the cookies than the fact that there were cookies. Perhaps it is more important how the board moves through its agenda than the fact that it got through the agenda. Perhaps it is more important how you sweep the sand or serve the meal, more important with whom or for whom you fold the special mailing or attend the protest rally. Perhaps the quality of our relationships, the quality of our living, is the point – not the fulfilling of the tasks.

The work of the church is not as important as the quality of the experiences – no, that’s not right. The work of the church is the quality of the experiences we have while doing the work of the church. This is not to say the cookies and the agendas and the justice projects and all the other tasks are unimportant. Only that there is something that is more important, and it is the reason we are a congregation in the first place: a hunger for intimacy, ultimacy, and agency, for richer connections, deeper meaning, to nurture your spirit and to help heal the world.

“I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.” Consider this: serving needs beyond your own can be the single most enlivening and fulfilling practice you can do here for your spirit. It can deepen and transform your life. And as is the case with so many of the everyday spiritual practices: all it takes is a shift in how we see the world and one another.

To be clear, the shift I am highlighting is to not focus on the task or project as much as the people and relationships. It is important to be in your context rather than imagine you are simply out there in a vacuum ‘doing good.’ Ethicist and Unitarian Universalist Dr. Sharon Welsh has said, “a single actor cannot be moral.” One must be part of a community, grounded in a context.

Who are we? With whom are we in relationship as we act with justice and compassion? What does it mean to do Social Action in the context of this congregation? Or, perhaps I can ask – what will it mean? Who will we become? What will we do and with whom?

Back in the spring of 2020, during the early stages of the pandemic, an essay came out from author and activist Arundhati Roy https://www.ft.com/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca entitled “The Pandemic is a portal.” The premise of the essay is summed up in this quote:

“Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.”

And soon after the essay was published, I used it as the centerpiece of a sermon about our response to the pandemic as a congregation. In that sermon https://douglastaylor.org/2020/05/12/standing-in-the-doorway/ I said:

[Roy] reminded us that we don’t have to trip along and come gasping out of this pandemic crying out for a return to income inequality, a return to hyper-polarized politics, a return to prejudice and hate, a return to fetishizing our police officers while devaluing our teachers, or a return to the sick, sick way we have commodified health. We don’t need to simply stand in the doorway wondering what might come next. We can, instead, choose to rise up and [move] through this portal with a plan. We can, instead, choose to cross this tragic threshold with an eye toward the world we intend to create. We can, together, make of this pandemic a portal toward the more just and fair society that is emerging among us even now.

And here we are now, a few years on and still wondering what’s next. Let’s make a difference. Let’s choose to move across this threshold into the world we are yearning to create. Who will we become? What will we do and with whom?

I encourage you to hear these as real questions you are invited to respond to with me after this service. We have a Chapel Chat scheduled immediately after the service and we are re-launching the Social Action HUUB to support the ideas and actions that are emerging.

When we say – our congregation does Social Action – what does that mean? What do you think it can look like? Who are we becoming? What will we do, and with whom? Come create the next transformative step for our congregation. Come join me in service.

In a world without end,

may it be so.