I hear a distant song: it fills the air. I hear it, deep and strong, rise up in prayer: ‘O Lord, we are many; help us to be one. Heal our divisions: let thy will be done.’
Friends out of strangers: start with me and you. I see another time, another place Where we can all be one, one human race. The walls will melt away, We’ll come together on the day of freedom, freedom, freedom.
When have you had a moment when you felt like Christina described in her testimony?
When you felt that diverse human community,
people you know and people you don’t,
people of many ages and races and religions,
a warmth and a gladness of being together?
Have you felt something like that in your life?
Some of you were at that same event last Sunday - so many you felt that there!
I’ve had moments like that in my life — when people,
across the differences that sometimes divide us,
gather together for common work,
with shared values.
When people expect everyone there to be true to themselves —
not to assimilate or pass,
but to be yourself,
and I’ll be myself,
and we’ll share, we’ll work together,
start with you and me,
join hands,
make the many one.
Have you had moments like that?
Aren’t they beautiful?
Isn’t it glorious?
A distant song that calls us to a new way of living.
A distant land, that land for which we are bound,
that vision of human beings,
not the same but beautiful in our difference,
connected by our love for each other,
our love beyond our differences.
This is what we seek.
This is what we wish.
But this is not the world we live in.
I mean, there are moments, but then we slip away again,
into our identities and our assumptions.
We are too often divided, by politics, by race, by religion, by class, by geography.
Not just in this country,
but human beings everywhere.
We long for that distant land,
but we don’t have it all the time.
When I planned out my preaching schedule, last summer,
I thought, ah, in the month of prophecy I should talk about where I think Unitarian Universalism
is going,
what does our future look like?
In the world of less sticky religious affiliation, and changing demographics,
in our over-loaded multi-media age,
what is the future of this faith of ours?
And then, you know, it’s been a week.
So many of our most cherished values are under attack by the president of the united states:
our commitment to science, assaulted by the silencing of scientists and erasure of data.
our commitment to democracy, attacked by false claims of voter fraud.
our commitment to loving our neighbors, to welcoming the stranger, affronted by orders to build useless walls and enact hateful bans.
So it seems a little silly for me to stand here and speculate about the future of our faith,
to think about what we might be like in 50 years,
when I know where your hearts are,
when I know you are so troubled by what is happening right now.
Karl Barth said that one should preach with the bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other,
and I’m not going to ignore what’s happening.
But I’m also not going to just regurgitate partisan political talking points.
We come here for religious wisdom, for courage and for perspective.
To reaffirm those values, so that when we go from here
we might practice them - in how we live our own lives and how we participate in the civic world.
And when Tim suggested the anthem, Distant Land,
for today, I realized what I wanted to tell you
about this world, this moment, and about the future of our faith.
I hear a distant song: it fills the air. I hear it, deep and strong, rise up in prayer: ‘O Lord, we are many; help us to be one. Heal our divisions: let thy will be done.’
In a world of division, and hatred, and confusion, and separation,
when the people of the world are cast apart
by the fears of our own hearts and the machinations of power,
we must not just imagine the distant land,
we must not just imagine the world where we are one,
we must not just think about what can be, if we dream,
we must not just wake our compassion and our senses up to the world,
we must practice this vision.
We must live it.
We must embody this vision of a world where people,
celebrating their differences but not being divided by them,
where people, with love and warmth and joy,
reject false gods and pretend kings,
and care for each other as neighbors and siblings.
We cannot just hear the distant song,
we must sing along.
We must do this is all kinds of places and all kinds of ways:
in how we are with our children,
in how we treat our coworkers,
in how we connect, or not, with the people in our neighborhoods,
in how we organize for impact,
and in how we are in church.
This is my thesis:
Over the next four years, and over the next fifty years,
our task, our work, our future as a faith,
is to learn, practice, and share Love Beyond Belief.
Love Beyond Belief,
that we need not think alike to love alike,
that we can be loyal to each other and to the spirit of love
though we do not agree about theology or creed or ritual.
And not just Love Beyond Belief.
it is our task and our work and our future,
to practice Love Beyond Culture, Beyond Race, Beyond Gender,
Beyond Age, Beyond Class.
Tranquil Streams, commissioned for the merger of Unitarians and Universalists,
almost sixty years ago, articulates our vision of this distant land:
free from a social code that fails to serve the cause of human need,
prophetic church, the future waits
the liberating ministry;
Go forward in the power of love,
proclaim the truth that makes us free.
This is who we say we want to be:
a church of freedom from the old divisions of human kind,
a church where love is practiced without limitations of creed or culture.
Our future is this vision.
Where do we come from?
Where are we going?
To this distant land of a love larger than any division, any category.
Our future is to be a community of Love Beyond Belief,
and Beyond Culture and Class and all the rest.
And we must do that now, right now,
because the world needs communities that do this:
that practice a different way of being human,
that embody this vision,
and teach its children this liberating ministry.
How do we respond when our values of inclusion and reason and love
are under attack?
We double down on what matters to us.
We proclaim our values without hesitation.
And we we work harder to practice those values in this hall,
and in our lives.
I don’t know what else to do, do you?
I cannot make someone else share my values.
I’ve tried, and it doesn’t work.
What I can do is live my values as best as I possibly can,
and others may, by witnessing this,
be nudged toward living their lives with a larger heart.
We, as a church, cannot make anyone else do anything they don’t want to do.
But we can practice our commitment to Love Beyond Belief,
to Love Beyond Culture and Class and Gender,
we can practice it, get better at it, so that others might say,
hey, maybe they are on to something.
We should not have too much hubris about this.
Let us not think we are so special.
First of all, we are not the only community that tries to practice
these values of compassion and love for all people.
There are groups of parents gathering of potlucks,
and there are neighbors who meet to share their lives,
and there are internet chat groups where folks offer their love to each other,
and there are other religious communities,
each in their own way, who are trying to be a light of love and justice in the world.
We are not alone.
And thank God for that!
We are much to small to do this by ourselves!
Part of the future of our faith is to join with others who share this overarching commitments:
even if their theology is not ours,
even if we differ about taxation, or regulation, or musical styles or how long a worship service should be,
if we agree about love, and we agree about loving our neighbor, and we agree about everyone having a voice in our world,
then there is work we can do together.
But let us not have the illusion that we can do this by ourselves.
Our unique contribution is the non-creedal nature of our religious community,
where atheistic humanists and liberal christians and earth-centered pagans and taoist mystics
and more can come and worship together,
where without giving up our own ideas, we can be one in faith -
that’s special, that’s different, and that’s important.
But let us not think we are the only place that shares our values.
And let us be glad.
Second, let us not think we practice our values perfectly!
Not by a long shot.
If we are to be, in the next four years and the fifty beyond that,
a place of Love Beyond Belief, beyond divisions,
then we’ve got to get better at it.
We’ve got to be less stuck in our cultural modes,
we’ve got to be more willing to get out of our own patterns and try new things.
We’ve have to be willing to be changed by our encounters
with theological, cultural, class, and ability diversity.
Chester and Wilson think the way they do things is perfectly fine.
They like their way of doing things,
and don’t have much of a reason to change.
Lily — well, she’s so different.
She thinks differently, she acts differently, is just is different.
An act of solidarity brings them together.
And then they both begin to adjust.
This is important.
They stretch themselves - and so does Lily.
Neither of them gives up all of who they are to be in community.
That’s what we need to practice to live out Love Beyond Belief,
Love Beyond Culture.
Solidarity, common effort - and stretchiness.
We cannot expect folks who are not in the majority to all do the adjusting.
That limits everyone -
because what’s beautiful, what’s glorious,
what the vision of the distant land compels in us,
is a world where everyone is celebrated as they are,
where we are together in our diversity and better for it,
when our hearts are opened to each other.
I am not saying that we have to perfect Love Beyond Belief
in here before we go out there and try to do in the world.
I want us to work on it at every level of our lives all at once:
in our own personal lives, with our lovers and friends and children,
here in the church,
and in the wider world —
all at once.
All these places need us to practice this wider revolutionary love,
at home, in church, in the world -
learning to live this way is our vision and our purpose.
In fifty years, or 175 years, I hope that we will surprise ourselves
with our embrace of diversity.
That diversity will be theological, as naturalists and buddhists and christians,
hindus and yorubas and magicians gather together to discern what is true and right for them,
that diversity will be cultural, and musical, and stylistic and linguistic,
not just because if we don’t learn to do this we’ll fade away,
but because living as siblings with all people is our religious task,
our theology of universalism actualized.
That is who I think we are and should be.
That is the fire of commitment we must tend and follow.
One more thing:
perhaps the most important thing.
I’ve been preaching today about unity in diversity,
about a love that unites us across our differences.
But this unity must be for the sake of something more than unity itself.
Love must be for the sake of the spirit of Love, capital L,
and not for the feeling of love, of connection for connections sake.
Our unity must have a purpose worthy of that unity.
This is the warning of the story of the tower of Babel.
The humans took their great power - their common language,
their unity,
and what did they do with it?
The built a tower.
It was huuugggee.
It was big, so beautiful.
They built a tower but it could have been a wall.
Huge.
And God saw what they were doing, and confused their speech,
and scattered them to the wind.
We can be united for the sake of love, and justice, and compassion.
We can use our power of unity to bind up the broken and heal the wounded,
to let justice roll like a mighty stream,
or,
or,
that power of unity can be used to build walls and weapons,
to turn tribal nationalism into idols,
to cast off supposed enemies,
to resist inevitable change,
and to secure power, excuse greed, and license corruption.
That is a choice.
We must be committed to our values in our unity.
For the next week, the next year, the next four,
the next generation and beyond,
our work, our practice, our vision,
our song,
must be a hope larger than fear,
a circle wider than tribe,
a freedom greater than comfort,
and a love stronger than hate.
I pray this day that we are people of courage,
people of wisdom,
and, on this day and all days,
when it is hard and when it easy,
when we can feel that distant land and when we can only barely remember it
in all times and places,
I pray that we will be,
in our bones in our hearts and in our deeds
people of love.