Would you Harbor Me?

Sermon by Cassandra Howe
Jan. 16th, 2011, UUCC

Last month I drove out to South Haven, and went for a walk on the shore of Lake Michigan. It was a little windy here when I left, and I was amazed at the strength of the wind when I got out of my car. I was also amazed at how quickly I became worn out from the cold wind and rain. What would have normally been an easy walk along the beach, turned into an exhausting, “why am I doing this, again?” pointless excursion.
Life can be like a storm. Just like ships out at sea, we need harbors in which to rest. Nourish ourselves. Gather strength for the journey. Harbors are important for a crew’s journey, and can be life-saving. Often they’ll have light houses shining out for boats lost in bad weather.
Harbors have three essential characteristics:
1. Sturdy walls or land formations that protect the inside from storm and weather. 2. An accessible and open entrance 3. Water deep enough to set an anchor.

I love that both the firm, sturdy walls, and the wide, open entrance are needed for an effective harbor. Both of these help to create an inner environment of calm waters deep enough to lay an anchor. Deep enough to rest and restore.
Religious community is like a harbor. We need firm walls and an open entrance in which to gather, to rest, to learn, and to return, fully engaged, into the world.
As a religious community, we strive to give safe harbor to the many who come our way. What do we offer each other at the water’s edge? How do we encourage one another to grow? To heal? To seek deeper meaning in our daily life?
Today we welcomed six people as members into our community. In an era of rugged individualism, committing to live and grow with others is a radical act. A choice that affirms our interdependence and deep union with all of life.

One of the functions of religious community is to deepen our understanding of hospitality. Together, we expand our concept of neighbor. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, we are told the law states: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind; and love your neighbor as yourself.”
Whether or not one believes in God, we can appreciate the importance this reading places on the second part of the sentence: love your neighbor as yourself. It is spoken in the same sentence, the same breath. Loving our neighbor as ourselves was considered as important, and as challenging, as loving God with all your soul.
When I was young, I would help my mother send out newsletters- probably between 100 and 200 newsletters, a few times a year, to people living with AIDS. She was part of a group of people that put on “Strength for the Journey,” an annual retreat for people living with AIDS in the Seattle area. For anyone who has helped with mass mailing, you can relate to the taste of stamps and envelopes that will forever be engrained in my mouth.

When I started, didn’t really have a concept for what AIDS was. I just did it because my mom told me to. When I got older, I grew to have more pride in the work my mother did for people living with AIDS. It wasn’t until I was in high school did I learn something that really helped to ground my work for social justice.
A brief introduction to my adolescent revelation is that I was born six weeks premature. Today, it’s not a big deal. In 1981, it was. I was severely anemic and was given two blood transfusions that probably saved my life. What I realized when I was in high school, was that I was born at the cusp of the medical knowledge around AIDS. What I cannot be sure of is if they were screening for AIDS at the time of my birth. I could have been one of the attendees for this conference. Suddenly, these people to whom I was stamping and addressing envelopes were no longer strangers. They were part of my family. People with whom I felt a common destiny.

Dr. King writes, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
The parable of the Good Samaritan is a story of radical hospitality. Left for dead, it was not the beaten man’s family that stopped to mend his wounds and bring him to safety. It was his enemy. A person with whom he knew no commonality. With whom he had a history of hatred and un-ease. The Samaritan did not just lightly help him. He put water and oil on his wounds. He carried him to a safe place and, when he had to go, made sure that the wounded person would be taken care of until he was well enough to care for himself.
The Greek word for hospitality is philo-xenia. Literally love of stranger. This story of hospitality are not just about comforting one of our own. It’s about reaching across boundaries of race, class, politics and religion. In his act of hospitality, the Samaritan was healing not just the individual, but society as well.

Love of stranger. Who are the strangers in our midst?
I would say religious community is a stranger. I speak as someone who grew up in liberal religion, and now serves a religiously liberal institution as a minister.
Liberals have an ambivalent relationship with organized religion, to say the least! Often, people who have worked for change within liberal religious institutions, find that you are free to do anything you feel called to do, as long as you are willing to do it alone.
The well-known architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who was a Unitarian, and who designed many of our churches spoke the mind of many of our members. When asked what he thought of organized religion, he said, “why organize it?”

We are right to feel ambivalent. Religious community has often been more oppressive than liberating. More soul confining than soul uplifting. Consider the sex scandals of Catholic priests, and the painfully slow response for justice by Catholic leaders. Or, the role certain Christian groups like the Family are playing in elevating violence towards gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender people around the world. Fundamentalists in every religion are igniting hatred and intolerance. This is heavy. Scary. Real. And makes me want to run the opposite direction from organized religion.
But just because these violent acts are loud does not mean that they get to define what is religious community. Even amidst terrible oppression by religious authorities, people have gathered together to protect their religious convictions. Of love of neighbor. Of freedom. Dignity. Truth.

As Unitarian Universalists, we have a history rich with people acting boldly to create space for religious tolerance and pluralism. People who sought not uniformity, but authenticity.
The history of the flaming chalice, the symbol of our faith, is one such act. In Prague, in the early 1400’s a man names Jan Hus anticipated later reforms of the Church by offering mass not in the traditional Latin, but in the local language, so people could understand. During communion, he gave them not just bread but wine, an element previously reserved for clergy.
These may seem like small acts to us, especially as communion is something many of us don’t feel much connection to. But in his time, these were bold acts, and in 1415 he was condemned for heresy, and burned at the stake. The flame of his death was not forgotten by his followers, who linked it with the chalice of inclusion, as he had offered it to everyone.

Skip a few hundred years to 1939 when the Unitarian Service Committee enlisted a Czech artist named Hans Deutsch, to design a symbol. He chose the flaming chalice. You can find the chalice stamped onto documents from WWII, a formality needed to assist the service committee in rescuing Jews from Nazi persecution.
Just before that time, in 1920, back in Prague, a man named Norbert Capek created the Flower Communion- a simple ritual performed by many UU congregations- including this one- each spring. He created it as a ritual everyone could participate in- whether you were Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, agnostic or atheist. In the ritual, each person brings a flower from their own neighborhood (or grocery store), and adds it to the common bouquet. At the end of the service, everyone then receives one flower, taking home a piece of beauty brought by someone else. Capek publicly opposed the Nazis and thus was killed during the war.

Today, UUs stand with others in the struggle for rights of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender folks in the US and abroad. Rev. Jill from Peoples and I are working with other clergy and lay leaders to put on Kalamazoo’s first National Prayer Hour on Feb. 1st, to highlight the violence against gays in Uganda. As our country becomes more polarized religiously, I see more of a need for a faith that seeks pluralism instead of homogeneity.
Dr. King writes, “There are some things in our social system to which all of us ought to be maladjusted.”
Perhaps part of why we are all here is because we don’t want to be adjusted. We need help from one another to stand true to our higher ideals. In community we learn to love the stranger. Perhaps the strangers in our midst are not distant people who we do not know. But people in our own families. People with whom political and ideological differences have stunted relationship and meaningful conversation. Perhaps the strangers in our midst also read of and feel the hate rising and lament, as we do, the death of communion, the promise of peace, by an increasingly polarized nation.

May we give harbor to the strangers near and far. May we make strong walls that shelter us from the wind, and give us strength for the journey. May we open wide our welcoming doors, inviting the wanderer in from the storm. And may we seek to give one another deep waters from which to rest, to seek, and to grow.

Works Cited:

Barnwell, Ysaye. "Would You Harbor Me?" Musical composition, Safehouse, 1994.

Buehrens, John and Forrest Church. A Chosen Faith: An Introduction to Unitarian
Universalism. Boston: Beacon Press, 1998.

Beuhrens, John and Rebecca Parker. A House for Hope: The Promise of Progressive
Religion for the Twenty-first Century. Boston: Beacon Press, 2010.