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Good Morning.
Welcome to Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church
in Bethesda, Maryland.
It Is Good to Have You with Us.
A Sermon Given
by Rev. Roger Fritts
on September 14, 2003
at Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church
Bethesda, Maryland
"Good morning. Welcome to Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church in
Bethesda, Maryland. It is good to have you with us." I speak these words each
Sunday as we begin our worship together. I do not say them casually or
lightly. It is good to have you with us. You did not sleep in, or stay
home to read the Washington Post or the New York Times. (The
Times had an ad on television for a while claiming that "Sundays were made
for the New York Times," a historically questionable statement.)
You are not on the court or sipping coffee at Starbucks; you are in church.
You have decided to get up, get dressed, and get yourself to church, and not
to just any church, but to this church. I for one, am glad you are here.
Still, why are we here? Each of us has our own story about what has brought
us to a Unitarian Universalist church. Consider, for example, a story I once
heard told by Rev. John Wolf in Tulsa. When World War II broke out the man in
this story was a high school principal in South Carolina. The state
legislature had passed a statute mandating that all children repeat the Oath
of Allegiance to the Flag before each school day. However, the principal had
some Seventh Day Adventist children in his school, and for religious reasons
they were not supposed to repeat anything like an Oath of Allegiance. So they
would not be embarrassed, the principal allowed the children to pick up around
his office, empty waste baskets and things, during the first part of the
school assembly. That worked well until a home room teacher found out about
it, and in an exercise of righteousness and patriotism held a surprise Oath of
Allegiance in her classroom when the Seventh Day Adventist children were
present, and then reported them to the principal when they did not
participate.
Instead of reprimanding the children, the Principal reprimanded the
teacher. She, in turn, took the episode to the community and, at once, the
principal and the children were in a firestorm of controversy. The minister
where the principal attended church even dedicated a sermon to chastising the
principal for his lack of patriotism.
That was the last time the principal attended a church except to go to
mandatory church services when he was in boot camp. He had a doctorate in
Education from Columbia University and a master’s degree in Personnel
Management. The Navy was in need of Personnel Officers at the start of the
second world war. However, he was not able to get a commission for a long time
because of the incident in South Carolina. The Navy questioned his loyalty.
Finally, he applied for a commission giving only in-service references, and he
became an officer in the Navy.
He and his wife came to Chicago after the war. They never went to church
but they sometimes listened to the religious broadcasts on the radio over
their Sunday morning breakfast—just to get their blood going. One morning they
happened to turn on Dr. Preston Bradley, Unitarian minister of the People’s
Church of Chicago. In his sermon Dr. Bradley praised Tom Paine for his ideas
about religious freedom. The couple got up from their breakfast table, got
dressed, drove to the church and joined it on the spot. This is why they
attended church on Sunday mornings.1
Another clue I found was in a book by Frances Moore Lappe, the author of
the 1970s best-selling book Diet for a Small Planet. In a book called
Rediscovering America’s Values. The book deals with economics, civil
liberties, democracy and human nature.
In the foreword Lappe wrote:
I grew up in Fort Worth, Texas, in the fifties, the daughter of a
forecaster for the United States Weather Service and a transportation agent
for the Corps of Engineers. But my parents’ professions influenced my early
life much less than their volunteer efforts. When I was four years old, they
and their closest friends founded the First Unitarian Church of Fort Worth. My
most vivid childhood memories are of being toted to endless committee
meetings, playing on the scaffolding as they repainted the church sanctuary,
and packing up for family church camp.
The church fellowship provided a forum for my parents and their friends,
not only to express their spirituality, but to discuss and participate in the
burning social issues of the day. Since my parents’ goals included a racially
integrated congregation, not surprisingly they faced many obstacles.
Despite the inevitable conflict, my fondest memory of these years is this:
I am lying in my bedroom half asleep, down the hallway from the kitchen. It is
a Saturday, close to midnight. I can hear my mother’s and father’s voices,
animated, intense, amid a jumble of other familiar voices. Occasionally there
is laughter. I can’t make out the meaning of much of it, but I love the
intensity of this hum from the kitchen. Every once in a while, the percolator
goes back on the stove and the familiar smell of coffee drifts in. I love
that, too. But mostly I love knowing that the grown-ups are doing what
grown-ups do--talking about the big, important things.
They did not always agree. Not at all. But they were talking about things
they cared about deeply — about how to make our world better.
So you see, I grew up in a family that took for granted that one of life’s
greatest joys is engagement. We assumed that developing one’s thinking in
lively interchange in order to act responsibly is part of what it means to be
alive.2
As I read Lappe’s words I remembered my own childhood. In Arizona back in
the 1950's, my parents packed their children into the car and drove for half
an hour to the Unitarian Universalist Church of Phoenix. It was an ordeal to
get us dressed and ready, but because they did it on a regular basis, I knew
that Unitarian Universalism was worth a great deal to them; that no other
church would do.
Yet another clue to why we are here on Sunday comes from Rev. Eugene
Pickett, past president of our denomination. Gene was born and raised in
Westminister, Maryland. He has written:
During my growing up years in a small village in Maryland, the local
Methodist Church was central in my life. But in my high school years,
questions and doubts about my religious beliefs began to surface. Feelings of
isolation began to grow, for there was no one with whom I could discuss my
changing beliefs and experiences, no one to share my yearning and searching.
My high school and early college days and my time in the Navy were deeply
lonely times. I still recall with painful intensity those early months in the
Navy when I was just eighteen, frightened, and alone. At the end of the day, I
would crawl into my bunk, and pull the blankets over my head, and pray that
God or someone would help me in my loneliness, and then I would cry myself to
sleep — fearful that someone in a nearby bunk would hear me. Praying didn’t
seem to help, but I think the crying did. How much I needed someone to share
my religious search. How great was my need for someone to care. The need for a
supportive and searching religious community has never left me. That in part
is why I became a minister; that in part is why I am committed to building a
strong Unitarian Universalist movement.3
These are clues about why we are here.
Like the school principal I am here because this is a place where the
principles of separation of church and state are respected and promoted.
Like the social activist, I am here because I have fond childhood
memories of my parents discussions about the big, important issues of social
justice.
Like the young man struggling with deep loneliness I also have struggled
with loneliness and have found a community in a Unitarian Universalist
church.
Another clue to why we are here can be found in a story told to me by
Brandoch Lovely, retired minister of Neighborhood Church out in Pasadena,
California.
Nine years after he entered the ministry, Brandoch went through a personal
and professional crisis. He was serving a church in Texas. He had serious
doubts about the value of having churches. In the back of his mind there was a
feeling that the church was a pointless, futile project. He doubted whether
his sermons had any value; the social events felt superficial and the
committee meetings seemed endless. The same issues seemed to come up at the
Board meetings month after month. He was weary of the fund raising. And he was
tired of the chronic complainers in the congregation. As the minister of the
church he felt like a moving dartboard for every liberal who ever had a
problem with authority.
But one weekend an event occurred that swept away his doubts about the
value of churches. On a Friday in a Texas town not far from where Brandoch was
serving as minister, the President of the United States was shot and killed.
That Sunday as Brandoch approached his church with the sermon he had quickly
written in response to the President’s assassination, he found the parking lot
and the streets near the church already filled with cars. The church was
filled with people who needed to be together in a place that they felt
comfortable, in a liberal religious community. Brandoch became convinced that
morning of the essential value of the church. There might be times when the
Sunday service is dry and dull, or when a committee meeting feels like a waste
of time; but we keep coming back—because in times of celebration and in times
of loss the church community is where we turn. Brandoch Lovely’s story gives
us a clue about why we are here.
Two years ago we all had the same experience. Sunday, September 16, 2001,
our church, like every other religious community in the United States, was
filled to overflowing. At times of crises we need to be part of a religious
community, to sing together, to hold each other, to pray together.
We experience national crises, and we also experience personal, individual
turning points in our lives. We go through a divorce, we lose a job, we become
ill, or someone close to us becomes ill. And we get ourselves out of bed and
go to church, hoping to find some help in the words, the music and the
community of people. We who lead the worship, the ministers and the musicians
know that each Sunday out their in the congregation people are hurting. We
might never know the details of a particular person’s crises, but we know that
you are out their and we hope that what we do each Sunday helps you a little.
I think of a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon. In the cartoon Calvin couldn’t
sleep. He said, "I think the reason nighttime is dark, is so you can imagine
your fears with less distraction. At nighttime, the world always seems so big
and scary, and I always seem so small. I wish I could fall asleep, so it would
be morning." He pulled the covers up over his head with a deep sigh. Then
bouncing up again he looked over at Hobbes. "Look at Hobbes, he’s asleep. He
sure looks funny when he sleeps. Tigers close their eyes so tight. I wonder
what he’s dreaming about. Good old Hobbes. What a friend." He reaches over and
touches Hobbes, and says, "Things are never as scary when you’ve got a best
friend." Indeed, things are never as scary when you’ve got a friend.
1 This story was in a sermon by
John Wolf given September 11, 1988.
Office@CedarLane.org
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