Rev. Edmund Robinson

September 12, 1999 -- Opening Sunday

Reading: Deuteronomy 6:1-12 (King James Version)

6:1   Now these are the commandments, the statutes, and the judgments, which the LORD your God commanded to teach you, that ye might do them in the land whither ye go to possess it:

6:2   That thou mightiest fear the LORD thy God, to keep all his statutesand his commandments, which I command thee, thou, and thy son, and thy son's son, all the days of thy life; and that thy days may be prolonged.

6:3   Hear therefore, O Israel, and observe to do it; that it may be well with thee, and that ye may increase mightily, as the LORD God of thy fathers hath promised thee, in the land that floweth with milk and honey.

6:4   Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD:

6:5   And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.

6:6   And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart:

6:7   And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.

6:8   And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be as frontlets between thine eyes.

6:9   And thou shalt write them upon the posts of thy house, and on thy gates.

6:10   And it shall be, when the LORD thy God shall have brought thee into the land which he sware unto thy fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give thee great and goodly cities, which thou buildedst not,

6:11   And houses full of all good things, which thou filledst not, and wells digged, which thou diggedst not, vineyards and olive trees, which thou plantedst not; when thou shalt have eaten and be full;

6:12   Then beware lest thou forget the LORD, which brought thee forth out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage.

In early June, I stood in this pulpit as the candidate to be your minister and invited us to think of water as a symbol for the Holy. I went on to elaborate the metaphor at some length, and likened the juncture at which this church and I found ourselves to the confluence of two rivers. By your vote to call me, you decided that these two watercourses, your church history and my life, would join together, and so – here we are. I, for one, am delighted to be here.

Today we have seen the confluence metaphor work on another level, as we took the water collected during our summer break and poured them into a common bowl. This symbolized the rejoining of our lives. The thing about water is that when you join water collected from here and yon and pour it in together, it is together. No one can unjoin it as it was. We can pour it out again into the individual vessels, but the water itself will still be mixed.

Even so with our lives, individual and collective. Though this is my first worship service as your minister, I have already started interacting with many of you and each of us is being changed by the experience. I want to talk a bit about change today.

Change can be a scary thing, it can be an exhilarating thing. This congregation is going through a big time of transition right now. One much beloved and very central member has died. Two others are leaving us today. Those three did many of the jobs that kept the church functioning day by day, and they were important conduits for information. Another valued and active member is leaving at the end of the month. There may be more departures I’m not aware of. And you look up here and you see a new person in the pulpit and a new person running the R.E. program.

Moreover, these changes in key personnel may be just the beginning. You have said that you want to grow, and growth means taking in new members – it also means holding onto the old ones, but that’s a different story. I suspect that for a lot of you who have hung in here over the years, one of the attractions of this church is that it’s small enough that you can know just about everybody and just about everybody can know you. Growth carries with it the risk that you will see new faces in the pews, that we will have to get to know people, or simply that we will have to deal with people who don’t share our history.

Well I want to explore the themes of change and continuity, even though, as the new kid on the block, I realize that my idea of the continuity, the history of this place is much sketchier and shallower than any of yours. I do so in the hope that reflections on this might give us all a new appreciation of the precious thing we have here. And want to do so by extending our metaphor of water as the holy. You know well that the holy is not always, and maybe not usually, on the surface of things. Sometimes its streams are nowhere to be seen. We even discovered yesterday that water we can’t see can short our electrical circuits. Sometimes we walk around on dry land, desert even, and are completely unaware of the streams, rivers, and lakes of spirit which course through the ground under our feet, under the solid-seeming surface of the everyday world. But water there is; it’s there, we’re just out of touch with it. In order for it to do us any good, someone has to dig a well.

Now I’ve never tried to dig a well, though I have watched a dowser at work. A good dowser can tell you not only where there is water under the ground but also how far down it is and how many gallons per minute flow through it. All this from the twitchings of two L-shaped copper rods. It’s truly uncanny.

Once the dowsing has been done, someone has to do the hard digging or drilling. After the well is dug, many people can benefit from the water, but until someone takes that initiative, we will all thirst.

Thus the title of this sermon; it seems to me as we contemplate the enormous contributions to the life of this church made by the people we have known who are leaving us now, and as we extend that thought to all the people who have passed through these walls in the past Hundred and Eighty-Six years, we are all drinking from wells we did not dig. We exist in the spirit today because of the contributions of the people who have sat in these pews between these windows and tried to find the fountains of spiritual refreshment. Well do we drink, who drink from this well.

In a larger context, this church was founded in the stream of Universalism, which existed in the still-larger stream of Christian tradition, which was an offshoot of Jewish tradition going back four thousand years. The Biblical passage that I read this morning captures something of the sentiment. Let me set the context: the Book of Deuteronomy is Moses’ swan song. Actually he has three final speeches to the Israelites in the book, and this passage is near the beginning of the second speech. Moses has led the Israelites out of Egypt, he has brought them near to the land flowing with milk and honey which God has promised to them, and this passage is his reminder that they are not to forget that God is one and that they owe all this to God once they have crossed the Jordan. The Canaanites, after all, are polytheists and the temptation Moses wants to guard against is the temptation to forget the one true God and start worshiping local Gods, as the Israelites had done when Moses received the law on Mount Sinai.

Now this story in contemporary political perspective has disturbing if not loathsome imperial overtones. Our sympathies are likely to be much more with the displaced Canaaanites than with the conquering Israelites, and we wonder at the the justice of a God who would simply turn one set of industrious people out of the cities they built, the wells they dug and the fruit trees they planted so that another people who did not build the cities, dig the wells or plant the vineyards might enjoy them. We are apt to agonize over similar injustices perpetrated on the original human inhabitants of America by our European ancestors. As the ancient Israelites stole Canaan, the Puritans stole Massachusetts.

Applying this modern political lens, however, blinds us to the deeper point of the passage, which I think is a sense of the givenness of the blessings we enjoy. In a way, it is a foreshadowing of the much later Christian concept of grace: you did not get here by your own efforts. If you are saved, it is because of the agency of a power beyond yourself.

That is the sense which I want to take from this passage into the present crossroads at which this congregation finds itself: we are enjoying the fruits of others’ labor, drinking from wells we did not dig, eating from vineyards we did not plant.

You can all fill in for yourselves the particulars of what I mean. We got a taste of it at the Board of Management retreat two Sundays ago, when Bob and Ellen Allman brought forth a two-page memo on all the odd but essential jobs they have been doing around this church for years, over and above Ellen’s official duties on staff and Bob’s on his various committees. One of them is to turn on the heat at 8 AM on Sunday so that the sanctuary will be warm enough by the time of service. Anyone who has sat through a service without freezing has drunk from this particular well.

You all know this history of this place better than I do; I am just beginning to get a taste of it. Let me share a few random impressions. I checked out the photo album downstairs, to see how many kids from the last 15 years I could identify. We seem to have had some colorful pageants here in the past. At General Assembly I had a long conversation with Terry Ellen, minister here in the early 80’s, who told me how the publisher of the paper had come here in the 40’s and made an anti-Semitic slur, and the minister had called him on it, with the resulting legal action in the courts which the minister won. I climbed up the steeple to inspect the bell, and read the inscription on the side of it to "the Universalist Church of South Reading," which indicates, I gather, that that bell predates the change of name of the town.

I also understand from Terry that this Universalist symbol gracing our altar, the cross off-center in the circle which symbolizes a Christianity taking its place among other ways of being in this world, was designed by a member of this church, and that the particular one here was the first one used in a Universalist church before the merger of the two denominations.

When I conducted my first candidating service on Memorial Day, I planned to tell the children something about the meaning of the holiday, and asked whether there were any memorial plaques to the war dead of the church. No one knew of any, but after the service, I was nosing around in this all-purpose repository just off the chancel and found just such a plaque to those who had served in the Great War, meaning World War I.

But this is only my surface investigations. This church intersects each of your personal and family histories at dozens of points. Many of you can probably remember which people sat in which pew, what parts your children played in the pageant, who served on committees with you, who remembers your birthday, and in all likelihood you remember all these a lot more than you can remember most of the ideas from most of the sermons you listened to. And that is as it should be. Well do we live, who live by this well.

Moses presents God to the Israelites as the God of history. Look, he says, what the Lord has done for you: He brought you out of the land of Egypt, He made promises to your ancestors Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and He is just about to make good on those promises by putting you in the land of milk and honey.

That’s Moses’ argument, but what is mine? I’m not trying to sell God to you or convince you to follow the Ten Commandments which, as some wags would have it, Unitarians are always trying to convert into the Ten Suggestions. But I am suggesting that in the history of this church, and particularly as this church intersects with each of our personal histories, we can find the wellsprings of something holy. It is often said in Unitarian Universalism that congregational polity is our theology. That is, the congregational form of church government, which traces its origins to the Cambridge Platform of 1648, is so foundational to our sense of who we are that it serves the same function in our churches as a common theology does in more orthodox denominations. We are proud of our diversity of opinion and background, but we are also proud of our ability to maintain a cohesive and nurturing religious community despite our differences of belief.

I’m not suggesting that this place has been, or should be, some kind of communion of saints. I already begin to see some of the antagonisms, the fault lines, that are inevitable in any group of intelligent, strong-minded people. But I also see here a basic acceptance of each other, a basic embrace of and celebration of the differences among us and love and commitment over and above those differences.

As many of you know, I went to Star Island this summer for the annual conference of the Institute for Religion in an Age of Science. I was exposed to an abundance of profound ideas during the week, some of which I will be exploring with you in the weeks to come. But perhaps the most striking exchange I had was just at the end of the week, on the ferry back to Portsmouth, with a neurobiologist named Terry Deacon. Terry has written one fine book on the evolution of language, and I asked him what he was working on now. He described a plan for two new books on consciousness.

Now you have to understand that the quest to explain consciousness in scientific terms is sort of the Holy Grail of modern cognitive science. Two years ago I slogged my way through Daniel Dennett’s book which purported to do that, but found he did it by the unsatisfying claim that consciousness was basically an illusion. Terry Deacon had a different approach. He thought that any form of organization – a virus, a gene, an amoeba _ had a type of consciousness. I said, "you mean the difference between me and a planaria worm is only a difference in degree, not in kind?" and he said "yes." He went on to say that under this concept it was not necessary for consciousness to be limited to individual organisms _ corporations, churches, cities could have consciousness. I told him he was opening new theological vistas for me, because one of the problems I had with any kind of personified god was that I didn’t believe intelligence or consciouness could exist outside of an individual brain.

Terry said yes it can, and he then said something which really made me think, and which bears on the theme of continuity and change we are exlploring this morning. He said, if I heard him right, that he thought nothing we ever do or say was wasted. Everything we do or say has some effect. And those effects will continue after we ourselves are gone. I was familiar with the chaos theory image of the butterfly flapping its wings in Africa and causing a typhoon in the Pacific. But I had never before thought of ourselves as that butterfly. And I had never before connected this idea with a kind of immortality.

Think about it for a second. The things you do today and the words you say today will have an effect, even if you can’t see it, and will still be having an effect after you’re no longer here. It sort of makes you stop and think about what you say and do, doesn’t it? It also makes you wish that you could unravel the chain of cause and see what here in these four walls has been caused by what our spiritual ancestors said and did here in the last hundred eighty-six years.

But it also should inspire us. The departure of the minister, R.E. director, and key lay people is more than an occasion of remembrance and appreciation; it is also an opportunity for those of use who are here now, including those of us who are in this sanctuary for the first time, to join in the work of this church, to drink from the wells our forebears have dug and share with those here now the waters of the spirit. No, none of you will be Alva Fullum or Bob or Ellen Allman, any more that I can be Christine Jaronski or Mary Louise Schmalz. We will move into the positions and the tasks vacated by these folks and we will do them in our own new way. Inevitably things will change around here. The trick is to change mindfully, to be aware of what to hold onto and what to let go of. And to continue the deep spirit which has nurtured this church all these years. Well do we love, who love by this well. AMEN.