“Exceedingly Good 

Installation of the Reverend Ron Sala

Stamford, CT – April 14, 2002

Rev. Bruce Southworth

The Community Church of New York Unitarian Universalist 

 

It is so good to be here on this day of joy and gladness! …This day of hope, of promise, and of mutual courage! 

I remember meeting with Ron in my office, and hearing about his interest in, his sense of call to ministry, beginning the first of many conversations. I also remember being impressed. 

He, of course, has a keen intellect, a ready sparkle of a smile, and a seriousness of purpose combined with a sense of humor that I imagine the members here know full well. 

Ron is also a doer and an organizer, and he was an integral part of the glue that helped sustain a welcoming young adult group at Community Church. His presence, his gifts, made all the difference, as I know he shall with you. 

So, it is an honor to be here, and I thank you for this opportunity to participate in this celebration with this congregation committed to urban ministry, as you are. 

As I think about this day and your history as a congregation arising out of Universalist tradition, I want to revisit our foundations and lift up one more time, our calling… our calling, yours and mine as courageous, fragile, powerful creatures in this glorious, goofy, tragic and beautiful world of ours. 

A starting point, for me one of the essential starting points, is the gift of original blessing and how we can bless the world: the essential matter of healthy religious life, right living, powerful faithfulness… 

Sometime ago, a colleague and friend, Dr. Ernest Campbell, who served the Riverside Church in NYC as its Senior Minister during some of its most turbulent times of the late 1960s and 1970s, wrote provocatively asking Christians where their Bible started. His point was that too many Christians focus on (and misunderstand) the story of Adam and Eve in the garden, to the point that they forget the first chapter of the book of Genesis. The mythic story of creation there speaks of each day’s work being good. All of it was good. 

Then, with the creation of humankind, these words: “Now God saw all that … [was] made, and here: it was exceedingly good! There was setting, there was dawning: the sixth day.” (Gen. 1:31) 

The earth, the sun, the moon, the animals and fishes, all good; Humankind, you and me, exceedingly good! 

James Weldon Johnson overcomes my dis-ease with anthropomorphic imagery of God in his poem “The Creation” which begins, 

After the sun, the moon, the stars, the earth, the seas, the green living things, the creatures of the air and land, “God looked on His world/ With all its living things, /And God said: I’m lonely still…. 

And it was not just good; it was exceedingly good. 

“The glory of God is a human being fully alive,” declared one Christian teacher nearly 1700 years ago. 

We are created with such great possibilities…. fragile, radiant beings – and we can grow our souls and build the Beloved Community, amidst a culture that scares and scars so many because they are infected by the sin of original sin.  

Some traditional Christian theology is catching up with the genius of Unitarian Universalism. Creation-centered theology, for example, celebrates humanity as an original blessing, over against the perverse notions of original sin. 

At the moment of creation, of the beginning of the universe, within the stars, embedded in the evolution that has brought us forth and created us as the universe coming to conscious, within all of this, here it is, in this creation, we especially… are exceedingly good! 

Some years ago, a taxicab driver in Mexico City by the name of Manuel Lubian spent two days hunting for a passenger who had left $53,000 in his cab. He explained why he didn’t just keep the money this way: “I felt that I would lose the beauty inside of me.” 

The beauty inside… (You can exhibit that beauty inside you with your own generosity to this congregation, right?) 

The Algerian born Nobel Laureate in Literature, Albert Camus speaks about “our weakness for beauty.” One of the defining qualities of being human, he says, is this weakness for beauty, which I take to include inward beauty as well. 

All this opposes the heresy of original sin. 

Feminist theologies, earth-centered traditions, humanist teaching, Buddhist wisdom and others have changed the landscape and mindscape on the progressive frontiers; they seek a wider recovery of spiritual wisdom that has been part of our own Unitarian Universalist heritage from its inception. 

We celebrate the inherent worth and dignity of each person. We are precious; we are the universe, thinking, reflecting, laughing, crying, loving, such a miraculous thing. We are created out of the stars, star-stuff, gifted. Amazing… 

The potential - exceedingly good… 

As one raised in Tennessee, I hope I have your indulgence regarding this story of blessing. 

Fred Craddock, a teacher, minister, and preacher, was driving through the state some years ago. He stopped at a restaurant for a meal, and he was intrigued as one man went from table to table greeting everyone sitting there. 

When he came to Craddock and learned he was a minister, the man insisted on telling a story. He said that he had been born in the mountains not far from where they sat and that his mother was not married when he was born. In that time and in that culture, the mother was frowned upon and indeed scorned. The boy himself would feel as he grew up the love of his mother, but also the scorn of the townsfolk. At recess, his classmates would ostracize him, and he learned to keep to himself, then and also at lunch, in order to avoid the taunts that came his way. Even walking downtown was a hardship because of comments of passersby. 

The boy at age 12 took up going to church on his own. A new minister had come to the church near his house. He would slip into the building just as the services began, into the back row and leave before it was over so that no one would challenge him by asking, “What’s a boy like you doing here.” [And if you think about it, what a church ought to be, namely summoning our better selves, is not what a church always is; we know how things so often are when prejudice reinforces prejudice.] 

However, one Sunday he forgot to slip out, so taken was he with the service, the singing, whatever. Before he could quietly exit, he felt the big hand of the minister on his shoulder, light and gentle. The preacher looked at him and asked, “Who are you, son?” “Whose boy are you?” 

Once again, the boy’s heart sank, and perhaps his pain showed on his face. But then the preacher answered, “Wait a minute. I know who you are. The family resemblance is unmistakable. You are a child of God.” 

With those words, he patted him on the back and added, “That’s quite an inheritance. Go, and claim it.” 

Craddock reports, “As the boy changed to manhood in that restaurant, the old man said, …’That one statement literally changed my whole life.’ He explained that his name was Ben Hooper and he had twice been elected governor of Tennessee.” 

A word of encouragement… To encourage means to put heart into, to put love into… 

Encouragement, putting heart into, putting love into others and blessing the world… To be sure, we can sometimes bicker in our congregations, and when we do that, we fail to live by heart, which is not to deny the reality and appropriateness of respectful disagreements. Those we have in abundance, but liveliness, growth, change, and creativity come from the sorting through, sifting, visioning, and doing. 

Islam says that original sin is forgetfulness, and somehow Christianity, much of it, forgot, with its self-denying, self-degrading image of humankind, that we are made for joy and creativity. 

I shall skip the more demoralizing words of John Calvin on this subject of original sin. [John Calvin in his efforts during the Reformation in the 1500’s gave his own interpretation of the Bible and declared, “Original sin seems to be a hereditary depravity and corruption of our nature, diffused into all parts of the soul, which first makes us liable to God’s wrath.” 

Such a view, to my mind, is one of the most pernicious and destructive declarations of religious teaching to wound the world. It is hurtful and hateful of our humanity and has inflicted cynicism and left too many scared and scarred.] 

It infects our culture so that we humans are never quite good enough.

In this view, something is wrong with us, with me, with you. Not just occasionally when we do something of which we are not proud. It may lead to deep self-doubt, self-questioning, with a teaching that there is something deeply sinful and evil within each one of us, about which we can do nothing, on our own. [As the Book of Common Prayer asserts, “There is no health within us.”] 

What a perversion! We know that we do not always do what we want or should to honor our best selves. Absolutely. 

Do we hurt others, live by our compromises, and forget some of the important things? Absolutely. 

In giving Ron the charge to the Minister at his ordination, I echoed the words of Joseph Barth at a UUA Ministers' convocation before a General Assembly where Joe was the 50-year speaker. “Be careful with thy honor; thy right hand and left hand, will teach thee many terrible and glorious things.” 

Danger, yet, there is health within us, for we are children of a creative universe, filled with possibilities of joy, strength, power, love, and justice. 

73% of those surveyed here in our nation believe in a literal hell, an archaic, supernatural damnation, a cosmology of ancient belief systems that somehow for many people coexists with or overthrows modern conceptions of nature, time, and our interdependence with all things. Interestingly, only 6% believe that they are going there personally… 

One of the great stories of our tradition is that of John Murray’s arrival on these shores, his accidental meeting with Thomas Potter down at Barnegat Bay in New Jersey, and the reluctant Murray’s return to preaching Universalism, such an exceedingly good thing for us and for this land. 

On that occasion in the summer of 1770, John Murray blessed the universe that had treated him so harshly.  

A gracious, grace-filled thing happened that changed the world. The wind did not change; John Murray preached and was encouraged to take up a new ministry in a new world. Universalism as a religious movement began. 

Murray unleashed a mighty Spirit, a faith in the power of love and in the graciousness of creation. Murray wrote, preached, and celebrated again and again saying, “Go into the highways and byways of America, your new country. Give the people, … something of your new vision. You may possess only a small light, uncover it, let it shine, use it in order to bring more light and understanding to the hearts and minds of men (and women.) Give them, not hell, but hope and courage.” 

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This is the day that has been given to us, and it is exceedingly good!  

You have embarked upon a new chapter, and I trust that you know who you are. The resemblance is unmistakable; you are the sons and daughters of a glorious creation, filled with beauty and made for joy.  

Claim your inheritance… Build the Beloved Community… Bless the world with your love and courage and change the world with your deeds. 

And Creation will be exceedingly glad! 

 

 

 

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