"Nothing Evil"

Thank you for inviting me to share this day of celebration with you. I bring with me greetings from the larger family of faith of which you are apart. 1055 free, liberal religious congregations which come together to create the Unitarian Universalist Association. And also thanks to you for your on-going support of the Association, even as you have strained to find the resources to build this building and create a more effective ministry in this community.

Your contributions to the Association help insure that our liberal religious voice is heard, and support the services to this congregation which can help it thrive.

Our Association is, today, strong and vibrant. Our numbers have grown in each of the last 19 years. This is, by my count, the 160^th building dedication we have celebrated in the last 8 years. But more important than our growth in numbers, and more important than the building of sanctuary walls, is our growth as a spiritual community. We are becoming a faith which is willing and able to share our Good News with the hurting world outside these strong, sheltering walls.

This day has been a long time coming. You’ve worked hard. You’ve given generously. Though pride is a tricky emotion, today is a day to be proud of what you have accomplished. Value your commitment to this community. Imagine deepening your ministry here in Franklin. Honor the labors of so many of you. Celebrate the possibilities your new home offers.

Because this is your new church home. A. place. A place where your coming together will no longer be "church in a box". A place where you can enjoy the blessing of predictability, where your materials will have a permanent home, where you can count on both support and challenge to be present for you each week.

I am delighted to be here to celebrate your achievement, to honor your commitment to ministry here, to praise your commitment to religious education, to share your appreciation of the role of beauty and love in your lives.

Many of you are no doubt tired, ready for this building to be finished, longing for the time when you can relax and simply enjoy one another and the community you have created here. I was a housing developer and contractor in a previous professional incarnation. It is quite normal to move into a home which is "not quite finished." Religious community is always a work in process, and no less the sanctuaries where we gather.

Making a new space "home" takes time. I remember working with one congregation which had bought a larger new building, a former Jewish house of worship two years before. At a meeting one evening, something was spilled on the new carpet and required a quick clean-up. I remember vividly the chairperson of the Board raising the question in frustration: "Where do we keep the brooms around here." They were still in the process of moving in, of making their new space their home.

And with your new space will come new people. Families in need of a religious home; singles, elders, couples, youth, empty and depleted by the shallow consumerism that is offered up as salvation in our culture, looking for community. Your growth has made possible this achievement, and more growth is ahead. Try to remember, as you struggle to remember new names and new faces, that the reason you raised this roof was not only for your comfort, but to offer ministry to this community.

May these sheltering walls be strong to keep hate out and hold love in.

Especially in these times, we long for a place where love prevails. Where hate is held at bay.

May nothing evil cross this door.

We yearn for safety and security, a space where evil cannot penetrate.

This congregation was Universalist long before it was Unitarian Universalist. And I, personally, draw so heavily on the Universalist side of our heritage, that it is always a pleasure to worship in a traditionally Universalist church. The embrace of all persons, the image of a loving God who would condemn no person to hell. Give them not hell, but hope and courage. The Universalist message supports and nurtures my soul.

But Universalism, no less than Unitarianism, has always had a problem dealing with evil. If God is a loving God, how do we understand evil. Where do we see God in acts of violence and destruction? If we are powerful, how do we understand our complicity with evil, and our participation in suffering.

The attacks on the twin towers and the Pentagon have shattered our illusion of safety. Evil has pressed itself upon us. We know that our longed for security can rest not in the construction of larger, stronger walls. At some fundamental level, the events of September 11 change everything.

In the words of one of our congregants at the First Unitarian Church of Brooklyn:

On Monday we e-mailed jokes.
On Tuesday we did not.

On Monday we thought that we were secure.
On Tuesday we learned better.

On Monday we were talking about heroes as being athletes.
On Tuesday we relearned who our heroes are.

On Monday we were irritated that our rebate checks had not arrived.
On Tuesday we gave money away to people we had never met.

On Monday there were people fighting against praying in schools.
On Tuesday you would have been hard pressed to find a school where someone was not praying.

On Monday people argued with their kids about picking up their room.
On Tuesday the same people could not get home fast enough to hug their kids.

On Monday people were upset that they had to wait 6 minutes in a fast food drive through line.
On Tuesday people didn’t care about waiting 6 hours to give blood for the dying.

On Monday people were trying to separate each other by race, sex, color and creed.
On Tuesday they were all holding hands.

On Monday people were fighting the 10 commandments on government property.
On Tuesday the same people all said, "God help us." While thinking "Thou Shall not Kill."

I believe that our real challenge, as a nation, is not political or military. I believe it is a spiritual challenge. Our assumptions about our world and the universe seem no longer to apply. Our faith is being tested.

On September 11 I was in Washington. And when I preached at All Soul’s Church at the prayer service that night, I could only use God language. I asked, "Where is God today?" If you use different language in your own life, please excuse mine and hear my questions as you would give them language.

Where should we look for God today? And what God do we seek?

Do we seek the all-powerful God of the Book of Genesis and Exodus, who created the universe and parted the waters so that the children of Israel could pass through and on to the Promised Land. The God of Joshua who caused the walls of Jericho to tumble. This is the image of God proclaimed by Jerry Falwell, a stern and powerful God who can be angered by our failings and whose wrath can be called down wrath upon us. This is a righteous God and a God of one particular people, not all persons. Do we seek that God?

Or do we look to a much more distant "Watchmaker" God, who in some distant time ordered the universe and now stands far back, watching with frustration and sometimes humor as we struggle for the good and fall short time and time again. This is the God of Thomas Jefferson and rational humanists everywhere, though many would not use the language of God. The natural order is to be understood, and used, hopefully for good.

Do we search for support from a comforter God. One who can know our sorrow and our fear. One who will walk with us. This is the God of the musical tradition called Gospel. "Precious Lord, take my hand. Lead me home. Help me Stand." Many of us have needed a comforter God in these last weeks.

Do we know a divinity who co-creates with us, who challenges us to use our vision and our creativity to support life and help the universe bend toward justice. This is the God of Liberation theologians. MLK said: " The belief that God will do everything for us is as untenable as the belief that we can do everything for ourselves. It too is based on a lack of faith. We must learn that to expect God to do everything while we do nothing is not faith but superstition." To paraphrase for our community: The belief that we can do everything while the spirit of life offers does nothing is not faith, but hubris and narcissism.

May nothing evil cross this door.

There are many images of God. But all images of God are metaphors. They are our attempts to make meaning in what sometimes seems a world divorced from the gentle spirit. And the metaphors that we use are powerful. They help us construct reality.

God, the three great western religious traditions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) tell us works through and in history. In the Hebrew Scriptures, the Book of Joshua, in which God causes the walls of Jericho to come tumbling down, is followed by the Books of Judges and Kings. These books tell of the generations long invasion of the land of the Caananites, by the children of Israel, and their eventual conquest and appropriation of that land for themselves.

Jericho is, of course, an actual city and was in Biblical times. Contemporary biblical archeology has determined that there was, in fact, a tragedy in Jericho which might be the source of the Joshua story. The walls of Jericho were made of earth and stone. Houses and shops huddled against them. The walls did come tumbling down, whether was a result of an attack or a natural disaster we will never know. What we do know is that it was the collapse of the walls that killed the population. The very walls built to protect the people were what caused their death. What walls have we created?

God works through and in history. And Americans, as Steve Wasserman, the Book Editor for the New York Times, believes, "suffer from a persistent collective historical amnesia. Our politics are hobbled by our refusal to understand the manifold ways in which history, as was once so famously said, weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. Americans have cleaved to the conceit that history, insofar as it was deemed important at all, was more hindrance than help in our presumed unstoppable march to the munificent future…Americans have refused to be held hostage by history, believing America to have burst its bounds The cost of such myopia is large. It enfeebles understanding and licensed the infantilization of public debate."

Remember that it was European Americans who claimed a Manifest Destiny which allowed them to appropriate a continent and displace the indigenous populations. We must remember our history and refrain from a righteousness that would hold us as pure. We are as flawed as any other people.

Mark Morrison-Reed describes the role of religious community. "The central task of the religious community is to unveil the bonds that bind each to all….The religious community is essential, for alone our vision is too narrow to see all that must be seen, and our strength too limited to do all that must be done. Together, our vision widens and our strength is renewed."

What must we see? What must we rely on our congregations to help us know, about ourselves and about our world?

The reality is that we are connected, in ways we are only beginning to be able to see, to the tragedy of September 11 and the world, we have helped to create, in which such violence is imaginable.

Michael Wood, in his book, America in the Movies, says: "There is in our country a dream of freedom which appears in many places and many forms, which lies somewhere at the back of several varieties of isolationism. It is a dream of freedom from others; it is a fear of entanglement. It is what we mean when we say, in our familiar phrase, that we don’t want to get involved. There is, however, no hiatus from history, no reprieve from reality."

Unitarian Universalist response to the tragedy has been remarkable. It frankly makes me proud. We have reached out to the Arab, Muslim and Sikh communities in this nation with the simple, but powerful statement, "We will stand with you." This has been a profoundly Universalist response. All people are children of God. We have ministered to ourselves and to others, with compassion and a generosity of spirit born of our own pain, fear and anguish. And we are tired, spent.

Yet an even greater challenge lies ahead, a calling if you will, which will test both our stamina and our collective ability to know the truth. Our national response runs the risk of mistaking vengeance for justice, leading us into a deepening spiral of violence. Though we may wish it otherwise, there is no reprieve from reality.

The role of religious community is not to construct policy, it is to raise fundamental human questions which policy must address.

Reality is always constructed. The religious community must ask us all to inspect our constructions, to see more broadly than any one of us can see alone.

Paul Lederach, Professor of Peace-Building at Notre Dame (The Challenge of Terror, A Traveling Essay): "Conflict is, among other things, the process of building and sustaining very different perceptions and interpretations of reality. In the aftermath of such horrific and unmerited violence that we have just experienced this may sound esoteric. But we must remember that this fundamental process is how we end up referring to people as fanatics, madmen and irrational. In the process of name-calling, we lose the critical capacity to understand that from within the ways they construct their views, it is not mad lunacy or fanaticism. All things fall together and make sense.

When this is connected to a long string of actual experiences wherein their views of the facts are reinforced (for example, years of superpower struggle that used or ignored them, encroaching western values…McWorld(MTV, McIntosh and McDonald’s)…considered immoral by their religious interpretation, or the construction of an enemy-image who is overwhelmingly powerful and uses that power in bombing campaigns and always appears to win) then it is not a difficult process to construct a rational world view of heroic struggle against evil. Just as we do it, so do they. Listen to the words we use to justify our actions and responses. And then listen to the words they use. The way to break such a process is not through a frame of reference of who will win or who is stronger. In fact the inverse is true. Whoever loses, finds intrinsic in the seeds of loss a birth of justification for renewed battle. The way to break such a cycle of violence is to step outside it."

I believe that we are called to stand on the side of love. Love resists demonization. Love is relationship, not isolation. Love strains to know the other, not shut the other out. Love opens its eyes to a larger vision, struggling not for victory, but for justice. Let us stand on the side of love.

May these sheltering walls be strong, to keep hate out and hold love in.

What does it mean to hold love?

It means, among other things, staying in relationship. And it means a willingness to acknowledge our shortcomings. Just before the attacks of September 11, a World Conference Against Racism took place in Durban, South Africa. Sponsored by the United Nations, many of us had high hopes for the gathering. But the United States sent only a low level delegation, provided only $250,000 in financial support (unlike the $8,000,000 we contributed to the Beijing Women’s Conference), and, when the conversation moved in directions we did not approve (reflection on the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and Zionism) we withdrew from the conference. We left the table.

I hope we will stand on the side of love. I hope that we will step outside the violence. I hope that we will recognize that we share a common destiny in the world community. I hope that we will stay at the table. I hope that we will hold love.

This is a day of celebration for you. And celebrate you should. But your new home sits in a world where the illusion of safety and security has been shattered. Minister to one another and minister to that broken world.

May you use your new religious home well. May you use it to love one another and, in the great tradition of Universalism, make manifest the power of love in this community.

Use this community to broaden your view. Resist the easy answers of sound bites, the language that would construct for you an evil enemy deserving destruction.

Know, deep in your souls that it is only love that can cast out fear.

And know, that there is a universal love, however you name it, that has never broken faith with us and never will.

Amen