Good News!

a sermon preached by Rev. Khleber M. Van Zandt V at First Unitarian Church of Alton, Illinois, May 10, 2009

Decades ago, a new type of joke made its way into the popular lexicon that used the ‘good news/bad news’ format.  For example, you could imagine a cockpit announcement this week that sounded like this:  “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking.  I have some good news and some bad news.  The good news is that we’re ahead of schedule.  The bad news is that volcanic ash has knocked out our navigational equipment and we have no idea where we are.”

Or, a joke I’ve heard before that’s a little closer to home for me is this one:  The president of the congregation calls the pastor and says, “I’ve got some good news and some bad news.  The good news is there’s been a substantial increase in attendance over the past three weeks.  The bad news is that for those three weeks, you’ve been on vacation.”

Well, whatever it takes to get people to come to church.

I’ve been more upbeat this week than I was last, so I wanted to impart some good news to you this week, but it seems like for every piece of good news I can find, there’s an equal measure of bad news heaped up alongside it.  Maybe balance has some value to it, but I really was hoping that the good news this week would outweigh the bad news from last week. 

Last week, you may recall, we were reeling from the revelation that our church’s former finance chair / endowment secretary has been arrested for defrauding one of our members out of a large sum of money.  And this is no joke.  The good news is that he has been found out. The good news is that he was under arrest.  The good news is that he will now finally face legal proceedings that hopefully will keep him from stealing from anyone again.  

The bad news is that, as individuals and as a community, we can no longer afford to be innocent or naïve.  The bad news is that we now have to live with the knowledge of good and evil among us.  The bad news is that many of us are suffering with wounds that are deep and are going to take a long time to heal, if indeed they ever do.

If the bad news is that it happened, the good news is that it’s in the past and now we know about it and so it’s over to some small degree.  But of course it’ll never really be over because we’ve been changed in the process of this violation, in the process of welcoming someone to come among us who’d do such a thing to a friend, in the process of being wounded, suffering with the wound, trying to find a way to heal the wound, in the process of which many of us may find that we don’t possess the power to heal our wounds by ourselves alone.  And that may be a revelation for some and a reminder for others.

I’ve spoken to a number of people this week who’ve needed to talk about their deep wounds from this breach of trust.  When someone the church has trusted to take care of its finances is found to be untrustworthy, it rips the fabric of the promises we‘ve made to each other.  When someone you’ve known, someone you’ve been close to, someone you’ve considered a friend is revealed as a con man and a crook, it can call all our relationships into question.  Do you really ever know anyone else?  How can you know who these people are that you’re in relationship with?  In my experience, when that kind of chasm has been opened up beneath your feet, it can feel as if you’re in psychological freefall.

That’s the bad news.  The good news is that people are talking.  The good news is that many of you are working it out amongst yourselves, processing it together, helping each other to find meaning in what are awful events and in what has been an awful time.  And I hope that will continue as long as it needs to, as long as it’s productive rather than destructive.  If you are not talking, and you have things that are bothering you, I hope you’ll find someone, either around here or somewhere else, to talk to, because like I said, there are things we can’t do for ourselves, things you can’t do for yourself, and it does not mean that you are weak if you recognize this as one of those things.

 

I actually started out to try to find the good news in the message we send out as a church.  People often ask what we’re about and it’s sometimes hard to say.  We have a mission statement, but that’s a little different from an actual mission, I think.  The mission statement is a stab at articulating what we think we’re about;  you can see the mission statement we developed a few years ago on the front page of your order of service.  It’s pretty good, actually.  It uses the right words, says some good things, and has probably helped us get where we are as a congregation.

But for the upcoming district assembly in Chicago this next weekend, I wanted to be a bit more challenging and a bit more succinct and to burrow in a little closer to the heart of the matter.  And I wanted to make sure I had it as right as I could get it - at least from my point of view.  So this morning I want to share with you what I will say about the church’s mission - both this church’s and the broader Church’s mission - before I go up there and say it before a bunch of people who are not from this congregation, and I hope then you will let me know before next weekend if you think I’m going to embarrass you when I say these things after I’ve introduced myself as your minister. 

Here’s what I’m gonna tell them, that I think the mission of the church is three-fold:  to care for and nurture people on their journeys, to build a just faith community, and to effect a saving message of hope and justice in the world.

To care for and nurture people on their journeys.  One of the primary thrusts of our mission is towards the individual and towards her/his needs in the realms of care and nurture and education and support and comfort and challenge.  If we truly accept (like our 1^st Principle says we will) the inherent worth and dignity of every person, then we accept that there is something inherent in each and every individual that is important.  One way to put it is that we each carry a spark of the divine within us.  Another way to say this is that we are all children of  - God, the universe, choose your name for whatever is larger than yourself.  I heard a member of the church say something along these lines this week and I’m still thinking about it.  What she said goes like this:  “I am a divine being, a distinct portion of the essence of God.”  If we accept this thrust of our mission to individuals, then we will not only talk about it and say that it’s true, but we’ll act on this truth, we’ll act in a way that embodies this truth.  We’ll say to each other, “You are important.”  We’ll treat each other as if we’re each important.  We’ll treat every other person as if they are divine beings, as if every person is a distinct portion of the essence of God.

A tougher piece is the second one:  To build a just faith community.  Another primary thrust of our mission, I think, is to work toward building the type of relational community - right here, right now, among us gathered today - that is the very model of an organization based not on privilege and hierarchy but based on just and equitable sharing of power and resources among an inclusive group that mirrors the diversity of all humanity.  We want to build a community here gathered around the ideas of justice for all and around ideas of faithfulness to both tradition and innovation.  Even as we remember and celebrate and honor many of the traditions that came before and that have been passed down to us, yet we welcome the changes and innovations that building such a welcoming and diverse community inevitably bring.  As we gather an ever-widening diversity of ages and genders, educational backgrounds and sexual orientations, economic means and family configurations, and as we take apart the privileges and flatten the hierarchies found in the outside world, we develop a model of an organization committed to recognizing and embodying that previous piece of our mission, namely that all are important, all carry the divine spark, all are children of God, all are divine beings, all are distinct portions of the essence of the divine.  But this piece goes beyond that individualistic thrust to a broader communal focus:  building a just faith community requires us to relate to each other in just ways and requires us to expect each of us to behave in certain ways toward each other, and to hold each other accountable when we fall short and do not treat each other justly. 

Now the toughest piece of all, perhaps:  to effect a saving message of hope and justice in the world.  The most common question I get from long-time Unitarian Universalists whenever I talk about the concept of salvation or being saved is, “What in the world do I need to be saved from?”  Good question.  I usually answer with another set of questions, something like, “Well, how are you doing today?  What is it that’s not going well?  What are you worrying about these days?  Is there anything that seems broken in your life?”  Usually we can find something that could be better - broken families, lost jobs, medical issues - most of our lives include something that is out of kilter and a major challenge.  As I think about the phrase, saving message of hope and justice, it occurs to me that the opposite of hope is despair.  Most of us could stand to be saved from despair - the despair that things don’t always go well in our lives, if we live long enough we lose people and things and abilities;  the despair that our dreams don’t come true and that pieces of us go unfulfilled;  the despair that none of us gets out of here alive, that we all face the absolute certainty of death.  I have felt despair that the world is such a difficult place for so many and that so many of our sisters and brothers are tossed aside and forgotten and left out;  it is in this regard that our work on the other thrusts of our mission is so important and may help to show people that there are ways to practice justice in relationships and to organize just communities built simply on faith that such a thing is possible.

That is the saving message we have, I think:  that despair is real, but that you don’t have to succumb to it.  That bad things do happen to good people, but that bad things don’t have to have the final word no matter who you are.  That death will come - your death, my death - but life itself will still continue.

Hope can triumph if you will let it.  Yes, life will be hard.  Yes, awful things will happen.  Yes, you will die.  But in the end, you will be okay.  In the end, so will we all.  In the end, it is love that lasts, love that remains, love that is the good news that transcends all the bad news.

This must be our common faith - not that we will all someday rise bodily from the ground;  not that we will all fly into the sky to live on streets paved with gold;  not that there will someday come a perfect world to replace this broken one.  But that you and I will be okay.

This is not an easy thing to articulate for most of us.  Adherents of other religions have easier ways of getting it across.  For them, there’s an agent of salvation - Jesus, God, Allah - who’s sending you to a more-or-less concrete place called heaven.  But when you can’t name the agent and you’re okay with wherever you end up, you really are living on faith.

You can be saved through this faith in ways that you cannot be saved through keeping a tally of the good works you’ve done.  We are not on a spiritual treadmill where we have to make so many points or get our tickets stamped so many times to be considered worthy.  You are already saved, you are already worthy, you are already a distinct portion of the essence of God.

But, good works do matter;  they are a natural response to the gifts we receive.  A practice of works can communicate better than we can in words our underlying faith that - like Julian said - all will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.

As a church, the good news is that we have some good news.  The bad news is it’s hard to talk about and get across.  For myself, working toward articulating this good news has led me to find that it’s better if I do some things than others.  I find that it’s better to treat people the way I‘d like to be treated yourself than to act as if I’m the only one who matters.  I find that it’s better to be in relationship with all its challenges and heartaches than to suffer alone.  I find that it’s better to live in an imperfect community such as this one than to wait by your lonesome for a perfection that will never come. I find that it’s better to struggle with articulating our saving message of hope and justice, as hard as it may be, than to accept the fanciful, the supernatural, or the unacceptable.

The bad news is that despair is real, life is hard, awful things happen, we all die. 

But the good news is, in the end, you will be okay.  In the end, so will we all.  In the end, it is love that lasts, love that remains, love that is the good news that transcends all.

Welcome to church this morning.

So may it be.