Sermon – May 19, 2019
Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon
The Christian pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber is the heavily tattoed, spiky-haired, renegade minister who pastors the Lutheran church in Denver called the House for All Sinners and Saints. Most of the church’s members are folks who have been hurt in other churches … told they were not up to snuff either because they were gay or some other supposed misfit.
They love their new church.
When they tell Nadia what they love about it, they say many of the things I hear people say they love about our church: the community, the music, the way you don’t have to hide part of your story in order to be welcomed…
But then Nadia says:
“…Despite how much I love [my church], I am still not an idealist… Every human community will disappoint us, regardless of how well-intentioned or inclusive… As a matter of fact, at our quarterly “Welcome to [our church]” events… I tell them that… This community will disappoint them. It’s a matter of when, not if. We will let them down or I’ll say something stupid and hurt their feelings. I then invite them on this side of their inevitable disappointment to decide if they’ll stick around after it happens…
Welcome to [our church]. We will disappoint you.” ((http://www.pastrix.com/excerpts/Pastrix-Excerpt-3-Thanks-ELCA.html#sthash.xdEICqtO.dpbs))
So some may wonder why I’d preach about this topic – your church disappointing you – when later in the service we are welcoming new members today.
We will disappoint you!
That’s not really what we want to tell people, is it? !
It’s not that I’ve necessarily been hearing anything specific about this church disappointing people. So please don’t feel like there’s some subtext here that you don’t know about…
I think we need reminders that community will sometimes disappoint us. If we are clear-eyed about that fact, when it happens, we won’t bail, and miss out on the transformative work that happens when we stay.
And my second point that I’ll get to is that a community that never disappoints…that always meets your needs and preferences and expectations…is not the kind of community we are going for here.
But first: what happens when we disappoint you?
First, I’ll focus on what happens when that disappointment comes in the form of hurt.
Nadia Bolz-Weber encourages her people to stay through their disappointment because, if not, she says, “they won’t get to see how the grace of God can come in and fill the holes.”
But because of our diversity of belief, we Unitarian Universalists don’t share the same view of God or of Grace. We are not a creedal church.
Instead we are a covenantal church.
By our covenant, we agree on a way of relating to one another.
The pillars of our covenant include affirming each person’s inherent worth and dignity, recognizing our interdependence, encouraging one another in the pursuit of truth, promoting justice, equity, and compassion…
With this covenant we commit to figuring out together what that means for how we treat each other, and how we repair and renew the relationship when it goes wrong.
The Jewish theologian Martin Buber said:
“The human being… is the promise-making, promise-keeping, promise-breaking, promise-renewing creature.”
We make promises all throughout our lives…to our spouses, our families, our friends, our places of work…
And so what we are practicing here, in our church, through covenant, is that similar promise-making, promise-keeping, promise-breaking, promise-renewing work.
So – if not all of us look to the grace of God to fill the holes of disappointment – where do we look?
Because we are a covenantal church, we look to “relationship itself.”
As my colleague Dan Lillie says, “When we find ourselves disappointed by our community…we look to the relationship itself as that which is both worthy of our reverence, and as the powerful force that has the ability to heal us.”
Now I certainly don’t mean that every specific relationship is holy and can be healed – Many of you have examples of individual relationships in your lives that were not capable of being healed – and so divorce or estrangement or some other boundary-setting became the most healthy thing.
But being in relationship with a community means we can rely on the strength of all of us together. We can commit to all of us together helping each other mend and strengthen that interdependent web of relation.
We figure it out together.
And that’s scary, I think.
It’s scary to show up to a community in a real way that might let in disappointment or conflict.
I was raised here in Midland, and I’ve been back here now for four years. I’ve observed that the culture of Midland is a pretty conflict-avoidant culture in general.
In fact, most humans are pretty conflict-avoidant, but I think here in particular, for whatever reason there is an impulse to stay on the surface of things. The phrase “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all” sometimes gets skewed into an avoidance of real honesty with one another.
But real honesty –– when held by our covenant – can lead to deeper intimacy.
I have a few relationships in which I’ve never had a “fight” or a disagreement. Those friendships don’t feel nearly as strong to me as those in which we have risked difficult times of honesty with each other – in which we’ve risked coming to one another and saying, “Man, I am hurt that you did that.”
Risking that honesty has meant navigating anger, and misunderstanding, and deep listening, but where it has taken those friendships is a place much stronger – a place we know can weather storms.
According to M. Scott Peck, any group of strangers coming together to create a community goes through four distinct and predictable phases of community.
The first phase is pseudocommunity and it is dominated by conflict avoidance.
Wanting to be loving, people minimize or ignore differences and withhold full truths: “The group may appear to be functioning smoothly but individuality, intimacy, and honesty are crushed” (Peck).
In order to get to true community, groups often have to go through chaos and emptiness. Doesn’t sound pleasant, does it? I’ll have to explore this more in another sermon, but suffice it to say that true community is worth it.
The poet Mark Nepo says, “Unconditional love is not so much about how we receive and endure each other, as it is about the deep vow to never, under any condition, stop bringing the flawed truth of who we are to each other.”
What a gift if we have a community that is resilient enough, courageous enough, loving enough, to hold disappointment and heartbreak and disagreement?
What a gift if we have a community to which we can come even when we are not our best selves.
What a gift if we can make a mistake and loving people can call us back in, inviting us to our stronger selves?
What a gift if we can be vulnerable with one another, take risks together, get stronger in the broken places together?
What a gift if we have found people who, when they are faced with hurt or disagreement or disappointment, won’t close off, won’t run away, won’t just be “polite,” and won’t hurt you back – but will stay put, and keep on trying and growing and learning.
In the first UU church I was a part of – up in Maine – I was asked really early in my membership to be on the Board. I was young and kind of naïve… and it was my first time being on a Board… and I was new to the church…and it turned out the Board already had some deep, unaddressed conflict.
Eventually, instead of just letting it fester under the surface, some Board members and the minister brought it forth and we looked at it square in the face. A facilitator was brought in from our UUA to help us.
And at first I was just kind of wide-eyed as I witnessed this conflict going down.
But gradually I leaned in. I spoke up even though my voice trembled, and we all did.
And we stumbled forward together.
It was messy work, but I certainly grew in the process. And we all grew, and the church grew.
We were stronger in the broken places.
We were more able to fully see one another. We were more able to take risks together. We were more able to do transformative ministry together.
Another form of disappointment can come in the form, not of hurt, but of disappointment that this place isn’t perfect.
Maybe it’s an imperfection most of us see – a way we clearly need to grow. Maybe it’s an imperfection that’s more about your personal preference. Because, you see, especially in a church as diverse as ours – some people love sermons on justice issues and some love sermons on spiritual growth. Some love prayer and some have had to learn not to flinch at the concept of prayer.
Whatever the way the church disappoints you in these kinds of ways – I think it’s still our covenant that holds us together.
Our covenant reminds us that we are not here to get our individual needs met.
And so that person who really doesn’t like holding hands in a circle at the end does it because they know it helps someone else make it through the week. And maybe you don’t have to check what the sermon topic is before you come because you know doing church together is about more than what the minister says from the pulpit. And you know that even if that Sunday’s message didn’t hit home for you, maybe it was just what the person next to you needed – and it meant the world to have you sit beside them while they heard it. And maybe you know this church isn’t yet all it has the promise to be, but you know that we make it what it is by our work together.
Covenants remind us of our best intentions and deepest values.
My colleague Kendyl Gibbons says:
“We [covenant] because what we build with intention, and even with difficulty, is more satisfying in the long run than the pleasures that we happen to encounter. We do it in time-consuming rituals, invoking powers that we scarcely know how to name, because we are seeking some way to give our lives the density, and dignity, and depth that we suspect, with longing, might yet be possible.”
So thank you for being here, even though I know most of you already know what Nadia said about her church is also true about ours:
Welcome to our church. We will disappoint you.
And yet you’re here because you’ve caught glimpses of true community or even lived right there within it for a time.
True community is where we grow stronger in our broken places.
May we know it to be so.
– Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon