A sermon by the Rev. Daniel Schatz, delivered at BuxMont Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, January 4, 2004

Sermon:  Good News

Stand by this faith.  Work for it and sacrifice for it.  There is nothing in all the world so important as to be loyal to this faith which has placed before us the loftiest ideals, which has comforted us in sorrow, strengthened us for noble duty and made the world beautiful.

Do not demand immediate results but rejoice that we are worthy to be entrusted with this great message:  that you are strong enough to work for a great true principle without counting the cost.

Go on finding ever new applications of these truths and new enjoyments in their contemplation, always trusting in the one God which ever lives and loves.

Stand by this faith.

 ­- Olympia Brown

Before coming to Pennsylvania, I lived in the booming metropolis of Tamworth, New Hampshire, home to one downtown block on which you can find one summer theater, one inn, and two stores  – the Tamworth Village Store and The Other Store.  The Other Store, they used to say, “is the kind of place where you can go in and get a plate of scrambled eggs and a bucket of paint.”

What Tamworth didn’t have, and I needed, was a mechanic.

When you live alone in a rural area, a good mechanic is essential.  And its helpful to have one in your town, because if you have to wait very long while your car is being fixed, there’s nowhere to go and nothing to do.

One day I was sitting at The Other Store, with Susan, Bill and Edith around the counter and Sarah behind it, bemoaning the fact that I had to drive all the way up to North Conway to get my car fixed.  Somebody – I think it might have been Susan – asked if I’d heard of Hidden Automotive.  I hadn’t.  “Oh that’s the place to go around here,” said Bill.  “I took my car there last week,” said Edith.  And so, as soon as I got home, I looked up “Hidden Automotive” in the phone book.

Nothing.  Nothing even close – and no mechanics at all listed in Tamworth Village.

The next day I asked Sarah if she knew where Hidden Automotive was, and she didn’t.  I asked if anyone knew where I might find a phone number and was told, “Oh their number is unlisted.”

It took several days, but finally I received directions to a tiny garage, set back into the woods a mile and a half up the aptly named Great Hill Road.  I missed it the first time and had to drive back.  Clearly the owner had chosen the name of his garage well.

When I walked into the office to make an appointment the mechanic introduced himself to me.  His name was in fact Sam Hidden.

Sam didn’t talk very much, but he was by far the best mechanic I have ever had.  He had enough work to suit him and didn’t really want any more than word of mouth would get him, so he was content to remain in practice, as well as name, hidden.  As for the needy car owners – well, you can always find another mechanic, although when I moved away I did have to go through grief therapy.

I liked Sam Hidden, for all his taciturn efficiency.  I also like the Unitarian Universalist churches and fellowships I’ve seen again and again that are so warm and welcoming, spiritually uplifting and intellectually challenging – if you can ever find them.  I like going to them, feeling the closeness of the community, and even the question asked again and again – especially when they don’t know I’m a minister – “How did you find us?”  There’s almost a sense of surprise when they ask that, as if it’s a wonder that anybody could have managed to find them at all.  I sometimes feel like saying, “Well, after I bought the secret map from the pirate with the wooden leg, it was a simple matter of navigating the labyrinth, fighting the yeti and I was in!”

It isn’t that bad, and BuxMont certainly is never like that.  We are extremely welcoming.  What we do share with other UU congregations, though, is a certain kind of complacency with being hidden.  We have our listing in the yellow pages and we have our web page, and anybody who’s looking can find us.  It’s passive but it has brought new people to our doors – over the years most of you have come that way.  And you’ve been welcomed warmly.  It’s hidden, but not at all unfriendly.

The problem is that while you can always find another mechanic, if not as good a one, you can’t find another religion like Unitarian Universalism.  There is no other religion like Unitarian Universalism.  There is no other religion with our particular emphasis on diversity, freedom, spiritual growth, integrity and community.  There is no other place where Humanists and Christians and Pagans and Buddhists and others all worship together, go to classes together, work together for the common good.  There is no other Unitarian Universalism.

When we remain hidden, people who are desperately searching for something like us come up dry.  They simply have to do without, sometimes for years, never knowing that within ten minutes of home is a vital, welcoming, friendly, spiritually uplifting fellowship grounded in freedom and diversity and integrity.  They never know.

Consider the following story:

A young college student named Cary was going through a crisis of faith, as many college students do.  She had been raised in the Episcopal Church, but although she liked the sense of ritual and liturgy, she couldn’t bring herself to believe in the Apostles creed and wasn’t even sure whether she believed in God.  She commiserated with a good friend about it, but he offered no suggestions.  As Cary grew older, she continued searching, off and on.  When her mother died of Pancreatic cancer at the age of only 60, Cary spent six months caring for her, and they spoke together with a closeness neither had ever experienced.  Her mother spoke of the same feelings Cary had lived with for years – “not knowing whether there was a God, but believing that the church was important.”  After her mother’s death, Cary renewed her search for a religion, but still could find nothing that satisfied her need.  She said, “A year after Mother died, I met my husband, Jerry, and while we were courting, attended the Cedar Lane UU Church in Bethesda, Maryland with him, his boys and my daughter.  Within two weeks, I knew I had found a religious home.  Within three years, I had started my seminary training.”

That woman was my stepmother, the late Reverend Cary Kauffman, and though she fully celebrated the 15 years of Unitarian Universalism she had in her life, she always regretted the thirty-eight years she had to live without it, and also regretted that her mother had never had the chance to benefit from a UU community.  She regretted these things even more when she discovered that the good friend she had spoken to about her crisis of faith way back in college had been an active member of a UU fellowship all along, and had never once said anything about it.  She discovered, too, that one of her mother’s best friends was a Unitarian Universalist and had never said anything.

Cary’s story, sadly, is a familiar one.  It is said that there are millions of people out there who would jump at the chance to become UUs, but have never heard of us.  Newsweek magazine once estimated that there are five times as many people who already consider themselves UUs but have never joined a congregation as there are UUs on our membership rolls.

Last month I spoke on the phone with a newcomer, who told me she and her husband had been searching for something like Unitarian Universalism for four years, but had never heard of us until we were recommended by a friend in another city.  She lives in Warrington, drives by our fellowship regularly, and never had the faintest idea what we did in this building.  “So that’s what they do in there,” she said.

Unitarian Universalists need to do better.  We need to stop being the hidden religion and begin to let our presence be known, speaking with a voice that is firm, unabashed, respectful and proud.  There are people out there who desperately need what we have to offer and they have nowhere else to go.  They need Unitarian Universalism, and we should not deprive them.

I’m not saying that everybody should be a Unitarian Universalist, or that our religion is better than anyone else’s.  I hope none of us are out to convert those who are content in other religions, or who clearly are uninterested in a faith without dogma or creed.  Liberal religion isn’t for everybody.  But it is for some people, including many who as yet know nothing about us.

If you are discovered Unitarian Universalism as an adult think about what it meant to you to find this religion.  Think about what it means to you now to have a spiritual home that doesn’t get into the business of telling you what to believe.  Now think about what it could mean to someone else, someone just around the corner, maybe, who has for years been looking for the same thing. 

I’m talking about evangelism but not classic evangelism – so you can all start breathing again.  Too often “evangelism” gets away from its root meaning of “sharing the good news” and instead focuses on bad news.  The doorbell rings.  You answer.  “Hello.  You’re going to Hell.  Of course you could join our religion, and be happy because only your friends and family are going to Hell – but not you.”  At the University of Virginia hospital, where I served as a chaplain resident, one of my jobs was to collect and dispose of the evangelical material that people would leave around.  In the men’s room on the first floor I kept finding pamphlets on the urinals, that queried, in huge letters, “DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOU’RE GOING?” 

I’m not talking about that.  I’m not talking about evangelism in the sense of proselytizing.  I am talking about sharing the good news, because we have genuinely good news to share.  We don’t have to be intrusive.  We don’t have to be rude.  But we also don’t have to be silent anymore.

We don’t have to be afraid that if we start speaking up as Unitarian Universalists about Unitarian Universalism or anything else that we will become proselytizers who care about nothing but numbers, numbers, always the numbers.  We don’t have to be afraid that we will become a “bottom-line” fellowship.  We need to spread the good news about Unitarian Universalism not because we care how many people are here, but because we know there are people out there who want and need to be here.  We know that their lives would be enriched by joining with us.  And we know that they in turn would enrich our own lives, our own community.

If we were to seek out growth for the sake of lifting our numbers, or paying our bills, we would miss the point – and we wouldn’t grow.  People can tell why they are being invited into a spiritual community.  Were we to forget the people and think only of the “bottom line” anyone who came in the door would be too turned off by the emphasis on numbers to stop and listen very much to our message, or experience our substance.

This is one of the great fears that keeps Unitarian Universalism hidden.  Even the most basic steps can seem like agony if we remain afraid that sharing our faith means giving up our character.  Some fear that we will lose our intimacy if we grow too much, and although the feeling is valid, the reality is different.  A consultant went to my home church, Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church, when they reached 900 members for the first time.  He said the number one concern people voiced was that if we got to more than 1000 members, we’d lose that intimate feel.  In fact, the reverse had happened – as the congregation grew there were more adult religious education programs, more activities, more small groups, so that the feeling was as intimate as it had ever been.

But still, we resist change.

At another congregation the minister campaigned for years to have the fellowship put up a lit sign, so people driving by at night could see that there was in fact a Unitarian Universalist fellowship behind the thick border of trees along the parkway.  After five years the Board finally agreed to take up the question.  Unfortunately, the Minister was at General Assembly the week of that meeting, but he was told that the Board Chair would leave the decision in writing on his desk.  So he returned only to find a note saying:  “See Mark 8:12.”  The baffled Minister opened his Bible and read, “Why does this generation ask for a sign?  Truly I tell you, no sign will be given to this generation.”

We do need a sign, and we do need to advertise and publicize and all the rest of it, but not because we need to grow in numbers.

We don’t need to the numbers.  We need the people, and the people need us.  If I were to stop and think about one reason more than any other why Unitarian Universalism needs to grow, it would be this:  People suffer.  They struggle with addictions and they struggle with bad habits.  They lose people they love.  They become ill.  They suffer with change or hardship.  They struggle with relationships.  They hurt.  Life isn’t always like that, of course, but every life has some loss and some suffering and some pain.  That’s when we need religion, and for many, the traditional answers from the traditional religions are adequate to the task.  But for others those answers ring hollow.  These people need to question, and they need to find their own way, and they need support in that journey.  If they had a religious community that was as open to questioning as it was to care, think about how much better their lives would be.  What a tragedy it would be if they were to live and die never knowing that all along they could have been part of such a community.  It is for these people, more than any others, that we ought to make our presence known.

We can do it in many ways, but we can’t do it effectively without some effort.  We can’t sit with our web page and our yellow pages listing and expect that the people who need to find us will come.  We have to be intentional.  We have to let the world know something of who we are.  There are as many ways of doing this as there are congregations, and I won’t presume to tell you what methods we should choose.  Some advertise in newspapers, or on the radio.  Some choose to take a visible role in social justice and community activism, so that people in the wider community know about the Unitarian Universalists and know we do good and important work.  Some become centers for the arts, hosting or providing space for concerts, exhibits and dancing.  For many it is a combination.  For all, spreading the good news means individual people inviting friends to services and social events.

Every one of these methods is valid, and every one in its own way enriches the life of the congregation.  Even the advertising does, because in the very act of creating an ad we determine what is most important and precious about our community – and there’s also a sense of pride in opening the newspaper and seeing our name and our message.

What is most important is that we no longer remain hidden.  We have good news to share, and there are people within walking distance of our fellowship right now that are in desperate need of our good news.  There are people in our lives that have been looking for us for years and years.

We have good news to share! 

It is the good news of a faith that embraces questions.

It is the good news of a faith that stands for justice and compassion and equity.

It is the good news of a faith in the inherent dignity of every human being, no matter who you are –  and we live that faith.

It the good news of a faith of the free, of seekers,

of people of substance

and of depth

and of feeling

and of openness

and of diversity

and of acceptance

and of celebration.

It is our faith to live and to share.  Long may it grow!

Go out into the highways and byways.

Give the people something of your new vision.

You may possess a small light,

but uncover it; let it shine.

Use it to bring more light and understanding

to the hearts and minds of men and women.

Give them not Hell, but hope and courage;

preach the kindness and the everlasting love of God.