This service will celebrate and offer highlights of The Big Day, the all-community strategic planning day held the day before. The planning day, facilitated by Erica Baron of the UUA and Peter Laarman, PruComm Strategic Planning Liaison, will result in a guidebook to the future for the First U community. Come hear the latest news about our vision and plans.

We are worshiping in person in the Meeting House; there is now a mask-only section in the worship space for those who are being extra cautious. If you cannot join us in person, click here to visit our YouTube channel at 10:30.

 

“Becoming” – Sermon preached by Rev. Liz Lerner Maclay, April 30, 2023

I am standing on a flat, concrete rooftop, holding on to the painted wrought iron railing that encloses it. I look up and down the street at the other buildings of similar size and form – small apartment buildings, one apartment per floor, about 3 stories each. It is late at night and most of the buildings are dark, but one home, a ways down, is fully lit. Music and the sound of many voices carry down the dark street to me as I stand in the cool night, the clear black starry sky above me. I can hear speaking and laughing, but I can’t tell what they are saying. I don’t understand the music. I am in Greece, a country where I don’t know the language, where I have one, fairly new, friend, where I am about to start a job I have no training for. I must be crazy, I think, to be doing this. I don’t see how this will work. I am lonelier than I have ever been, and more than afraid, terrified, that I am about to fail. I turn and go back to my small apartment on the roof of this small building because I have to prepare for tomorrow. This is the beginning.

When I look back on my life thus far, that was the moment I think I woke up. That was the moment I came into my adulthood, after college, after working at a job I hated, even after the radical decision to move to Greece and try living in that country I’d always wanted to visit. I was 22 when I finally fully woke up and began not just living a good and responsible life that was expected and even that I wanted to, but a life that was mine alone, shaped by me, right for me, fully me. That was when I declared myself, owned myself, in a sense, began to become myself.

Congregations have a long, long lifespan. Most take longer to mature than human beings, and happily their vital, mature years can last decades, even centuries. Sometimes, like people, churches cycle back into new vitality after seemingly fading into quiet latter years. This church has been growing into its maturity for a long time. Gathering itself in the beginning, finding a place to live, moving, building the first building, rebuilding after the first fire, adding the Parish House, moving into Unitarianism, rebuilding after the 1966 fire and adding our Religious Education wing – all the while growing into a faith community that has continued to evolve into this Unitarian Universalist church. The skills this church necessarily gained over time still matter now – learning to hold each other in respect and compassion even across conflicts, surviving times of great challenge through care and commitment. Growing our faith, our religious education, our music, our spirituality, and our social justice presence. All this grows our capacity to make a difference in our own lives and in the life of the communities we inhabit, and it is a cycle that repeats, a cycle we are renewing right now. We are again, right now, declaring ourselves, owning ourselves, shaping a life and an identity that is ours alone, shaped by us, for us, right for us, fully us.

By no means do I think that with our work yesterday, we’re done becoming for the next little while. But I do think we have done a lot of becoming, not just yesterday but also as we have weathered the pandemic of the last few years. I love and am so proud of what we have done for each other and our neighbors, what we have gained and accomplished, and the courage and commitment that has made all that growth and doing, deepening and maturing possible. Because it surely takes courage. We did not merely survive or endure the last few years, we stepped up and changed to meet the extraordinary challenges of those years with strength and love. And now in our Big Day conversations and processes, we have together stood on a rooftop and looked around us and declared our commitment to the untrod path before us, just a few of your decisions from yesterday. You decided to:

• become a church for the city in multiple ways and strengthen our presence and impact at city and state levels
• Fully commit to becoming an anti-racist church
• Expand opportunities for simple fun and creating connection through multigenerational events
• Expand our multicultural and multiethnic congregation
• Explore the role of Sunday services and Meeting House in support of deepening individual and collective spirituality
• Explore the role of joy in sustaining a robust, spiritual life
• Form stronger and better creative partnerships with other groups and movements whose commitments in social justice work match our own, amplifying our agency and collective voice as First U
• Identify, select, prioritize and resolve major capital needs such as: improve sound system, kitchen, organ, accessibility of the Meeting House, redesign dais, improved parking, glass doors in RE Space with a capital campaign sufficient to meet our priorities
• Strengthen our church’s development strategies such as our planned giving program, annual giving, capital campaigns, revenue generation, grants, etc.

You have identified a path of joy, authenticity and spirit, a path of anti-racism and multiculturalism, a path that calls us to excellence, to greater presence and collaboration; to further justice, reckoning and wisdom; a path for increasing our financial clarity, generosity, capacity and strength; a path for a deeply creative multigenerational church; all of these inspiring, courageous choices that we could have shied away from or simply failed to perceive.

I want to tell you another story – with thanks to my friend Vanessa for her account titled “No Spectator Sport” which I drew on to remind me of some details. Anyway, some years ago, the nationally-renowned Christian Church, Disciples of Christ preacher the Rev. Kay Northcutt preached a sermon at a large conference of UU ministers, telling us Unitarian Universalists that we are the hope for the nation. She thinks this even though she is not a Unitarian Universalist. In the sermon she said:

“You are life-savers.

You are mosaic-makers

called to put broken bit by bit –

creating patterns of beauty and meaning

out of pain and loss.

You are bone-carriers

like the Israelites,

who lifted the bones of their ancestors

and took them across the boundaries into the desert.

Bones are heavy things,

she says,

but what you inherit from those who come before is rich,

so make sure you take them with you.

Life-savers,

mosaic-makers,

bone-carriers.

Find your greatness!”

After she preached this prophetic call, Rev. Northcutt met with the preaching class of UU ministers she was leading that week and asked whether she had made it clear that she thinks we UU’s are the hope of the future. She was checking in, asking “Did I say I came because I think you have a chance to heal the world?” “Did I say I thought you were the future of religion –

not my people, but you?!  Did I say that?!”

She had also told a story in worship, that morning. She said that when she was young, every school day started the same way, with her and her sister trying to rush out the door to school without their mother noticing. But their mother would always notice and she would run to the door after them, throw it open, and yell loudly across the lawn at her fleeing daughters. “Girls,” she would yell as they ran away fast as they could, but never fast enough: “Girls!  Find your greatness!” And having told her story, Rev. Northcutt ended her sermon the same way. Calling out to us she said:

“Find your greatness, Unitarian Universalists.

Life savers

Mosaic makers

Bone carriers.”

Her words, her charge to us, didn’t feel like too much when I heard them. They felt right. Right to me. Right, now I believe, for us, for you, First Unitarian Church of Providence: life-savers, mosaic-makers, bone-carriers.

Bone-carriers because we carry our ancestors with us, their presence is all around us, demanding both gratitude and new reckoning with the sins and blessings of their days. Mosaic-makers because we know there is brokenness within us and we honor it – no-one, nothing, is absolute and pure, everything is flawed and still, everything is shot through with beauty and promise and we know we can take our flaws and parts and bits and combine them, find the ways we fit, fill in the gaps, sometimes with grit, sometimes with gold, and together create, and keep creating, something multifarious and marvelous, a community that is whole and powerful and beautiful. Life-savers because we know we have come here and found hope, found family, found affirmation, found belonging, found healing, love that pulled us back from despair, from isolation, from the world’s harshness, from our own cynicism, from outrage that drowns our joy, from the overwhelm of so much that needs doing that we cannot do alone.

‘Find your greatness’ is really not too much to ask. This is one prophetic charge a religious liberal can believe in and commit to. I believe in it, and I believe we are on that path together. Life savers, mosaic makers, bone carriers, in establishing a strategic plan, we are taking our brokenness and wholeness, the lives we are saving – including our own, and the bones we carry, both the burden and the best of our past, to choose the strongest, most relevant, most worthy, most joyful future for ourselves and our faith. We have just set important and exciting goals for ourselves; next we will coalesce them into a plan and next year we will embark on the first year of our strategic plan as a congregation and will continue to discern our next steps forward on this journey. Our journey to the world we believe in starts for so many of us with a church we believe in.

 

This community has built itself into a congregation with a storied past and wide-open future. It’s time for another beginning, time for the next awakening, time for the next transformation in the long unfolding of the First Unitarian Church of Providence. We are standing on a rooftop. We hold on to the railing – the sturdy safeguard that is our care and compassion for each other. We stand under the dark clear starry night that is the world with all its challenge and all that overwhelms and all that is beautiful. We look out and see that we are at a turning point – that there is hardship here, truths to encounter and integrate, language to learn and understand, partnerships to build, strength to develop, music to create, people to love, joy to nurture – a next stage of life to live, a new level of being for us here. Ours alone, shaped by us, right for us, fully us. Life savers, mosaic makers, bone carriers, this is our new day. Amen.