True to What We Can Together Become

Rev. Mark Stringer

First Unitarian Church of Des Moines

November 3 & 4, 2007

 

“It’s not differences that divide us.  It’s our judgments about each other that do.” —Margaret J. Wheatley

Sharing a Story        

 

Today’s story is about wanting to do things when other people don’t think you can.  It is about dreams, and barnyard animals, and bikes.

 

It is called Duck on a Bike.[1]

 

One day down on the farm, Duck got a wild idea. 

“I bet I could ride a bike!” he thought.

He waddled over to where the boy parked his bike,

climbed on and began to ride.

At first he rode very slowly and he wobbled a lot, but it was fun!

 

Duck rode past Cow and waved to her.

“Hello, Cow!” said Duck.

“Moooooo,” said Cow.  But what she thought was,

“A duck on a bike? That’s the silliest thing I’ve ever seen!”

 

Then Duck rode past Sheep.

“Hello, Sheep!” said Duck.

“Baaaaa” said Sheep.  But what she thought was,

“He’s going to hurt himself if he’s not careful!”

 

Duck was riding better now.

He rode past Dog.

“Hello, Dog!” said Duck.

“Woof!” said Dog.  But what he thought was,
“That is a mighty neat trick!”

 

Then Duck rode past Cat.

“Hello, Cat!” said Duck.

“Meow,” said Cat.  But what she though was,

“I wouldn’t waste my time riding a bike!”

 

Duck pedaled a little faster.

He rode past Horse.

“Hello, Horse!” said Duck.

“Ne-e-e-igh!” said Horse.

But what he thought was,

“You’re still not as fast as me, Duck!”

 

Duck rang his bell as he rode toward Chicken.

“Hello, Chicken!” said Duck.

“Cluck! Cluck!” said Chicken.  But what she thought was,

“Watch where you’re going, Duck!”

Then Duck rode past Goat.

“Hello, Goat!” said Duck.

“Maaaaaa,” said Goat.  But what he thought was,

“I’d like to eat that bike!”

 

Duck stood on the seat and rode past Pig and Pig.

“Hello, Pigs!” said Duck.

“Oink” said Pig and Pig.

But what they thought was,

“Duck is such a show-off!”

 

Then Duck rode no-hands past Mouse.

“Hello, Mouse!” said Duck.

“Squeak,” said Mouse. But what he thought was,

“I wish I could ride a bike just like Duck.”

 

Suddenly, a whole bunch of kids came down the road on bikes.

They were in such a hurry that they didn’t see Duck.

They parked their bikes by the house and went inside.

 

The animals looked at the bikes…they looked at each other…

 

Next thing you know, all the animals had bikes! 

They rode around and around the barnyard.

“This is fun!” they all said.

“Good idea, Duck!”

 

Now, in the story as it was written by David Shannon, the animals

put the bikes back by the house.  And no one knew that on that afternoon, there had been a cow, a sheep, a dog, a cat, a horse, a chicken, a goat, two pigs, a mouse, and a duck on a bike.

 

But in my version of the story the animals never get off.  They just keep riding.  And having fun!

 

Meditation

This weekend, around 60 of us attended and participated in at least some portion of our MORE summit, a time of intentional reflection and engagement around what we do and who we are at First Unitarian Church of Des Moines when we are at our best.  This summit offered an exciting time of honoring what is unique about our church and dreaming together about who we might become, together, in the days ahead.  It is in the spirit of the summit that I offer you this meditation from Margaret Wheatley[2]:

 

 “We Never Know Who We Are”

 

We never know who we are
(this is strange, isn’t it?)

 

or what vows we made

or who we knew

or what we hoped for
or where we were

when the world’s dreams
were seeded.

 

Until the day just one of us
sighs a gentle longing
and we all feel the change

one of us calls a name
and we all know to be there

one of us tells a dream
and we all breathe life into it

one of us asks “why?”
and we all know the answer.

It is very strange.

 

We never know who we are.

 

Reading

“For the Children” by Gary Snyder[3]

 

The rising hills, the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us.
The steep climb
of everything, going up,
up, as we all go down.

 

In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.

 

To climb those coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:

   

    stay together
    learn the flowers
    go light

 

Sermon

 

A few weeks ago, at one of our “Get Acquainted Gatherings”, the organized small talk events designed to help newcomers mingle with the staff and other members, I was enjoying a conversation with a couple new to our church and to Unitarian Universalism.  They had come to us from a more orthodox Protestant background, a background that they had not completely dismissed, but which had left them wanting more.  As I recall, I’m not sure they could put their fingers on exactly what had been missing for them, but somehow they had found this church and have been dipping their toes in the water for a couple of months.  Like many of our newcomers, they had been entrepreneurial about learning about us.  They had perused the website, attended a few services, read some of our pamphlet literature.  And they confessed, “It sounds so great and it seems so great, but how is it possible?  How exactly does it work?”

 

“What do you mean?” I asked.

 

“Well, how do people with such different beliefs get along…especially in a church?  How does it work?”

 

Rather than give them the answer as I see it, I gave the question back to them, you could say, by suggesting that they continue to get to know people and see for themselves how it works.  I also added my typical cautionary words about this being a human community and therefore not only filled with inherent worth and dignity…but also filled with inherent imperfection…just like every other human community on the planet.

 

Before long one of the members present asked to hold the couple’s infant child, who was getting a little restless.  The mom gladly accepted the offer and we continued the conversation as the baby was strolled around the room, gently held, and cooed over.

 

Perfect, I thought to myself.  This is what church should be.  Members caring for each other, treating newcomers and old-timers alike with the respect and care they deserve as the important people that they are.  People sharing the love, basking in the glow of glorious human possibility and compassion….

 

Before long the young mom wandered away to check on her child and the dad and I continued our chat.  Soon the mom came back, a clear look of irritation on her face.  “Well,” she told her husband,  “I’m starving our child.”

 

“What?” he asked.

 

“Well, that’s what that woman told me.”

 

Weeeeeep-woaaaaaaa.

 

Even through her irritation, the mom seemed to have a sense of humor about it all, which is good.  But, nevertheless, my heart sank.  “Oh, don’t worry about that,” I said.  “That’s just so and so….”

Which was my clumsy way of saying, if you new this person better, you’d know that her bark is not the attack it seems, but rather a proclamation of things that have nothing to do with you…just like nearly every other bark in our human family.

 

But the offending words had been said, and the damage had already been done, if not to this new couple, at least to my (and maybe their) momentary mirage of church perfection. 

 

Ah, who needs mirages anyway? 

 

I thought a lot about that interaction over the next few days.  Is there anything I could have done other than to try to dismiss it?  What would you have done?  Did anything need to be said? 

 

The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized that I had, in a sense, asked for what happened, when I suggested to the couple that they “get to know people and see for themselves how it works.”

 

“It” being the promise of this place…this church where we claim, as our 16^th century Unitarian forbearer Francis David did, that  “we need not think alike to love alike”.

 

This uneasy interaction was laid out for these new folks almost as if on cue.  How does it work when we can hold such different beliefs? This time, it happened to be about breastfeeding.  Another time it might be about theology, or about politics, or about endowments, or landscaping, or furniture…or a minister having the congregation sing a Christmas carol with different words…or whatever….  How do we coexist when it is almost inevitable that we will, consciously or unconsciously, step on each other’s toes now and then, if not downright offend one another?

 

The short answer is we forgive. 

 

The long answer is we get to know one another, we listen to each other’s stories and perceptions, we learn from those stories, allowing them to sometimes even transform us, we don’t take ourselves or each other too seriously…and, then, when necessary, we forgive.  We forgive each other and ourselves for being human.

 

When the couple asked me the question of “how does it work?”, the answer that first came to mind, the one I didn’t give right away, was “we’re not all that different you know.”  And I wasn’t thinking “we’re not all that different” in the fuzzy, feel-good-about-how-alike-we-are way.  I meant it literally. We (meaning, in my experience, the members of this particular Unitarian Universalist church) really are not all that different. Most of us have been able to find a religious home here because, even when we do not agree about the nature of, or even the existence of, God, we are (or generally try to be) open to the one divine truth upon which we seem to all agree:  all notions of the divine are speculative at best and therefore should all be taken lightly.  This is not to mean that we should not seriously consider our own faith commitments or theologies or disrespect those who hold beliefs unlike our own.  Rather, in a church that intentionally claims a free and responsible search for truth and meaning, I think it means we should be careful about how we present our commitments, particularly keeping an eye on how our version of the truth might be impacting those around us.  Just as any of our other firmly held beliefs (such political views and perceptions) should be carefully presented.

 

What do I mean by carefully presented?

 

Let me explain through metaphor.  I am a sports fan. Have been most of my life.  I know its absurd to care whether the Cleveland Indians corporation is victorious over the Boston Red Sox corporation, but I do.  I have found that one of the most challenging aspects of being a sports fan, besides rooting for teams from Cleveland, is when fans from other teams refuse to acknowledge that I am just like them…that we are, in essence, just like each other…and I don’t just mean our common concern about multi-millionaire men playing games.  I’m talking about the way we care, often times more than we rationally should, about our teams.  Realizing that we are more alike than different, leads me to be, when I’m at my best, compassionate toward them…to ask about their teams…to acknowledge their losses, just as I would hope that they would acknowledge mine.  I believe that this is the civilized, if not religious, way to be.

 

Perhaps it’s a crude metaphor, but I want our church to be like this, too.  I want it to be a place where we are attuned to how our own predispositions are impacting others.  Of course we’ll miss the mark now and then, if not a lot.  But I yearn for us to keep trying all the same.   Trying to leave space for the differences among us and forgiving when we need to forgive.

 

I recently heard a story that epitomizes this dream I have for our religious community…indeed for our world.  It is a true story shared with me by UU minister Judith Walker Riggs.  It takes place in the early eighties, at a conference center in Washington state called Seabeck.  For two weeks every year, this conference center has been rented out by Unitarian Universalists…kind of a UU summer camp for families.  The year this story takes place, there was some controversy in the camp.  

 

During the time the UUs were at Seabeck, a Trident nuclear missile was scheduled to be delivered up the Hood Canal, right by the conference center.  Many of those attending the camp were distraught by this and decided that their UU values demanded that they speak up.  So they organized a protest.  However, not everyone at the camp shared their view.  There were many present at Seabeck that week who believed that these soon-to-be protestors had it all wrong…that without the build-up of the very nuclear weaponry they were protesting, the world would actually be a much more dangerous place.  Their UU values demanded that they not protest.

 

I’m not sure how uneasy the discussions around this were at the camp that week.  But I do know that early on the chosen morning dozens of the camp members did travel down to the canal to do what they thought was their UU duty.  The day of the protest was miserable in almost all respects.  Not only was it rainy, cold, and windy; the powers that be learned of the protest and decided not to transport the Trident that day after all.  As it turns out, the missile was delivered a couple of days later, in the middle of the night.

 

You can imagine how downtrodden and disappointed the protestors were as they made their way back to the conference center late that afternoon.  But what you might not be able to imagine is what happened while these folks were gone.  The people who had been following their UU values by staying behind and refusing to protest spent the afternoon baking cookies and preparing warm cocoa for the protesters to enjoy upon their return.  They greeted their cold, wet, and disappointed fellow humans with warm blankets and warm embraces.  They asked how their day had been and after a while everyone went into supper together, divided equally at tables that included protestors and cookie bakers.

 

When Judith told me this story, I could hear her voice change.  It got softer, more tender, and I could hear the lump in her throat.  “Mark,” she said, “it was a beautiful glimpse of what could be possible in human community…of what we can be for each other.”

 

She had been there, had seen it with her own two eyes, and she had been changed by it.  She also wanted me to be sure to understand that the power of the story is not just that the people who didn’t protest supported those who did.  Equally important was that the people who wouldn’t go protest were also accepted and supported by their counterparts.  They were not judged for not going.

 

There was space at that conference center for difference of opinion…for what I would call, real, compassionate, engaged community, where “we need not think alike to love alike.”

 

This is the kind of church I want to be a part of.  Indeed, this is what I believe our UU approach, when we are at our best, can offer the world. But first, we must continue learn the lesson ourselves and practice the discipline that can lead us there…to be true to what we can together become.  How did the people at Seabeck do it?

 

I think they followed the same advice offered in today’s reading.

 

They knew how to go light.  They didn’t take themselves or each other too seriously.  They must have expected differences of opinion and didn’t let that get in the way of what was most important.

 

They learned the flowers.  I love that expression.  It reminds me of our annual flower communion ritual.  The second Sunday of June everyone is encouraged to bring a flower to the service, and then take a different flower home.  It is a celebration of our diversity, the beauty and gift of it and it symbolizes the call to community present here for each of us.  They learned the flowers,  meaning they knew each other well enough to understand and respect their diversity.  They didn’t have to all agree to be in community.  Gardens have a better chance to thrive when more than one crop is growing. 

 

They knew how how important it was to stay together.  Staying together does not hinge on everyone always agreeing about everything.  How boring that would be.  Rather, staying together is about seeing that we are fellow travelers…that we are bonded not by the teams we root for, but by our very hopes and dreams that lead us to root for a team in the first place, or believe in a cause, or center ourselves in a divine vision of what might be.  We are bonded together by our need for community and our willingness to hang in there with it, even when it gets messy.

 

Or as I like to say, anytime we welcome another new batch of new members to our church, as we do this weekend, none of us becomes a member of this church when we sign the book or make a pledge.  We become a member the first time…the second time…the third time…the fourth time…the fifth time…and on and on…that we are disappointed…and we stay anyway.

 

It is this staying that enables us to be true to ourselves, true to each other, and true to what we can together become.