The younger children had a chance to contribute their reflections toward our mission/vision process this Sunday. Questions and answers follow.
What are some of your favorite things that you have done at Starr King Fellowship?
What are some things you have learned here?
Who is someone you got to know better at Starr King Fellowship?
Adults and children will have another chance to share their dreams for the future of Starr King Fellowship on Sunday, March 21, 2010.
I started with a story shared by my colleague, the Rev. Thom Belote, about the meaning of a covenantal faith:
Last Thursday, [Thom writes,] I was participating in a protest down by the Nichols Fountain on the Plaza. Missouri Governor Matt Blunt recently signed legislation that called for abstinence-only sex education in all Missouri schools and also restricted outside instructors in health classes to those with no connection at all to any health care system that offers abortion as option. Meaning, of course, that someone who is trained and has expertise in teen health counseling but who works for, say, Planned Parenthood would be barred from speaking to a health class at a public high school.
So, I went down to the Plaza to hold signs and talk with passersby and advocate for an approach to health education for young people that says that information and education is better health policy than ignorance.
But that is not really the point. You see, down at the protest these two young women were hanging around. They approached the protesters, and lied that they were writing for a student newspaper. In reality, they were…reporters for a fundamentalist Christian magazine. Soon, word got out that a minister was at the protest – and that minister happened to be me – and so these two…fundamentalist infiltrators made a bee-line to me to interview this minister (can it be believed?) who actually supports sex education. I introduced myself as a Unitarian Universalist minister and they asked me to explain what UU’s believe. I explained that we are a covenantal faith, not a creedal faith. We share a covenant of how we try to be together, not a creed of what we all must believe together.
Then the questions began: “Well, does your church believe in the Bible?”
I responded: That is a creedal question. We are a covenantal church. We share a covenant of how we try to be together, not a creed that says what we are expected to believe together.
“Does you church believe in God?” they ask.
“That is a creedal question,” I respond. “We are a covenantal church. We share a covenant of how we try to be together, not a creed telling us what we are expected to believe together.”
This went on for a while. It took them a while to get this. They were being challenged to think in a new way.
Thom is not the only minister (or the only Unitarian Universalist) confronted with this question of what Unitarian Universalists believe. I love his answer: we do not believe things together, we covenant to do certain things and be certain ways together.
This doesn’t quite mean we can believe whatever we want. Any given congregation has made agreements within itself about what kind of things it will do together, and what kind of place it will be. Those commitments require certain beliefs.
For instance, Starr King Fellowship has always been committed to the spiritual lives of its children, and to working together to make the world a better place. Those ideals require actions, and actions require belief. Ideals without actions are hollow; actions without belief, even it is just a glimmer of hope for our children or our world, are a lie. So, to be a member here, certain actions, supported by certain beliefs, are necessary.
We welcome all people into our fellowship, we come together for personal growth and mutual support, and we have beliefs that support those commitments. What we don’t insist upon is that we share beliefs about the nature or existence of the divine, about what happens to our unique selves after we die, or about what is required to remain in God’s good graces (if there’s even a God at all). We don’t have creeds, we don’t insist on a single form of worship, prayer or meditation. Once you come here to be part of this community, your personal journey, of spiritual or intellectual growth, is your own.
One way of articulating who we are together as a community is a covenant. A covenant, which some of you may be familiar with from small groups, or even covenant groups, is a statement of how we will be together as a group. They can be a list of commitments, or they can be a shorter, more poetic statement that congregations say together in worship.
There are some examples of this more worshipful form of covenant. One is found in our hymnal, and used in many of our congregations. You can see it at number 471. It has been arranged by L. Griswold Williams.
Love is the doctrine of this church,
The quest for truth is its sacrament,
And service is its prayer.To dwell together in peace,
To seek knowledge in freedom,
To serve human need,
To the end that all souls shall
grow into harmony with the Divine–Thus do we covenant with each
other and with God.
A shorter version, without any language about the divine or God, is at number 473, by James Vila Blake.
Love is the spirit of this church, and service its law.
This is our great covenant:
To dwell together in peace,
To seek the truth in love,
And to help one another.
Another favorite of mine is proposed by the Rev. Alice Blair Wesley.
(from lecture Four):
Though our knowledge is incomplete,
our truth partial and our love uneven,
From our own experience and from
the witness of our faith tradition
We believe
that new light is ever waiting to break
through individual hearts and minds
to illumine the ways of humankind,
that there is mutual strength
in willing cooperation,
and that the bonds of love keep open
the gates of freedom.
Therefore we pledge
to walk together in the ways
of truth and affectionas best we know them now
or may learn them in days to come
That we and our children may be fulfilled
And that we may speak to the world
with words and actions
of peace and goodwill.
These statements declare the shared values of a congregation, what it holds holy, and what it will do together. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the covenant between the divine and the people is always initiated and extended by the divine. Even if we are doing the work to articulate our relationship with each other and with what we hold holy, we should remember that we are doing that work in a spiritual context, held by, bound by, and responsible to our highest ideals. Our understanding of the best and the highest comes first; out of that first commitment comes our commitment to one another in community.
As much as we may like the sample covenants I read, and as much as we may still affirm the mission statement we wrote as a congregation in 1995, the real value of this kind of work comes from working on articulating our shared values together. To that end, the Committee on Ministry and I are inviting you into a process of sharing your best experiences, memories and hopes of our fellowship. Out of this process, which will continue this winter and spring, we hope to develop a covenant and a mission statement: in other words, who we are, and where we are going.
I invite you to join me in prayer.
We lift our hearts and minds to that which is best in humans and in human community, to that force of life which animates us and connects us to all living things. We feel this force within us making us who we are and connecting us to one another. When we are sad or struggling, we turn to this community of fellow human spirits to carry us for a time. When we are joyful, we come here to share our overflowing delight.
Turn to your neighbor. Look in the face of the unique soul sitting near you, the person who has come here ready to know you for who you are, and to be so known. Feel your own best self, your own commitment to love and accept this person whoever they may be, well up inside you. Know that you yourself are so loved, so accepted, all of you, the successes and the failures, through the gains and the losses, wherever life may take you. Know that you are welcomed here.
Spirit of life, we ask your blessings on our work and on our journey. Be in us, grow in us, and help us be together more than we can be alone.
Amen.
On Sunday January 17, we raised $1,050 for the UUSC/UUA Haiti Relief Fund. Thank you, thank you, thank you for your generosity and caring for the people of Haiti. This is truly an outpouring of the spirit. The UUSC writes about their efforts in Haiti on their website.
In two weeks, I will have the great honor of standing before two women in Bethlehem, New Hampshire and proclaiming them, by the power vested in me by the State of New Hampshire, married. I will conclude by saying, “What God has joined together, let no one put asunder. You may kiss to seal your bond of marriage.” The women’s small gathering of close friends will beam happily on them and hug them. They will be legally married, no different than the millions of different-gender couples who are currently married in New Hampshire. Couples who are currently joined in civil union may convert their unions into marriages this year. Next year, any remaining civil unions still in effect will automatically become marriages.
New Hampshire is one of five states in the union where same-sex marriage is legal. The others are Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecticut, and Iowa. The District of Columbia has also voted to allow same-sex marriage, and marriages are expected to begin in February. Those are the success stories. Same-sex couples used to be able to marry in California, but voters repealed the law allowing equal marriage in the 2008 election. Maine’s legislature passed a same-sex marriage act, but voters there overturned the law this past November, before it was ever enacted. California and Maine still allow civil unions for same-sex couples, as do Colorado, Hawaii, New Jersey, Nevada, Oregon, Washington and Wisconsin (“Same-sex marriage”).
Here in New Hampshire, the process came about through the legislature. Our legislature passed a civil unions law in 2007, and civil unions have been legal since January 1, 2008. Last spring, both the House of Representatives and the Senate in New Hampshire passed same-sex marriage legislation. There were moments when it looked like the bill would not make it through either chamber (“Same-sex marriage in New Hampshire”). Our own senator, Deborah Reynolds, initially voted against the legislation in the Senate Judiciary Committee, which she chairs. On reflection, she changed her vote in the full senate and the measure passed. I was one of many constituents who wrote to Senator Reynolds to ask for her support of the legislation. Part of what I wrote to her was that people of faith, such as herself, can and do support same-sex marriage. With Senator Reynolds’s support, along with the support of a majority of her fellow senators, New Hampshire’s same-sex marriage law went to Governor Lynch’s desk. After asking for a change in the bill’s language to ensure religious freedom for faith organizations that may oppose homosexuality or same-sex marriage, our governor signed the bill. As of today, gay and lesbian couples have been able to marry in the state of New Hampshire for three days.
Same-sex marriage is important for all the same reasons different-sex marriage is important. Marriage supports stable, loving relationships and provides a family for any children the couple may have. It represents a couple’s lifelong commitment to each other, publicly before their friends and family and before all that they hold holy. There are so many arguments against same-sex marriage in our society, and so many reasons I disagree with them, that I can’t go through them all this morning. I point you to two excellent books: What Is Marriage For?: The Strange Social History of Our Most Intimate Institution by E. J. Graff, and Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America, by Jonathan Rauch. These are books which offer both politically liberal and conservative arguments in favor of same-sex marriage.
So I’ll just touch on two of the most charged: children and the Bible. Children are often used rhetorically as one of the arguments against same-sex marriage. Some opponents say that children need one parent of each gender. This is usually another way of saying that children need fathers, since lesbian couples are much more likely to have or adopt children than gay male couples. Another argument against same-sex marriage is more biological: it states that people should get married in order to have children. Because same-sex couples can’t conceive children together, the argument goes, there is no need for them to get married. I’ve been to about four hearings on civil rights legislation for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people in New Hampshire. Regarding same-sex marriage, I have heard both of these arguments again and again.
Research has shown that the first argument is not strictly true, and common sense shows the second is limited at best. Children need parents: this is true. Babies and toddlers with both an involved, caring mother and father showed less separation anxiety than their peers with less involved parenting, and it manifested later and was a shorter stage of development. But babies and toddlers with even more caring adults in their lives, such as grandparents, aunts, uncles or nannies, did even better. Children benefit from living with and being cared for by caring adults, regardless of gender (Graff 120). The more caring, the better.
The second argument, that marriage is for the purpose of creating children, is obviously false. Conservative religious and political organizations do not oppose marriage between heterosexual couples who will not have children, such as older couples, infertile couples, or people who do not wish to have children. Sex makes children, not marriage. And children have been born within and without formal ties between their parents for all of human history. In fact, modern marriage exists to support the family, not the other way around. Marriage is a good idea because people do tend to have children, and those children do better if they have more adults committed to taking care of them. Marriages strengthen communities by encouraging people to remain financially stable and committed to one another. The argument for same-sex marriage is essentially conservative: that marriage is a good thing for committed couples to do. The more loving, committed couples who get married, the better. If they conceive or adopt children, better that those children’s loving parents are married than not.
People arguing against same-sex marriage are often grounded in a conservative Christian tradition. What the Bible says about marriage and sexuality is often misused, in my opinion. In the Hebrew Bible, injunctions against homosexual sex are more about the rules surrounding hospitality and property than they are about sexuality. In any case, conservative arguments against gay marriage are not made on the grounds that being gay is wrong, at least here in libertarian New Hampshire. They are made on the grounds that marriage is Biblically ordained as a commitment between one man and one woman. What these conservatives overlook are all the other kinds of marriage and sexuality sanctioned by the Bible: polygamy, concubinage, seduction, even (in the case of Lot and his daughters) incest and (in the case of Judah and Tamar) prostitution. Marriage as we know it draws much more on the precedents set in Roman and European practice than it does on biblical ordination. If we married each other like they did in the Bible, our families would look very different than they do today.
Here in New Hampshire, it seems unlikely that our new same-sex marriage law will be overturned by voter referendum, as has happened in Maine and California. New Hampshire does not have a voter initiative process like either of those states. Same-sex marriage is moving ahead in some states and stalling in others. I hope that in a generation we may look forward to action from the courts that assures the equal treatment of all people under the law when it comes to marriage. The majority should not be allowed to vote to overturn the civil rights of the minority.
Despite these successes in the area of same-sex marriage in New Hampshire, we cannot lose sight of the work still to be done. The success of same-sex marriage here reminds me of another triumph in New Hampshire: the confirmation of Gene Robinson as the Episcopal bishop of New Hampshire in 2003. The Right Reverend Robinson was the Episcopal church’s first openly gay bishop. Although this was a great step forward, it has led to the opening of a fissure in the Episcopal church. A few Episcopal churches have seceded from their dioceses and are either associating themselves with more conservative African dioceses, or are trying to create a new diocese of North America, which so far the Archbishop of Canterbury does not recognize. The Roman Catholic church has opened a pathway for dissenting Anglican priests to move into the Roman communion.
Meanwhile, the African churches, which are more conservative than their American sisters on issues of both sexuality and gender, are threatening that the confirmation of gay bishops could split the church. The African churches complain that the American churches, which are mostly white and mostly wealthy, are insisting on their way. I disagree with the African churches and the American churches that support them. But I do hear their plea that the ethical concerns of the American churches not trump the ethical concerns of the African churches, such as poverty and war. I hope that the American Episcopal dioceses will continue to move forward with the spirit, nominating and confirming gay and lesbian bishops when those people are the best candidates for the job. And I hope that Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, will have the courage to include those gay and lesbian bishops in the church as the Anglican communion moves forward. But I do hear the African church’s plea that white Americans not tell them what to do. Even as we move toward greater civil rights worldwide for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people, we must confront the problems of racism, poverty and war. Success in one area of oppression should only energize us for work against all oppression.
Although we in New Hampshire are celebrating same-sex marriage today, we still have work to do in achieving civil rights for all. There is the Defense of Marriage Act, a law which prohibits recognition of same-sex marriages, and which is in effect at the federal level and in about thirty states. Our military personnel also still suffer under the policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” In February, just after joyfully celebrating the marriage of two civilian women, I will witness the vows of two women currently serving our country in our armed forces. One of them is now serving in Iraq. They will speak their loving vows, they will declare their intentions of lifelong commitment, they will stand together as a couple bound in love and faith–but not as a couple bound in law. If they were to get married here in New Hampshire, where it is legal, they risk discharge from the military. They plan to marry legally once they retire from the armed services. They are serving our country in a dangerous place, but their country does not support them in their lives and love for one another.
As we ring in this new year of 2010, we celebrate together–gay, straight, male, female, transgendered, parents, child-free, the elderly and the young. We celebrate a step forward in freedoms and civil rights for all. And we recommit ourselves to the greater work of liberation still to be done by all peoples and for all peoples.
Please join me in prayer.
Each of us comes into this room from a particular personal history, family history, ethnic background and web of personal experiences. We come here to find and know that greater spirit within us and among us that inspires us to do better work than we have done, to cast our web of community ever wider.
We all retain rights and privileges in our society because of characteristics and identities beyond our control. We strive to keep in mind the privileges we enjoy which we have not earned. We are all too aware of the rights and privileges that our society keeps from us and our fellow Americans, because of our gender, sexual orientation, economic status, race, or country of origin.
We feel ourselves reach out in solidarity to those who do not have those same rights and privileges, because of who they are or where they were born. Imagine being denied those rights and privileges with them. Imagine helping them take up their struggle. We ask that spirit that we find here to help us use the privileges granted to us in society to help those on the margins. We dream of how we can build a more just world for all. Let us take a moment in silence to restore the sources of our inspiration for this important work. Amen.
Graff, E. J. What Is Marriage For?: The Strange Social History of Our Most Intimate Institution. Boston: Beacon Press, 2004.
“Same-sex marriage.” Wikipedia. 2 Jan. 2010. 1-11. Accessed 2 Jan. 2010.
“Same-sex marriage in New Hampshire.” Wikipedia. 2 Jan. 2010. 1-5. Accessed 2 Jan. 2010.