Our Common Vocation
© 2009, Rev. Bill Hamilton-Holway
Do you ever feel overwhelmed by it all? I do.
There is so much aching all around:
in our personal lives, our communities, the world.
It sometimes feels like too much.
And, there is so much good happening, so many energetic people doing so much, and asking for support.
When asked what is the distinguishing mark of the culture of free societies, Unitarian Universalist theologian James Luther Adams suggested it is “voluntary associations.” Free people gather together to devote their time to what is most important to them. It is through voluntary associations that we shape the world around us. Our religious communities, our political parties, our non-profit organizations are all voluntary associations, and we join and support them to further the values they affirm and make real through their actions.
JLA, as he was called, applied the theological principal of agape to our work, through voluntary associations, to shape the world. Agape, from the Greek, is self-giving love. It is love expressed not for self-gain, but because it is experienced as the very nature of being. We humans long for connection. Our hearts call us to shape the world towards justice: a pure love that embodies mutuality. We are our truest being when we are one with the presence within us of agape.
Looking forward to this Sunday has been overwhelming. Many months ago the requests started coming in. October 25th, the last Sunday in October is United Nations Sunday. Please plan a service affirming the work of the United Nations.
An email came from a Religious Education class in a Unitarian Universalist congregation in Florida asking us, on this Sunday, to Stand Up for the Millennium Goals of the United Nations.
October 25th will be Unitarian Universalist Association Sunday. Our theme will be Growing Our Diversity. Please join the celebration.
Saturday October 24th will be International Day of Climate Action. If you are concerned about our environment, the very atmosphere that supports life, please plan a service of consciousness-raising.
Health Care Reform, Marriage Equality, and Water Rights: these are the main emphases of the Unitarian Universalist California Legislative Ministry.
Please encourage your congregation to participate in all the activities planned to support these efforts.
The President is re-evaluating the strategy of the war in Afghanistan. Please join all those who believe that a peaceful end can be achieved only through peaceful means.
October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month. Every year since 1989 the United States Congress has passed legislation calling for all of us to do what we can to end violence against women and their children. Please join in a service of commemoration.
Twenty-five years ago advocates in the East Bay organized to preserve, protect and expand affordable housing opportunities. Please join in celebrating this interfaith effort by planning an October service in your congregation to support East Bay Housing Organizations.
It’s overwhelming, isn’t it?
Yet, as we pondered how we could say YES, on this one Sunday morning, to all of these worthy efforts to shape the world into a better place, that word agape kept coming back.
If you had attended last June the General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association in Salt Lake City, and walked through the halls of the Salt Palace Convention Center, you would have seen banner after banner proclaiming “Standing on the Side of Love.”
It’s an affirmation first raised among us as a call to marriage equality. In Salt Lake City we were encouraged to stretch our understanding of this fundamental expression of agape as the foundation for all our actions in the world.
On this United Nations Sunday, when we read The Charter of the United Nations, we hear the call of agape.
“We, the peoples of the United Nations, determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women, and of nations large and small, to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom, and for these ends to practice tolerance and to live together in peace as good neighbors, to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security, to insure that armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest, to employ international machinery in the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all people, [we the people] have resolved to combine our efforts to accomplish these aims.”1
“Following World War II, the United Nations (UN) was founded on October 24th, 1945. Since then October 24 has been called United Nations Day.
There are 192 member states of the United Nations... cooperating in international law, security, economic development, and social equality. With aims to protect human rights and achieve world peace, it is a center for governments to communicate and develop strategies to reach these ends.”2
“The founding of the U[nitarian] U[niversalist]-United Nations Office can be traced to April of 1962. US Ambassador to the United Nations and a Unitarian, Adlai Stevenson wrote to the president of the Unitarian Universalist Association:
Let me recommend to you the appointment of envoys in UU churches . . . to promote better knowledge and understanding of the United Nations. In this disastrous and shrinking world it is no longer possible - if it ever was - for local communities to be more secure than the surrounding world. Our ultimate security therefore lies in making the world more and more into a community. . . All of you have the opportunity to share in the answer, and thus help us build a peaceful world.”3
Agape. Together, forty-seven years later, through our United Nations Office, we Unitarian Universalists are Standing on the Side of Love.
All over the Bay Area yesterday thousands of concerned people turned out to demonstrate for cutting carbon emissions that are warming the Earth. The United Nations Climate Change Conference is coming up in Copenhagen this December, and we need the decision makers to know that we are committed to this reduction in greenhouse gases. The scientific consensus is that the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere has reached its limit if we are to sustain a planet similar to the one we know and to which life on Earth is adapted.
We demonstrate for change. We act to reduce, personally, our carbon emissions.4
Agape. For the future of the Earth, we Are Standing on the Side of Love.
There is no greater challenge expressed in the United Nations Charter than“to practice tolerance and to live together in peace.” As the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, led by the United States, extend into yet another year, we join the President in reviewing what should be our strategy. We remember the cruelty, and particularly the oppression of women by the Taliban. We remember the terrorist felling of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center by Al Queida. We do not want to perpetuate such violence. Yet, we long for an end to the killing.
Whatever decisions are made, may they be based in agape, that we lay the foundation for a world that can Stand Together on the Side of Love.
There is a tension within American culture between individualism and community. We affirm individual and states rights, and we look to the power of the nation to keep these rights in check, and to ensure equal access to them. We Unitarian Universalists are not all that different. We affirm individual freedom of belief, in which we call one another to follow our conscience in matters of religious belief. Sometimes we get lost in our individualism. We take it for granted, and fail to answer the call, as James Luther Adams would name it, to participate with one another in shaping the common good.
Our common vocation is to Stand on the Side of Love, to encourage and support one another in transforming our communities and our world, into places of greater justice and peace. It is only in community that affirms individuality, that both can thrive.
There are so many good causes, so many things we believe in. As individuals we can’t do it all. We each do what we can, when we can. As a community we can support those who are working on other causes we care about. We can express our support and appreciation to others for their actions on our behalf.
This is true not only on a congregational level, where we have so many people involved in so many important issues, but also in our association with other Unitarian Universalist congregations.
For decades Unitarian Universalists have worked for the right of gay, lesbian, and transgender people to legally marry. With the passage of Proposition 8 almost a year ago, through the Unitarian Universalist California Legislative Ministry, we join with all who are discerning the next steps in this historic quest for human rights, and pledge our continuing support.
Last Tuesday evening members of this congregation joined with others of the interfaith community to call for Health Care for All. As Congress moves toward adoption of Health Care Reform legislation we tell our stories, we call, write, and email our insistence that affordable health care is a right of all people.
Through the actions of the UU California Legislative Ministry we live from a core of agape. We Are Standing on the Side of Love.
There is so much more.
“The[ir] first Day of Unity [was] observed in October, 1981 by the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. The intent was to connect battered women’s advocates across the nation who were working to end violence against women and their children. The Day of Unity soon became a special week.”5 Since 1987, October has been observed as Domestic Violence Awareness Month. We mourn those who have died because of domestic violence, celebrate those who have survived, and support those who work to end violence, in homes and on the streets.
Each Friday at 12:45 p.m., in weeks that have held a murder on the streets of Richmond, members of this congregation join with others to remember these lost lives and to call for the end of such violence. Friday we stood at the corner of Cherry and Alamo in North Richmond, where 35 year old Gabriel Schroeder was shot and killed in his car, with his 14 year old son next to him.
We stand on this hilltop, just across the parking lot, next to the Guns Into Plowshares monument, with 21 guns buried beneath it, and recommit ourselves to Agape.
To witness to and to end violence, We Are Standing on the Side of Love.
East Bay Housing Organizations celebrated last week twenty-five years of “working with communities in Alameda and Contra Costa counties to preserve, protect and expand affordable housing opportunities through education, advocacy, and coalition building. At their annual interfaith breakfast, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, Christians, Buddhist, Bahais, Unitarian Universalists, and secular justice advocates joined together to begin the building of a national movement for housing justice.
Agape. Standing on the Side of Love.
“Today we affirm our common bonds and purposes with Unitarian Universalist congregations across the continent and beyond by celebrating Association Sunday. Recognizing our connection and common vision can inspire and empower us to do good work in the world. We are better together, as an Association of Congregations, and together we can have more influence on our country, which needs to embody more inclusive values.
The focus of Association Sunday this year is on Growing Our Diversity. This will look different in different congregations, but through our combined effort we can continue to build the beloved community. We need to deepen and extend our racial, cultural and economic diversity.”6
It is as we join our lives together, in voluntary association, with agape in our hearts, that we can affirm the efforts of all around us to make a better world.
How wonderful it is that we can be in community with others who are doing the work that we want to be done, but that we cannot do ourselves.
How wonderful it is to be able to affirm those who do so.
At the Housing breakfast last week, Civil Rights leader Vincent Harding spoke, saying “You have the power to carry out what needs to be done. Draw together. Keep doing the work until it’s done. Don’t think this will be done in your lifetime. That’s just ego. Keep doing the work as long as you can.”
It is a lot, and that is why we stay anchored in Our Common Vocation: agape.
Together we can do a lot. In all we do, let us Stand on the Side of Love.
1www.un.org/en/documents/ charter/
3 http://uu-uno.org/history/history.html?Itemid=71
5 http://www.ncadv.org/takeaction/DomesticViolenceAwarenessMonth.php
6 http://www.uua.org/documents/stew-dev/assnsunday/2009/090901_flyer.pdf
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
