Theological Hospitality

READINGS

A number of writers have been attracted to the thesis that God is a verb. Buckminster Fuller, in 1940, wrote:

Here is God's purpose –
for God to me, it seems,
is a verb
not a noun,
proper or improper;
is the articulation
not the art, objective or subjective;
is loving,
not the abstraction "love" commanded or entreated;
is knowledge dynamic,
not legislative code,
not proclamation law,
not academic dogma, nor ecclesiastic canon.
Yes, God is a verb,
the most active,
connoting the vast harmonic
reordering of the universe
from unleashed chaos of energy.
And there is born unheralded
a great natural peace,
not out of exclusive
pseudo-static security
but out of including, refining, dynamic balancing.”

Here’s how the poet Wild Bill Balding puts it:

God is a verb, not a noun:
'I am who I am,
I will be who I will be.'
dynamic, seething, active
web of love poured out,
given, received, exchanged,
one God in vibrant community
always on the move,
slipping through our fingers,
blowing through the nets we cast
to hold and name,
confine to nouns, to labels,
freezeframe stasis,
pinned like a butterfly,
solid, cold, controlled, lifeless.
'I am who I am,
I will be who I will be' -
not pinned down by names, labels,
buildings, traditions,
or even by nails to wood:
I am: a verb, not a noun,
living, free, exuberant,
always on the move.

Jean-Claude Koven writes:

“God is indeed a verb. He is not the creator. He is the ongoing unfoldment of creation itself. There is nothing that is not a part of this unfolding. Thus there can be nothing separate from God. . . . When we perceive God as a noun, we envision him as the creator, the architect of, and therefore separate from, his creation. Identifying ourselves as part of that creation, we see ourselves not only separate from our source but separate from each other and all other manifest things as well. . . . Once I viewed God as a verb instead of a noun, my perception of life shifted. Everything around me, manifest or no, became God. There was only God. When someone spoke to me, it was with God's voice; when I listened, it was with God's heart. As you begin to view God not as the creator but as the constantly changing dance of creation itself, you'll discover God in everything you see – including yourself.”

PART 1: HARD TRUTH AND DEEP TRUTH

On the one hand, we Unitarian Universalists do cherish our theological diversity. We like being around people with a range of viewpoints and practices.

On the other hand, though, we aren’t always able to be as hospitable to divergent religious viewpoints as we could be. Some years ago, our Unitarian Universalist Association conducted a nationwide survey of our various theological identities. It asked people to identify their own theological identity and indicate whether they felt completely welcomed in their congregation. The UU Christians by-and-large said they felt more-or-less accepted, but they were sometimes marginalized. The UU Pagans said they felt basically accepted, but sometimes marginalized. The UU Humanists also felt mostly accepted, albeit, they said, sometimes a little marginalized. The UU Buddhists said, “We’re fine.”

To think in a welcoming and hospitable way about people with diverse theological views – a way that makes everyone, regardless of their preferred metaphors for matters of ultimate concern, fully accepted and integral to the center of our congregational life, it helps to think for a moment about: Truth. The thing is, our default position – which we think to ourselves even if we don’t say it aloud – goes like this: “My way of understanding the world is true, and other people’s bizarre fantasies will just have to be tolerated – because we’re proud of our theological diversity.” So let’s think through a little bit this notion of truth so as to minimize the (perhaps unconscious) stumbling block that it can be for us. As a tool for conceptualizing this, allow me to submit for your consideration, that there are two categories of truths: call them hard truths and deep truths.

Hard truths are the domain of scientists and historians. Hard truth is also the concern of criminal trials to ascertain the hard truth of who did what. This is a kind of history, as the attorneys attempting to convince a jury of what happened on the night of 23rd are functional historians, sifting through evidence to tell a story of what happened in the past. If you find yourself on the witness stand at a criminal trial, they are not going to be interested in poetry. They do not want your creative metaphors that limn the unspeakable depths of what your soul has experienced.

Indeed, the methods and claims of the historian may be seen as an outgrowth from the earliest forms of criminal justice. The genre we know as history is commonly said to have been invented by the Greek writer Herodotus, whose Histories was written between 440 and 430 BCE, providing an account of the Greco-Persian Wars. Herodotus was able to conceive of this new genre, this new kind of writing, and his readers were able to comprehend what he was doing, I think, only because Herodotus was building upon and extending modes of thought available from centuries of community practices for dealing with transgressors against the community’s norms (i.e., criminals).

To decide if a person was, in fact, a criminal required the beginnings of a notion of what I’m calling hard truth. Early human communities had to ascertain the hard truth of just what was done to whom. They has to consider available evidence and how best to interpret that evidence. There may not have been anything much like Sherlock Holmes-type deduction from the physical evidence, and the parties’ status in the community probably carried more sway than, to us, would seem fair, but still, there was likely something like character witnesses and some attempt to work out what most likely really happened – to discern, that is, the hard truth of the matter.

For a long time in human history, this may have been the only sphere where hard truth really mattered to the community. Outside of needs to determine moral responsibility, storytellers wove stories about the origin of the world, of how the people came to be the people they understood themselves to be, and these mythic tales were assessed by communal agreement that they were satisfying stories. Such mythic stories were not matters of “hard” or “evidence-based” truth, but they did tell deep truth with moral lessons. The stories were true by virtue of corresponding to the moral reality of the community.

Then Herodotus came along and by his example created an interest in telling stories about the past that were not just edifying and morally instructive and uplifting, but were hard true, or “evidence-based.”

Then science came along – though it sure took its time getting here. There were various methodologies of what I’d call pre-science or proto-science through ancient and medieval times, but a full-on embrace of the experimental method didn’t happen until about 400 years ago. If I had to pinpoint it, I’d say 1642. That’s the year Galileo died and the year Newton was born: kind of the center year of the transitional period into our scientific age. Scientific method doesn’t come naturally to homo sapiens brains. Our species has been around for about 300,000 years. Suppose we say exactly 300,000 years. That would mean it took us 299,600 years to grasp and adopt the scientific method, which we have had for only the last 400 years.

What science has given us in these 400 years is amazing powers of prediction and control. When you can predict what things will do, you can set up conditions to make them do it, and, boom, we’re off – steam engines, electric lights, automobiles, airplanes, radios and so on to all the devices we live with today.

I hear my Mom’s voice – she was a physics professor – saying that science aims to explain our world. OK, Mom, but science is a particular kind of explanation – namely, the kind that facilitates prediction and control. The hard truths in history and in criminal law provide us our best guess about what happened. The hard truths of science provide us with amazing prediction and control. But we want more than to predict and control our world. We want also to befriend it. We need to love, and to belong, and to know how to think about what’s right and what’s wrong -- what’s good and worthy and valuable and what isn’t – and who we are. We need to know not just what has happened or what we now could make happen, but how to decide what should happen – what we want to happen.

For that we need truth that is deep rather than hard -- poetic truth that speaks to the depths of who we are and what is our place in all of this. Science and history figure into that, but they cannot by themselves convey these deep truths. A good novel is fiction, but it contains deep truths that science and history alone cannot.

I’ve said before that theology is best understood as a kind of poetry. So science and religion can have no quarrel with each other. One is in the hard truth business and the other in the deep truth business.

I know that sometimes some people have thought that what scientists were saying was a threat to what their theology said. The Catholic church tried Galileo for heresy for saying the Earth went around the Sun, not vice-versa. And a lot of people even today regard evolution as in conflict with their religious teachings. But that doesn’t mean we have to see any conflict between science and anybody's religious teachings.

Religious teachings – whether ours or someone else's – provide a person with deep truth, while evolution is a product of our quest for hard truths. It’s out of place to start citing T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” on the witness stand, and in just the same way it’s out of place to start citing Genesis in biology class – though both “The Wasteland” and Genesis are profoundly meaningful and important works of literature that command our attention in our quest for deep truth.

If our religious differences are understood as matters of different poetry, then the fact that some people are Catholics and some are Shinto may be regarded the way we regard the fact that some people prefer Walt Whitman and some prefer Emily Dickinson. If a new style of poetry shows up, then let us be interested, curious, and maybe even playful with the possibilities that these new metaphors open up. After all, we are a religious institution – and the human grappling after deep truth is what we’re all about.

Theological literacy helps – it’s helpful to know more about what sorts of theological options are out there. So let me give an example. Maybe for some of us this will be good practice in being sympathetic and open to ways to think about God. Maybe there’s some poetry here that you can add to your very own heart’s spiritual anthology. Radical hospitality, you see, goes beyond tolerance, beyond accepting, beyond welcoming, and embraces a willingness to be changed by the other. Radical hospitality is interested in finding new poems to add to one’s own personal spiritual poetry anthology. The example I will go into is one that some of us may know, but not, I think, all of us – or, at least, maybe we could a reminder: Process Theology.

PART 2: PROCESS THEOLOGY

Process Theology began in the early 20th century, as a development from Process Philosophy, created by Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947). Whitehead, a mathematician turned philosopher, published Process and Reality in 1929. Western thought since Plato has privileged Being over Becoming. Whitehead flipped that. He said reality is fundamentally becoming. Process is what’s fundamental, and things are just temporary manifestations of unfolding process -- as opposed to the predominant presumption that things are fundamental and that they change is nonessential, an imperfection, a design flaw. The perfection of God, from the Platonists through Thomas Aquinas and up to modern times, was God’s unchangingness. Whitehead said change is not a bug in the system. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature. Change is not nonessential – it is the essence. The ultimate principle is creativity – the process of creating takes precedence over any product creation.

Whitehead gives us Process philosophy, and while Whitehead did write about the place of God in his philosophy, process philosophy did not become full-fledged process theology until the Unitarian Charles Hartshorne’s work expanded, extended, and revised Whitehead.

Born in 1897, Hartshorne lived to age 103. He was giving a talk at our UU General Assembly as recently as 1994, when he was 97. For Hartshorne’s Process Theology, God is not omnipotent. God is finite – changing and growing along with creation. Reality is made of events, not material substance. God, being finite and not omnipotent, doesn’t have full control of what happens. Rather, God engages with us in a process in which both we and God develop together. God changes. God offers us possibilities the full meaning of which God doesn’t know. As we, God’s creatures, explore the offered possibilities, Creator and Creation alike learn, grow, develop, allowing new possibilities to be offered.

Hartshorne held that people do not experience subjective immortality, but we do have objective immortality in that our experiences live on forever in God, who contains all that was. Just as you, throughout your life, build on your experiences, developing new experiences shaped by all prior experience, so, too, God, after your death, continues to build on your experiences. Your experiences continue to contribute to God’s new experiences for all eternity.

Yes, God transcends the world, but the world also transcends God. Yes, God creates the world, but the world also creates God. We are a part of God. Our growth is a part of God’s growth. God’s knowledge is the sum total of the knowledge of all life-forms – God’s desires, the sum of the desires of life.

The emphasis on change leads to the idea that God is a verb. In the readings above, Buckminster Fuller, Bill Balding, and Jean-Claude Koven, articulate this “God is a Verb” thesis. UU minister Stephen Phinney puts it this way:

“I believe that the holy is in the process of giving and taking of the love we have. In other words, the holy or God is the process of interchanging love.”

You might find this perspective radical or exhilarating. You might also have noticed that the God-is-a-verb people are not actually using “God” as a verb. They say, for instance, that reality is more a matter of events than substances. “Events” does convey a more dynamic quality than “substances,” but if we’re talking about parts of speech, “event” is just as much a noun as “substance” is. They speak of God as “process” and as “creativity” and as “energy.” All three are nouns. Jean-Claude Koven said God was “unfoldment,” and “infinity,” and “everything,” and “a dance.” Nouns every one. For that matter, “verb” is a noun.

Still.

The point is: there is in our life and our experience a cause for wonder, mystery, reverence. This is better thought of as a process, a dance, a creativity, a love than as a person or entity. Calling it a verb is just a way of alluding to its active doing.

But supposing – just to be playful -- we did want to be sticklers for actually meaning what we said. How would that go, for God to be a verb? Well, verbs need a subject, if we’re going to speak in sentences, so we could say: The universe gods. There’s the vast cosmos, quietly, grandly godding along through the ages. Reality gods. I god, you god, he she it gods, we god, you god, they god. All God’s children . . . god.

And what sort of activity is it “to god”? Following the lead of the process and the creativity theologians: to god is to unfold, like an infinite flower opening its petals; to develop through a process of interaction with all the rest of the godding universe. To god is to become transparent to the creativity of the universe shining through you. Certainly not a hard truth, but possibly a deep one.

To god is to fandango across the ballroom of oneness, to trip the light fantastic with -- no, as -- mountains and rivers and great wide earth, the sun, and the moon, and the stars. To god is, in the words of Sufi poet Hafiz, to “laugh at the word two.” It is to swim in the sea of mystery; to quaff from the cup of abundance. To god is to suffice. Whoever you are, whatever your imagined shortcomings, you are enough – ample. To god is to do and be everything that you do and are. Why would anyone want to call these activities "godding"? We might call them godding to help us remember, to help us wake up to, and attune ourselves to, the fact that everything we do and are is a part of the whole, a part of the dance, the mystery of creativity, the unpredictable unfolding of new things under the sun.

For the medievals, to apprehend reality at its most ultimate meant to conceive of changeless eternity. Above this world of corruption and change, God was pure, immutable, outside of time. To think of God as an active verb is to emphasize the time during which the actions take place. It is to put God in time, rather than removed from time. It is to perceive the holy in change, rather than imagine it in changelessness. It calls attention to divinity as spread throughout all of nature, as manifested by the activities of nature.

Verb theology can incorporate modern science, building a deep truth with building blocks of hard truth from science “that reality at the most fundamental level is composed of shimmering waves of probability, fluctuating, intertwining matter and energy” (Phinney). Instead of saying species just are, biologists now understand species as in flux. That hard truth can be a building block in cultivating spiritual awe and wonder at the playing out of unpredictable creativity all around us.

I have been imagining God as an intransitive verb. But let’s continue to be playful – yet at the same time heartful. What if God were a transitive verb? If reality gods, what does it god? Perhaps we could say the universe gods you, and it gods me. Reality gods the mud and the flowers alike; it gods the Republicans and the Democrats alike. It godded Palestinians and Hammas and it godded Israel and its militant leadership. It godded despotic governments at the very moment they were disappearing their own people and turning away aid.

There is an activity of relationship between all things, an active connection of each thing with all things. In the fullest realization of God-as-transitive-verb, everything gods everything (else). Unitarian theologican Henry Nelson Wieman, said that the “universe becomes spiritual” as

“more events become signs, as these signs take on richer content of qualitative meanings, as these meanings form a network of interconnective events comprehending all that is happening in the world.” (Wieman 23)

It would seem, to carry Wieman to his logical conclusion, that the universe will have attained total, complete and perfect spirituality when everything signifies everything else -- or when, we might say, everything gods and is godded by everything else.

Godding, then, would be the activity of building meaning by building interconnection and relationship. The butterfly in Australia gods the weather in Chicago. You god the stars and the stars god you. Joy gods sadness and sadness gods joy.

This use of “god” seems to mean something like “connects with” or “interdependently arises with.” But more. This way of thinking maybe helps us see through the illusion that there are any separate things. Everything IS everything else.

Verbs need a subject -- that is, I said, if we’re going to speak in sentences. But what if we dispensed with sentences? Could we tell the story of life, of creation, in a language without subjects or objects, a language of only verbs, a language that perhaps the Cosmos itself speaks when it whispers to itself -- or whispers in your ear? Because it is timeless we need verbs with no tense (past tense or present tense or future tense). And because it is both one and many, we need verbs that are neither singular nor plural. Because it is infinite, the Cosmos speaks in the infinitive. So in the pursuit of poetic truth, I offer, in closing, this poem consisting entirely of infinitive verbs.

To come, to go,
To run, to jump, to twirl.
To birth, to grow.
To laugh.
To fall, to break, to cry, to rage.
To abandon.
To return, to embrace, to love.
To wound, to bleed, to weep.
To arise.
To work, to play, to smile.
To journey.
To heal.
To arrive, to arrive, to arrive.
To bless.

Amen.

Gathering In

Here we are, gathering in, kicking off our new church year. It is good to be together. As we begin our year, as we gather in, it’s a good time to reflect on why. And the first answer is just that: it is good to be together.

Good as it is, it’s sometimes not easy for human beings – particularly human beings in these polarized, disconnected, alienating times. A poll by the American Psychiatric Association in January of this year found that 30% of U.S. adults feel lonely at least once a week, and 10% feel lonely every day. Last year, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy released an official advisory on our epidemic of loneliness and isolation.

The report said that from 2003 to 20219 (so this is before the pandemic), time spent alone increased for the average American from 285-minutes-per-day to 309-minutes-per-day -- representing an increase of 24 hours per month spent alone. We need some alone time – but not 36 hours a week, on average, which is what we were getting in 2019 -- and then the pandemic, of course, spiked that number further upward.

From 2003 to 2020, the report said, time respondents engaged with friends socially in-person decreased from 60 minutes-per-day to 20 minutes-per-day. That’s not enough.

In 1990, nearly a quarter of Americans (27%) reported having three or fewer close friends. In 2021, nearly half (49%) said they had three or fewer close friends. Whatever “close friends” might mean, Americans are reporting that they feel close to fewer and fewer people.

Being the Surgeon General, Murthy looked at this as a medical issue. The physical health consequences of poor or insufficient connection include, the report said: A “29% increased risk of heart disease, a 32% increased risk of stroke, and a 50% increased risk of developing dementia for older adults.” Overall, “lacking social connection increases risk of premature death by more than 60%.” So: it’s really good to be together.

Just coming here is such an important thing you do for yourself and for each other – and yet, any kind of relationship with others is something Americans have been finding it harder and harder to do. “The thing we need most is relationships,” writes David Brooks, adding: “The thing we seem to suck at most is relationships.” Why is that?

I heard Nicholas Epley, professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago, on a recent "Hidden Brain" podcast. Epley said he commuted to work on the train, where he had an unvarying protocol. He said:

“I just sat there and ignored everybody. I'd read a book, I'd listen to music, I'd scroll through my phone, looking at the news, the kind of thing that everybody else does. Sit down, you leave other people alone.”

Epley was doing this, even as he was on his way to the office where, among his academic duties, he was also working on a book “describing how we're made happier and healthier by reaching out and connecting with others by being social.”

One day it hit him, “like a lightening bolt,” he says:

“that here we are, highly social creatures with brains uniquely adapted for connecting to the minds of others. And yet, we're all sitting here ignoring each other. And that struck me as bizarre.”

We have this image of the obnoxiously gregarious passenger, and we don’t want to be that person, so we withdraw into our phone or a book. Where did we get that image? We probably picked it up from movies or TV rather than experience. Epley says,

“I decided I'd try to have a conversation with somebody that morning. I'd take an interest in somebody else. Eventually, all the seats are taken, and a woman comes and sits down next to me. She's an African American woman in probably her mid 50s or so, I would guess. She had on a bright red hat. I remember that very vividly. She sat down next to me, and I decided I'm going to try to get to know a little something about her. And so I said the first thing that came to my mind, which was a joke, but a compliment at the same time, I complimented her on her hat. I said how much I liked it, and that I had one just like it. And we both chuckled. I mean, it wasn't, look, it's probably not the best joke you've ever heard. But that got the conversation started. And from there it just went. We talked about our careers and our jobs and what we did for a living, but also whether this was really what we wanted to do for a living. I remember her feeling sort of stuck in her job and it wasn't quite what she wanted to do and thinking about making a change. She talked a little bit about her family, how she needed to support her family. And, you know, the conversation went really fast. It was about a half an hour trip. It was over really quickly. I was struck by that. And as I got up to leave, I thanked her for taking time to talk to me. She seemed delighted to have talked to me. And as I walked off the train, I remembered two feelings. One, that it felt nice. It was nicer than what I'd normally done that morning, which was probably scroll through the news. But the other thing I remembered was that it was surprisingly nice. I was, I was surprised by how nice it was.”

So Epley, being a research psychologist, began a study. He and a colleague went to the Homewood, Illinois Metra station and set up a sign on the way up to the train platform that recruited people to participate in an experiment if they were interested. He says,

“we handed them a $5 Starbucks gift card, and then we randomly assigned them to do one of three things on the train that morning. In one condition, we asked people to just do whatever they normally do on the train. In the next condition, this is our solitude condition, we asked people to keep to themselves, to just focus on their day ahead, and not engage other people in conversation. And in the third condition, we asked people to do the thing that I did on the train that morning, which was when somebody comes and sits down next to you, try to have a conversation. We then handed them an envelope that had their Starbucks gift card in it and a survey in it. And we told them, at the end of your commute, fill out the survey, drop it back in the mail to us. And off they went.”

The survey asked them how pleasant was your commute compared to normal? How happy do you feel after this commute? And how sad do you feel? Epley reports:

“What we found was that people actually reported having the most positive experience when they talk to a stranger. And they had the least positive experience in the solitude condition, where we asked them to keep to themselves. The control condition where people did whatever they normally did fell in the middle. We conducted another experiment where we asked people not to tell us … how they thought they would feel if they were in each of these conditions -- to predict how they would feel. And what we found was that people actually predicted that they would have the least positive experience in the connection condition and the most positive experience in the control and the solitude condition. And those expectations were just precisely wrong.”

Epley goes on to say that extrovert vs. introvert doesn’t matter. He says:

“Psychologists have been doing lots of experiments where they ask people to behave more extrovertedly or more introvertedly, and the very consistent finding is that when people actually do this, people feel happier when they act extroverted than when they act introverted, and that's just as true for folks who are consistently extroverted as it is for folks who are consistently introverted. As far as we can tell, where introversion and extroversion matters is not in people's experience of social interaction, as much as it is in their choices of social interaction. That is, extroverts choose to reach out and engage with others a little bit more often than introverts do. And as a result of choosing to reach out, they tend to be a little bit happier. In many ways, it seems a little bit like physical exercise, that some of us choose to exercise more than others, even though all of us, regardless of whether we choose to or not, would actually be a little healthier if we exercised more often. The same thing seems to be true with our sociality as well.”

So research from Epley and others shows we systematically underestimate how much we will enjoy connecting with people, and how meaningful our outreach will feel to others. Why do we underestimate this?

We have a desire to connect, but we also have fears that lead us to avoid other people – and the “avoid” circuitry tends to win out over the “connect” circuitry more often than is really optimal for us. Most of us, usually, have to give ourselves a little push, stretch ourselves a bit, to go ahead and start up that conversation.

The quality of the connection is especially enhanced if we don’t just stay at the level of small talk. We have this idea that we have to get to know a person over a long period of time, and slowly work our way up to deeper conversations. Actually, it doesn’t take so long. You can very quickly – not quite immediately, I would say, but almost – ask a relative stranger a really deeply connecting kind of question: What do you regret most in your life? Or what do you want to be known for? What are you most proud of? If we were to become friends, what would be most important for me to know about you? If a crystal ball could tell you anything about the future, what would you want to know? When was the last time you cried cried in front of another person? Or if you just say, “tell me about yourself,” they will often start going pretty deep into who they are – their hopes, trepidations, yearnings.

We’re afraid of being rebuffed, but Epley says,

“I cannot think of a time where I've tried to really connect meaningfully with somebody in conversation and they've said no. You take an interest in somebody, you ask about something they really care about, they're happy to talk to you about it typically.”

I’m talking about gathering in: gathering in as a congregation – and what it takes to gather people into our lives. Why do we gather here – why are we a part of this church? I said, first, that it’s just so good to be together – so necessary, even, though its sometimes a push to make ourselves do it.

When we ministers get together, we have sometimes been wont to express a little frustration about congregants who seem to think church is just a social club. But you know, in these days of increasing isolation and loneliness, the fact is we need more social clubs. If that’s all that we were, that would be reason enough to keep the doors open. At the same time, that’s not all that we are – we are not just a social club. We are a covenantal people – a people of covenant, and Bill and I reviewed the levels of covenant at the beginning of our service today.

We have a mission: "love radically." That's not typically what a social club would say. "Grow ethically and spiritually. Serve justly." So we gather in because its so good to be together, and we also gather in to carry out our mission. We gather in to love radically – and to learn from practice and from each other how to do that. We gather in to grow ethically and spiritually.

We have work to do. And like starting up a conversation with a stranger, it might feel a little uncomfortable at first. You can think of this church as a social club, but also a gym. Earlier I cited Nick Epley as saying that sociality was like exercise – some of us may be more inclined to it, but its good for all of us. This is a place for toning those spiritual muscles -- strengthening the meaning, purpose, and wholeness of your life.

In my sermon a year ago at our in-gathering, I cited my colleague Rev. Victoria Weinstein. Let me this year remind you what she said:

“If I go to the gym and people are sprawled out napping on the floor of the aerobics studio, I will think the gym management is not just remiss, but nuts. It’s no different in church. We’re all there for heart strengthening of a different kind. Leaders should be empowered to be able to say: 'Get off the aerobics floor, please. You can nap at home.' This isn’t about not loving people. It’s about being clear what congregational life is for. Napping on the floor of the aerobics studio is not part of our mission, so we won’t be addressing your complaints about the pillows.”

Thank you, Rev. Weinstein.

To say that a church is a spiritual gym is not to forget that the church is also a spiritual infirmary. There are times in life when we come to church sick at heart, soul weary, broken-spirited. Before we can think about the exercises and disciplines which cultivate and strengthen our wisdom, compassion, and equanimity, we just need to be cared for. We need replenishing rest. We need salve for our woundedness, for indeed salve is the root of salvation, with which our religious forbears were particularly concerned.

Yes, the church has that pastoral function in addition to its prophetic task to serve justice. As the saying goes, the church’s function is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Let us recognize that every one of us is both – in some ways afflicted and in need of comfort, and in some ways comfortably complacent and in need of an afflicting prod. What we are here for, the reason we gather in, the thing that both comforts us in our affliction and afflicts us in our comfort, is this mission: love radically, grow ethically and spiritually, and serve justly.

We grow by continuing to learn and reflect, and to help focus that, we have 10 monthly themes we’ll be developing this year:

• Hospitality,
• Fear,
• Reason,
• Awe and Wonder,
• Vow,
• Borders and Boundaries,
• Dignity,
• Caring,
• Beauty,
• Community.

Explorations of themes like these help UUs develop a language of faith, competency in our theology, and the inner resources for dealing with tough times. So come to Sunday service, read each month’s issue of “Connecting,” get out your journal and delve into the journaling prompts included in the issue, sign up for and come to Connection Circle (click here).

Radical hospitality is our theme this month, and it’s what today’s sermon has been about, though I didn’t mention the word hospitality until now. The need for hospitality given our epidemic of loneliness and isolation; the benefits of talking with strangers, on trains or anywhere – both to us and to them; how quickly we can go deep in conversations even with people we haven’t known long. It doesn’t come easily and naturally to us to open up to others, to build real connections, but that’s what being hospitable is all about.

As we gather in as a congregation, let us gather into our lives more people. We need it. They need it.

May it be so. Amen.

Labor Day Lessons about Hospitality

We are exploring hospitality this month. And it’s the Labor Day weekend. It is my task this morning to weave those two together to effect your delight and edification -- to see what hospitality lessons may be gleaned from the Labor Day story.

I’ll begin with a poem that Sarah Chang shared during her service a couple Sundays ago. It is a Coleman Barks poem inspired by Rumi. I say it that way because Coleman Barks is the poet singlehandedly responsible for the boom in interest in the 13th-century Sufi mystic, Jalaludin Rumi. Coleman Barks is a fine American poet. He does not speak or read Farsi Persian. He read English translations of Rumi and thought, “I think I can say better what I think that’s saying.” I have read some of those earlier English translations of Rumi, and in my opinion Barks is right about that: he does say it better. But whether what we’re getting is really Rumi or more Coleman Barks is an open question. For one thing, Rumi was deeply, devotedly Muslim, and references to the Koran are sprinkled extensively through his poems, but all of that has been erased from Coleman Barks’ versions, so I feel like I ought to acknowledge that. Still, this Coleman Barks poem inspired by Rumi is lovely, and is beloved by many throughout the English-speaking world – and is very wise.

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

You are a guest house. Hospitality is your job – it is the labor (see what I did there?) the joyful labor of being human.

Hospitality involves the skill of making other people feel welcome, assured that they belong. And what Rumi by way of Coleman Barks tells us is that every experience is like a person – every emotion, every passing fear or sadness or moment of joy, every momentary awareness, every problem or challenge – is like a person to be welcomed and entertained and assured that they belong. You could try to keep out those guests you find unpleasant – and I guess you probably have tried to suppress feelings you didn’t want. But if you don’t welcome them at the front door, emotions do have a way of sneaking in through the back door. Hospitality is about welcoming all of your life into your life – and that includes other people.

Now: On this Labor Day weekend, I want to share with you a story about the origin of Labor Day – how we came to have this holiday. It is fundamentally a story that has its roots in the impulse toward hospitality – wanting to be hospitable, but not hospitable to everything. When our hospitality isn’t radical – isn’t extended, as Barks and Rumi say, to whatever comes – when we want to welcome what is fun and joyous and slam the door on what is dark or hurts a bit – then things won’t work out so well.

Labor itself is the mixing of what is hard with what, we hope, is rewarding – intrinsically rewarding ideally, and at least extrinsically rewarding, but even when intrinsically rewarding, still sometimes un-fun. We happen to inherit a tradition in which labor is punishment. In the Genesis story, the original humans ate “of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,” and Yahweh kicked them out of paradise, and gave them labor. Yahweh was gender-specific about the labor – in keeping with the culture of the time from which these stories emerge. The woman’s labor is childbearing. The man’s labor is working the fields. So labor is what we have to endure because we ate of a tree and got called out. We go out of Eden and go into: labor. Tough break.

The interpretation of that Genesis story that makes more sense to me is one offered by Rabbi Lawrence Kushner in Eyes Remade for Wonder. Kushner suggests that the whole thing was a setup. Like any good parent, God knew that to grow up we would have to leave home and so put that tree there to create a pretext for kicking us out.

“We have read it all wrong. God was not angry. God rejoiced at our disobedience and then wept with joy that we could feel our estrangement and want to return home.”

The return home, however, is not easy. It is, in fact, labor. And the labor of making our own way home and the labor of making others feel at home turns out to be the same labor.

Whether or not labor seems to us to be a pain or a drudgery to endure just to pay the pills, there is before us also the prospect of labor as the path home. Let me then relate the cautionary tale of industrialist George Pullman, born 1831.

George Pullman founded the Pullman Palace Car Company that manufactured railroad cars, particularly the Pullman sleeping car. In 1880, he bought 4,000 acres 14 miles south of Chicago, and got an architect to design not only his new plant for making railroad cars, but a whole town: houses for 10,000 workers, shopping areas, a church, theaters, parks, a hotel, and a library – all owned by one man. He built and owned the power plant that powered his factory and his town. The town was named after him: “Pullman, Illinois.”

Pullman’s workers worked for him, lived in houses owned by him, paid their rent and their utilities to him, and shopped in stores owned by him, strolled in his parks. He was, in his way, and in his mind, being more hospitable to his workers. His aim was to solve the issue of labor unrest and poverty: labor unrest for his own industrialist motives, but at least he had the insight to see that to do that required tackling poverty.

For years George Pullman had been a philanthropic supporter of fine schools – with the aim of providing business with a better quality of laborer. He wanted a happy, loyal workforce, so his town provided for all his workers’ needs. They got a state-of-the art home: indoor plumbing, gas lights, sewers – well above the average dwelling of the time. They got fine country air and beautiful neighborhoods. The mortality statistics, indeed, established that Pullman, Illinois was one of the most healthful places in the world to live.

The town created a national sensation. The press praised Pullman’s benevolence and vision. To ensure there would be no unhappiness, Pullman prohibited outside agitators, allowed no saloons, or vice district. The hotel on the edge of town had the town’s only bar, and it was open only to visitors, not the residents. He prohibited independent newspapers, public speeches, town meetings or open discussion. He wanted his workers to have clean homes, so his inspectors regularly entered homes to inspect for cleanliness and could terminate leases on ten days notice. Private charitable organizations were prohibited. Pullman was showing hospitality – but on his own rather restrictive terms – which isn’t real hospitality at all.

He built only one church building in his town: the Greenstone Church. Pullman’s plan was that all religious denominations would band together and share the one building. But the various denominations would not unite, and no single denomination could afford the rent, so the church stood empty for the town’s first seven years until Pullman finally slashed the rent by two-thirds, and Presbyterians rented it. But it all came crashing down.

In 1893 the stock market crashed. The railroad "bubble" (overbuilding railroads, and relying on shaky financing to do it) burst. The "Panic of 1893" was, at the time, the worst economic depression the United States had ever experienced. 150 railroads closed. There was massive unemployment. Pullman cut his workers' wages by 25 percent or more. He did not, however, reduce the rents he charged his workers for living in Pullman, Illinois. Hospitality sometimes entails sacrifice, and Pullman wasn’t willing to share in the sacrifices of hard times.

The next year, 1894, 4,000 Pullman employees went on a wildcat strike: "wildcat" because it wasn’t authorized by the workers’ trade union officials -- which was because they didn’t have any trade union officials -- which was because Pullman didn’t allow labor unions. Then organizers for Eugene Debs' American Railway Union came in and signed up many of the striking workers, and the Pullman strike spread. Soon 100,000 railroad workers across the country were refusing to handle trains with Pullman cars. The strike shut down much of the nation's freight and passenger traffic west of Detroit.

Various sympathy strikers prevented transportation of goods by walking off the job, obstructing railroad tracks or threatening and attacking the replacement workers the railroads sought to hire. At its peak, the strike involved 250,000 workers in 27 states.

Pullman called up his friend and fellow railroad director, United States Attorney General Richard Olney. With President Grover Cleveland's backing, troops were sent to Chicago. The federal government secured a federal court injunction against the union, Debs, and the top leaders ordering them to stop interfering with trains that carried mail cars. They refused. The Army moved in to stop the strikers from obstructing the trains. Violence broke out in a number of cities inflicting millions of dollars in damages and killing 30 people.

The Army broke the strike. Debs went to prison for violating a court order. The railroads fired and black-listed all the employees who had supported the strike.

As soon as the strike was over and the trains were running, President Cleveland and Congress moved to make conciliation to organized labor. Six days after the 1894 Pullman strike ended, legislation was pushed through Congress declaring that the first Monday of September was a Federal holiday, Labor Day.

So that, dear ones, is why we have Labor Day. It is the consolation prize we got after the Feds sent in troops to protect corporate interests and break up a strike. It was a bone to try to head off further conflict. And they put it in September, instead of giving official recognition to the more widely known International Workers Day on May 1, because they wanted to pull attention away from the more radical labor movements.

The story of conflict between "management" (the wealthy, the controllers of capital) and people whose labor they want to make use of (whether slaves, indentured servants, or laborers) is the central and on-going story of our country. This is who we are as a people.

Labor Union membership peaked in the 1940s and 50s, and has been declining ever since. There are 6.4 million working poor, as of 2021, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. On the weekend for celebrating labor, let spare a thought or two for those who labor and aren’t paid enough to not be poor.

The story of George Pullman is of particular salience to us Unitarian Universalists. This story -- the story of the industrialist who owned an entire town, ruled over it, sparked a national strike, and then brought in the Army to violently break that strike -- is our story, quite specifically. You see, George Pullman was one of us in a very direct sense. George Pullman was a Universalist: born, raised, lived and died. George’s father, raised a Baptist, and his mother, raised Presbyterian, converted to Universalism, drawn to the “God is Love” message of the Universalist minister Thomas Eaton. George's Dad often led the services when no preacher was available.

The Pullmans were a devotedly, devoutly, Universalist family. Both of George’s two older brothers became Universalist ministers and were prominent figures in our faith. Late in his life, George Pullman had a Universalist church built in his hometown, Albion, New York, as a memorial to his parents.

Industrialist George Pullman was a Universalist, born and bred and lifelong. Something of the Universalist outlook may be detected in his life and actions. He believed his workers deserved decent accommodations. He saw that education was a win-win: it made workers lives better, and made them more useful workers for businessmen like him. "I have faith," Pullman told the press, "in the educational and refining influences of beauty, and beautiful and harmonious surroundings."

Pullman had a kind of Universalist hope that different denominations could come together and worship together in one church. There is a certain idealist, utopian strain of thought in the planning of his town. Liberal religion is characterized by an optimism about human possibility. From our beginnings 450 years ago, Unitarians and Universalists have been peoples who rejected Calvinistic conceptions of humankind’s total depravity. That optimism about human capacity is displayed in Pullman’s vision of a company town where every one was happy and productive.

In his case, it didn’t work out. Shortly after Pullman's death in 1897, courts ordered the homes sold to individual homeowners. What went wrong was that Pride and Control took over. Yes, people can get better -- can learn, can grow -- but they have to do so in their own way. That is the key to genuine hospitality – not merely meeting what you think their needs are, but journeying with them in the discovery of those needs. Growth, learning, and development cannot be all planned out with precise outcomes determined in advance.

Pullman believed in human improvability, but didn't believe in people enough to let them work out their own growth, awakening, salvation, in their own way -- even if they used their freedom to go backwards for a few years -- or a few generations -- and even if, left to their own devices, they drank, or listened to speeches from agitators, read independent newspapers, gathered and discussed unsavory ideas. Pullman wouldn't listen to his workers' needs.

We can’t ever be so arrogant that we won’t meet and talk and consider where other people are coming from. For Labor Day, remember George Pullman, the industrialist whose meanness sparked the events that led to the creation of the holiday. Remember George Pullman, the Universalist who got the optimism but didn’t get the humility – because we Unitarian Universalists today follow in his footsteps in more ways than it's comfortable to admit.

When has your voice of “let’s make it better,” come out as "fix it my way or I will treat you as evil obstructionist"? When have your own ideals made you cruel? I think we do that every time we think someone else is wrong. Then let this be our Labor Day prayer: to find the courage of hospitality: to talk to the people we think are wrong, and stay at it until we get over ourselves.

“God rejoiced at our disobedience,” said Rabbi Kushner, “and then wept with joy that we could feel our estrangement and want to return home.” We feel the estrangement. My challenge to you – and to myself -- is to talk, face-to-face, with someone you think is wrong. It’s election season – it’s not hard to find them. The hard part is talking to them, and keeping a civil tongue even if they don’t.

And that is hard. We feel our estrangement. So many of our fellow citizens, have such anger and fear – it’s easy for us to get angry at, and a little afraid of, them. The labor of hospitality, of returning home, one small step toward one small mend in one small relationship at a time, is ours to do. May we take up that labor. Blessed be. Amen.