“Building the Beloved Community”
Rev. Robert M. Hardies and Rev. Shana Lyngood
Sunday, 24 September 2006
Rev. Lyngood: In the just over three years that I have been your Associate Minister, there have been several occasions upon which my colleague and I have decided that we need to preach together, about something that we think is of the utmost importance in our community of faith. We’ve done so maybe only two or three times and this morning is one of those occasions.
The reading this morning comes from Romans, Chapter 9, Verses 25 and 26. Some of you may recognize it as the epigraph to the book, Beloved, by Toni Morrison. It’s from Romans, but it is also taken from the Book of Hosea:
“I will call them my people who were not my people, and her beloved who was not
beloved, and it shall come to pass in the place where it was said to them.”
There are many aspects and qualities of the All Souls experience that are unique; you might even say that they’re singular, many gifts that worshipping with such a diverse community and a caring group of people offers, which are hard to find anywhere else and hard to capture in words that would adequately express what this All Souls feeling can sometimes be like. Many of the moments, my friends, that we share have, what I’ve come to call “the quintessential All Souls feel.” For me, I’m sure many of you who are familiar with our congregation could name many such moments, but for me, one of the most meaningful and poignant is our annual Christmas pageant.
For those of you who haven’t been here before, and for those of you who have – it’s been a whole year since you’ve experienced it – let me describe a little bit about what I see when I watch the pageant unfold before us the Sunday before the Christmas holiday. This whole scene is transformed; we have children of many different ages and many colors dressed as shepherds and sheep, dressed as angels. And we have little ones who descend magically from the balcony and come to hover as the heavenly host and the cherubs to witness the miraculous birth of Jesus.
Now I’m not quite sure what the power is of the pageant. I know that some of it has to do with the mix of adorable young children wearing sheep costumes. Some of it has to do with the sentimental power of the familiar Christmas music. And it is indeed a sweet and cute Sunday. But it is much more than that. I’ve come to feel that it’s not just a saccharine kind of “Oh, aren’t they cute” kind of Sunday, but it’s a touching portrayal of a timeless story told with new generations of mixed communities of children. It’s that timeless story told by the youngest members of our community. There’s something about the pageant that for me is transcendent, calls beyond that one moment, calls beyond any one of our egos toward a shared life, a communal life, the shared humanity that we often forget but that is right there, beneath the surface.
Now even though the pageant is pretty much the same every year – we sing the same songs, the children do the same rituals as part of the pageant – there’s one change which is constant, one change that you can count on. And that is that each year, you never know who’s going to be the baby Jesus. In fact, this year when my partner and I had a baby and I first came back this fall, one of the first things somebody said to me is “She’s too old to be the baby Jesus.” [Laughter] I wasn’t even thinking about it yet! Nor would I invoke favoritism at all, in any way. [Laughter] But since I was already put on notice that Athena would not be the baby Jesus, I thought a little bit more about what that tradition means. I thought a little bit more about the fact that, since we never know what color skin the baby Jesus will have, how small, what color eyes, there’s something beautiful about that. And there’s something remarkable about that transformative moment that happens toward the end of the pageant when the doll that the child has been holding throughout the pageant becomes a real-life member of our community.
That transformation from pretending to a real life that we are caring for that may indeed be, as our tradition says, one more redeemer for this world, there’s something amazing and powerful about that moment, something that overflows, I think in all of us, in realizing that the varieties of families in our midst contribute to that redemption, contribute to that hope in ways that we maybe don’t completely or fully understand. And each and every year, the pageant asks a very important question of all of us: Who is in your holy family? Who is included in your circle of love and care? Who is part of your community of faith? And every year we don’t know who it will be, but we are called to love them nonetheless.
That question – Who is in your holy family? – that the pageant raises every year has come home to me in a very significant way recently, in a way that reminds me both that it is a question that is so deeply personal and also so remarkably outwardly-focused. It is both a question about how we will live and express love in the most intimate circles of our lives and what implications that love has for those ever-expanding circles which we say we want to have in our lives. The first end-statement of our church is to live out love in ever-expanding circles. Well that means you have to begin at home and you have to be committed to keep going. For friends, as I often say to the wedding couples I work with, living and loving doesn’t take place in a vacuum. Your family, your loved ones, all of that spreads out in ways that you can’t even perceive.
My personal story. Recently, Athena and I – that’s my daughter who, those of you who have met her now know has brown hair (not very much of it) and green eyes and white skin – went on our first solo trip without Mommy to the Safeway on Georgia Avenue near our home. And we had the first of what I suspect will be many experiences in which our connection to one another will be questioned and wondered about, if not disdained. I couldn’t put everything in the cart – you would have been laughing at me – I was wearing Athena on the front Baby Bjorn pack and I was reaching to put things into my cart, and I saw the eyes staring at us as I grocery shopped throughout the store. I realized that the people around me were wondering and making assumptions about who I was to Athena and who she was to me.
And friends, I realized in the Safeway – that most intimate of spiritual awakening places [Laughter] – that I don’t want to live in a world in which it will be assumed that I am her nanny. I don’t want to live underneath the assumption that there is something wrong with the reality of Athena and me being family to one another. I want to live in a world that can see the connection between us for what it is. And as I stepped back from my own experience, I realized that I want that not just for Athena and not just for me – it could be selfish – but because I think we all need to live in a world where we can love as we would like to love, as boldly and as broadly as possible.
Which is why we need a place like All Souls, and why we need All Souls to be as racially diverse as possible. Because friends, we need communities like this one, that are working to create a world in which hearts are shaped more broadly and in which love is cast more inclusively. For too often, love and community, ties that hold and guide us, are confined to two-narrow spaces and we are not encouraged as we should be, or allowed to be, those bold lovers of justice and of all people that we should and could be. We are not encouraged to love across and beyond racial and other differences. And so the pageant’s challenge continues to ring in our ears: Who is in your holy family?
Rev. Hardies: William Ellery Channing asked himself that question one day: Who is my holy family? To whom am I related, not through blood, but through spiritual bonds. And one day he answered the question saying “I am a living member of the great family of all souls. All people are my brothers and sisters.” And then, a generation later, the members of this church, which was at that time called the First Unitarian Church of Washington, asked themselves, who are we as a people? Who is part of our holy family? And they drew on Channing’s words and on June 4, 1877, almost 130 years ago today, our ancestors voted to change the name of the church from First Unitarian to All Souls. And aren’t you glad they did? Doesn’t that have a better ring than “I am a living member of the First Family of Unitarians?” [Laughter] Not quite the same.
That was a fateful day for our church and that theological vision was a fateful commitment for us as a people. I see that our commitment today to continuing to sustain and build a multiracial, multicultural community, I see that as a reaffirmation of the commitment our ancestors made 130 years ago this year.
Channing called it “the great family of all souls.” Dr. King called it something else. He called it “the beloved community.” And he knew that the beloved community was something that didn’t exist in our world today and so Dr. King had to talk about it not as a reality but as a dream. And we all remember the dream that he set out that day, the dream he said of how one day in Alabama little white children and little black children might hold hands together and be as brothers and sisters. Sometimes it’s easier to see the dream for our children than it is to see it for ourselves. Maybe that’s what Reverend Lyngood was getting at when she was invoking our children’s pageant as an embodiment of that dream.
So we see glimpses of that dream in our world today. We see it in the pageant; I see it as children from our neighborhood walk to our church during the week to use our gymnasium downstairs for their P.E. classes. They come from all the local schools and they’re holding hands, as Dr. King had imagined. Two by two, coming into the church. We live in a neighborhood, this neighborhood of Columbia Heights, that is literally a third black, a third Latino, a third white. And some of us may be tempted to ask, well, maybe this dream has actually become a reality already. Maybe we have no more work to do! And then we realize that Dr. King knew that the reality would look right before it would actually feel right. Dr. King made an important distinction between physical segregation and spiritual segregation. He said there will come a day when our elbows are together but our hearts are apart. I don’t know how anyone can live in the City of Washington DC and not feel the sting of those words. “Our elbows are together and our hearts are apart.”
We are crowded together in this city, as people of diverse cultures and many races, just as we are in cities all across this country, just as we are all across the world. Our elbows are bumping; our hearts are not together. And so he said, he signaled in that idea of spiritual desegregation the important role of the church community, the important role of the church to be a place of bringing together not elbows but hearts. And he alluded to the fact that it’s no surprise that eleven o’clock on Sunday morning is still the most segregated hour in American culture. And it is still today because spiritual desegregation is still the place that we have to work toward. We’re not there yet, but that is the special calling of the church in our culture, to be a place where that spiritual segregation is healed, where we are brought together. The church has a special role to play in the healing of the divisions of our nation and our world.
As we recommit ourselves today, to this important and difficult work of building a multiracial and a multicultural community, I want us to remember who we are and what we bring to this work. For we are not novices in this work. We are not beginners. And for all the difficulties of this work, we have already come a long way. It’s important for us to remember who we came from and, therefore, who we are. We have to remember, after all, the people who 130 years ago said we will be a church of all souls. We have to remember that this church has been a multiracial community not for five years or ten years or twenty years, but for 50 years, which is about as long as a community could have been multicultural and multiracial in the United States of America.
We have to remember that we are veterans of the Civil Rights movement, veterans of the women’s’ rights movement, veterans of the movement for gay and lesbian rights, organizers for immigrant rights, educators and organizers for racial and cultural reconciliation to this very day. We are not novices. We know that there is a price to be paid for this work. Many of us have experienced first-hand the price of racial oppression. Many of us have experienced first-hand the price that comes when we struggle against that oppression. We have lost, in this congregation, one of our ministers in this struggle, the Reverend James Reeb who died on the streets of Selma at the hands of a white segregationist. He married some of you; he was the youth advisor for some in this congregation. We know that there is a price to be paid. We also know, however, that there is a joy that comes when we sit around a table together and, even for a moment, glimpse what it might look like for the great family of all souls to be together, not just our elbows, but our hearts. And every once in awhile, we catch a glimpse of that here at All Souls Church. And it’s ever so important that we do because we must share that glimpse, that vision, with the world.
I look around today, friends, at the world. I look at the streets of the West Bank; I look at the streets of Darfur; I look at the Mexican-American border; I look at the streets of Columbia Heights. And everywhere racial and ethnic and religious differences are tearing us apart. Friends, let us claim our theological inheritance. Let us claim the knowledge and the strength that we bring to this work. Let us reclaim the vision of the beloved community, of the great family of all souls. The world desperately needs that vision and I ask us today, if not us – if we will not take up this challenge – then who will? And if not now – if we don’t take up this challenge now and offer it to the world – then when will that happen? Let us be about this important work together. Amen.