Beyond Control

Sermon by Rev. Alan Taylor
Preached at Unity Temple Unitarian Universalist Congregation
June 5, 2005

From the Story for All Ages:

How many of you got caught in that terrible storm yesterday around 2:30 in the afternoon? It was awful! One of my neighbor’s windows was ripped right out, and another neighbor who belongs to this congregation had a huge branch land on her roof. Did all that lightning and thunder scare you? Well, that is what it was like exactly one hundred years ago. There was lots of lightning and thunder during a terrible storm. But one hundred years ago there weren’t any tall trees in Oak Park. The tallest thing in Oak Park was the steeple of our old church. Do you know what a steeple is? Our building today has no steeple. That was intentional, but this isn’t the building our congregation has always had. One hundred thirty-four years ago, they built a lovely little building that had a high steeple. Exactly one hundred years ago, something terrible and unexpected happened. Do you know that was?

During that terrible storm with lots of lightning and thunder, a bolt of lightning hit the steeple and the steeple caught fire. As it burned, a neighbor heard the sounds and saw what was happening. He called the fire department. Soon several volunteer firefighters were at the building. They couldn’t reach the steeple, but they felt sure that they could keep the fire in the steeple from reaching the main building. But the fire licked through the foundation for the steeple, and it fell into the church, and the entire building went up in flames.

By this time many of the congregation’s members were watching with horror. Among them were two young girls with their mother. One yelled and cried, “Mommy, mommy, our church is burned, our church is burned!” The minister back then was named Rev. Johonnot. Rev. Johonnot heard her and came over and said, “No, dear, our church hasn’t burned. It is our building that has burned. Our church is the people and we are all here and we will build a new building.” But that didn’t make the awful event any less terrible.

Yet if this traumatic incident had not occurred, we would not be gathering today in this beautiful building which our congregation has been doing for 96 years. It is an important lesson to learn that for every crisis that comes our way, it is also a time of opportunity.

Sermon:

A reading by Ralph Waldo Emerson from his first published work, which he initially penned anonymously, entitled Nature:

Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchers of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism.  The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs. Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us, by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines today also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.

A reading from A Powell Davies, one of the great Unitarian ministers of the past century:

The years of all of us are short, our lives precarious. Our days and nights go hurrying on and there is scarcely time to do the little that we might. Yet we find time for bitterness, for petty treason and evasion. What can we do to stretch our hearts enough to lose their littleness? Here we are—all of us—all upon this planet, bound together in a common destiny, living our lives between briefness of the daylight and the dark. Kindred in this, each lighted by the same precarious, flickering flame of life, how does it happen that we are not kindred in all things clear? How strange and foolish are these walls of separation that divide us!

Has anyone ever counted how many church buildings there are in Oak Park? I can’t seem to go down any street more than four blocks without coming across at least one church, sometimes, two, or three, or even four or five if you walk a few blocks on Lake Street! Religion came to Oak Park in 1840, but there were no church buildings for over thirty years. It’s a funny story. When the first church of Oak Park formed in 1840, it called itself Union Church and met in a community building called Temperance Hall. The first church building constructed in Oak Park was by a group of religious liberals who refused to follow the lead of the Union Church minister who in 1871 claimed the church needed to follow the orthodox teachings about Jesus and the salvation of the world. Eleven dissenters, or perhaps we’d like to think of them as free-thinkers, decided to form a church that focused more on the love of God and the potential of humanity than on the judgment of God and the awful aspects of human nature. A bunch of Unitarians and Universalists banded together because they believed religion was more a matter of living according to one’s conscience than a matter of believing the specific things about God, Jesus, and the Bible. And that’s how the second church of Oak Park started, calling itself Unity Church because it believed in unifying people for the goodness of society rather than dividing them through fear and creeds. They raised $13,869 to construct the very first church constructed in Oak Park.  It was located on Pleasant and Wisconsin. (Wisconsin Street is now called Marion at that intersection). How did the first church building of Oak Park look? It’s on the cover of your order of service.

It was a rough first decade for Unity Church. Please note that this was over a generation before Charles Fillmore would found the metaphysically-based Unity Church that today holds that name. For our Unity Church, it was a rough first decade. This congregation in that little white-steepled building had a terrible time with keeping a minister. The first minister was here little more than a year. Several other ministers came and went until it was so bad that for a while a minister from Chicago volunteered without pay to keep the church together.  Then, fifteen years after the congregation started, Augusta Chapin, an energetic, multi-talented, and organized Universalist woman, preached here for six months and was unanimously called to be the pastor in 1886. She helped redirect energies of the congregation and the church grew and grew. Someday we will talk more about her, because she was really a remarkable person and minister. It was during her six-year ministry that Anna Jones Wright joined this congregation who came to church with her son Frank. For history buffs among you, Anna Wright was the sister of Jenkin Lloyd Jones, the minister at All Souls Church in 1890. It was distressing to the congregation when Rev. Chapin announced her resignation. The congregation conducted a national search. Rev. Robert Johonnot was serving in Lewiston, Maine when he accepted this congregation’s invitation to be the new minister for a salary of $1,800 a year. Now Dr. Johonnot was a dynamic administrator and a great preacher. Membership grew so much that the congregation started talking about building a new church building. In fact, there was a special congregational meeting held on May 24^th 1905 where members decided to look into what it would take to build a new building. There were a lot of folks who said it couldn’t be done. They said things like, “It would be much too expensive.” “It would be far too much work.” “Trying to build a new church could very well result in losing the congregation altogether.”

But then something unexpected happened the following week. You know the story. The lightning bolt, the fire in the steeple, the building in flames, nothing but ashes.

Sometimes it takes a crisis for transformation to happen. Sometimes the lightning of fate strikes our lives and overnight, suddenly our lives will never be the same. Often when crisis hits, panic sets in. Anxiety thrives. Fear gets a stronghold within the heart. What had seemed like a solid foundation below our feet or over our heads suddenly is no longer there or lying in ruin amid ashes. It is precisely such times of loss that challenge our understanding of ourselves, of the essential goodness of life, and of how to carry on. But in that challenge, in that struggle, human beings are provided an opportunity, perhaps a desperately unwanted, unasked for opportunity, but an opportunity nonetheless.

Our lives in large part are not so much defined by the losses or crises that occur, but how we learn to cope with them. Traumatic moments cause such stress because human beings typically resist the place of not-knowing, and when in fear, it is hard to imagine what is possible.

This congregation has within its DNA not only the capacity for initiative and innovation but also the ability to pick itself up and carry forward when awful things happen. It built the first church building of Oak Park. It rallied together to provide for future generations. It called one of the first woman ministers in American history to its pulpit, when ministry was considered an exclusively male occupation. When the building burned to the ground, the congregation didn’t bicker among themselves how to go forward but put trust in a committee headed by Rev. Johonnot that agreed to contract with a young, brash architect who hadn’t yet designed any public buildings. The relationship would stretch everyone, as the committee assented to young Frank’s wishes and vision to use cement, a material that had never been used before for building structures, to adopt an extraordinarily unique, unconventional design, and to cover the rising expenses as they came in, well over expectation. I imagine there were plenty of hard feelings, frustrated folks, and acerbic statements during this anxious time, but the congregation found themselves four years later in a masterpiece.

To have an original relationship to the universe, one must respond to the issues of the day. It may be tempting to live among the theology and responses to the world of yesteryear, but our faith is to engage with the world authentically today. The founders of this congregation believed this. Frank Lloyd Wright believed it. May we believe it as well. For our faith tradition affirms that revelation is never sealed. Ever new truth emerges among people who come together in religious community to discern how we shall be together and live faithfully in response to our world.

When I was in seminary, during the early nineties, I thought, gosh, I’m becoming a minister when there isn’t anything like the McCarthy era or the Viet Nam War or Civil Rights movement. I wondered: what will be the public witness required of ministers during my lifetime? Little did anybody know that history would spiral back into a time of fear, of anxiety, of despair, that we would be facing rising empire, an unending war in the middle east, and an assault on the civil liberties of citizens of Arab descent.

There is much in today’s world to cause anxiety, dread, fear, apprehension. There is no lack of crises in our world, locally or globally. There is no lack of opportunities for us to embrace and cultivate our faith through engaging with the world.

The deepest crisis in our world today, I believe, emerges from the human capacity to distort the humanity of others, the failure to discern the humanity of another that one feels has wronged us, whether that is Israel and Palestine warring with one another, the United States in Iraq or Afghanistan, the Sudanese military committing genocide. I could go on and on. We human beings have an innate ability to erect walls of separation among us. Even in a small community, our hearts, if unchecked, dwell on petty concerns thus erecting walls that divide us. Our faith tradition affirms that authentic religion calls us to overcome these walls that divide us, to stretch our hearts to overcome their littleness, to make of our lives, as brief as they are, a light of hope and goodness in the world. It was this calling that led our predecessors one hundred thirty-four years ago to build the first church of Oak Park, to defy convention and affirm the unity of all people by calling a woman to its pulpit, and to respond to the crisis of their burnt building as an opportunity to build one of the most acclaimed church buildings in the world.

May we embrace our legacy of maintaining this beacon of hope and unity. May we  embrace initiative and innovation as we respond to the crises of our day. May we foster a faith that cultivates an original relationship to the universe and transcends the walls of separation that divide us.

May it be so. Amen.

© Copyright 2005 Rev. Alan Taylor, All Rights Reserved.