Good News Jan/Feb 2009 Page 4

"Reclaiming Nazareth"
By Rev. Ron Robinson, Executive Director
 

This month, the UUCF turns 64 years old, and like all who reach that age now, we turn to celebrate and contemplate with the gospel according to Paul (McCartney) who sang: "will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I'm 64?" These are, in all seriousness, good questions for us these days, as we look at our relationship with the UUCF, with our small groups, our church, our Association.
 
As I write this, one of the Epiphany season selections from the lectionary of biblical readings to be used on an upcoming Sunday is from the first chapter of John 1:
"....The next day Jesus decided to go to Galilee. He found Philip and said to him, “Follow me.” Now Philip was from Bethsaida, the city of Andrew and Peter. Philip found Nathanael and said to him, “We have found him about whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus son of Joseph from Nazareth.” Nathanael said to him, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Philip said to him, “Come and see.”
 
This year, will we so embody the spirit of Jesus that others are drawn to be with us? Will we be peaceful healing, missional presences in our communities? Will we invite others to come and see what we have found? Will we continue to challenge and enrich our own faith lives by coming to be with others (to small groups, to Revival, to General Assembly, to our online forums,etc.) to see what God has for us through them? Let us never think we have depleted the wellsprings.
 
This year, will we defy expectations? Will we break the way others, and we too, have defined us? Being crazy about Jesus in our Unitarian Universalist world and ways can cause both other UUs and other Christians to wonder if our place of being, our home, is so small and out of the mainstream of influence that nothing good and lasting can come from us. And yet we have the witness of Nazareth. We know we are a living part of that history that took a small, marginal, fringe group of radical Jesus followers who over a few centuries became the dominant religious force in the Roman Empire. Our true home and place of the Spirit is to be co-creating with God little Nazareths wherever we go, from which surprising good and hope comes again and again.
 
January is that time of the world's calendar when we look backward and forward, as the god Janus was portrayed. Jesus' early followers were finding both fulfillment of their historic faith, and a new manifestation of that faith in their experiences with the one they'd found, or who found them.
 
In the UUCF, January is our midpoint of the year too. We look back and see much accomplished in 2008 with the new website, with an expanded General Assembly program and lecture by Father John Dear, with a wonderful new UU Christian Journal exploring many things related to Jesus and Judaism and Unitarian Universalism and more. We also launched a review of how we structure ourselves organizationally in order to nurture our organic movements, and we have created a new survey to help us see others and ourselves more clearly. In ways not quantified, last year like all our years we helped many people along their faith journey, whether or not they were already or ever became members of the UUCF, as they one on one encountered us and pondered with us the truths of their lives. And we are looking forward, as other news in these pages will show, toward new life in our Revival, and in our emerging new ways of being present at General Assembly, and in the new people that will become friends and leaders among us in the months to come. Just as it must have when those first disciples answered the call to "follow me," the heart beats a little beat quicker this time of the season, Epiphany's journeys leading us toward Lent and Easter, Nazareth leading to Jerusalem, the cross and empty tomb.
 
Amid all the new plans and ideas and events, I often ground myself not only in the history of the church, but even in the history of the UUCF. January is a good month for us to do that in the spirit of looking back and forward at the same time. Lately I have been reading the Unitarian Christian Journal, vol. 24, from the summer of 1968. Then as now there was even a faster heartbeat in the pulse of the country. Then as now there were stirrings and anxieties aplenty in the Unitarian Universalist Association, and in how Christians would continue to be present. It was soon after that time that the UCF itself became the UUCF. On the wider front the UUA had released its first major study of itself since the 1961 merger. People were questioning such things as vision, mission, growth. The UUA set out a goal of growing to 500,000 adults between 1968 and 1980, and of course the reality is that the numbers fell or stayed even most years during that time. History is a good yellow light for any impulses to New Year's Projections. And I am reminded that all our visions and dreams are only made real due to the decisions of real people, you and me.
 
That issue of the Journal from 1968 was organized around three questions: where do we stand? where should we go from here? what calls us?  Among the many responses I want to highlight those of the Rev. Harry Hoehler, minister emeritus now of First Parish in Weston, Mass., because they seem to foreshadow and echo many of the recent comments as we have pondered these questions again. And they are words worthy of repeating. Some of his words have come true among us; others continue to call to us.
 
The Rev. Hoehler wrote in 1968: "The UCF, it seems to me, possesses a golden opportunity in this period of denominational myopia. The UCF could, if it would, become the radical "underground church" in the Association. It could, if it would, by explicating the concept of Christ as God's man for others, bear witness to a faith which takes seriously its responsibilities to the world. It could, if it would, make clear the implications of such a concept for the establishment of a free but genuine servant church in our midst. It could, if it would, hold high the vision of a church flexible enough to shape and reshape its structures around the moving and varied shapes of mankind's needs. It could, if it would, become a small example to those individuals and churches in our Association who understand the mission of the church to be more than growth figures, budget evaluations, and the creation of happy suburban ashrams for sophisticated sectarian minds. The UCF could, if it would, exhibit what it means for an institution in our denomination to take as its mission Christ's command that it become the gracious neighbor to a needful humanity.
 
He continued: "Now, in order not to be misunderstood, let me make it clear that I am not suggesting that the UCF become a miniature U-U Service Committee. What I am suggesting is that it develop a worship life, and educational life, a community life established around the dual concept of gathering regularly to celebrate what we believe God is doing to reconcile our world and of scattering to do what is required of us to make this world of ours a more liveable and human place.  Granted, many of us would stand on the fringe of such an organization. We would participate in its worship and corporate life only when able; but still it could stand for us as an example of a viable form which a true servant church might take. Thus I am suggesting that the UCF become more than a loosely knit association of individuals who gather yearly to celebrate past glories and frustrations. I'm suggesting that it adopt some of the structures of a church, not a residential church to be sure, but rather a church of dedicated persons who are committed to performing specific tasks for the renewal and reconstruction of their world nd who come together to celebrate that fact and learn from one another.
 
He finished: "The UCF could do such things, I believe, if it only would. But to do so it must stop concerning itself with such rearguard and fruitless battles as the humanist-theist controversy. It must give up its own concern for growth, with heralding itself to the outside world, with enlarging its political power base within the Association, with making the denomination "Christian" and respectable. It must end its reactionary tendencies, that is, its almost unfailing negative response to anything the UUA does. Instead, let it do the things it can do best. Let it do the careful theological analysis which apparently the UUA is incapable of doing and discern what it means in our day to be a church in and for the world....What the UCF is called to do in these critical times is to become radical for the first time in its existence, to rethink its priorities, to align itself with those groups outside the UUA who have a vision of the church as mission, to sell its headquarters building and use the money received plus its annual dues to sustain the religious life of those Unitarian Christians who are working to alleviate some of the pain of our common life, and who need to gather, reflect upon, clarify and celebrate with one another what it means to heed Christ's call to become servants in the affairs of men."
 
These seem words of guidance not only for the UUCF now, especially as we enter our 64th year this month, but are words that can feed us as individuals in relationship to our own churches. Also, they seem good lessons we can share with others in the UUA who may find themselves now in positions of change and anxiety not unlike the journey we as UU Christians have made many years before. And, for what it is worth, they are also good words for the UUA itself as it contemplates again its being in and with the world. Thanks Rev. Hoehler, thanks to all upon whose shoulders we stand as the UUCF today, and as we do move forward in the new year, thanks to all who answer the call of Nazareth with us again.

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