Sermon "A Church Ahead of It's Time" Rev. Roberta Finkelstein, June 8, 2008               On January 1, 2008 this sanctuary was full of people singing and clapping and celebrating the passage of New Hampshire's Civil Union law. Our administrator, Julie Frank, officiated at 15 civil unions that day. Terrie Norellie, the Speaker of the NH House, along with Senator Martha Fuller Clark and other legislators, thanked us for our support of their work. We rocked the house with music and dancing.             On Monday May 30, 2008, Memorial Day, at 1:45 pm our bell began to toll slowly and mournfully. A few minutes later the first of dozens of volunteer readers stepped to the podium to begin a litany that would last almost 8 hours: the reading of the name of every American service person killed in Iraq and Afghanistan in the past 5 years of war.             On Sunday June 1, dozens of South Church members piled out of cars and trucks dressed in our finest gardening attire. Joined by the residents of Pepperidge Woods, an affordable housing community in Barrington, we planted trees and shrubs and perennials, spread mulch, and beautified the grounds of their cooperatively owned community.             These three events – different in tone but imbued with the same spirit - all occurring within the last 6 months, have brought our history to this living moment. They represent the culmination of hundreds of years of loving dedication, hard work, and faithful living.             There are many different ways to tell the history of a congregation, just as there are many different ways to write the history of a nation. You can go the 'great men' route; and yes, even today it is mostly men who get written into those histories. In the case of a church, that would focus on the ministers. We do honor and remember our ministers; you see some of their portraits on display this morning. But to tell the story of the church only through the ministers is to miss the most important aspects of our history. A church, especially a Unitarian Universalist congregation which lives out the priesthood and prophethood of all believers, is much more than it's minister.             Another approach to organizing a history is to write a chapter on each 'great conflict'. For nations that means going from war to war. For churches it means going from fight to fight, retelling the stories of the splits and the spats that linger still in our collective memory. South Church has had it's share of conflicts, but they are not our history.             History, they say, is written by the winners. So I've cast an appreciate eye back over our history and identified four winners, four recurring themes that I believe have shaped us into the people we are; four enduring values that have bestowed upon us our religious identity.             The first winner: at South Church, whenever we have come to a fork in the road, we have chosen the broader and more generous route, the most progressive, no, the most liberal path. In 1707, the families that worshiped in our first building, the large Meeting House at the corner of South Street and Marcy, voted to accept the Half-Way Covenant. Now this may sound like esoteric theological history, but bear with me! One of the struggles for churches in the New World was to come to terms with the reality that day to day life was very different than it was back in Europe. The church didn't have the same sway over village life, there was a greater sense of freedom and choice. The old rules for church membership and participation which had come from Europe just didn't seem to apply here. Some churches dealt with that struggle by digging in their heels and fiercely enforcing those old rules, running off people who didn't follow them. But others, the early practitioners of progressive faith, had a different idea. They suggested a compromise – the Half-Way Covenant. Instead of trying to turn back the clock or deny the reality of the new way of being in the new world, the Half-Way Covenant was an accommodation, an acknowledgment that progress was inevitable and that church practices needed to change to reflect the changing culture. Acceptance of the Half-Way Covenant was our first formal step on that road to liberal religion.             Half a century later, we took another step down that road. The minister at the time, Rev. Samuel Haven, preached a non-creedal Christian faith. He nudged our ancestors towards a religious faith developed through the use of reason and intellectual discourse. That generation laid the groundwork for the formal decision, made in 1819, to leave the orthodox fold completely and declared South Church to be Unitarian. We have always chosen the liberal path.             The second winner:  at South Church, we have always believed that place matters. Rejecting the culture of scarcity that pits physical facility against staff and program, we have chosen the both/and culture of abundance. Our ancestors dug deep to build a solid granite building, a building that I suspect will last forever. We worship in a sanctuary of stunning beauty and amazing acoustics, our grounds are graced with beautiful trees and flowers. Our building is home to innumerable self-help groups, a meeting space for all kinds of community groups, a venue for folk and jazz and classical music concerts, a place where people with a vast array of progressive ideas can speak and be heard.             We have put together a space use plan that will allow us to retain the historic nature of our buildings while retrofitting them for the needs of a 21st century congregation. The space use plan involved staff, board, volunteers from the Life Span Faith Development Council, and you – the congregation members who attended the open meetings last month. This plan will most likely be the basis for a capital campaign in the next few years. That campaign, and the work that gets done with the money raised, will simply be another example of our ongoing belief that at South Church place matters, and abundance flows from people who believe in the power of place.             The third winner: South Church has always been a sanctuary, in the true sense of the word, a safe place for people marginalized by the rest of society. Back in 1717, as many of you know, Portsmouth's earliest identified  African American family was baptized at South Church. In 1818 South Church established the first Sunday School in Portsmouth. (It was only the 3rd Sunday School in the nation!) All the children from all the churches and the town came to this Sunday School. The women involved in the Sunday School soon realized that many of those children came with needs far beyond the reach of religious instruction. Some of them were hungry and in poor health, some were illiterate. Now the original intention of founding the Sunday School had been to provide a safe place for the children to come to learn about religion – a sanctuary. But our ancestors realized that the needs of these children could only be met by going out into the community and working, in coalitions with others, on behalf of literacy, public education, and public health. A few decades later, evidence suggests that the women of South Church were involved in the Underground Railroad.             Now fast forward a century and a half. Once again, South Church finds itself offering sanctuary to people needing a safe place. Around 1993, the Open Door City Coalition started meeting here. Made up of both church members and others in the community, the Coalition worked to end both cultural and legal discrimination against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered persons. That work led to South Church going through the Welcoming Congregation certification process, and to our January 1 event.             At South Church we have always been a sanctuary – we have advocated for marginalized people by engaging with the larger culture, working in partnership and coalition, and taking our faith out into the world at the same time that we were inviting people in.             The fourth winner: at South Church we have always been advocates for peace. In 1840, our congregation opposed the invasion of Mexico. This was one of the military skirmishes that led up to the Mexican-American War (which by the way is known in Mexico as La Invasion Estadounidense. There is nothing new under the sun.) When much of our nation was celebrating our victory, South Church declared a day of mourning for the dead on both sides. We refused to join some of our religious brothers and sisters in ringing our church bell to celebrate the victory. The silence of our bell on that day 150 years ago spoke as loudly as the tolling of our bell on Memorial Day to call attention to the true cost of the war in Iraq.             A few weeks ago I was invited to address a Kiwanis club prayer breakfast. They asked me to come and tell them about South Church. I told them that at South Church, we are people who have always chosen the open-minded and big-hearted approach to religious life; that we have always been proud of our building and have always been committed to making maximum use of our facility for the good of the larger community; that we have always been people who have stood on the side of the oppressed; that we have always, always worked for a peaceful world.             What a fine and proud heritage! One more always. I hope we will always build on those powerful ideals and values that sustained us in the past and formed us into our present incarnation. I hope that a hundred years from now, another group of South Church members will celebrate Heritage Day by bringing out the pictures of us doing the work we hold most dear: the work of gently persuading people to open their minds, the work of protecting the vulnerable, the work of maintaining this building that allows us to do so much ministry, and the work of bringing about a more peaceful world. At South Church, we have always been, and always will be, that kind of a people.  © 2008, Rev. Roberta Finkelstein