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(This sermon was originally given at the July 13th, 2014 service of the Morristown Unitarian Fellowship.)

You might be wondering why we’ve been talking so much about sanctuaries today, when the title of the service is clearly a Full Life Faith.  No, I didn’t forget the actual topic, I promise.  See, I can think of no better way to talk about a full life faith than by talking about sanctuaries.

That’s because I believe one of the purposes of our Unitarian Universalist faith is to create sanctuaries wherever we go.

And how do we do this?  By we ourselves becoming a sanctuary.

When you think of the word “Sanctuary” all sorts of different images likely come to mind.  Some of you may be thinking of the very room we’re in right now.  Some of you may be flashing back toward a prior faith tradition that abused the word, trying to make you feel guilt.  Some of you may be thinking of that scene in the movie where someone runs into a church screaming “Sanctuary!” trying to avoid persecution.  Some of you may be thinking of big gothic architectural cathedrals, which is what I used to associate with the word sanctuary.

But then I started to hear of a different definition.  Sanctuaries are places of healing when we are at our most desperate.  Sanctuaries are safe havens from the onslaught of the broken world we live in.  Sanctuaries are where we go to find renewal and to get recharged.  The new definition surprised me, but then I realized something that changed how I see the purpose of our faith.

Our Unitarian Universalist faith is a sanctuary.

How many of you have found Unitarian Universalism to be a safe home for you, when you felt turned away by another religious tradition?  How many of you have found Unitarian Universalism a saving, healing presence in your life?

I know it has been in my life.

I moved from Columbus, Georgia to Atlanta to attend Georgia Tech, and I fell in love with the city.  I felt free to truly be myself, finally away from a difficult at times home life, and out on my own.  I fell in with a great group of friends while there, all of us united in our awkwardness.  When it came time for graduation, I knew I was going to stay in Atlanta.  All of my close friends, however, moved away.  I felt incredibly alone, and I was going through a pretty serious phase of being less than impressed with myself.  I needed a safe place to make sense of the world that suddenly didn’t make sense anymore, and I needed a community – not just the occasional friend, but a true community.  I checked out one of the local UU Congregations, and I’ve never looked back.  I have experienced some pretty dark times in my life since then, but my faith community was there to nurture me and then to call me to be my best self.  I had found my sanctuary in that great sanctuary of the UU Congregation of Atlanta.

Our Unitarian Universalist faith is a sanctuary.

So let’s talk about sanctuaries. What are some things sanctuaries need in order to be built?  Sanctuaries need deep, solid foundations.  Sanctuaries need a support structure.  And sanctuaries need a mission.

To build a sanctuary, you need a deep, solid foundation.  A strong foundation is the first step to any sort of building project – without that solid foundation that goes deep into the ground, the building will fall over with the first storm.

So how do we deepen and strengthen our foundation as an embodied sanctuary?

I suppose this is the best place to give a plug for our fantastic Adult Learning Committee and our various Adult Religious Education programs.  Ok, all joking aside, there are scores of opportunities to build and deepen your faith here at our Fellowship.  We are a community of life long learners, and I boast about that to every other DRE I meet.

Committing to a regular spiritual practice will help deepen your foundation.  Whether it be prayer, meditation, tai chi, yoga, jogging, painting, well, you get the idea.  It’s important to set aside a regular time for your spiritual practices – if you’re anything like me, it takes actually scheduling it in your calendar for the regular reminders, but find a way to incorporate a regular, hopefully daily, spiritual practice into your normal routine.  It will not only deepen your foundation, it will strengthen it beyond your wildest expectations.

It’s up to us to not only deepen and strengthen our own personal foundations, it’s up to us to deepen and strengthen the foundations of the world around us.  We need to teach, not just to teach others within these walls but teach out in the community.  We need to help others deepen and strengthen their own personal foundations.

Keep learning, keep practicing, and keep teaching: this is core to living your UU Faith everyday.

To build a sanctuary, you need a support structure.  When you’re building any sort of building, you need some solid beams of support or else the building will eventually come crashing down.

So how do we build a support structure as an embodied sanctuary?

Here at the Fellowship, we build networks of support by any range of means.  We have our Neighborhood Groups, there for when you need a helping hand, or in my case, when you need some cat sitting.  Our covenant group program has been a support structure to hundreds here in our Fellowship.  Our Pastoral Care associates are always there for you.  We show our support for one another through our caring committee and through coffee hour conversations.  And we gain spiritual support through our Sunday morning worship services.

We have our Fellowship Family support structure.  But we need to do more – it’s up to us to be a part of support structures for our friends, family, and the greater community.  We need to be the support structure for the broken, for those being wronged by society, for those who have no other support in their lives.

Build your own support structures while helping others build theirs: this is core to living your UU Faith everyday.

And to build a sanctuary, you need a mission.  A sanctuary without a mission is simply a building where people gather.

I’m a big believer in mission statements, and I believe we should be driven by our Fellowship’s mission statement.  We should remind ourselves regularly of what our mission is.  So I want you to flip to the back of your order of service.  Because we’re going to read our purpose and our mission statements out loud together.  Let us begin with the Purpose of the Morristown Unitarian Fellowship, which was written as part of our bylaws when our Fellowship was founded in 1955.

The purpose of this society is to promote the fellowship of those who, because of belief in human dignity, or reverence for God, or adherence to the teaching of the great spiritual leaders, or for other reasons esteemed by the individual conscience, are dedicated to fostering liberal religious attitudes and living; and to further the following principles: Individual freedom of belief, discipleship to advancing truth, the democratic process in human relations and recognition of the bond that joins all people.

And now, let us read together our mission and covenant statement.  Mission statements are a living document, and as part of a good practice, it’s good to revisit the mission statement from time to time.  Our most recent mission was adopted by our congregation in 1993.  Join with me in reading.

We the members of the Morristown Unitarian Fellowship, mindful of the rich diversity and essential oneness of human experience, covenant to weave the fabric of community from the strands of our separate lives. This is our pledge:

  • To create for ourselves and our children a spiritual home that will nurture, challenge, and offer us renewal.
  • To seek what is true even as we celebrate the mystery of existence.
  • To reach out to all who share our liberal religious values and participate in the broader Unitarian Universalist movement.
  • To work for social justice and the well being of our planet Earth.

That is our mission as a Fellowship.

But let’s make it personal.  What is our mission as embodied sanctuaries?

We all have our own personal missions.  A few years back in my old congregation, I was part of a covenant group that talked about personal mission statements, and we each wrote our own.  My personal mission statement begins with, “To live each day with love, hospitality, generosity, and integrity so that I may be remembered for having made others’ lives better and for helping others to discover and grow into their true potential.”  And I try to remember that in all that I do.

I recognize that not everyone has had the inkling to write their own personal mission statements, although I strongly suggest you spend some time to do so.  If you haven’t thought of your own personal mission statement, reflect back to our mission as members of the Morristown Unitarian Fellowship.  How can you enact that mission in your everyday life?

What is our greater mission as Unitarian Universalists?  It’s a part of our mission to create safe places of peace and justice in a world that’s broken.  It’s a part of our mission to create spaces of healing for our friends and family to ease the burdens on their souls.  It’s a part of our mission to create pockets of the world we have only ever dreamed about.

Live your mission: this is core to living your UU Faith everyday.

So, back to sanctuaries. I want you to think about your own personal sanctuary.  We all have a place we retreat to when we need to pause from our everyday lives and heal our own brokenness.  Is it art?  Is it social justice?  Is it reading a really great book?  Is it your favorite hiking trail? Go ahead and picture in your mind your personal sanctuary.  Think about how it looks, feels, smells.  Now I want you to think about the feelings you get when you’re in your own personal sanctuary.  Do you feel calmness?  Peacefulness?  At one with the universe?  Fully engaged?  Go ahead, take a moment and think about it.

Now, don’t you wish you felt that more often?  Don’t you wish others in your life could experience those same feelings more often too?

There are over a hundred of you here right now.  Imagine what our community would be like if throughout the week, we set up sanctuaries wherever we went.  If in our interactions with people and society we were an embodied sanctuary?  Imagine how it would change our local community.  Imagine how it would change the world.  Imagine how it would change our own lives.

So, how can we live our Unitarian Universalist faith more deeply?  What’s the secret to being a UU every day of the week beyond just Sunday Mornings?  Sanctuaries.  We need to build sanctuaries in our lives.  Every day, every week, every month and every year of our lives – it’s our mission to be and to build sanctuaries wherever we go.

May it be so.