"Washed Away & Back Again with the Outgoing Tide."

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So, Sunday's sermon - quite possibly my last sermon ever (and certainly for the foreseeable future), and much different than most of the preaching I've done in my nearly 30 years of ministry. Just a list of notes scribbled on the Order of Service in roughly the order I hoped to address them. But on another level you could say I'd been preparing that sermon my entire lifetime. Started out with a little riff about Father's Day, and the summer solstice, and what it was like to be called "father" by people who really didn't know much about our faith tradition. Was sitting in my wheelchair at the head of the aisle, because I just wasn't feeling strong enough to climb up into the high pulpit, even though it wasn't nearly as high as I'd remembered. And eventually I got around to describing how I became a Unitarian to begin with (a story I've often told in the context of newcomers orientation classes) -- knowing that I WAS a Unitarian, but not really knowing what that meant, since my father had chosen to leave the church in Palo Alto at just that time, in rebellion against its "Hippie" culture and anti-war activism.

But fortunately, once we moved back to Seattle the following summer, there was another UU Church (Eastshore Unitarian in Bellevue Washington) just a mile or so from our home, so on Sundays I would arrange to ride my bicycle past the front door just as services were letting out, and then jump off real quickly just to see whether there was anything of interest in the pamphlet rack or on the book table. That's where I found a 35 cent Bobbs-Merrill edition of William Ellery Channing's "Unitarian Christianity and other Sermons." Channing preached that sermon on May 25th, 1819 at the ordination of Jared Sparks as the minister of the Unitarian Church in Baltimore, Maryland...Unitarianism's first real expansion outside of New England and "the neighborhood of Boston." And he took as his text that day a passage from Paul's First Letter to the Thessalonians, chapter five verse 21: "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." Channing argued from this text that Unitarianism's leading principle in interpreting Scripture is that the Bible is a book written for human beings, in the language of human beings and its meaning is best discerned in the same manner of that of other books, which is to say through the constant exercise of reason.

Well, that all sounded perfectly reasonable to me, but next I needed to come up with an actual Bible of my own, which I eventually did a few months later during a High School Debate trip, where I stole a Gideon Bible out of my bedside drawer at the Leopold Hotel in Bellingham, Washington. I mean, it was right there waiting for the taking, and so I took it...and I haven't really looked back since....

The rest of the sermon pretty much explored many of the same themes I've been talking about in Portland the last few months: the importance of (and relationships between) Worship, Education, Fellowship, Hospitality, Outreach, Social Justice and Pastoral Care in creating authentic and devoted communities of faith, along with the interdependent qualities of Humility and Gratitude, Generosity and Service, which form our Character and provide the energy and commitment to "be of use." This commitment often has its seeds in some sort of "unitive" experience (which someone like myself might even describe as "mystical"): the recognition that we are a very small part of much larger "whole," yet whole within ourselves and still completely dependent upon things beyond our control for our very existence and survival.

There were a few other minor themes I touched on as well, but I can't for the life of me now remember what they were. It was SO great though finally to have this chance to get back to church, to see so many of those wonderful, familiar faces, and also to met some of the folks who have joined the church since I departed from there in 2003. And then there are the faces of the missing: Grace Grossman, Faith Oldham, Ginny Coffin, Cynthia Young, Bill Hance, and Margaret Hitchcock to name just a few. So many fond memories, of challenges faced and risks taken, and joys and sorrows shared.

But the most gratifying thing of all was the way in which so many people pulled together to make the trip possible at all. What under "normal" circumstances might have been an easy and pleasant weekend excursion turned into a major expedition, physically challenging for both myself and my caring hosts, and with hundreds of dollars of additional, unanticipated expenses. And I'm also worried that this may well have been my final visit ever to The Faraway Island. Couldn't even make it to the deck to throw my pennies at the Bryant Point Lighthouse; had to send my traveling attendant upstairs to do it for me instead. So we'll see. One thing I do know for certain; I love you all so much that the mere thought that I may have just seen you all for the last time breaks my heart and brings tears to my eyes.

Something that seems to happen to me pretty routinely these days....