This sermon was preached by Dan Harper at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, in Kensington, California. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Sermon copyright (c) 2003 Daniel Harper.
Here’s a handsaw. There’s more than one type of handsaw, but when I worked in residential construction, we sometimes called this a panel saw. In a nutshell, here’s how it works:
You put the piece of wood you’re working on across a sawhorse, or something low enough that you can trap the work with your knee — start your cut slowly, then begin sawing in long rhythmic strokes — keeping the saw absolutely perpendicular to the work by twisting your body slightly — if you have to make corrections, to keep cutting along the line you’ve marked, you twist slightly at the handle of the saw….
Well, that’s the basic idea. But I realize as I try to tell you how to use a handsaw that it’s not something that’s easy to put into words. I learned to use this tool by working as a carpenter for five years. I watched my boss, watched how he did it. I learned a lot from my boss, and I learned a lot from the saw itself. The saw taught me — if you don’t keep the saw absolutely perpendicular to the work, it buckles and throws you off — if you don’t take long, rhythmic strokes, you’ll never get the work done. I built up muscles in my right arm that I didn’t know I had, and after a time my body naturally took the right posture — knee on the work, ready to go — whenever I picked up a saw.
Tools can teach us. Psychologists call this phenomenon “distributed cognition.” A tool contains the distillation of generations of human activity and wisdom. Tools can teach us, can shape our bodies and our very beings, just as books can. Any cultural artifact can shape us and teach us — tools, and books, and, yes, churches. We use cultural artifacts, benefitting from the wisdom of the ages, and as we use them they shape us, shape our muscles and ligaments and bones, shape our souls — whatever a soul is — so that we move through the world in new ways.
Consider this church. Look beyond the new lights we have here in this room. Forget about the argument about whether there should be bigger windows. Ignore the inconsequential matters. Get down to a deeper level. Here we sit, in a large room together on Sunday morning, in much the same way Unitarians and Universalists have sat together on Sunday mornings since Unitarianism and Universalism began in North America. We stand to sing hymns in much the same way that Ralph Waldo Emerson and Lidian Jackson Emerson and there children stood to sing hymns in their Unitarian church a hundred and fifty years ago. We sit and listen to a sermon, in much the same way that Judith Sargent Murray sat and listened to John Murray, one of the first Universalist preachers in North America. We come together in much the same way that religious liberals came together to hear Thomas Starr King preach liberal religion for the first time in California a century and a half ago.
Our liberal religion, our Unitarian Universalist faith, shapes us each week when we come to church. We come to hear poems and great religious writings read out loud, and we are shaped by them. We listen as ministers and lay leaders try to make sense out of the world. We are shaped by what they say, and then during coffee hour we talk with them, and they in turn are shaped by the congregation. We reshape the great old scriptures to meet our needs, turning the Torah and the gospels of Jesus into books of liberation — and shaped by their liberating message, we in turn go out of this church to shape the world.
As you can see, churches are just like handsaws. As we use a handsaw to cut and shape something we’re working on, the handsaw teaches us and shapes us. Maybe we don’t want to push that metaphor too far — churches don’t make sawdust. And churches are different, too, because the church shapes us as we shape the church, and those of us in the church are all shaping each other.
So we are shaped by church. But here’s a funny thing. While we let ourselves shape and be shaped by church, we no longer let that process happen to our children, at least not much.
Up until fifty years or so ago, Unitarians and Universalists mostly had their Sunday school classes for children (and sometimes for adults) before the worship service, maybe at 9:30. Then, in theory at least, after Sunday school was over, whole families would go to the 10:45 worship service together — just as Lidian Emerson sat in the Emerson family pew flanked by her daughter Ellen on one side, and her son Edward Emerson on the other side. By the early 20th century, however, people began to notice that more and more often families with children would leave after Sunday school and not come to the worship service.
In the 1920’s, a brilliant religiou educator named Sophia Lyon Fahs noticed that children were not coming to church much any more. Using the new science of developmental psychology, Sophia Fahs thought she could explain this phenomenon — worship services were not developmentally appropriate for children and teenagers. Sophia Fahs was not sure about changing worship services to make them appropriate for both adults and children, but she thought she could create a really good, age-appropriate Sunday school for children.
She got the Union Theological School in New York City to sponsor her new school, so from the bginning her school had no connection with a church. Her school was absolutely wonderful. It was so wonderful that when the Unitarians and the Universalists teamed up together to create the best curriculum series possible, they naturally hired Sophia Fahs to take charge of the project.
Sophia Fahs and her generation completely split the Sunday school from the worship services — they completely split the children from the adults of the church. Typically, children were not even allowed to come in to worship services. By the time our building was built, in 1961, many Unitarian Universalist congregations worked hard to separate their children and teenagers in completely separate buildings. While Sophia Fahs is one of my heroes, I now feel that separating children from adults was the worst possible thing to do.
I feel that way because I was one of those children. As a Unitarian Universalist child, I rarely was allowed in worship services at all. When my parents and other adults went to wroship services, we children were all sent off to a completely separate wing of the church building. Looking back, I remember almost nothing from any of my Sunday school curriculums. What I do vivdly remember was when I got to go to worship services.
I remember when I was twelve or thirteen, I would sometimes help my father usher — I think he was head usher that year, and he had a terrible time recruiting enough ushers, so that’s why I got to usher — and when it came time for the sermon, I’d go and sit down to listen. Sophia Fahs was right — mostly I couldn’t understand the sermon, because it wasn’t developmentally appropriate. I always tried to sit next to a man named Hrand Saxenian, because during the sermon he would periodically take a notebook out of his pocket and scribble some notes to himself. When I sat next to him, I felt it was OK to read the back of the hymnal. Those of you who remember the old blue hymnal will remember that in the back, there were little capsule biographies of all the authors and composers. I loved reading those capsule biographies, and from them I learned about William Ellery Channing, Kennethe Patton, and Beethoven. Maybe the sermon wasn’t developmentally appropriate, but sitting next to Hrand Saxenian certainly was. I learned that even if you couldn’t understand the sermon, you came to church to be with other people, to gather in community.
But mostly, I went off to Sunday school. As did many kids who grew up as Unitarian Universalists in those years. The funny thing is, most of the kids I went to Sunday school with are no longer Unitarian Universalists. Most of the ones I still know don’t go to any church at all. My generation of Unitarian Universalist kids got a strong message: go off to school but don’t bother us adults in church. I feel lucky that my dad let me usher, and that I got to know Hrand Saxenian.
Recently, I was talking with my friend Jen Devine, who also grew up as a Unitarian Universalist, and she has given me permission to tell you about her experiences growing up in a Unitarian Unviersalist church. Her experiences were quite different than mine. Her family belonged to a small Unitarian Universalist church in norhtern New England. She remembers that there were only ten or twelve kids, of all ages, in her Sunday school, and they all met in one big room. But she only went to Sunday school about half the time. The rest of the time, she was upstairs in the worship service. Like me, Jen said mostly she remembers being “bored out her mind” during the sermon — “someone droning on with a sermon up in front” is how she put it. But the worship services were important to her nonetheless.
Jen remembers that when you walked into the worship service there was an eternal flame that was lit, symbolizing the wisdom of the ages, and that the chalice was lit from that eternal flame showing our debt to the ages past. She remembers gazing up at a mobile from which hung symbols of the world’s religions, and she felt some kind of connection with those religions. When a new minister came, she remembers that worship services got even better for kids. The new minister made sure kids got to light the chalice, and do readings, and become full participants in the worship service. Jen would still go downstairs to Sunday school about half the time, to do an art project or something — but I sense that it was the time in worship service that really shaped her as a Unitarian Universalist.
I asked Jen if, as was true at my church, most of the kids she grew up with left Unitarian Universalism. No, she said after a moment’s reflection, most of the kids from her church are still Unitarian Universalists.
Here’s what I think happened:
In my childhood church, we had a vision of separateness. Just as in the wider society, children were to be separated from adults. The children were shaped by that experience, and naturally did not stay in church.
But in Jen’s church, children and teenagers were integrated into the whole life of the congregation. Jen’s church was counter-cultural in the best possible way, because her church had a vision of wholeness. I’ll go further — her church truly had a vision of the oneness of humanity. Including children. Including teenagers. As well as adults of all ages.
When children come to church, we shape them — we adults shape them. Earlier, you saw how Bill shaped the children during the storytelling, helping them to be a grove of trees. But did you also notice that the children shaped Bill? By where they stood, by how they moved, they helped to shape Bill’s dance. Just so, when Bryan has the children sing one part of a round, and the adults sing another part, our voices blend together in a harmony that would be impossible if we sang alone. This, my friends, gives you a snese of the wholeness that is possible in our church.
Where does this church stand? How well do we integrate children into the whole life of the congregation? We do better than the church of my childhood — we welcome the children into the worship service, we sing with them, we dance with them, and they feel comfortable with us. These things are very important, and they are to our credit.
But I am troubled by other aspects of our church. I am troubled by how hard it is to find Sunday school teachers. We only have about 65 children and teenagers on any given Sunday morning. In our church, with its 550 members, it should be easy to find more than enough people who are called to a ministry with children and youth, who are willing to be Sunday school teachers and youth advisors. But here it is October already, and I still need half a dozen more teachers and advisors — and I worry about January when I will have to recruit more teachers and advisors. There are other, equally troubling signs. I look around and I don’t see any children’s art on the walls. In fact, I see almost no evidence in this building that children might use this building. If I were a child, how would I feel about that? Would I feel that this was an adult-only building, and that I was not completely welcome here?
Here at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, we say that we welcome people no matter what race, we accept you if you’re gay or straight; we believe in the oneness of humanity. We have a vision of wholeness for ourselves and for our world.
But our vision of wholeness must also include all people no matter what their age — children, teenagers, young adults, middle-aged folks like me, and older adults. Like my friend Jen’s church, we must find a way to be counter-cultural, to resist the impulse to age-separation, to become whole.
I’m a good Universalist, and so for me it all comes down to the fact that love is the most powerful force in the universe. I feel we are called to find deeper ways of shaping and being shaped by children, and teeneagers. I feel we are called to open ourselves to increasing the numbers of young adults in our midst. If we let it, love will shape us so.
As a Universalist, I know that love will triumph in the end. We will heal the separation between children and adults. I believe we are called to become a community of wholeness, a community bound together with bonds across the generations, a community where people of all ages are central to our life together — in short a community worshipping together in love.