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  • Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
  • Stewardship and Gift Policy
    • Saints We've Known
    • Charitable Giving and the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act
  • Sermons 2022-23
    • A Waste of time
    • The Seventh Principle
    • Make Light of It
    • A Turn of the Screw
    • America: Part II
    • What Do You Expect?
    • Good Mourning
    • Beyone Repair?
    • No Signal
    • Absolutely, Maybe, Definitely Not
    • Do Guardian Angels Exist?
    • Right Here
  • Our Covenant
  • Minister's Welcome
  • Religious Exploration
  • Music & Choir
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  • Unitarian Universalism
  • Driving Directions
  • Photos of Us
  • Making the BUUC Accessible
  • LOVEUU
  • Community Resources
    • Mental Health Providers, Worcester MA
    • Southern Worcester County Parent Guide
  • Contact Us
    • Sermons 2021-22
  • Sermon Archives
    • Finding Joy in Uncertain Times
    • The Arithmetic of Joy
    • Of Muck and Martyrs
    • Doing Dishes
    • Idle Worship
    • The Fear of the Refugee
    • It's Not Just You
    • If We Choose
    • Lazy Busy
    • A Most Human Season
    • Running on Empty
    • Alone Together
    • Come Home
    • Winter Warmth
    • How Big Is Your Circle?
    • Thanksgiving Life
    • Kurt Vonnegut: Humanist Hero
    • In Costume
    • Again
    • Borderland
    • The Geometry of Life
    • Transformation and Growth
    • Come Build a Land
    • Our Brains, Our Minds and Our Hearts
    • Gifts
    • Repairers of the Breach
    • The Times They Are A-Changin'
    • Mission Possible
    • It Matters
    • Thanksgiving Reflection
    • Shoes That Fit
    • Winter
    • Ignorance, Answers, and Bliss
    • Questions, Questions
    • Living to the Point of Tears
    • Lost in the Shuffle: UU's Less Popular Principle
    • On the Turning Away
    • A Matter of Degree
    • A Collection of Near Death Experiences
    • I Know Her So Well, I Think. I Thought.
    • Faith-based Resilience
    • To Abet Creation
    • Who Cares?
    • A Matter of Life and Depth
    • Pass/Fail
    • Enough
    • O Holy Light
    • With New Eyes
    • Coming Alive
    • Beyond Words
    • Becoming
    • A Miracle Even Thomas Jefferson Could Embrace
    • Fear Not!
    • The Miracle of Change
    • Meeting Grace
    • R-E-S-P-E-C-T
    • Serving with Grace
    • The Pursuit of Happiness
    • When Heresy Met Sally
    • The Souls of All Living Creatures
    • What Are You Looking For?
    • Beloved
    • Let Me Count The Ways
    • Happiness
    • Chosen
    • Faith and Belief
    • Room To Grow
    • Blessed Fools
    • Don't Be a Superhero
    • Getting There from Here
    • Unfinished Business
    • Universalism's Origen
    • Yearn to Learn
    • Beauty Saves
    • Commentary on Freedom
    • Being Human: Religious Community in a Plastic Age
    • Questionable Certainties and Faithful Doubts
    • Commentaries on Murphy's Law
    • Children of a Lesser God
    • Fragile Nets of Meaning
    • Life Incarnate
    • So You Want to Be Happy
    • A Year's End Resolution
    • Where Stars Are Born
    • Thanking Eve
    • Anger, Our Teacher
    • Everlasting Punishment
    • Comprehending Moral Imperatives in a Me-centered World
    • Promises Kept
    • Dancing With The Stars: Science and Religion
    • Two Steps and Missteps: Church Membership for Human Beings
    • Light of the World
    • Dear God
    • Imago Hominis
    • CESA: Reflections on Drug Addiction
    • Falling in Love Again
    • How Does Your Garden Grow
    • Repent! No Guilt Trip Required
    • Go Out into the World
    • Thanks-living
    • Life and Not Life
    • Guilty As Charged
    • Dare To Hope
    • Don't Forget To Chew
    • Break the Silence - Stop the Violence
    • Living Among Strangers
    • What Is Religion Anyway?
    • East of Eden
    • Praying Attention
    • Wholly Human
    • The Healing Power of Forgiveness
    • All I Want for Christmas
    • Let It Be...Let It Go
    • Why Not?
    • People Like You
    • Vulnerable Trust
    • Thin Places
    • Now What?
    • Courageously Humble
    • The Last Butterfly
    • The Good, The Bad, and The Whole
    • Sacred Souvenirs
    • Made Whole
    • This Wild and Precious Life
    • Fragile Nets of Meaning
    • Where Our Future Can Begin
    • Taking Stock: Managing Our Spiritual Inventory
    • To Convert Life into Truth
    • Are We There Yet?
    • Family Matters
    • Ordinary Saints
    • All I Wanted Was Everything
    • Giving Thanks
    • To Be or Not To Be
    • Entering the Christmas Story
    • A Great Light
    • What's Real?
    • Troubling the Water
    • The Amazing Mr. Wedgewood
    • Lend Me Your Ears
    • Work That Is Real
    • Happy Melba Toast Day
    • The Great Pacific Garbage Dump
    • Plastics, Benjamin!
    • Surprise Beginnings
    • A Place at the Table
    • Norbert Capek’s Flower Communion: A Call To Honor Life
    • Voices of God
    • Hold On To What Is Good
    • The Little Stone Church That Rocks
    • What Would Jean-Luc Do?: A Tribute to Humanist Hero Gene Roddenberry
    • From Who am I? to Whose are We?
    • Turning
    • Spirituality
    • R & R
    • Spritual F-Words
    • Does Anyone Really Like Herding Cats?
    • Prepare to Be Amazed
    • The Greatest Gift
    • The Impossible Will Take A Little While
    • Taking Sides: Journey to the Center of the Universe
    • Help Wanted, Apply Within
    • Two Truths & Plastics and Water Don't Mix
    • The Third Conversation
    • Good People >
      • UU You >
        • Twitter and Covid and Wall Street, Oh, my!
        • I Do Believe in Spooks >
          • Holy Homophones >
            • What's in a Name?
            • So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Goodbye!
            • Open-Mindedness, As Assigned
            • Going on a Journey
            • Cheap Love
            • Nonproductive Delight
            • The Persistence of Memory
            • Thoughts about the Historical Jesus
            • Lindens and Tiarella and Bearberry, Oh My!
            • Season's Greetings
            • I Still Have A Dream
            • Peace Corps - A Lesson in Caring
            • Spiritual Engineering
            • Thanks for the Memories
            • Our Stories, Ourselves
            • Anxious Gardeners
            • The Best Sermon Ever!
            • UUnited
            • We Are Courageous
            • A Right Way to Be Wrong
            • Sacred Ideals
            • This Wild and Precious Life Revisited
            • 20/20
            • Home
            • What About Now?
        • Fragile
        • Time Ravel
        • Now Is Not the Time for Hope
        • The G Word (It's Probably Not what You Think)
    • No Thanks, I'll Walk
    • Be the Change
    • I Don't Know
    • What Lies Within
    • Guest Perspective
    • Growing Panes
    • De Colores
    • Roots and Wings
BROOKFIELD UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST CHURCH

A Place At The Table

Sermon given at Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church

 April 27, 2014

Rev. Craig M. Nowak

Many years ago my husband Kevin and I were invited to have lunch at the home of some friends.  They were relatively new friends who were also customers of my husband’s antiques business.  We had gone out to eat many times, but they always talked about what great cooks they were and how they’d love to have us over to sample their cooking.  They also knew from conversations and eating out together that I don’t eat seafood, regardless of how its prepared or who prepared it. 

And so the day of the luncheon arrived and Kevin and I dove out to our new friend’s house.  It was actually their summer house, and a grand one at that, abutting a lush golf course.  Inside, the vast rooms of the house brimmed with fine furniture, artwork, and other antiques, some which they had purchased from us.  The massive kitchen of the house was beautifully remodeled and stocked full of all kinds of herbs, foods and wine.

When it came time to eat we sat down together and there set before each one of us were two plates.  One with mixed greens and the other with what appeared to be a slice of meatloaf.  As it turned out it was a meatloaf made in part, our hosts gleefully explained, with seafood.  They then proceeded to tell me the reason I didn’t like seafood was that I had probably never had seafood the way they make it, reminding both Kevin and I what great cooks they are.  In my frustration I wanted to remind them that I had spent many summers as a youth at the shore and had had ample opportunity to sample all manner of seafood and preparations. But, in the interest of civility, I tried the meatloaf which I had to chase down with a gulp of water.  Afterward I pushed the plate aside and ate the mixed greens. 

Now, I was probably a few pounds lighter than I am today, but let’s face it, a plate a mixed greens isn’t going to feed a guy my size.  A few hours later, Kevin and I departed our from friend’s grand, overflowing with abundance home, hungry.

The hunger I left with that day wasn’t only felt in my stomach; I felt it in my being.  I left feeling like I somehow didn’t belong, that although lunch had been served, there was not really a place for me at the table.  I felt on a deeply personal level, unwelcome.

For too many, such an experience is not merely confined to the dining table of a perhaps well intentioned, if not misguided, friend.  Indeed, for many, much of life itself may be experienced, as Rosiland Russell’s character, Mame Dennis described it in the movie Auntie Mame, “a banquet”...where “most poor suckers are starving to death!” Much like the scene in hell from this morning’s reading.

The fable of the long spoons offers an interesting observation: the difference between heaven and hell is not a matter of geography.  If you recall, in the fable both heaven and hell were identical in every detail, including the setting.  Indeed, there was but one crucial difference between the two.  In hell the people struggled to feed themselves; in heaven they fed one another.  Now there are many directions one could go with this story, but one way of understanding the difference between heaven and hell is to say that in heaven, the people practiced hospitality.

Hospitality is the one of the most venerated and essential of spiritual practices; and it is the right and responsibility of all who would call this community their spiritual home. 

Mentioned throughout the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, hospitality was considered a moral obligation in ancient societies where travel was often extremely dangerous.  

As various religious traditions teach, the practice of hospitality goes beyond the act of providing another with food or shelter or the sharing of material goods.  For Unitarian Universalists hospitality is a state of heart and mind we seek to promote and practice in our congregations and through social action work and is directly related to our principles. 

Hospitality then, is about cultivating and practicing a generosity of spirit....the opening of one’s heart and mind to the unique presence and gifts of another as well as honoring and respecting another’s differences and limitations.  This generosity of spirit reveals and recognizes our interconnectedness, and is responsive to its truth that the way we live in relation to one another and the larger world impacts us all.  Hospitality is both outwardly and inwardly directed, something we practice in community and in solitude, mindful that so many of us have been taught to welcome others while remaining distant strangers to ourselves.

Hospitality is fundamentally about our relationship to others, ourselves, and to life.  It is, at least in part, how we practice what is means to be human.  And church, according to the late UU theologian James Luther Adams, is a place to engage this practice.

Here at the Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church, we strive to provide both a place and means to practice the spiritual discipline of hospitality.  As a community we seek to welcome, affirm, and empower one another.  We work to provide a safe place to be vulnerable, to ask questions, to give and to receive.  We promote learning, encourage spiritual depth and growth.  And we look for ways to continue and deepen our practice outside these walls in the community, in our homes, schools and workplace.  Of course, like my friend with the seafood meatloaf, we don’t always get it right or go as far as we could, and so we also try to recognize and learn from our mistakes or assumptions and try again.

Hospitality is a sacred commitment we make as people of faith to live a more generous life in body, mind, and spirit, even, or especially in the face of challenges.  It is the commitment we make as members of this faith community to support its mission with our time, talent and treasure…the way we prepare a place at the table for members to be... and the same commitment we ask others to make when they join this congregation. 

This church year we have had four people, Mike, Colleen, Gordon and Mary become members of Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church. The formal act of becoming a member is relatively easy. Mike, Colleen, Gordon and Mary attended services for a period time, met with me briefly and then signed the membership book.  The less formal, but no less important part of becoming a member, is the process of living into the rights and responsibilities of membership, to which the spiritual practice of offering and receiving hospitality is central, including:

Regular attendance at worship to strengthen the bonds of community, nourish our spirits and maintain connection to our highest ideals.  

Voting at congregational meetings.  The right to vote is one of the great legacies of congregational polity dating back to the Cambridge Platform of 1648.

Contributions of time, talent and treasure in support of the mission, ministries, programming, and operations of the church.

Spiritual growth and development for the benefit of the individual, the congregation and the larger world.

These rights and responsibilities of membership remind us that the church and its mission is not here for us alone, but for those near and far, who may or may not ever cross our threshold, but who pray and find hope in the possibility that a community like ours exists.  For the world we live in is too much like the hell as described in the fable of long spoons...a banquet overflowing with abundance where people are struggling awkwardly to feed themselves, to explore and find meaning, to experience generosity and compassion, to nourish and grow their soul. 

We know it doesn’t have to be this way.  We know we can make a difference. And so, today, as we prepare to welcome Mike Colleen Gordon and Mary as members into the life of this generous, compassionate, and, I’ll add, party-loving religious community, let us pick up our long spoons and recommit ourselves to the spiritual practice of hospitality, that we may feed and be fed by one another here and in the worlds we inhabit outside these walls.

Let us make for all people, a place at the table.

Amen and Blessed Be

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