By Rev. Barbara H. Gadon
September 18, 2011
First Unitarian Church of Chicago

Here we sit, in this big, beautiful room.  This is a demanding space – it doesn’t go easy on energy - with its high, soaring architecture, it keeps our gas bills soaring too.  And it doesn’t go easy on the worshiper.  This room asks something of each one of us.  Look around you.  Some call it a cold space, with so much concrete and marble.  But once you know some things about it, it becomes much more than that.  When you enter, carved above the doors is a quote, “Enter the gates with praise.  Pay vows to the most high.”  I would love to see us create banners with these words.  It is too easy to ignore them.  The room, with its great arches, the “vault ribs in stone”, actually begs you to do this.  In today’s language, we might say, “For God’s sake, look up!  Turn off your cell phone and look up! Stop reading that order of service, and look.”  Find yourself here in this room.  

Construction for this part of our building started in 1929, which when you think of it, is a strange time to create a lavish, new worship space.  The stock market would crash, the depression was about to hit.  The original church on this property was actually Hull Chapel, the lovely, golden room, up to your left.  Hull Chapel was built in the 1890s, at the invitation of the University of Chicago.  The university founders aspired to greatness.  They wanted to be the Harvard or the Oxford of the Midwest.  And both of those venerable institutions were ringed by chapels, so they invited churches to build.  In my tour of the building from Joan Pederson, (which inspired this sermon) I asked Joan why a tiny religion like Unitarianism would be on the short list for an honor like this.  She said we had established ourselves in the city by our considerable efforts helping the suffering during the Civil War.  We had also demonstrated great respect for the human intellect and learning.  William Ellery Channing, considered to be the “father” of American Unitarianism, taught us to cultivate the “free mind.”  “I call that mind free”, he said, “which recognizes its own reality and greatness.” An unusual claim for a preacher to make in the early 1800s.  That appealed to the founders of a university, so we were invited to be present in this part of the city.  

In the 1920s, Von Ogden Vogt was your minister, and, like you, he envisioned his little church growing larger, so he decided to build a bigger sanctuary to house the people he hoped to attract.  If this were somebody’s house, Hull Chapel would be the house; the room we are sitting in is the “addition”.  I marvel at the courage of vision that must have taken.  

The idea behind this little add-on was “unity” – or from the many, one. God is ONE, said the Unitarians.  And there are many ways to know God.  Looking in this room, what would you say that we worship?  There is no one symbol that dominates – no cross or crucifix, no Star of David or candelabra; no massive, sleepy-eyed Buddha.  This room reminds me more of the mosques I’ve visited, where the geometric designs create a pleasing harmony, subtle and complex.  There is no one thing you are supposed to look at in a mosque.  You are simply supposed to BE in the presence of the holy.  So it is here.  This big room was designed to inspire awe. This room says, “You are not at the epicenter of the universe”, as the advertisers would have you believe.  It’s not about you in this room.  And yet you may find yourself part of something grander than yourself.

Von Ogden Vogt saw worship as “a celebration which interrupts our work.”  I like this idea.  We work entirely too much in this culture – in Vogt’s time, it was to make our day-to-day lives without the labor-saving devices we have now. Today, we have much higher expectations of the work week; we make idols of our careers.  In this economy, some of us work two and three jobs.  Worship, he says, interrupts that work.  And since we are now constantly being interrupted with incoming texts and tweets, I rather like the idea of being interrupted instead, by worship.  

So this space grabs our attention.  Its very shape offers a kind of lavishness, a sense of abundance to me.  Its symbols offer an abundance of meanings.  

It matters where you sit in this big room.  Sit on the left side, and you see a baby; you are meant to contemplate birth.  Sit on the right side, and you see a skull and coffin; death looks straight at you from that side.  The right side of the room is hard.  But looking at birth is not always easy.  Think of the woman who has come back from the sonogram with hard news.  Think of the woman who has delivered a stillborn child.  Birth and death do not seem as far apart to her.  You must say yes to both, the big room tells us, and to everything in between.  “Just as long as I have breath, I must answer yes to life. Though with pain I made my way, still with hope I meet each day.”  You may say that the purpose of this room, and our reason for worshiping in it, is to find ways to say yes to life.  You may call that faith.  More on this later.  

I first found myself in this room in the fall of 1992, as a student at Meadville/Lombard Theological School.  Entering Meadville with me, though by that time well-known to this congregation, was a tall, slender, rose-skinned, and big-hearted young man named Jeffery Odell Tidwell.  He introduced himself to our class in the bravest possible way.  He said, “I am here because I am positive.  I am a positive person.  I am HIV-positive.  And I am positive in my life.”  I remember the smile tightening on my face, as it must have for everyone else sitting there.  This was 1992.  Jeffery had just told us he was going to die. And yet he was saying yes to life.  Yes to birth, and yes to death.  Yes to new beginnings, and yes to the end. It wasn’t easy.  We need help doing it.

The richness of symbols in this room, hint at the resources we have to say yes, all that we have to assist us.

Up above the baby and the skull, you find the “types of life which may all lead to truth.”  In Greek myth, they would be personified as gods, but here they are objects, kind of like those Mexican playing cards with drawings of skeletons and hearts with thorns.  There is the bleeding heart for the Lover, the owl and book for the Thinker, the city on the hill for the Seer, and the fist of action for the Doer.  Joan particularly liked the fist, she said.  As a teenager in the late 1960s, she had the black power salute in her church. Very cool.  Notice that they are all the same size, she told me, and none is elevated above the other.  All of these gods are yours to call upon.  

Above the lover, thinker, seer and doer, is the most traditional-looking symbol here, the stained glass window, the rose window.  Even here, you don’t just see one angel, but you have four.  Going clockwise, starting from the top or North:  they are Michael, Rafael, Uriel and Gabriel.  In the great myths and stories, angels are powerful beings, not meant to be tamed or put to human use.  I once heard Sister Joan Chittister mock the new age tendency to use angels as “our personal shoppers”.  Nonsense, she says.  Angels are fearsome entities in the Bible – Why else would the first words they speak to people always be “Fear not”?  But they are fearsomely beautiful.  And don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t have a guardian angel as a Unitarian Universalist.  In this room, you have four.  They show us joy, readiness for challenge, healing and wisdom.  

This big room has housed many students in its day.  Meadville/Lombard students, students from the University, students of life.  In this big room, all along the walls where you sit, you will find symbols honoring many forms of study, and many trades and vocations.  There are symbols of the trades, business, arts, sciences and professions.  Joan says they “elevate the ways we make our lives.”  As you look at them, you might find yourself represented in one or more of them.  They represent the honor and dignity of human life, and again, because they are of equal size and at equal heights to the more overtly religious symbols, the room says, these ordinary parts of life are on par with the divine.  

In representing the trades and the unions, the church was acknowledging the struggles of everyone to make a living, to make a life.  Some symbols stood for politics, some for commerce, like the money bag.  I think I am going to enjoy contemplating the money bag, I think, when it comes time for the pledge drive.  Money is an uncomfortable subject in many churches.  So are politics.  We would often “spiritualize” our world, and prefer to talk of “higher” things in church.  How much more true was this in 1929, when construction of this sanctuary began.  It would not be long before money and politics would begin their dangerous, difficult dance together.  A dance that continues to this day.  The big room says it all belongs, it’s all a part of the life we share.

Think how controversial it would have been to put the symbols of science – of engineering and chemistry, astronomy and geography, in a sacred space. 1929 was not long after the infamous Scopes Monkey trials, that pitted science against religion with an animosity that has not yet abated in some circles.  It would make secularists suspect the poetry and psychological wisdom of the Bible, it would make fundamentalists reject the breath-taking discoveries of science.  We still have some difficulty putting these two parts of ourselves together, which are what science and religion are, parts of the human whole.  We haven’t caught up with Von Ogden Vogt, even today.  We still want to separate them out, make categories.  “I am a secular humanist,” one might say.  “I am a mystic and a Christian,” says another.  “Fine”, says Von Ogden Vogt.  “Come to church”.  

Harvey Cox, one of my favorite current-day theologians, wrote about this in his recent book, The Future of Faith.  He says there is a disturbing “new trend” in modern religious thought, one that is very troublesome to the conservatively religious.  The lines between the sacred and the secular are becoming more and more blurred.  There is now a tremendous shift in our thinking, he says.  “More people today seem to recognize that it is our everyday world, not some other one, that, in the words of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘is charged with the grandeur of God.’” (Cox, The Future of Faith)  

In this big room, religious symbols and secular ones are thrown together for contemplation.  All are part of life.  No one area is more sacred than the other. Nothing is off-limits.  

I made it my business to get to know Jeffery Tidwell.  We became friends, and it was an adventure.  He took me everywhere, to gay bars and strip clubs.  (I kept saying, “Now what’s in this for ME, Jeffery – just tell me that.”)  He tried to shock me with self-revelations.  He usually did.  It was through Jeffery that AIDS became personal for me – and I know it was the same way for the people here who knew and loved him.  I never did think it made any sense to see AIDS as some kind of punishment for how you lived your life.  Jeffery was too unrepentant and too scandalous and too wonderful for any of that to make sense.  Here was a man who partied AND taught Sunday school, getting his students to write to letters to congress.  He dressed in drag sometimes AND was a little brother of the elderly.  It was all part of one good person, it all went together.  A good person who was 29, had lost two lovers to the illness, and was now using a cane to walk.  It was not fair.  

Church is not supposed to be a fortress against the difficulties of life, but a place where we learn to embrace them.  It is a place that embraces us.  Where we learn what resources, what abundant resources, we have to face our lives.  Where we learn to say yes.  Harvey Cox says that in church, now, we are learning a new meaning for the word faith.  Faith does not mean belief, he says.  The two are not the same.  Belief is about opinion, and it can’t be proved, or agreed on.  Faith, he says, is different.  “Faith is about deep-seated confidence.  In everyday speech, we usually apply it to people we trust or the values we treasure.  It’s what the Hebrews spoke of as the ‘heart’”.  Without our hearts, we die; so without faith in life, we give up.  It is this faith we hope to learn here.  

In this big room, you and I have faced many challenges that make it difficult to say yes.  Jeffery Tidwell’s illness progressed, and the illness claimed more and more of that slim body.   And still we said yes.  It was taking more and more faith for Jeffery, and it was taking more and more faith from us.    

 I know people from this church visited him often. We rode the rollercoaster of his illness.  There were hospitalizations and close-calls.  There was sinking and there was rising back up.  Some of us agreed to stay overnight at his apartment with him, when his mother was unavailable.  We were scared to death.  Loving someone with a terminal illness takes courage, as any caregiver can tell you.  “Just as long as my heart beats, I must answer yes to love. Disappointment pierced me through – still I kept on loving you.”  William Ellery Channing considers such love a part of the free mind.  “I call that mind free,” he writes, “which sets no bounds to its love.”  

 We must answer yes to life, even in the most difficult times. When the great depression hit, in the ‘30s, those early worshipers must have strongly felt the no of life.   If they weren’t personally slapped by the hard hand of poverty, they could be at any time. And all around them was suffering.  And they were held by this room and the other people in it.  

This big room contains all of us.  There are times when you are just raw and sad, a little raggedy around the edges.  I remember times coming to church and not being able to make it through any of the hymns.  And on the days I could sing - I remember singing in the choir, feeling particularly held by the men who were singing behind me, many of them still here – Richard Pardo, Dick Snow, Dick Blough, and some not – Alex Coutts, may he rest in peace.  And hearing those men singing, something about it – it became a tender and restful place.  I could say yes.  This also happened to be a time when I was doing my hospital chaplaincy, an emotionally demanding time for any student.  After worshiping here, I could go to that hospital another day, see more patients, feel more grace.  I could feel more at peace somehow, with even the most difficult and hard-to-fathom parts of my life.

We don’t know how or why things happen, and taken as a whole, it is rather mysterious.  For some things, there are no real answers, only mystery.  

Albert Einstein, when asked by a rabbi to declare in less than 500 words whether he believed in God, said this, “The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious.  It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science.  He to whom this emotion is a stranger can no longer wonder and stand in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle.  To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly:  this is religiousness.  In this sense, and in this sense only, I am a devoutly religious man.”  

None of us certainly understood AIDS, or why it would strike as beautiful a soul as Jeffery.  The “no” of his illness was powerful.  And within this church, there came a yes.  This church ordained Jeffery in the last six months of his life.  He would die, but he would die as the Reverend Dr. Jeffery Tidwell.  You made this happen. You found a ‘yes’ in the middle of it all.  Wallace Stevens said, “After the final no there comes a yes.  And on that yes the future world depends.”  In our yes, we come alive.  In our yes, God is reborn.

The NO voices in our heads are powerful, as Meg Barnhouse said.  They tell us we are no good, that we screwed up, that we will never amount to much. “God is the ‘yes’ of the cosmos.  We need the YES.  “YES, be who you are.  YES, you are a good enough person.  Yes, you have something to say.  Yes, be angry and let it move you.  YES, fall in love.  YES, throw yourself into your life.”  (Barnhouse, “The Yes Barn” from Radio-Free Bubba)  Let us come here to learn how to say yes, with all our hearts and know that we are held by the world.  Let us learn to say, with Dag Hammarskjold, “For all that has been — Thanks. For all that shall be — Yes.  Amen.