SERVICE IS OUR LAW


There are many ways of being religious. 

One can perform rituals and feel a sense of security in the sameness of those 
rituals: prayers, chants, the lighting of candles, the proper sitting of objects, 
and many other things. Many members of high liturgical religions like 
Christian Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism hold to ritual as being the most 
important element of the religious life.

There are sacred texts--like the Koran, the Tanakh of the Jewish people, the 
Christian Gospels, the Mahabarata of Hinduism and many others-to which 
some members of these religions turn religiously for learning and 
inspiration. Whether scholar or layperson, they rely on the truth in these 
texts being the most important truth they can know. 

A third way of being religious is to follow a great leader, whose life and 
teachings are so exemplary that they command all our attention. Moses and 
Mohammed, Zoroaster and Jesus, the Buddha and Baha'u'llah were such 
leaders. For some people, ultimate religious wisdom is incarnated in a single 
human being.

Yet others find theological belief most compelling. Some Jews believe that 
God has called them to be a holy nation and a kingdom of priests. Some 
Christians believe that salvation depends on taking Christ into their hearts. 
Some Muslims believe that the message of Allah conveyed through 
Mohammed was divine. Some atheists believe that there is no God and that 
human hope begins with that belief because we are no longer deceived by 
fantasies about a caring deity.

Then there are those whose religious way is the way of service. In every 
religion there will be found those who feel that however important rituals 
and texts, great leaders and inspiring theology may be, it is ultimately the 
deeds that we do, the actions we take, how we really live in the world that 
counts the most.

If any way could be said to be the religious way of Unitarian Universalists,  
it is this way, the way of service.

Not that we do not value the other ways of being religious. We do. 

In this congregation, for example, we appreciate the rituals of the Water 
Communion, the Flower Communion, the  Rite of Spring, and Ashes to 
Ashes, as well as the rituals associated with marriage and with death. Every 
Sunday we begin our service with ritual words and song. Many of us, myself 
included, have small personal shrines at home, in my case a shrine for 
deceased family members.

We do not, as many religions do, have a single sacred text. We have many. 
Indeed, Tony Larson accurately described our sacred text as a "loose-leaf 
Bible," ever-changing and growing.

We look to great leaders of our movement like Michael Servetus and 
Olympia Brown, Francis David and Sophia Lyon Fahs, taking inspiration 
from their wisdom and their courage to live wisely and humanely in our 
times.

Surely there is no nobler theological assertion than the fundamental principle 
of our movement that there is an inherent worth and dignity in every human 
being.

But above all else, we UU's look to service as the touchstone of our religion. 
What are we actually doing? How are we helping the world to be a better 
place? What are the ways in which we are strengthening individual rights, 
pursuing justice for all, nudging the world a bit closer to a truly peaceful 
planetary community? 

These are the kinds of questions UU's tend to ask more than any others. This 
is the kind of religion that we are, a religion in which, as we say on Sunday 
mornings in our Words of Affirmation, "service is our law." From the things 
that we do as individuals and as a congregation, it is clear that we do not 
speak these words in rote fashion. We think about them as we say them. We 
think about them through the week. We try to live them in what we do.

Service is our law. 

To serve others we must begin by serving ourselves. We do so not selfishly 
but because by serving ourselves we do not burden others with our care and 
because in serving ourselves we make ourselves able to serve others. 

We serve ourselves when we learn how to take care of ourselves so that we 
foster good health and energy in ourselves. 

We serve ourselves in taking care of our bodies.

We learn what foods are good for us and try to eat them. We learn about an 
appropriate regimen of exercise for ourselves and try to discipline ourselves 
to follow it. We learn how much sleep our bodies require and establish 
routines by which we can get that sleep.

We learn how to treat the minor aches and pains that come with being flesh 
and bones. We learn how to earn a livelihood so that we do not have to 
depend on others to provide us with our needs as we did when we were 
children.

We learn how to be self-reliant.

This is one of the great lessons of our tradition. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote 
a famous essay with that title. Henry David Thoreau lived at Walden by 
himself to show what it meant to be self-reliant. He describes in the first 
chapter of his well-known book his simple but healthy diet, the shelter he 
built for himself, his regimen of work and study. He was taking care of 
himself.

We serve ourselves in taking care of our bodies, and in taking care of our 
souls. 

This kind of service begins with the recognition that we are not divine nor 
are we immortal. There are limits on our capabilities and limits on our 
resources. Our spirits can only bear so much before we need relief. 

Taking care of our souls means that we find ways of relaxation to balance 
the times of stress, that we know how to play as well as how to work.

One of the great dangers for those devoted to a religion of service is 
exhaustion, a physical and mental weariness that renders us incapable of 
continuing. 

Service to ourselves means not to let this happen, to find what for us is a 
balance of giving to others and doing for oneself that enables us to give 
without collapsing. This dynamic balance will be different for different 
people and different for the same person at different moments in life. What 
matters is that we have a clear understanding of our needs, our talents, and 
our responsibilities so that we can continue to serve.

Each of us will have times when we must withdraw somewhat or completely 
from our usual engagement with the world. It can be new pressures at our 
work place, the birth of a baby, the illness of parents and the need they have 
of our time, or a return to school. It can be just the slowing down that comes 
with age or a need to refresh ourselves by getting out of the swirl of things 
for a period of time.

Such a stepping back is healthy and wise. It is a service to ourselves so that 
we will be able at a later time to return to our former or a new life of service 
to others.

Part of that stepping back, something we can do every day for a few 
minutes, is to involve ourselves in some form of spiritual discipline such as 
prayer. 

There is an ancient Jewish saying: "What is the service of the heart? This is 
prayer." Jewish understanding recognizes prayer not as asking God to do our 
work for us, but as a cleansing of the heart.

Such prayer begins with yearning. 

Prayer is a way of thinking or speaking about the very best in life that we 
can know or imagine. Prayer as yearning is about wanting good things to 
happen, from wanting our loved ones to recover from sickness to wanting 
justice to prevail in our society. Prayer as yearning is trying to understand 
what really is right and good and true and beautiful.

Such prayer is also silence and stillness. This gives us the opportunity to 
reflect on how we can make real these noble things for which we yearn. We 
must sometimes not just slow down but stop, be still, be silent, and listen to 
the voices within that can show us what we can do to bring peace on this 
earth, to turn hatred into love, to establish equity for all people. 

We try in very abbreviated form to model this in our meditation time during 
the service.

In communal or individual silence and stillness, we can plan how to turn our 
dreams into reality and make the world a better place. 

This kind of prayer is a hard discipline to follow. It does not offer the 
comfort of a God relieving us of our burdens or even of a God who hears 
what we have to say. It demands that we look honestly at our actions, being 
critical of what we have done poorly or wrongly, thinking of ways to be and 
to do better, being serious about improving ourselves so that we can be of 
greater service.

Service begins with service to ourselves, taking care of our bodies and our 
spirits.

It must not end there, for then such service is merely selfishness. We must 
reach out to others in their need and reach out to society in its needs. We 
seek to be self-reliant individuals but individuals within community, as when 
the issues were important enough both Emerson and Thoreau, reclusive by 
nature, proved to be. Self-reliant they were, but Thoreau went to jail for 
refusing to pay a tax to support the Mexican War, a war he considered 
immoral and Emerson left his study to be a strong voice in the movement for 
the abolition of slavery. 

Teresa of Avila, a Christian saint, gives us one reason why we must extend 
ourselves in service: "God has no hands or feet or voice except ours, and 
through these God works." 

Theists like Teresa speak of doing the work of the world because it is divine 
work. Humanists use a different language, describing the work of the world 
as our work. Both point to the same truth. Either as God's "hands and feet" 
or as agents acting on our own behalf, we are the ones who must take care of 
the world, changing it for the better or allowing it to descend into hell. 

Such service can be very ordinary. Most of the work of this world is 
ordinary, but it needs doing. Often it is unglamorous and hard work, mostly 
unremarked.

Consider, for example, the work of those who volunteer in hospitals to bring 
magazines and snacks to patients, to play with children hospitalized with 
serious diseases, or just to chat with people who are lonely in their hospital 
beds.

Consider the ordinary but oh-so-valuable work of those who make the coffee 
and tea and provide bagels and donuts for us on Sunday morning.

Consider the groups who take the responsibility for cleaning up certain 
stretches of our highways or those who are always willing to take the 
minutes at meetings or those whose hand is the first one up whenever 
volunteers are needed for anything, from bringing food to giving a ride to 
someone to cleaning up after an event.

Consider the ordinary work of our board of trustees over the past month as it 
sought to put together a budget for the year 2003 in the midst of difficult 
financial circumstances for many people in this congregation. The work of 
these 12 people, especially the work of the treasurer and the financial liaison 
and the fund-raising liaison and the president, was largely unexciting, often 
very difficult, mostly unknown, and absolutely necessary to the well-being 
of this congregation.

All of these are ordinary acts of service that make life a little sweeter and a 
little easier for us. All too often they go unnoticed and unappreciated 
because they seem so commonplace. Without them, though, our lives would 
be poorer.

This is service that accomplishes the routine but important tasks of life that 
help make our lives a bit smoother. 

Buddhism teaches us another aspect of service. A Bodhisatva, one who is 
enlightened but who holds back from entering nirvana until all can enter 
with him, takes a vow that "although suffering is limitless, I vow to end it." 
Suffering is the great fact of human life, and compassion drives the 
bodhisattva to do all that is possible to ease that suffering. 

We need service for the ordinary tasks of life. We also need service for the 
larger issues that confront us, issues that arise out of the fact of human 
suffering.  These are issues of injustice and inequity, of war and violence, of 
poverty and prejudice, of catastrophe and callousness, of hunger and disease, 
the grim specters that haunt the human story and fill it with tales of misery.

The response of the Buddha to this suffering was to imagine a religion 
devoted to ending this suffering even if it is without end.

Jews have a similar feeling for those who suffer, grounded in their 
instructional sacred texts. The Torah and the Hebrew prophets called on the 
people "to be holy." They were told to leave something in their fields and 
their vineyards for those who have no fields or vineyards to come and gather 
food and drink for themselves. They were told to deal fairly with those 
whom they employed, paying an equitable wage and paying it in timely 
fashion. The ancient Israelites were told to treat those who are vulnerable, 
the deaf and the blind and widows and children, with special love and care. 

The prophet Amos called on the people to "let justice roll down like wasters 
and righteousness like a mighty stream." 

These injunctions were intended to remind the people of how easily justice 
turns to injustice, how easily the rich take advantage of the poor, how easily 
we become indifferent to the cries of the oppressed. 

Jesus added his voice to this stream of moral teaching by telling his disciples 
that service to God is found in feeding the hungry and giving drink to the 
thirsty, clothing the naked and visiting the sick and those in prison, by being 
peacemakers.

The Muslim Sa'di taught that "the path is not other than the service of the 
people; it is not the rosary, the prayer rug, and the dervish robe."

In other words, we have to live the truth of our religion. We have to act in 
service to humanity. This is the way to save the world. 

What does it mean to save the world? 

Long ago Unitarians and Universalists quit arguing about the afterlife, about 
which we know nothing, but they continued to try to save the world and all 
of us who are in it. Their method was simple: do whatever we can to make a 
better world.

The way we try to do that is found in these words of the Lotus Sutra: "Of 
yore, I made a vow/Wishing to cause all creatures/To rank equally without 
difference with me." 

This commitment is not about some kind of mathematical equality in which 
every person's house must look exactly the same as every one else's and the 
food we eat be the same for every person at every meal and the clothes we 
wear be boringly the very same as what all others wear. 

What the Lotus Sutra points to is equity, everyone being considered as 
worthy as every one else and thus deserving of what that person needs and 
what will make that person happy. 

If every one worked to make this equitability real, the world would be just, 
and suffering, though it would not end, would be far less.

That is what the Buddha urged upon us in the Lotus Sutra. That is what the 
Unitarian Universalist way of service urges upon us as well..

Theodore Parker, the great 19th century UU preacher, once proclaimed that 
"greatness consists in the amount of service we render to the world."

Such service can be about big things. The members and friends of this 
congregation are deeply involved in service of this kind. 

There are people working on ways of defusing the momentum towards war 
and trying to bring relief to the beleaguered people of Iraq. This includes an 
endorsement by our board of trustees of the peace march that will be held on 
February 8.

There are people trying to educate the community about First Amendment 
rights, working as well to defend those rights against those who would too 
casually set them aside in the name of national security.

As we heard last week in the service, there are people in this congregation 
working to preserve women's freedom to control their own reproductive 
choices.

Next week we will begin a sometime part of the service called Living Our 
Principles by inviting Alison Paine to remind us of the important work done 
by the Interfaith Hospitality Network and the role that we can play in that 
work. Again, hundreds of people have been involved across the past ten 
years in trying to help families pushed out of their homes.

There are many people working on environmental issues to help us 
understand how we can better care for our home on this planet, writing 
newsletter columns with wonderful ideas, giving the staff information about 
ways to conserve and recycle, trying to connect us with groups working for 
energy conservation, and finding ways that we can be good stewards of the  
45.9 acres of land that are in our care.

These are some of the programs in which we are involved trying to make the 
world a better place, trying to save people and society by easing suffering 
and indignity and injustice. Most of these efforts are on a large scale, but 
that is not the only form of service. 

On New Year's Day, a member of the congregation sent me an e-mail with 
this story from Native American traditions. "Once there was a great forest 
fire, and all the animals rushed to escape. A hummingbird went to the river 
and collected a drop of water. The other animals laughed. 'What are you 
doing?' they asked. She replied, 'I'm doing what I can.'

Most of us will never perform great acts of service. There is neither time nor 
opportunity and for most of us there are not the resources for acts as noble as 
what Dr. King did or Mother Teresa. Many of us at any given time cannot 
even participate in the larger programs of the church. 

But every one of us can do something. The place to begin doing something 
is with those closest to us.

I think of the service rendered in the home of Marty Elder in the last weeks 
and months of her mortal illness. Countless people brought in suppers and 
sweets. Doctors and even dentists made house calls. Friends came to be with 
her so Tavi, her husband, could do necessary errands. What a wonderful 
service they offered, surrounding her with love and support.

But they were not the only ones extending service. Marty gave what she 
could, sick as she was, by treasuring every moment of every visit and being 
fully engaged in conversation with whoever was there. She gave service by 
laughing and being at ease with people so that they could be at ease with her, 
In her last days, she left behind for every one who was with her the most 
radiant smile, which I will remember as long as I live.

Martha and her family and friends all practiced living the principle of "doing 
what I can." The world was and is a better place because of it.

Service is our law.

Service begins with service to our own bodies and our own spirits. Then it 
reaches out beyond our own selves to touch other lives, sometimes in the 
ordinary tasks of life, sometimes on a huge canvass for very important 
issues, sometimes in very simple but meaningful acts. 

Service means that each person does what she can where she is with the 
resources available to her. No one, including ourselves, has a right to ask for 
more.

Unitarian Universalists decided a long time ago that the best way to live in 
this world was not by worrying about another world but by filling the world 
we are living in with justice and kindness, with laughter and delight. If  we 
do a good job with this world, then surely if there is another one it will be 
the better for what we have done. And whether there is or is not another 
world, then just as surely this world will be the better for what we have 
done.

The Unitarian Universalist tradition is a tradition of service, to self, to one 
another, to society, to the very earth of which we are a part. The history of 
this congregation and its present dynamic life are exemplars of that tradition.

Service is our way of being religious more than any other. It is a very good 
way indeed.











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