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The television program, the PBS News Hour had a segment on how people budgeted their money. They had people broken into four classes: lower class, working class, upper middle class, and rich.

They couldn't find anyone to go on camera who would admit to being "rich." The upper middle class guy complained that he wasn't really upper middle class or at least he wasn't well off, because he spent all his money as it came in.

He was completely blind to the fact that being upper class isn't about how fast or how much you spend, it's about how much you take in.

I was reminded of this again, when President Bush convened sample families together to talk about his tax cut plan. He too wanted four classes of people: lower class, working class, upper middle class, and rich. This gathering wasn't going to be on camera. But guess which class he couldn't find to show up?

With all his contacts, all those folks who contributed to his campaign. Apparently he couldn't find anyone who would show up at his gathering who would admit to being "rich."

Nobody it seems, except maybe Ted Turner or Bill Gates, will admit to being rich. Since we can always find somebody richer than us, since we can always spend our money as fast or faster than it comes in, we must not be rich, either. In a sort of twisted logic, while we are willing to admit other people are poor, we don't like to admit we're rich.

What's your net worth? Jesus said it is not what goes in you that makes you good or bad, it is what comes out.

How much do money do you have coming in each year? This little factoid is usually well-hidden. It is more private than admitting you have a sexually transmitted disease.

I can come up to you with a straight face and ask you to contribute a pint of blood. And your impulse may be to wince, but you may also come up with the blood.

And I can come up to you with a straight face and ask you for a copy of your IRS 1040, and your impulse will be to punch me in the nose.

Because the dirty little secret is - that we unconsciously confuse financial worth for our worth as a human being. It is a public yardstick against which we will forever find ourselves coming up short.

But it is the truth that will set you free. And the truth of Unitarian Universalism is that you - and everyone - has an inherent worth and dignity - not measured in dollars. That you are lovable, just as you are. And that a life lived fully requires contributing your resources to something larger and longer lasting than your own life. It requires a measure of servant-hood.

To really learn about servant-hood, you have to be willing to pay to learn to be a servant.

But would people really pay for this experience? Why would anyone pay to become a servant?

Are they dumb? Are they throwing their money away? What are they getting from learning to serve? You won't find the answer on TV. But you may find the answer in church.

Some of you know the story of the life of Moses. Maybe from church or synagogue. Or if you're like me and grew up UU, maybe most of what you know about Moses came from Charlton Heston.

Moses grew up an Egyptian, a prince in the royal court, really. Servants would run ahead and clear the way for his chariot: Moses is coming, Moses is coming! This was for the first 40 years of his life. He learned lessons of state, the ways of the court.

But there are some lessons you can only learn through failure. Those are lessons he learned after 40 years.

For the first 40 years of his life, Moses lived like a prince of Egypt. He was famous, and people paid respects and bounties to him, and many envied him from afar.

But from the ages of 41 to 80, he gave up being a high Egyptian, and lived as a servant.

He went to work for a man named Midian, a shepherd, the lowest of the low professions, just above tax collectors. How far Moses seemed to have fallen.

Moses went from being served to learning how to serve. Previously, Moses had to negotiate dinner menus, construction deadlines, and political intrigue.

Meanwhile, his people had to negotiate poverty, slavery, and starvation. Then he had to learn to serve.

But we're not like that, are we? We have to negotiate airline tickets, stock market investments, and college admission procedures.

We can read about people who have to negotiate poverty, illiteracy, and starvation, but unlike Moses, we don't see much of them.

TV and movies teach us all the time how to act like the rich, while pretending not to be rich. TV and movies teach us all the time how to be served. But they don't teach us much about how to be of service.

We have to learn to serve. Like riding a bicycle, it is awkward at first, but learning how to be of service can take us new and interesting places. And the range of our spiritual explorations greatly increases, just like being able to ride a bike expands the territory of any neighborhood kid.

Very few of us went into the Peace Corps, Vista, or similar service. But to be a well rounded religiously liberal person, we have to learn to be of service. This is difficult. It is difficult in a world that focuses on luxury, novelty, and self-interest.

Much of the world we move through is about getting "more" of something. Where can you go to learn to give away more of something?

If you go to the state fair and plunk down 3 bucks, you can immediately get a yellow corn dog or pink cotton candy. You pay your money, you get your goods.

We can get just about anything delivered to us overnight. We are taught - in subtle and not so subtle ways - that this is how life should be.

But if some of life's best lessons can only be learned by learning how to be of service, then where could you go to learn how to be a good and faithful servant? And, let's have a reality check here - who would sign up for that class?

Let's see: I could take a course in "Szechuan cooking," "Sensual Massage," or "How to be a Servant." Hmmm.

Who would sign up for that class? And yet. In a strange sort of way, everyone in this room has at least temporarily signed up for that class - how to be of service. How to be of use.

A class in turning our beliefs upside down and shaking it to see which values fall away quickly, and which stick close. A class in which you are expected to make a financial contribution.

A friend of mine went overseas to teach a couple years back. The job required her to pay to teach, to pay all the expenses of one student to attend, and to pay both of their travel expenses. The teaching conditions weren't great, there was a language problem, and - frankly - as a single mom, she was not a wealthy person to begin with.

Why would anyone take a job like that? Maybe it would make more sense if I told you that she went to Croatia? To work with brutalized refugee children from the Balkans?

Maybe it would make more sense if I told you she is a UU minister, but there are plenty of UUs - just like you - who are working with the UU Service Committee and other groups in various parts of the world doing similar work.

The depth-oriented spiritual path includes a component that turns everything upside down.

To become great, you must become low. To more fully command your own life, you must give up control at certain times. To become truly rich, you must give away some of your riches. Uh oh.

This giving away of wealth goes against everything our culture teaches us. But the depth-oriented spiritual path means while Monopoly may be good for real estate, trying to corner a spiritual monopoly on Truth is a tragic mistake.

Don't pass go, don't collect $200. In fact, think about giving $100 a month to church. And if you're already there, think about a 10% increase. Making a financial commitment to your values can be tough.

When we bring up the subject of money, the little hairs on the back of your neck may stand out. You may suddenly find your fingernails or cuticles intensely fascinating. You may hear your heart: thump, thump, thump.

Or perhaps you'll have a different reaction. Maybe indifference, maybe disgust with the whole subject: Why talk about money? That's not why we're here. Good. Something to work with.

Our youth and young adults sometimes ask the same question. The implicit assumption is that church should be about utopia. That sort of makes sense, really, that church should be a slice of utopia.

A utopia is an ideally perfect place, especially in its social, political, and moral aspects. And there is one more thing we all know about utopias. It doesn't matter whether you're a conservative, a liberal or something else, there is a certain factor all utopias share.

Everyone knows - utopias don't have taxes.

And in many utopias, everyone is equal. And in church, we're allowed to have different gifts when it comes to service - we're allowed to have different gifts when it comes to singing or cleaning or plumbing.

But the taboo against recognizing we each have different gifts of financial resources overrules everything else. Why would we recognize and celebrate gifts of time and talent, but not gifts of money?

I have to wonder if it is because somewhere - deep in our minds - when we are outside of church, we think that gifts of time and talent aren't worth much - only money that is really real.

And because utopia is the opposite of that, then only time and talent is real, not money.

And talking about money blurs the line.

There is something in us too, that seeks survival. And no matter how rich we already are, we may think we could use just a little bit more security.

But if security was really what we're after, then remember - you give up freedom for that security. The guys in cellblock H have maximum security: regular food, a rent-controlled, bomb proof house to live in. They've got total security and no freedom.

Unitarian Universalism is very much about religious freedom, and paradoxically, that means giving up some security, a bit of financial assistance in order for us to organize to live out our values.

Whether you've just discovered UU-ism or grew up in the faith, you still have to claim the faith and make it yours.

Bring it into your life, and then let it shine through your life. This spiritual exercise, like the physical kind, brings benefits of spiritual health and vitality that you otherwise just don't get.

If you are born in this country, you become "American" with all the history, rights, privileges baggage, etc, and you don't have to DO anything to "earn" this.

But with the UU faith, you have to earn it, make it your own. The vitality of the UU faith is that it is YOUR experience. We don't simply hand you a creed and be done with it.

You have to do the work, you get to own the results. Working together, we build something that outlasts our own lives.

We earn our spiritual depth by spending our time, talents and money. And it is the story of our personal adventures that make up the Story of the Larger Faith.

It is the faith stories of all of us that link together to form the story of Unitarian Universalism. WE make UU-ism together.

It is our stories. It isn't created in Boston somewhere, it is created anew week after week among congregations all over the country.

Let's face it: while the history of this Chapel and of Unitarian Universalism has brought us to this day, we cannot live on our religious history any more than we can live on our parent's credit cards.

Our history built the room we sit in, but it does not act for us; our history expects us to act in our turn: we have been handed the baton. Do we merely gather on Sundays to sit down and admire the view? Or do we rise up and claim our faith?

When you join a UU congregation, you make a claim upon that community to feed and empower you spiritually. That community owes it to you to respond.

On the other hand, when you join such a religious community, you acknowledge the claim that community makes upon you to help feed the community. You feed it with your money and your time and your heart.

To put it another way, If you look at the letters in the word "church," you can see a "c-h" on either end and two letters in the middle. In the middle of the word church are the letters U R. You are the church. UU: you and you, make up UU-ism.

Unitarian Universalism can be no better, no different than you are. You are Unitarian Universalism.

The greatness of the UU faith is not in its history, it is not in the list of names of famous UUs. The greatness of the UU faith does not live in the dusty bones of those who advanced the cause of social justice - as admirable as that may be.

The greatness of the UU faith is not only in its dusty tomes - its books - of new ideas from long ago.

The greatness of the UU faith is not in the stately stones and beams planted in the earth that reach for the skies; it's not in the buildings our forebearers inhabited. Not even in this darling Chapel of ours.

Those things are just the party favors we take home from the UU History party we've heard about. But now it is up to us to put on that party, to send out the invitations, to bake the goods, to brew the coffee, to make ready the rooms, to put the balloons on the driveway post.

The greatness of Eliot Chapel, and of the UU faith is not in the dust of the past but in the daring of your heart today.

For only as your spiritual adventure lives and glows and shines from you, will it light up the world around you. Only in living our faith in a private and public way can we demonstrate we care enough to make a difference.

You know, the founders of this church did a strange thing. They threw money in a pot, they broke a sweat, the blistered their hands and feet, they went to meetings and parties and more meetings and parties and they built a church!

Ta da! What an accomplishment. But wait! There's more!

After they built the church - are you ready? - After they built the church - they gave it away! Already, what they created, they gave away, and it is still not ours. It doesn't belong to us.

Some of the founders are still with us, others are gone. But even for those who have passed on, their commitment reaches beyond the graves, beyond their names. Their commitment reaches beyond our knowing much about some of them.

What we know most about our founders is the legacy they left us. They worked to reach out to strangers - including the strangers who are you and me - we who now make up this congregation

Our history has handed us a wonderful chronicle but not for us to keep, not for us to keep. The Story, they've handed us yearns for more experience, and it is up to us to move that Story onward.

Let us move -
forward through the ages/ in unbroken line
with faithful spirits, let's heed the call divine

We each have gifts of differing measure/ but hearts of one accord
Many ways of service/ But One the sure reward.

Hymn            Forward Through the Ages, #114.

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Benediction
Recessional

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