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In the wheel of life, we mark the holy day of Imbolc. It is midway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. The name, in the Irish language, means "in the belly", referring to the pregnancy of sheep, since it is a time of year when ewes give birth, and Imbolc is also a Celtic term for spring. (Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org).

We are well into the new year, not yet done with winter, not yet fully into spring. It is a time to ask where we are going. I loved the choral anthem today: Woyaya. If the preacher asks the choir where we are going, the choir replies: “heaven knows where we are going, but we will get there.” Indeed.

You can also notice in your Sunday bulletin two notable Unitarians: Henry Whitney Bellows who organized the precursor to the Red Cross and helped move Unitarians from a collection of individuals to a denomination. He died 124 years ago tomorrow.

And this week we celebrate the 185^th birthday of Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman physician in the United States. She had to break through a lot of barriers to get where she was going. People thought it unseemly for a woman to be a doctor. It was unthinkable, it was improper, it was wrong.

Nowadays, of course, we’re mostly over those ideas. I hope. Being on the cutting edge is risky. Yesterday marked the 20^th anniversary of the Challenger explosion. We were reminded with chilling effect that we cannot take life and death for granted; that rocket ships occasionally blow up, and there are real consequences.

We also mark this week the explosion of the space shuttle Columbia. It was only 3 years ago. On board were people from 7 different religious faiths. One of the astronauts was Laurel Clark, a Unitarian from Wisconsin. She was a medical doctor, a United States Navy Captain, NASA astronaut and Space Shuttle mission specialist. And she died loving what she was doing.

I once saw an ad for a Unitarian church. It was in a newspaper, and it looked like a bookmark. It read: Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Myrtle.

And the idea was that there are well known prophets and healers and the lesser known. Myrtle, it turns out was an important person in her local church. When we think of Bellows, Blackwell, Clark, and even Myrtle, we think of people who had a certain personal power. They were unique individuals who made lasting contributions, a lasting impression on their community.

They lived well, they took chances. They made friends, did great deeds, and we know some of their story.

I think we can relate these ideas to a chalice. Think of a UU chalice as having three elements. We close most of our Sunday services with this idea: that the chalice contains the fire, the warmth, and the light.

The first element– and you have to be physically present to experience this– is the warmth. The warmth of our community is found in affiliation, in personal relationships with each other.

Affiliation: We come to church to meet others of like mind, to enlarge our intellectual reach, to be nurture our own spiritual growth, and to act for social justice.

And in the process of all that, we form relationships– we make friends– we become part of a covenant group– we end up with people who are teachers to us– sometimes church is all the more surprising because we end up with people we never would have picked in advance– and yet those people become our teachers or friends.

And so one of the important benefits of church is affiliation: joining something larger than yourself. For some folks this is the most important reason to join something like a church– it is a straightforward way to meet like minded people, maybe even to find a friend or two or three.

The second element is the fire of commitment. This is the ‘get up and go’ we need to accomplish anything of significance, which so many of you do and have done for so many years.

Accomplishment. This is the ministry to those outside and the ministry to those inside the church.

In our public acts of mercy, we help house the homeless, & feed the hungry. At Eliot, through our Room At The Inn program, we house the homeless right here in our building 3 times per month. We pick up and drop them off in our cars, we feed them, we provide them beds & books & videos & companionship to while away the evening. We wash the laundry in the morning.

We help feed the hungry by providing canned and dry goods into a shopping cart in Adam’s Hall. We buy Christmas presents for needy kids, we raise money for our Partner Church, for local charities, and many other worthy programs and events.

There are public acts of the prophetic voice. Over the years, UUs have publicly worked against slavery & segregation, for suffrage, for temperance, for reform of prisons and mental hospitals, for civil rights, and to aid refugees.

And there is ministry to those inside the church. We participate in Covenant Groups, we attend musical concerts, we go to Bible Study, we study the roots of our religion, we slow down for meditation retreats.

Surely that is plenty for any group of people to be doing. It even sounds exhausting just going through part of the list. I haven’t yet mentioned the 100 teachers and 300 kids in our religious education program– a huge undertaking all by itself.

Why do all that affiliation and accomplishment?

I was at a ministerial leadership conference in Boston a number of years ago. There were men there who had been ministers for 40 year down to newly minted ones like me at the time. One exercise really stuck with me. The presenter asked us something about why we wanted to be ministers. And we had to keep our answer under 25 words.

And I think I wrote something to the effect that I wanted to work with folks on their spiritual development as well as my own. And then we had to answer the same question again: why is that? Why do you want to do that?

And I think I wrote that I felt this was really important, maybe the most important things people could do– after they are fed, housed, warmed, clothed, etcetera. And again the question– why do you want to do this? And another answer, and again the question.

Each time, boiling down, each time, getting closer to some core, each time, getting a little more tender, a little more vulnerable, until finally, my answer was– because I want to live a life that matters. Not only to myself, but to other people.

For most of the memorial services I do for church members it is very clear to anyone who is paying attention, that these were people who not only had a spiritual depth and maturity, but who in some way, were models to us all.

And no one was named Myrtle, but there has been Mary, Bobbie, and Dave. And I think: they lived a life that mattered. I want that too. I want to help other people create that for themselves.

For almost 50 years, Eliot Unitarian Chapel has stood here, offering a present and a promise. The Present we offer here is that this is a place where you are invited to bring the real you here as you really are right now.

You are welcomed here whether or not you are married, divorced, widowed, gay or straight, happy or depressed, in recovery or in the closet or even if– you are unusually normal.

The present we offer is that you are invited in whether you are an atheist, a Christian, a Pagan, a Jew, a fuzzy theist, or totally confused. We’re not out to convert you to something, someone, else. That’s the present Eliot Chapel offers

The Promise: is that together and alone, this is a place for us to continue our work on our individual and collective spiritual depth: to become the you that you really want to be, and to figure out your own individual beliefs in community.

This house is a spiritual touch stone that we can start out from and return to when we seek to make our mark in the world, when we seek to accomplish great things we could not or would not do alone.

Affiliation or friendship, provides the chalice itself. It gives the needed warmth & sustenance to take on great projects. Accomplishment is the combustible fire of the chalice, it is the commitment, it is the means & the will & the action necessary to do all that this church has done.

I’m all for affiliation and accomplishment. We need the chalice, we need the building, we need the heat & light & paper clips & staff & health plans & parking lots– oh we don’t require them for our survival, but having them enlarges our possibilities so much that it would be self-defeating not to have them.

We need to start out as a Haven for religious liberals. And we gather not just to lick wounds or cry about injustice and do nothing. We need the Haven to be fed, and to have a few pep rallies to go out and accomplish things of substance.

What’s left? If we have the warmth and the fire, what’s left? The light. To find the Haven, we need a beacon..

We start with the warmth– that draws us in. We move on to the fire– that moves us out of our skin and into commitments to something bigger than our own worldly concerns. But in the final analysis, that is still not enough. We need the light.

And if we stop– even for a moment– to think about it, we know others need the light, a beacon to find what we have found, too.

And while warmth and fire are good, while our social justice efforts are important, there are hundreds– if not thousands– of people who are in the dark. They do not believe a religion like ours exists. They do not read about it in the newspaper. They do not hear about it on the radio. They do not see it discussed on TV.

We know there are people who are in the dark about us. Some people who have given up searching, because when they look around, the religious landscape is too dark, there is no sound, no one is welcoming them, no one is searching them out. No one is reaching out to them and they don’t see anyone to reach out to.

This religion, this community of faith that they might dare to seek– must only be a myth. It must lie somewhere over the rainbow, or east of Eden, or it’s the next town down from Atlantis.

Because surely such a community would not keep all of its riches to itself. Surely such a community would not keep the warmth of community & the fire of commitment hidden, hiding the light under a bushel. That wouldn’t be keeping with the idea of a diverse and welcoming community– would it?

There are people in the dark about us. There are people right now– walking around at this very moment, not 2 blocks from here; there are folks sitting in their living room in those new townhouses just across the railroad tracks– who don’t believe we exist.

We’re like Narnia or Hogwarts School of Witchcraft & Wizardry. You have to get here by magic. Oh, the church looks normal enough from the outside. People pass by it every day, walking, or in cars, or glancing at it from the snow cone stand. We’re hiding in plain sight.

No one suspects. Shh! No one suspects that what looks like an ordinary church really has a bunch of free thinking heretics! Christians & Buddhists & Pagans, oh my!

And some of those people just 2 or 3 blocks from our walls would do more than you might think to find us– if only they thought there was a chance we existed– somewhere.

There was a boy who one Sunday asked his mother why his dad got to stay home and didn’t have to go to church like him and his sisters and mom. And his mother was tired of answering this question, so she said– Go ask your dad.

And when asked, his father, slowly put down the newspaper he was reading, and looked his son straight in the eye and said very calmly:

If I thought for one moment that what they had going on down there was really real, I would crawl down the aisle on my hands and knees to get it.

That man is not alone.

What do we owe those who might look for us if they thought we might exist? Should we expend some of our resources to help them? Do we dare to turn on a nightlight in the darkness of conservative, orthodox religion?

Once upon a time, a church enlarged their building, including a new sanctuary, to house their growing congregation. And then they discovered that 250 housing units were going in right behind them — they would share a property line.

Their pastor said he had two conversations within a three-hour time period. The first individual said: “We need to build a fence so their kids don’t wander onto our property.” The second person asked: “Hey, do we have the money to build a sidewalk and steps so their kids can come here?”

Hmm. Which question should be asked? Which answered? There is the idea of the elephant question, and the unaskable question. The elephant question refers to the idea that sometimes there is an elephant in the room which nobody seems to be noticing at all, and yet it is obviously there.

For us an elephant question might be: What will we do with all the children, all the people who are already here? It’s a little too crowded for new people to really get comfortable. Should we have a third service? Remodel the buildings? Move?

The Unaskable question is the one no one wants to hear. Perhaps for Eliot, an unaskable question has been: What should we do for all the children and people who would love to come here but don’t know we exist?

What if we were serious about letting folks know we’re here? What if we went out of our way to do it? And if they show up, are we ready to receive them? Are we willing to share? Are we willing to welcome the stranger?

Sometimes when an extra person or two shows up for dinner, you just make room for them. Sometimes a new addition to the family means you have to remodel or move to a bigger house.

What are you going to do? You’re not going to kick the kid out, are you? Or hope they leave on their own, or act as if they simply have to fend for themselves.

In our reading this morning, we heard:

“...the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance, which no [one] could have dreamt would have come his way.”

Now we get to some interesting news. What if I told you that last week I read about a UU workshop on church public image being given in Chicago, and that on a whim, I emailed the presenter and asked if she might make it out to St Louis sometime for our area congregations?

And then what if I told you I was on the phone with her for an hour this week, and she said that since the UU General Assembly– or GA for short– was going to be in St Louis this June, she thought it quite possible the UUA Administration in Boston would be willing to employ her to do a marketing campaign in St Louis. And that the UUA administration would spend up to $10,000 on the campaign?

And then what if I told you this marketing consultant I was on the phone with said we could do this campaign this spring or in the Fall?

In fact, you can see the newspaper inserts they used in Dallas on the bulletin board in the hallway that leads to Adam’s Hall.

Talk about unforeseen assistance! We’ve got the warmth; we’ve got the fire; are we willing to share the light? I’m meeting with the St Louis area UU ministers on Thursday, and we’re going to talk about this.

And I think the UU Consultant is willing to come down and do a workshop for us, so keep your eyes open and your ears on your head, because the light from our chalice may get brighter!

"Come and Go With Me, "Will you? #1018. I invite you to rise and sing.