Within These Walls

Live Oak, August 26, 2007

Rev. Kathleen Ellis

In July we had a wedding here for Dawn Marsalis and Brian Winkelmann. Chuck and I both officiated, and we also joined the couple and their friends and family for the rehearsal dinner. I was seated next to Dawn, and for some reason, the subject of Hands on Live Oak came up. Thinking ahead to this sermon, I asked her about what kind of sermon theme would go along with Hands on Live Oak. After just a moment, she thought of the familiar text from 1 Corinthians (6:19): “Your body is a temple.” She made that quick connection between our bodies as the outer shell, and the church building as the external framework for the congregation.

The dancer and choreographer Martha Graham once said, “Your body is a sacred garment.” (Blood Memory, 1991) You have to take care of your body to get the most out of life. I was thinking about that while sweating at the gym the other day. This body, for better or worse, is the only one I have.

Aches and pains at my age are not necessarily going to go away. Flexibility, endurance, lung and heart functions need my attention more and more. Even my bones need help to keep from losing more density. So I try to step up the pace, do one more repetition, and challenge one more muscle before I rest.

More often than I used to, nowadays, I indulge myself less with sugar and more with fruit; less with fat and more with veggies. When faced with a tempting brownie, sometimes it is enough just to remember the taste, and I might not even need to take a bite. Sometimes.

Just as our bodies house our brains, hearts, and hands, so also this building houses the body of this congregation. We have to take care of it to get the most value from it over its lifetime, perhaps longer than any of us will be around.

Lao Tsu speaks of this in chapter 11 of the Tao de Ching:

“We join spokes together in a wheel, but it is the center hole that makes the wagon move.

“We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want.

“We hammer wood for a house, but it is the inner space that makes it livable.

“We work with being, but non-being is what we use.”

The space inside this room is arranged for specific purposes. The inner space makes it functional. Certainly it is true that the building does not make the church. A recent fire destroyed Trinity Baptist Church in north Austin at 3AM last Sunday morning, and the people held a worship service out in the open air just a few hours later. We would do the same if we had to, because the people make the church.

Did you catch the New Orleans Social Club last night on Austin City Limits? I couldn’t help but dance to the music even while I was thinking of the devastation two years ago of homes, schools, hospitals, and houses of worship. The blues have never been more meaningful; the gospel attitude of looking to a better day has never been so joyous as when it comes from the depths of those who have lost everything. Marcia Ball, Irma Thomas, Willie Tee, and Cyril Neville joined in for several of the numbers. “New Orleans is in the house, y’all,” Neville’s nephew Ivan said. Here’s text from their website:

“Hurricane Katrina took a savage toll on the musical heart and bayou culture of New Orleans. Now a handful of musicians who called The Big Easy home before the storm and its floods are trying to restore a bit of the city's musical heritage -- along with their own lives.

“So the New Orleans Social Club, a loose affiliation of famed musicians, has crafted a new CD filled with old and new songs: Sing Me Back Home.

“Two members -- Ivan Neville of the Neville Brothers and Leo Nocentelli of the Meters -- are something akin to musical royalty in New Orleans. They talk about the New Orleans Social Club's collaborative spirit and [their own] hopes to resurrect the sound and soul of the city they love.”

One guy said none of us were prepared for what happened two years ago. They thought they’d be gone for three days then come back home. It just goes to show that you can lose everything, any time.

I met a couple of weeks ago with Eliza Galaher, the new minister at Wildflower UU Church in South Austin. We are both interested in leading a trip to the Gulf Coast this spring to add our strength to the labor going on day in and day out for two years, and counting. Anybody want to go with us? Let me know!

But first, let’s bring it back home. At Live Oak, we also like our creature comforts, and if we want the luxury of indoor plumbing and air conditioning, we like to have a building as nice as we can manage. Did you know we have 12 heating and air conditioning units plus 10 window units? Or that we have 17 exterior doors that have to be checked multiple times every week? Collectively, we who use the buildings are also the owners—the ones who have to tend to countless windows, about 25,000 square feet, and nearly 5 acres of land. In that sense, all of us are trustees who are charged with its care.

My home church in Spring, Texas, used plenty of sweat equity on the way to a home of our own. First we rented a recital room in the back of a music store. Hours of labor to fix up the old house provided us with three years worth of free rent. Unfortunately, we outgrew the space in about one year.

So we bought land in The Woodlands and did all the menial labor we could to defray the costs of construction. My blood, sweat, and tears are mingled with everyone else’s. Our first potluck there was right on the slab, in the open air. Twenty-two years later, and new generations have taken over the maintenance, with pride. Still, they have just over a quarter acre—precious little breathing room.

While reflecting on that experience in The Woodlands, another bit of scripture popped into my head, this from the Gospel according to Mark (3:25): “And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand.” We were focused on working together in spite of our different methods and personalities to help ensure that we would weather any storms that come along.

And finally, more text from 1 Corinthians (12:14-17, 20):

“Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot would say, ‘Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,’ that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear would say, ‘Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,’ that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing where would the sense of smell be?” . . . As it is, there are many members, yet one body.”

From these various sources, I have extracted the core message for you today, proof texting, you might say, to find quotations that resonate with what I’m thinking. Live Oak would not be what it is without the multiple contributions all of us have made, from participating in services to joining one of our small groups, and on to working on teams and committees, as worker bees and trustees, as staff and volunteers. As I said in my parable, “From that day forward the family members knew how much they all needed each other.”

If you can stay after the service for lunch, then to wash a window, make a repair, clean up wax or carpet stains, paint a room, or adopt any other item on this list, all of us will owe you a great deal of thanks. If you can help with the kids, take pictures, or help with lunch, your support is also crucial. And if you can’t stay, perhaps you will say thanks to someone who’s working on your behalf. Maybe you’ll be able to do a chore some other time and maybe you won’t, but you are still an important part of this eclectic mix of people and programs.

You may have noticed the cover story in UU World that was delivered this week. For one thing, there’s a picture in there that I took of Paul Sullivan, Steve Hamlett, and Sherry Lyles—on page 48. Check it out! However, the cover is labeled “Liberal religion and the Working Class.” Doug Muder’s article is entitled, “Not My Father’s Religion: Unitarian Universalism and the Working Class.” His father is a factory worker who is far more comfortable in his conservative Lutheran congregation than with Unitarian Universalism, typically filled with an abundance of professionals.

Muder analyzes the difference in this excerpt:

“In the professional class, inspiration is the road to success. It’s the way out of the maze. Or at least it’s one way out, the bright way. There’s also a dark way out, for those professionals who are driven by fear and greed rather than pulled by love. They sell their time and energy for a lot more money than factory workers—and a lot more than many idealistic professionals—but they can get just as alienated. They also don’t seem to respond well to the UU message. Or at least I don’t run into many of them in my church.

“In the working class, the road to success is self-control. That’s what you want to teach your children: Resist temptation. Walk the narrow path. Do the hard thing you don’t want to do, so that you and the people who are counting on you won’t be punished.”

This afternoon, for at least a few hours, all of us have a chance to do something we don’t exactly want to do. I’ve got other things going on! Give me a ministerial break on a Sunday afternoon! But there’s the self-discipline angle prodding me to stay; there’s a determination to join in the effort. Children are counting on us. Future members are counting on us. (We’ll find a job for Chuck at another time!)

So today, instead of paying money we don’t have for childcare workers, painters, window washers, and yard maintenance, we’ll put in a little sweat equity, invest our time instead of money, and show up for the second shift. This afternoon we’ll be a working class church with abundant blessings. Think for just a minute about the blessings of this sanctuary, meeting rooms, classrooms, and the kitchen where Melissa Martinez and her crew are preparing lunch even as I speak.

On Thursday, about 40 or more women gathered for the fifth annual ingathering potluck. Joyce Phelps chose opening words from the same issue of UU World, this time reading the words of the Rev. Robert Fulghum, author of All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. During his address to our General Assembly in Portland this past June he said:

“We come to this place because we need each other. We need to see each other, we need to touch each other, we need to smell each other, we need to hug each other. We need each other. So we come to this place. We come to work, to talk, to sing, to laugh, to dance. We call this a religious community, not because this . . . is holy ground, but because what we do here, what we say here together, and what we are here, makes it a sacred gathering.”

Amen and Namaste