We are in the Church of the Incarnation, a Christian church in the Episcopal tradition. Episcopalians within the Anglican Communion, are descendants of the Church of England, founded originally when King Henry VIII cut ties with the pope in the 16th century when the pope wouldn’t annul his marriage to his wife Catherine of Aragon. Henry declared himself the Supreme Head of the Church of England which was shocking, but he did it while a Protestant tsunami was washing across Europe, making his betrayal of Rome less dangerous than that of Luther and Calvin or the radicals Menno Simmons of the Anabaptists or those heretical Unitarians.
When Henry Died, his young son became king, but when he died at the age of 16, Henry’s oldest Daughter Mary – you might know her as Bloody Mary – became England’s Monarch and she, like her betrayed mother, was Catholic. Religion at the time was national, not personal. You belonged to the faith of your people. Mary told everyone not to worry about that silly Church of England debacle; England is Catholic. When people protested or tried to worship in the Anglican tradition, she had them killed, thus the nickname. (In Mary’s defense, she didn’t do anything different from what any of her predecessors would have done, but Mary was a woman and she was living in an age no one understood yet – that of mass media. Books were printed. Ideas were passed around freely. Mary was cancelled because someone printed The Book of Martyrs naming every person killed for their faith under Mary’s rule. It wasn’t a good look for Mary.)
When she died, her sister, Elizabeth I took over. Elizabeth was both a better leader and a more adept theologian than her father. She moved the country away from Rome and into the Church of England. Her long rule and her vision for her country worked well to unify her people – or many of her people – under one theological umbrella. The nonconformists – like the Unitarians and the Congregationalists who were also called Puritans because they wanted to purify the Church of England of its Roman trappings – were persecuted. Some fled to this new land and eventually found themselves right here, the land of the Lenape.
I promised Meagan I wouldn’t talk too long, but you know how I get with church history. So, I’m going to jump ahead a little bit. When this land was colonized by the British, it was declared for the Queen and the Church of England, but 75% of the people here were not Anglican. After the Revolutionary War, those ties were cut, and the American Anglicans became Episcopalians. The church we’re in was founded in 1852 and moved to this building in 1864. This space is considered home of some of the finest ecclesiastical art in the country which includes this stained glass made by top American artists including that made by Louis Comfort Tiffany himself. The Church of the Incarnation is part of the Broad Church Movement, which is the progressive wing of the church.
I had wanted to tell you more about this particular church, but I figure we’ll have time for that. For now, I just want us to feel grounded in our new home.
Whenever I travel, I discover cultures, even micro cultures, that break me open to new ways of living in the world. I’m sure this is true for all of you too. There seem to be two ways to travel. One might be couched in anxiety or a need for comfort, hoping to recreate “home” as much as possible and the other is to be open to something entirely different and new.
I was in Paris many years ago. I was on line at the Louve and it was the height of the tourist season. In front of me was a man trying to buy a ticket. He was speaking English and getting annoyed and loud because the women behind the desk was speaking French. He was out of his element and clearly wanted others to accommodate him so he could shift back to comfort. The more frustrated he got, the angrier and louder and the more distance he created between himself and the Parisian people around us. When it was my turn, I asked for a ticket in 9th grade French and she responded in English. There was much less distance between us. We chatted for a moment, me in French, her in English, and I moved on.
It’s natural to want everyone to be just like us, to find our tribe everywhere, to walk into any room and think “these are my people”. But the beauty of humanity on this planet is the wild cultural diversity we’ve created here. Certainly everyone can find like-minded people, but there is rich life outside those circles. Stretching ourselves to learn about others, challenging ourselves to be open to new ideas is what it means to live in a multicultural world, and, might I suggest, what it means to be Unitarian Universalist.
As we move into this new home, I’m inviting all of us to engage a little cultural curiosity. Instead of wanting to force our own ways into someone else’s space, let’s be open to learning about how others do things. The more we learn about the people who call this space home, the wider and richer and deeper our own lives will be.
There’s a line in Christian Scripture in one of Paul’s letters to the Corinthians which says, “If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but I do not have love, I am only a resounding gong of a clanging cymbal…” I am heeding this ancient wisdom today, asking myself if what I do is done in the name of love or is it just performative. Am I grounding my actions, am I starting my words, am I sending my thoughts through a filter of love? These next few weeks, these next few years, might be challenging. If we speak poorly of each other, if our expectations are sparked by entitlement, if we forget our theology of welcome, we have walked away from love, and from one of our own core values. Alternatively, this next phase of Community Church history could be the time to live into the spirit of our theology, to embody Love fiercely. If we aren’t ministering to our buildings we can minister to each other and to this hurting, broken world that so desperately needs our message of radical inclusivity. We are who we’ve always been, non-conformists, breaking new theological ground, bringing love to the streets. That’s who we were, that’s who we will always be.