The Beloved Community I
Rev. Edmund Robinson
Unitarian Universalist Church of Wakefield
November 4, 2001

	A couple of Sundays ago, in talking about UU takes on sin, I concluded with a thought that our failing to meet our standards provided us an opportunity to grow, and this was a release from our failings which might be as close as UUs come to salvation.  Two folks came up to me afterwards and said, “I was really trying to follow that all the way, but what was it you said about salvation?”  I felt like I had been caught trying to slip one over on you all.
	Let me then address it squarely.  Salvation is one of those ideas which don’t disappear as we transcend orthodoxy, they just take on a different form.  All of us have some notion of how we are to be saved, individually and collectively.  My purpose here this morning is to suggest that for a lot of us, what we are looking for, what we are working towards is not eternal life of the spirit or the flesh, not a going to heaven on judgment day, but as much of paradise as we can build in the here and now.  And I think one name we can hang on this is the beloved community.
	This sermon started fermenting in my brain before the events of September 11, but I think it has taken on new meaning in the new reality in which we live.  There were two inspirations this summer, one was a song, which I will get to a bit later, and the other was an essay on prayer written by a person I knew, which extolled the virtue of going out into the wilderness to be close to the holy.  This is certainly a familiar pattern in many religions and was extolled by writers dear to us like Emerson and Thoreau.  Here are the words of Robert Redford in a recent piece arguing against oil drilling in Alaska:

When we are filled with grief and unanswerable questions it is often nature that we turn to for refuge and comfort. In the sanctuary of a forest or the vastness of the desert or the silence of a grassland, we can touch a timeless force larger than ourselves and our all_too_human problems. This is where the healing begins.

I think this is right to a point, but it is only part of the picture.  Certainly the holy resides in nature, and it is good to seek refuge in nature for some of the things about humanity which make us tired or scared or discouraged.
	But the holy resides just as strongly in humanity.  It is in our relationships with others that we can find our ground of being.  James Luther Adams, the leading UU theologian of the Twentieth Century, holds that there is no such thing as a good man as such or a good woman as such.  Rather goodness only comes in relationships, so that there is a good father or a good teacher. 
	Liberals in thinking about society tend to be influenced by John Locke’s idea of a social contract, which is based on an assumption that individuals will voluntarily band together in societies because that is their best interests.  But history and anthropology teach us that prior to the Enlightenment, there was very scant notion of the individual, and the social unit, not the individual person, was primary.
	Community.   How can I approach a subject so vast and so spongy?  In fact, it is certainly true that the word “community” has been way overused in the last decade or so.  We talk too easily about the community of this and that, of collections of people who never thought of themselves as communities: the community of fingerprint experts, the community of left-handed diabetics, Lord help us, the community of weight-reduction clinic managers.
	I think how I want to get a handle on it is to start with the concrete and then try to put the concrete into historical perspective.  I want to talk about two events in the recent history of this church.
	The first occurred last February.  In the wake of the Edgewater shootings, we had hosted a meeting of a gun-control group, the Middlesex Chapter of the Million Moms March.  Then we got a request from a pro-gun but pro-gay group called the Pink Pistols to use our building for a meeting.  Now this request could have simply gone to the Shared Space Committee and died there. But something in me said it needed a wider airing, it needed at least for the Board to be aware of it. And the Board concurred in my feeling that it really needed to have wider input, so we called a church meeting.
	I had a few sleepless nights over that, I can now confess.  Feelings were running high, if the e-mail was any indication, and I was wondering whether I had helped fan the flames of dissension that could get some people so wrought off that they might consider leaving the church.  Maybe it would have been better for it to die in the Shared Space Committee.
	Yet the meeting exceeded my expectations.  After asking all the questions we wanted of the group’s representative, we passed the speaking feather around the circle and let everyone have her or his say.  We discovered that among us was a startling diversity of opinions, ranging from one who was proud of the militia unit his ancestor had founded at this church in the XIXth century to fierce advocates of free speech and due process to a policeman’s daughter whose visceral hatred of guns was born of a fear that her father would one day not come home.  From this face to face meeting, the Board got a clear sense of the range of opinion within the church.  But something deeper happened.  We all came together to listen to one another.  And we all held the collective dearer to us than the difference of opinion.
	The other instance was two weeks ago, when one of us was in a stretch trying to care for one dying and one ill parent, and someone suggested that it would be a good time to create that caring circle we had been talking about for awhile and a sign-up sheet was posted and lo and behold we had six or eight signatures and suddenly there was a caring circle where there had been none before.  And when expected death came, there were the volunteers ready to step in with support.
	Now let’s step back.  The beloved community is in some ways a Christian concept.  Jesus did not talk about the beloved community.  He talked about the kingdom of God.  But he lived the beloved community.  
	Theologians use the word praxis to describe how Jesus lived and how modern followers of Jesus can emulate his living.  The concept is very popular among liberation theologians, particularly in Latin America.    	For Jesus and his followers were as poor as can be imagined.  The mission speeches in Luke and Matthew, which modern scholarship rates high on being close to an historical picture, shows a movement of evangelists traveling from town to town in ones and twos around the north shore of the Sea of Galilee, dressed only in one tunic, not two, carrying no purse and no food, greeting no one on the road.  They were to go from house to house and upon entering a house to say “peace to this house.”  If invited to stay, they were to eat whatever was provided.  They were to heal the sick, drive out demons, and proclaim that the kingdom of God or of Heaven was near.  If no house in a village opened to receive them, they were to wipe the dust from their sandals in protest, but still to proclaim the Kingdom of God.
	Other accounts of Jesus show him violating the rules of exclusiveness at table, for he would readily dine with anyone, tax collectors, prostitutes, Pharisees. It is from this inclusiveness that we take our principles of acceptance of people who are different from us, an acceptance which forms one of the key elements of the beloved community.
	In general, love seems to have been a guiding principle, if not the very glue of cohesion, for early Christian communities.  These crossed racial, gender and ethnic lines – as St. Paul said, there is neither male nor female, Jew nor Greek, slave nor free in the love of Christ.  The early Christian communities had their own communal suppers at which the poor were fed.  Indeed, by the second century, the Christian church appears to have taken over most of the charity work of the Roman state, providing for the widows and orphans through collection of alms. 
	The phrase itself originated in the Nineteenth Century with Josiah Royce.  Royce was a Harvard Philosopher, a colleague and friend of William James, but a philosophical opponent for, where James was a pragmatist, Royce was an idealist.  That word has a different meaning in philosophy than in real life; in real life an idealist is a dreamer, as opposed to a realist.  In philosophy, an idealist is one who believes in the primacy of ideas, as opposed to a materialist, for whom matter is the primary reality.
	One article I got on the web said this about how Royce’s idea of beloved community came about: Royce believed
the Absolute is a kind of collection of persons. But how can a collection of persons entertain purposes? Royce finds an answer in the psychological analysis of the individual.

A person is an organization of activities about a central purpose. Life's problem is to harmonize desires and integrate them into a self, which is an achievement. The integration of individual purposes into a self creates a little Absolute. The integration of little Absolutes forms a larger self, the "beloved" community, whose purposes would stabilize the world.
Whose purposes would stabilize the world.	The beloved community has some kind of common soul, some essence or purpose which is not the sum of individual parts.
	It is what is called an emergent property.  An emergent property is one that comes out of the relationship between individual units when they interact together.  Think of a car’s engine scattered around a garage floor.  It is only its parts.  But once it is assembled, a new property emerges: the ability to make a crankshaft go around.  The ability to do work.  The hum in the car engine at work is an emergent property.
	As life is an emergent property of matter, human community is an emergent property of our little corner of life.  And there is something emergent from the fact of community.
	You could feel it in the Pink Pistols meeting.  You could feel it in the church reaching out to the Dennis family.  A kind of caring.  A weaving of a fabric of caring on the warp of dialogue and the weft of freedom.  Emergence is often defined as Something more out of nothing but.  
	Well the more recent supporter of the idea of beloved community was the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.  King was a Baptist and familiar with the Christian vernacular, but he realized that talking in terms of the Kingdom of God was too narrow to have much relevance to Jews, Muslims or UUs, so he began reinterpreting this concept, so central to Jesus’ teachings, as the Beloved Community.  
	The Beloved Community as King envisioned it not only embraced people of all races and kinds, but also practiced nonviolent and restorative types of justice.
Here’s what he said in 1958:
Desegregation is only a partial, though necessary, step toward the ultimate goal which we seek to realize. Desegregation will break down legal barriers, and bring men together physically. But something must happen so as to touch the hearts and souls of men that they will come together, not because the law says it, but because it is natural and right. In other words, our ultimate goal is integration, which is genuine inter_group and inter_personal living. Only through nonviolence can this goal be attained, for the aftermath of nonviolence is reconciliation and the creation of the beloved community.
I think the reconciliation King envisioned in 1958 would have been a racially integrated community, but his views broadened in the 60's, and we have broadened the scope since then, so that beloved community embraces those of all races, religions, sexes, sexual orientations, abilities and personality types.
	
	It is a very Universalist concept, I think.  It would fit with Forrest Church’s great article in the UU world this month.  After all, the word love is right there in the name.  A community we love.  A community founded on love.  A community of love.
	And we’re moving in the direction, my friends, of the beloved community here in this church.  Not only with the caring circle, and not only in the small groups.  In circle suppers and walking tours and choir practice and the Islam course, we’re reaching out to each other.   And that’s a good thing in itself, but it also has ripple effects in the wider pond.  For one thing that a church can do in its community is to model good social relations; how ought we to relate to one another?  Another thing a church can do is to provide a refuge for its members to refresh themselves spiritually so they can go forth in the larger world to create the beloved community.
	A UU version of salvation, which combines the various kinds of salvation known to Christian theology:  salvation by works, salvation by faith, salvation by grace, even the Unitarian idea of salvation by character. 
	Now next week I will continue to explore some facets of the beloved community whether it needs rules, whether it can exercise any discipline on it members, whether it has limits and what they are.  For this is a subject which will not ever be finished.
	But I want to end with the song, because I think this song is one of the most singable I have ever run across and it commemorates a bit of history which shows that the basic foundation of the beloved community, what we now call the idea of the inherent worth and dignity of every person, is actually quite old.
	The song was written by Sydney Carter, who also wrote “Lord of the Dance.”   Carter is a British Quaker, and wrote John Ball in 1981, to commemorate the 600th anniversary of the Wat Tyler uprising, also called the Peasant’s Revolt in England.  For in 1381, the peasantry in several counties in southern England rose up against the polltax imposed by King Richard II to finance a very unpopular war with France.   They entered London and ran riot for several days.   The leader of the revolt was a man named Wat Tyler, and the revolt ultimately collapsed after Tyler was double-crossed and assassinated by the Lord Mayor during a negotiating session.  But before that happened, a mob of folks from Kent had liberated a renegade priest named John Ball.  Ball had been imprisoned since the 1360's because he was a follower of John Wycliffe and preached the heresy of social equality.
	At any rate, the story goes that thousands of people from  Kent were encamped on a great plain outside of London, and John Ball served Mass to all of them, and then he preached a sermon, the title of which has come down to us.  It is, “when Adam delved and Eve Span, who was then the gentleman.”  This is a fairly crude way of saying that God did not create orders of hereditary nobility, that everyone’s family is as old as everyone else’s, that every person has inherent worth and dignity.  John Ball was later burned at the stake while Richard II watched but not before his place was assured in the history of human liberation.  Carter has made here a very singable song.  You’re welcome to join the chorus or the verse as you feel moved to do so.

Who will be the lady, 
Who will be the lord,
When we are ruled 
By the love of one  another? Tell me, 
Who will be the lady, 
Who will be the lord,
 In the light that is coming
 In the morning.
Chorus 
       Sing, John Ball And tell it to them all -
      	 Long live the day that is dawning!
      	 And I'll crow like a cock,
	 I'll carol like a lark,
	 For the light that is coming 
	In the morning. 
Eve is the lady, 
Adam is the lord, 
When we are ruled 
By the love of one another, oh it's 
Eve is the lady, 
Adam is the lord,
 In the light that is coming 
In the morning.
Chorus
All shall be ruled By fellowship I say,
 All shall be ruled By the love of one another, 
All shall be ruled By fellowship I say, 
In the light that is coming In the morning.
Chorus
Labour and spin For fellowship I say, 
Labour and spin For the love of one another.
 Labour and spin For fellowship I say, 
And the light that is coming In the morning.
Chorus (3x)
Amen.