Rev. Megan Lloyd Joiner
Unitarian Society of New Haven
September 30, 2018
Call to Worship by Viola Abbitt, adapted
Message for All “Building Respect: The Rev. Joseph Jordan” By Janeen K Grohsmeyer
Prayer by Rev. Connie Simon
Reading “Black Joy” by Rev. Kimberly Quinn Johnson
Homily “A Visionary Faith” by Rev. Megan Lloyd Joiner
The poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote that “the universe is made of stories and not atoms.” How many of you have heard the story of Joseph Jordan before today? It matters, the stories we tell, the stories we hear.
As I began planning today’s service, I was thinking of a different story than Joseph Jordan’s. It’s a story Unitarian Universalists tell more often than his. It’s an origin story.
Today is the anniversary of the first Universalist sermon preached in this country. On September 30, 1770, John Murray, a Calvinist minister who had embraced Universalism, an Englishman, preached a sermon in a small chapel built by John Potter on the Jersey shore of all places. Potter was a man with a vision – that a preacher would come to preach the gospel of universal salvation. He had built the chapel with no idea who would fill the pulpit. Until one day, the winds blew in a ship and on it was John Murray, who was traveling to America in despair and desperation having lost his family to death and his faith to excommunication because of his belief in a loving God. Murray blew in and his ship got stuck.
John Potter knew he’d found his man and invited him to preach that Sunday in his little chapel. “If the winds don’t blow and the ship is still here on Sunday, I’ll do it,” Murray said. No wind blew. The ship remained stuck. He preached. And the rest is history.[i]
Now USNH is a historically Unitarian congregation. We were founded in 1951 by visionary people who wanted something different than they found in the mainline churches and reform synagogues in the greater New Haven area.
They wanted religious education for their children that was inclusive. They were interested in intellectual sermons and ethical living. They cared for each other and for their community. And just ten years after the founding of this congregation, they made the decision to join the national denomination, the American Unitarian Association, in consolidating with the Universalist Church in America, and USNH became a Unitarian Universalist congregation.
This consolidation was a marriage of sorts, a marriage of head and heart some might say, and, with it, the atomic structure of our faith changed radically. The stories of the Unitarians and Universalists met and merged. And some would argue, the Unitarians subsumed their Universalist cousins.
This congregation, like many historically Unitarian congregations, remained largely humanist and quite intellectual.
The congregation’s name did not change. And even the name of our faith lends itself to dropping the second half, the Universalist, and many of us refer to ourselves only as Unitarians.
I think we would do well not to forget the other half of our atomic structure. The Universalists had a powerful message, one that resonated with Joseph Jordan and his community in Norfolk, VA. A powerful message of love for all humanity and the ultimate goodness of the universe. The Universalists were a joy-filled people. They were a God-loving people. They were a people-loving people. And they leave that legacy to us, their spiritual descendants, we who are now Unitarian Universalists.
I wanted to share with you this morning the story of Joseph Jordan that we might wrest it from the jaws of history.
This story of a man with a visionary faith. In the midst of a post-civil war, Jim Crow South, a man who refused to condemn his fellow human beings – even those who might condemn him because of the color of his skin. A man who sought to educate the children of his community, to do all he could that they might envision a brighter future. A man who claimed joy as his own. I wanted you to hear his story today, on this anniversary of Universalism in America because he is a vital part of the history of our faith.[ii]
And I wanted to share with you the words of the Reverend Kimberly Quinn Johnson who writes about Black Joy.
I wanted to share her words with you this morning as part of this Practice and the Promise Sunday as we consider our commitment to our siblings of color within Unitarian Universalism and our support of Black Lives of Unitarian Universalism.
I wanted to share her words with you this morning because of the pain they hold – the pain of being seen as a caricature. I wanted you to hear her words and her pain and I wanted you to hear her simultaneous invitation.
“I call it Black Joy,” she says, “but I want to offer it—to the extent that it is mine to offer—to this faith…I want to challenge Unitarian Universalism and Unitarian Universalists to claim Joy.”
Opening ourselves to experiencing joy in the way Rev. Johnson describes, requires a visionary faith because it requires, for many of us, the capacity for and the openness to change.
The Rev. Dr. Mark Morrison-Reed writes in an essay included in his seminal work, Black Pioneers in a White Denomination, which I commend to you, that during the hours he spent pouring over the papers and records of African-American Universalist and Unitarian and Unitarian Universalist ministers, he spent much of his time with his head in his hands, weeping.
He wept over the pain these men and women experienced, over their rejection at the hands of their white counterparts. He wept over the lack of funding, the lack of faith, the lack of vision on the part of both the Universalists and the Unitarians. He wept over the isolation and the foiled attempts at mission he discovered again and again in the histories.
“A wider vision,” he writes, “of something grander and more inclusive, of a religion that could be philosophically and culturally diverse, was too much. Perhaps it was simply too threatening. It might have changed the religion that we were comfortable with and made us change too.”[iii]
Ultimately, though, both Morrison-Reed and contemporary Unitarian Universalists of color offer hope in the face of our troubled past.
Morrison Reed writes: “What I learned as I wept and despaired over the fate of our black pioneers is that there will be other opportunities. They will come again as they have in the past. Our challenge today is to develop a vision that is grand enough and hopeful enough to accept what the present has brought us and what the future shall bring us.”[iv]
This is my prayer. That as a faith and as a congregation, we might be visionary enough and hopeful enough and that we might work hard enough to truly open our hearts and our minds and our doors to all who long for the joy of a faith that proclaims the ultimate goodness of humanity and the ultimate goodness of the universe in a world that is so badly bruised and broken.
May we be open to joy unspeakable.
May we, like those who went before us, have a visionary faith.
[i] “John Murray and the Winds of Change”
[iii] Rev. Dr. Mark Morrison-Reed, “Where There is No Vision…”, Black Pioneers in a White Denomination. Skinner House Books, 1994. p. 189.
[iv] Ibid. p. 192.