Please click the link to watch Rev. Cynthia Snavely’s video recording of this sermon.
Just like the children in this morning’s Time for All Ages story, Pamela George’s Three Little Piggy Banks, you could say that our congregation has multiple piggy banks.
Our giving piggy bank is our Sunday plate collection. Each month we have an opportunity to give to a local charity that is doing good work in our own community. We have two savings piggy banks. One is our Working Capital fund, in which we put aside money for when the air conditioner needs to be replaced or we need to repair the steps.
We recently borrowed some money from the capital reserve against the money coming in from our capital campaign to pay off our mortgage and get solar panels. In March our treasurer reported to the Board, “The capital campaign has reached the level where I thought it safe to return the money borrowed from working capital (our main reserve). So that’s done.”
You could say our recent capital campaign was like you taking on the role of Ella and Andy’s parents paying most of the cost of their camera and bike. Our second savings piggy bank is our QEF or Quasi Endowment Fund. A number of members have remembered the congregation in their wills or named the congregation as a beneficiary of a life insurance policy. When that savings piggy bank reaches a certain amount, we will be able to use the interest and keep the principal intact.
But today I am going to be talking about our spending piggy bank. Our spending piggy bank—the bank from which Jennie, Will, Stephanie, Alison, and I get paid; the bank that pays for the snow plowing and the cleaning, and buys the coffee—is funded by your pledges. And today begins our stewardship campaign asking you what you will give to the congregation in the 2026–2027 fiscal year, which begins July 1.
Sometimes, probably more often than we should, my ministerial colleagues and I refer to the sermon that opens the pledge season as the sermon on the amount. So, what is the amount this year? Our goal is $245,000. Last year you pledged $236,137, so our goal is an increase from last year. But this sermon isn’t really on the amount. It is on the importance of spiritual community to us, and on the knowledge that if there is to be such a community, we must be the ones to create and maintain it.
The theme for this year’s stewardship campaign is “Courage to Care, Community to Share.” This year in our nation, caring has required more than the usual amount of courage. We say this congregation’s mission is to “Explore Spirituality, Engage Community, and Transform the World,” but our current administration has done more than I could have imagined possible to transform the world in all kinds of ways opposite to what I expect we imagine when we say we want to transform the world. Aid work halted; research stopped; diversity, equity, and inclusion considered as negatives; work to address climate change undone.
But we are here. We are making abortion care kits and know-your-rights whistle kits for immigrants, going to No Kings rallies, and calling and writing our representatives. We are standing up for and speaking out for what we believe in, given the courage to do so by those around us doing it with us. We give each other the courage to care.
This shared community is here for us, not just to give us courage to act, but also to hold us when we are in need, to teach us and our children as we seek to learn and to grow, to comfort us when things fall apart, to celebrate with us when we have something wonderful happen.
More than once, I have shared something written by one of my ministerial colleagues, Jane Rzepka, who grew up in what was then the Unitarian denomination. She said,
“I grew up in one of those Unitarian fellowships in the Midwest. And that little religious community really left its mark on me.
“For one thing, the grown-ups there believed we ought to use our heads. They encouraged us to ponder the big questions of beginnings and endings and anger and love and what was before and what comes next and what helps and what hinders. They thought we were smart kids, they listened to our ideas, we believed we were good thinkers. Now of course I know that the use of reason is a cornerstone of our long religious heritage, but then I just thought it was the way we did things at the Unitarian Church.
“And then in another mode we planted daffodils, we looked at the stars, we searched for guppies, we held a worship service at the river. These days we call it spirituality I suppose or earth-centered religion, but then we called it ‘miracle’ and ‘wonder.’ And that rootedness is in my blood as a Unitarian.
“Finally, back then, we children knew that we were a part of congregation that loved us. They taught us Sunday School. They doled out the cookies at coffee hour. They chaperoned the Youth Group. They wanted to know what we would do after graduation. They wrung their hands; they clapped their hands—for us, for one another. Now we call it community; now we call it connection. But, for me, back then, it was just Unitarianism.”
Hopefully, our children and we ourselves can say something like that about how we experience Unitarian Universalism.
The second part of our stewardship theme is “Community to Share.”
To offer each other the courage to care and to have a community to share, we need your commitment; often we say a commitment of the three Ts: your time, your talent, and your treasure. This worship service wouldn’t happen without people doing the tech to show the PowerPoint and send it out over Zoom, without people taking the time to learn and to sing a choir anthem, without people serving as ushers, without people reading or telling a Time for All Ages story, without people sitting near the children’s table to see that they are included. Our religious education classes wouldn’t happen without teachers and assistants. Our lawn doesn’t get mowed or our leaves raked unless you do it. Coffee doesn’t make itself. Your time and your talents as well as your treasure are needed to make this community.
In my collection of readings that I have gathered over the years is a litany from the Unitarian Church, Scarborough, England. I will change the word church to congregation for our purposes, but with that change it reads like this.
“This is my congregation,
“It is composed of people like me,
“We make it what it is.
“I want it to be a congregation that is a lamp to the path of Pilgrims, leading them to Goodness, Truth and Beauty.
“It will be if I am.
“It will make generous gifts to many causes, if I am a generous giver.
“It will bring other people into its worship and community, if I bring them.
“It will be friendly, if I am….
“It will be a congregation of loyalty and love, of fearlessness and faith, if I who make it what it is am filled with these.
“Therefore, I shall dedicate myself to the task of being all these things I want my congregation to be.”
Some of us have more time than money. Others of us have more money than time. We each have different talents. Some of us have been part of this community from its beginning. Others of us have just arrived. Some of us will be here for years. Others of us will be here for a while and then move away. But what each of us gives is valuable. What each of us gives makes us who we are as the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Somerset Hills here in Somerville, New Jersey.
If you have the courage to care, if you are invested in making this a community you can share with others, then make your commitment. We begin pledge season. And, yes, we are asking about money, but we are also asking about what this community means to you and all of the ways you can give toward making it what is and what it may yet be.
I end with this reflection by Karen B. Johnston from the Braver/Wiser email from the Unitarian Universalist Association on Wednesday, March 18.
“’This is the world I want to live in. The shared world…. This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost,’ (Naomi Shihab Nye, “Gate A4” from Honeybee).
“I have heard that the Buddhist teacher Sharon Salzburg has a spiritual practice when she flies. Waiting to board at the airport gate, she looks at the people sitting there and says to herself, ‘These are my people.’
“A random, possibly ragtag set of strangers are her people? Seriously? Yes, seriously.
“I have begun doing this. At the gate. On board. For the next few hours, these are my people. With weather delays, even longer.
“And I have begun doing it elsewhere. When riding the train. Attending a concert. In the grocery store. I even did it in January, when I was one of hundreds of clergy who traveled to Minneapolis to march with 50,000+ for the future of our nation. Every so often, in that frigid cold, I would feel the crowd around me and think: These people: They are mine and I am theirs.
“They weren’t my besties, nor my chosen family. Not even my immediate neighbors, but the ones that the universe cast as my temporary lot. Random. Not of my choosing.
“Except I choose to choose them. As a spiritual practice, it stretches me. This embrace of others that I believe my faith asks of me (requires of me?) is not necessarily logical, as well as occasionally mystical and nearly always complicated.
“Does this change anything? Bring about healing or justice? I’m not certain, but I can’t help wondering if this one way we get closer to Love at the Center.
“Does this transform me? Hell, yes. It commits me to the very nature of reality: interdependence. It reminds me that I—that we—belong to each other, like it or not.
“I’m thankful for the deep (so deep) and real (so real) and true (so true) ways in which we risk growing Beloved Community. In which we dare creating mutual aid networks beyond those besties. In which we risk creating and sustaining the necessary, complex, messy, sometimes prickly, sometimes joyful community coalitions to get us through this authoritarian nightmare.
“These are my people.
“You are my people.
Prayer: “Spirit of Life and Love, Ever-Presence of Interdependence and Transformation, if we shall be known by the company we keep, may that company support us in daring and risking a greater wholeness than we have known thus far.”
Amen.
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