Rev. Joseph Boyd

We all live here on the Northside, at least for this worship hour. The Northside has seen a lot of changes over the years. Known as a center of bohemian culture in the 1960’s, the Northside is where the artists lived. It’s where the poets lived. It’s where the counterculture was alive, and members of our congregation set up communes, and imagined a different way of being in the world. After the mills closed, many people fled this neighborhood. Many didn’t just flee to the suburbs. They left the state. They left where they could find any job that was offered. Since the 1970’s the Northside developed a different kind of reputation. It developed a reputation as a place full of people who couldn’t afford to leave. During the 1990’s at the height of the crack epidemic, this neighborhood was known as a place of crime and poverty. In the 1980’s the board of trustees at this church met to see if it was the right thing to stay in this neighborhood given these grim facts. There was consideration of perhaps moving to Canfield or Poland, or somewhere where people were moving too, not moving away from.

I am grateful to that board of trustees who met to make this fateful decision in the 1980’s at the height of white flight, and extreme economic stress. Without them, I am doubtful I would be here as your minister. And without them, we definitely would not be here in this sanctuary, in this home.

Some decisions we make cast a shadow for decades to come. Each decision we make is not just a decision in the present. Each decision we make impacts both the past and the future. For example, today the Northside is developing a different reputation. We are becoming known as a hotbed of community involvement, economic opportunity, and social justice. We are becoming known for our historic places of worship, beautiful park, and a street that seems to be growing and changing every month.

Right now there is a kind of creative confusion happening where some people are still scared to come and get out of their car, and yet there is a reputation that this is where you come for the best macaroni cheese in town, or the place for fresh produce, or the place where there’s an incredible church full of compassionate and engaged people.

All of this is possible because of a handful of people most of us have never met.

Our children inherit our decisions. They inherit them in the present, and they will inherit them in the future. Our decisions today will decide which rooms they can sit in, and which ones they won’t be able to. Our decisions today will decide which opportunities they will have, and how they will meet those opportunities.

I met with Mystery, Sunshine, and Hope to discuss the future of religious education at this church. We were looking at which decisions we would want to make with all of you over the next year. If anyone was going to help us decide the future of how we educate our children, I would want them to be named Mystery, Hope, and Sunshine. I feel better already just saying their names. It was an auspicious sign.

Nearly all of us, including myself, did not grow up in a church like this. For some, even the term religious education can seem arcane and a little strange. What are we teaching the children in this church?

It is this question I would like to spend the rest of this morning discussing. What are we teaching the children in this church?

In this church, the term religion has a much broader meaning. For us, religion is a response to life, to the life of our neighbors, and the life of our environment. For us, religion is not about rote memorization or pressure to believe in certain creeds or precepts. For us, religion is the basic human response of goodness to the complexities we find ourselves in. At its heart, religion is the lived experience that none of us are victims of circumstance. We always have the power of response. It is an understanding that there is always something greater than our pain.

This is my hope anyway of what religion might become, manifested here and through various beautiful and particular traditions. But as most of us know, children don’t learn necessarily by what we say. They learn by watching what we do.

What most of us do is rather confusing. It’s confusing to us, and it’s definitely confusing for our children.

We do not always understand why we do what we do. We have strong intentions, and sometimes we live by them, and sometimes we don’t.

This is why it is so tricky to teach resilience. Most of us don’t really know how to teach it, and most of us are not sure we even have anything to teach.

But we have something to teach, something humble but powerful. We are standing right now at ground zero for the kind of resilience we will need, and we are already living it. Trust me, you wouldn’t be here, if you didn’t already have this great power.

In our reflection with Mystery, Hope, and Sunshine, we discussed the history of this country over the last 50 years, and how this has shaped our understanding of how we should teach our children.

50 years ago, it was a great breakthrough in this tradition to focus more on helping children to ask great questions than to try to convince them of great answers. This whole outlook shaped the next generation of our children.

We raised a generation of questioners, seekers, children who grew up to be adults with an inquiring mind and heart. A couple of those are here in our congregation. It was a great freedom to open vistas for our children, to encourage wonder and exploration, curiosity rather than certainty.

That is still an important part of our tradition. But something has occurred over the last 20 years, and especially in the last 10. The questions we began to ask started to scare us, intimidate us, and fill us with dread. We began asking questions like: Will the earth survive and be around for the next generation? We began asking questions that sincerely disturbed us, very practical questions that need an answer. Basic questions, like: Will my child be safe in school? These questions are not intellectual puzzlers. They’re real, practical, and these questions need an answer. We began to understand over the last decade we need to raise children that can do more than just ask great questions. We hope to raise children that can help us find answers, and if not answers, responses that are worthy of our humanity.

This is where resilience comes in. Resilience is not born of circumstances any of us asked for or would have wanted.John Lennon said: “Life is what happens when we’re busy making other plans.” Resilience knows about plans being thwarted. It knows disappointment and it knows loss. It knows that something or somebody can be here in one moment, and disappear the next. Resilience is sensitized to the pain of others because it knows it from firsthand experience. But resilience also knows something else. It knows there is something more than pain. It knows in plans laid to waste there are opportunities, if we have the courage and vision to see them.

We are living that opportunity today. We are living a different plan than our parents and the previous generation intended. And given the circumstances at this moment, we are doing something incredibly brave and profound. We are looking to the future, and we are feeling inspired to respond on behalf of our children.

It may sound like I’m setting you up for a special mission, a special mission that only a superhero could face. I think there’s a reason we love these Marvel movies.

We see in them what is already in ourselves. The future doesn’t need superheroes. That is only a distraction from what we really need: ordinary human beings who know even in limitations there is enough: enough courage, enough beauty, enough hope.

Five truths and a lie is a great game. It’s a great ice breaker. It’s a way of introducing yourself by surprising others, getting others to guess about the truth of our life. I’ll give you five truths and a lie.

1. This is a church that has been flying the rainbow flag for nearly two decades, and has been at the forefront of advocating for and welcoming LGBTQ persons.

2. At an important board meeting in the 1980’s a group of brave individuals were faced with the stress of economic decline in this neighborhood and needed to choose whether to stay or move the congregation elsewhere. They chose to stay.

3. In 2019, the Unitarian Universalist church is known by locals as the “social justice church” due to advocacy for minorities and those on the margins of society.

4. As a church, our members continue to make the Northside a vibrant and beautiful place to call home.

5. We lack the resources to face the circumstances we’re in, and will probably have nothing to leave the next generation.

I can tell you what I think the lie is : It’s number 5. “We lack the resources to face the circumstances we’re in, and will probably have nothing to leave the next generation.” We never can tell what will make all the difference.

Sometimes it’s just a flower that everyone swears is ja weed. For someone, that weed is how they may find their way home. Things don’t become true just because we want them to be true. We’re learning this awkwardly, but we’re learning it. Our life decisions make something true for people we will never meet, for generations we may never see.

I have good news for you. If you have even an inkling of desire to teach our children what it means to respond to this beautiful, troubled world with an open heart, to teach resilience, you’re in the right place.

That inkling of desire means you’re almost there in making the difference between a truth and a lie.

Teaching resilience is a tricky proposition, because in many ways our children are more resilient than we are. Born into a different world, they’re starting point has set them up for the world ahead in ways we will never reach. The children are our best teachers. I firmly believe that. The paradox is that we will only know the depth of this truth if we teach them. If we give them what we have, especially in times when we feel like we don’t have enough: not enough knowledge, not enough experience, not enough courage. Through acting in spite of this, we teach the most important lesson of resilience: No matter what, there is enough. And you, you, are always enough.

So please join myself, Mystery, Hope, and Sunshine after this service for an exploration about teaching our children. Decades from now, one of these kids may be standing here in this beautiful place, saying there was a meeting that happened in this very place, a meeting that made all the difference for them and this whole community, a group of brave individuals who laid a foundation they could build on. Please join us in making that happen.