It is my honor to be here with you on this great occasion, and for Rev. Sean Neil-Barron (who will offer the blessing) and I to bring you greetings from the northern end of the Front Range.
Your new minister and I were baby ministers together in our earliest days of formation – he was an intern serving in Ogden, Utah, and I was the intern in Boulder; after meeting at the District Assembly in 2009, we ended up as study buddies preparing for the MFC.
Our mutual relief and celebration on that day in Boston when we were officially in fellowship will forever be one of my most cherished memories.
Just like Ron and I share a parallel history of formation, so do the two congregations we now serve, the Foothills Unitarian Church in Fort Collins, and All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church in Colorado Springs, both trace their beginnings to what we might summarize as: the bold, audacious, and resilient dreams of courageous women.
It was 1884 when the Rev. Anna Jane Norris arrived in the Longmont area, and began a years-long process of preaching between Longmont and Fort Collins, trying to plant a liberal church. She rode by horseback, and sometimes by rail, and at times managed to attract a crowd of more than a 100. Which was a lot at that time.
I have spent many hours trying to imagine what brought Anna Jane to Colorado. What inspired her, and what called her. Most of all what kept her going, through it all –
how she managed to stir up such a resilient faith in a transformed future – a liberal church at the edge of the Rocky Mountains – long before any real evidence that such a dream could ever become reality.
Sometimes, in this imagining, I feel the echoes of her ministry everywhere:
in the astonished look of relief on the face of a first-time visitor on Sundays (you know the one?); or in the many sacrifices we all made on behalf of the common good during the early days of the pandemic; and in the gatherings for trans youth we now hold in our church every month that affirms to everyone: you are loved as you are.
I feel Rev. Anna Jane especially when things are difficult, and confusing, when we are trying so hard to discern where love is calling us next, especially when that call beckons towards a place we’d prefer not to go, and a path no one would call easy, or simple.
In these moments, I feel this pulsing sense of mission that I know must have grounded her ministry, and fueled her, and held her steady through it all. An all-encompassing-passion for a message that her sense of call and her faith told her people needed, and that the growing communities in our area needed – the transformational good news that all souls are ultimately held in love, no matter what, for this love to be at the center of everything. A mission like this is the only thing that could explain how she could persist despite unfriendly and even hostile audiences, the near universality of sexism refusing the authority of a female minister, and what were surely not the most hospitable living conditions.
A deep sense of mission, and also, partnership. For despite appearances, the Rev. Anna Jane was not actually alone in her mission. She was a part of a great network of female preachers who were equally invested in the mission of liberal religion and its power in the western states, a network that became known as the Iowa Sisterhood.
Rev. Anna Jane would have known that less than a decade before she began her ministry, another female minister, one of the first women to be ordained as a Universalist, and a leader in the Iowa Sisterhood had brought the good news just a few towns to the south, to Colorado Springs.
The Rev. Eliza Tupper Wilkes moved to the Springs in 1874 for her husband’s law practice, and the first three of their six children were born here over the next three years. I mention her children, because even raising three small children could not stop Rev. Eliza from planting a new Unitarian church in her new town.
While she was not able to serve in full time ministry, she preached regularly, and helped in figuring out the church’s organization (and in her free time, she helped to start Colorado College).
While it’s true that the church that became All Souls Unitarian Universalist was not precisely the same church founded by Rev. Eliza Tupper Wilkes, just as we say about the Rev. Anna Jane Norris and her role in the founding of what became Foothills, this congregation, and Unitarian Universalism in Colorado Springs – and Colorado Springs itself would not be the same without the seeds she scattered in those earliest days of preaching and planting.
The echoes of their ministries, their vision, their dreams are here in this gathering today, in each of us. Their promises, and their failures live in our breath, and in our becoming. Even now, we would not be the same without their singular commitment to both their mission, and to the partnership that made that mission possible.
150 years later, I must confess it is hard to imagine what it would feel like to be at the beginnings of liberal religion, rather than in an age declaring its demise.
Since Ron and I started seminary in 2007, the non-stop message has been that the institutional and local church – especially the progressive church – is on the verge of implosion and/or slow drift into oblivion. We have learned that millennials thought we were irrelevant, boomers would soon be focusing on their retirement vacations, and the silent generation were aging out of the heaviest volunteer lifting we had relied on for so long.
You may have noticed that, in addition to Gen Zers who weren’t yet constituted – this regular analysis left out one generation, which your minister and I, as well as other gen xers now holding so much of the lay and professional leadership in our congregations, might want to suggest was a miscalculation.
My point is, our beloved local Unitarian Universalist congregations – these institutions born of the hard won dreams of the Iowa Sisterhood, and of all those who came before us – and these communities to which many of us have dedicated countless hours if not our whole lives – have long needed what Diana Butler Bass has described as a major re-orientation “if we are going to remain relevant in this new world.”
We have long needed a great shake up in the way we do religious education –
not because families and children no longer need our faith – they actually need it now more than ever. But more because family life has shifted dramatically in recent decades, yet we are still following patterns we set when today’s parents weren’t even born.
We have also needed a serious re-imagining of how we talk about and raise money, as younger generations both have fewer or different financial resources, and a much greater skepticism about why they should give those resources to a church, even if it is a church they love. We need new ways for how to speak to that skepticism, and the reasons behind it.
Maybe most of all, we have needed to address the grip of white supremacy that exists within the DNA of our churches – the shadow side of inheriting our ancestors’ dreams – and that has made many of our congregations some of the least progressive, most mono-cultural white/hetero spaces that many young people encounter in their lives, despite the story many of us tell ourselves, or the call most of us know our faith makes.
We have had a sense of all of these things for a long time, but then over the last few years, these questions have become even more pressing, as the middle and the late middle and the we’re-not-sure-when-it-will-ever-end of the pandemic came. As polarization grew, and fascism flourished. And as the climate crisis came in way too close as fires raged and water negotiations stalled, holding our lives and our planet in the balance.
For some of you who were a part of the High Plains Community, these same years have led you to realize the most faithful thing was to close your church, because sometimes the thing love calls us to do is to end, so that something new can begin. And still, even when we know the decision is right, such decisions still hold grief, and disorientation….
And in this community here at All Souls, you have faced this time without a settled minister, and so uncertainty has been compounded and extended.
All of these feelings in these years, all of these traumas, have meant that sometimes, may be a lot of the time, we start to wonder if the headlines were right. We start to wonder about our very survival, and we take up worry like it’s a spiritual practice. We make our dreams more manageable, and practical, more fitting for the future we can afford.
On more than a few days over the last few years, I know that these sorts of worries have seeped in to my own ministry. There have been days when I can feel my faith slipping, and the mission drifting, and the partnership feeling less like help, and more just like so much work.
One day like this I started thinking about the Rev. Anna Jane Norris. Except not thinking. More like, praying to, like the way in my Catholic childhood I used to pray to the saints.
In the silence, I asked for guidance, and for strength. How do I keep going?
And in the silence, I heard words echo back to me, words I wrote down as soon as I finished my meditation so I wouldn’t forget. I still think of them as her words, her echo finding its way to me, and now to you.
She said,
Everything you are thinking about,
All the things you’re stuck on – all these questions– none of this is God.
God is bigger than you know.
Bigger than what you can dream, or imagine.
I could’ve never imagined you, she said.
I could’ve never imagined this church that you serve today.
It was impossible. And still, somehow I was sure of it, even when there was nothing.
There are dreams at work beyond your own.
So, keep going. Just keep going.
You don’t have to do everything.
Someone will come next.
What you leave unfinished will be their calling.
Sometimes instead of Anna Jane Norris, or Eliza Tupper Wilkes, I imagine the dreams of James Dobson.
Stay with me, because mostly what I mean is, there was a time before Focus on the Family. A time before this town was dubbed “the Evangelical Vatican.” A time when there was no evidence for this future, too.
But Dobson and other evangelical pastors had a mission to transform this community, and this country according to their values, their faith – and as we all know too well, in many ways they have succeeded. We live in a future they committed their lives to making a reality – a future that has mostly inspired us to conclude that we want to be nothing like them.
We despise their vision, and so we ditch the idea of mission entirely. We detest their hypocrisy, and so we deride anything so bold, especially when it comes to religion. Their dreams have been so destructive to so many, we diminish our own dreams to a more tolerable size, which helps with that anxiety – at least for a while.
But in the stories of Anna Jane Norris, and Eliza Tupper Wilkes, we remember that the problem is not dreaming itself, but that we have conceded the place of big dreams and bold vision to religions based in hatred and shame, and forgotten our own claim, and our own inheritance to imagine a world transformed by the power of courageous love.
So, on this occasion of your great new partnership, it seems the perfect time to remember and reclaim our birthright to imagine a future bigger than we can complete in our own lifetime….
Here’s one example: perhaps we might imagine a highway exit sign, out there along the future path of I-25, whatever that might mean, a sign that directs us to the Unitarian Universalist Visitor Center, a great and world-renowned campus where they teach tools of belonging and resilience and joy, where we learn to take care of each other, and to embrace and learn from our differences as we all have a piece of the truth – and because a future without falling short would be a future with no humans in it, it would also teach modes of repair and reconciliation, all in partnership with the recently established Department of Peace, which took over half of the old Bases when the military’s budget was cut when the community was transformed by the good news that all souls are worthy of love.
Isn’t it cool how big the future becomes and how brightly we can come alive when it extends beyond our own lifetimes?
Oh, and obviously the Visitor Center would also include accessible, comprehensive sex education for all ages, and the teaching and practice of a new anti-racist culture, and a language beyond gender, ways of greeting each other and being together that we I can’t describe to you in this moment, because they haven’t been invented yet.
And, the good news is – like Rev. Anna Jane and Rev. Eliza, none of us need dream this big alone.
Beyond your partnership with your new minister, and with one another, we can know, and we can trust, and we can live out a greater partnership – that so that on those days when we can feel our faith faltering, and it just feels like too much work, we can give each other a call, and we can remember that we do not need to do everything, and as long as we do not foreclose on the future, in all of its wild possibility, we only need to keep going, and keep dreaming.
Trusting that someone will come next, and what we leave unfinished will be their calling.
Another Possibility 