A sermon by Reverend Rudi Gelsey,
delivered on December 22, 2002
At the Unitarian Coastal Fellowship, Morehead City, N.C.

For a while now, the airwaves have been blaring
"X number of shopping days left till Christmas,"
testimony to how a religious holiday

can be hijacked by Madison Avenue.
Multitudes rush from store to crowded store.
Some see the remedy to such commercialization
in "Let’s put Christ back into Christmas."

Personally I would make the case for
"Put peace back into Christmas,"
inner peace, peace in the home, and peace in the world.
No more mocking of Advent and Christmas,
as our government prepares for war in January, or maybe February.
Peace on earth, goodwill to all would restore
the spiritual meaning of Christmas,
would help usher in what Jesus called
the kingdom of God.
How about the New Year?
Unlike Christmas, New Years is a secular holiday,
simply a matter of separating one calendar year from the next.
New Years is generally celebration with merrymaking at parties,
or watching an exuberant count-down at Times Square,
but wait a minute!
Would it not make sense to dedicate the time between
Christmas and the New Year to spiritual reflection,
a time to review the outgoing year,
and set some goals and direction for the year ahead?
For the next five minutes,
Turn to your neighbor and ponder:
What was especially significant in 2002?
What went well or not so well?
Any lessons from the past?
Any hopes and perspectives for the future?
I trust this dialogue was meaningful to you.
Moving right along,
I remember a nostalgic, haunting, melodious hit
from my younger days.
Ron White, our local Pavarotti, will now sing:
Que sera, sera,
Whatever will be, will be,
The future’s not ours to see,
Que sera, sera.
The words suggest sweet surrender, letting go.
Do not push the river.
Don’t you know:
New Years resolutions tend to pile high
on a garbage heap of discarded good intentions.
Still, something can be said for setting sail,
for giving some direction to our lives,
rather than merely being jetsam and flotsam,
swept hither and yon
by currents and riptides not of your making.
There are many ways of looking at one’s life.
Let me start out with the personal aspect,
unique to each person,
the balance sheet of gains and losses,
disappointments and happiness.
Reviewing my life in 2002,
there was the uplift of two of our sons.
getting married in March and May.
I had the delightful privilege of performing their weddings,
and in the process,
acquiring two delightful daughters-in-law.
In September I accepted to serve you as part-time interim minister,
an enriching experience,
but barely had I settled down here,
I find to my dismay
that my wife had two malignant lesions on her liver.
Since, then, we have been living under a cloud,
though a visit to the doctor last Thursday was good news.
The liver area was not sensitive to pressure
and Trudi continues to have no pain.
We cling to the hope of a remission,
or at least a dormancy,
giving us as a family a few more years of quality life.
Painfully aware that there are members of this congregation
who are also facing major health issues,
our hearts, meditation, and prayers go out to them.
How does one face a serious or life-threatening situation?
The advice I have been receiving and my own conclusion
is not to obsess around illness or misfortune.
Concentrate instead on joys and blessings, past and present,
on gratitude rather than on fear or resentment.
Glean whatever happiness you can squeeze out of living.
Assuredly, more easily said than done.
When practiced though, it is a saving grace.
Another helpful attitude:
While doing everything possible to deal with a crisis,
remain unattached to the outcome of your efforts.
This is an age-old Hindu and Buddhist wisdom,
found as well in Western spirituality,
as in the serenity prayer.
The opposite of fear is not always hope, but serenity.
What happens personally in our lives touches us deeply,
but the larger picture around us is important as well.
As Dr. Martin Luther King put it
"We are part of an inescapable network of mutuality."
Alas, many among us have been having a sinking feeling
in terms of the direction in which our government is going:
the depressing prospect of perpetual war,
a war on terrorism,
a war on Iraq and down the road on the axis of evil,
starwars, and to top it all, a nuclear Armageddon,
devotedly hoped for by some fundamentalist Christian leaders,
on the assumption that it might signal
the triumphant return of Christ.
Besides the lust for war,
there is the paradox of wanting to force others
to give up weapons of mass destruction, while we keep ours;
the paradox of eroding our democratic freedoms
while claiming to defend them;
the paradox of exalting the virtues of our economy
while mired in gargantuan corporate scandals,
a Wall Street meltdown,
a galloping budget deficit, and rising unemployment.
You get the picture: a dismal picture, dismal indeed.
I believe it was Thomas Jefferson, who said
"I tremble for my country, when I think that God is just".
However, I am not prepared to give up faith
in the hard-won democratic achievements of our nation.
Whenever we have gone haywire in one direction,
sooner or later the balance is redressed.
After a long struggle, too long, slavery was abolished.
We apologized for the concentration camps for Japanese
Americans.
We survived the McCarthy paranoia.
The nation eventually rallies to reaffirm
democratic checks and balances. Hopefully the day will come, none too soon,
when we will view our current drift
toward an authoritarian, jingoistic, militaristic State or Empire
as a deplorable, counter-productive aberration.
It is high time to reverse course.
There is one more aspect I want to touch on,
a major change evolving as I speak.
For the first time since the founding
of your Unitarian Coastal Fellowship in 1980,
you are about to call a full-time minister.
It is partly an act of courage, partly a matter of faith.
I believe that a congregation
with a strongly lay-led leadership
can interact harmoniously with a full-time settled minister,
provided no one is on an ego trip,
and everyone is dedicated to the common good.
It is a matter of providing shared leadership
a question I will address in a sermon on February 2nd.
I believe that as a congregation grows,
it need not lose the precious quality of human closeness.
In the lay-led extended family type of a small congregation,
your present stage, everybody knows most everybody,
and most everybody pitches in.
It is cozy and comfortable, I am tempted to say comfy.
Many congregations, including this one,
like to hold on to their intimacy,
resulting in staying at a plateau,
when they reach 60 to 70 members.
After 15 years of part-time clergy,
you now take the bold step of calling a full-time minister.
One of his important missions will be growth
without getting lost in the dreary sands of impersonality.
In a larger congregation, the trick will be to maintain
the warm glow of a small Church.
Part-time ministers mostly do maintenance.
The search committee is looking for a candidate
who will help the congregation to be more ambitious.
Your own mission statement suggests that in a couple of years
you expect to have 125 members,
almost double your present size.
Very good, some would say, but how about this issue
of low population density in Carteret County?
Are we not daydreaming when we envision a large, vital
Unitarian Universalist congregation here?
After all, how could we possibly match
the Eno River congregation in Durham
with its 750 members, or our Charlotte Church
with a membership of some 525 souls.
Think again!
Take a community like Brewster, Massachusetts, on Cape
Cod, with a population of some 2.300 people, smaller than
Beaufort, not to mention Morehead City.
Cape Cod is a vacation area like the Crystal Coast.
20 years ago, they had some 100 members.
They called a full-time minister, the Reverend James Robinson,
to help their small, struggling congregation grow and prosper.
According to the 2002 directory of our denomination,
Brewster now has a membership of guess how many.
(guesses were 100, 200, and 400)
All of 750 of members!
a thriving Sunday School of 190 kids,
420 pledging units, a budget of $457.000
20 years later, Reverend Robinson is still their minister,
assisted by a colleague.
Naturally, the First Parish of Brewster
is deeply involved in community work.
It is wonderful to see what can be achieved
when instead of focusing on limitations,
one envisions an abundance of possibilities.
May the year 2003 be truly a turning point in the life
of this congregation.
Where there is vision, the people prosper.
The future is yours to see and yours to build.

May it be so.

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