Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
August 21, 2005

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Whether it’s been known as First Congregational Church of Monroe, Monroe Congregational Church, or Monroe Congregational United Church of Christ, this church has always done things a bit differently. To some extent that’s what you’d expect from it being a church in the Congregational tradition. We UCC people from the Congregational tradition have long had this crazy notion that people have freedom of conscience that we need to respect. We’ve always believed that the local church is the church. Local church autonomy is our most sacred of sacred cows. Just let some other church body try to tell us that we are now UCC and not Congregationalist and that we really should drop the word Congregational from our name. Never mind all the arguments that can be advanced in support of that contention (and never mind that those arguments are right). Nothing will trigger our Congregationalist stubbornness faster than somebody outside of our local church trying to push that idea on us-or most any other idea for that matter.

We’ve been different in other ways as well. Not long after it was founded this church basically ceased operations for want of money and yet survived. We used to take the summer off pretty regularly, and yet we survived. We made do with a part-time minister on several occasions-once for twenty years at a stretch-and we survived. From the late 1990s until less than a year ago we had no Sunday School at all, and we survived. Things that would have finished off most churches haven’t finished us off.

We’ve been different in other ways too. We are-well, technically, for about 56 of our 100 years we were-Congregationalists, and that means more than individual freedom of conscience and local church autonomy, as important as those things are. The Congregationalists long had this sometimes annoying notion that the Gospel is about social justice as well as about individual salvation. They led the Abolitionist and the Suffrage movements and ordained the first woman ever ordained, to name just a couple of the causes that we Congregationalists have championed.

Monroe Congregational picked up this part of the Congregational tradition too. It was sometimes expressed in ways that seem rather quaint to us today. In 1934, as Prohibition was coming to an end, the church passed a resolution directed to the Monroe City Council advocating that Monroe remain a dry town. More in line with the best of the Congregational tradition, in 1938 the church apparently wrote to our area’s Representative in Congress urging him to support an anti-lynching bill that was pending at the time. The church thus supported a very early part of the Civil Rights Movement that became so prominent twenty years later.

And more than that. In 1937 this church called a woman-Ellen Bradley-to be its pastor. Now, the church has had two women pastors in more recent times-Mary Olney and Dianne Schmitz--and we don’t think much of it any more; but in 1937 calling a woman as pastor was an act of courageous, prophetic witness. Even today many churches will not ordain women. In 1937 the ordination of women was an extreme rarity. You just didn’t see women in the pulpit, but you did in this one. I don’t know if the church thought of it this way in 1937 or not, but in calling Mrs. Bradley as pastor this church was boldly expressing and furthering the Congregationalist tradition of prophetic witness for equality and justice for all people. In 1938, this church was way ahead of its time.

It still is. It is in a least three ways. We see how it is ahead of its time in two slogans the church has been using for several years now. One of them has to do with how we see Scripture. We say "We take the Bible seriously not literally." The most common approach to the Bible in our country today is literalism. The most prominent representatives of Christianity among us proclaim that the Bible is literally the Word of God and that everything in it is literally, factually true. We, along with most if not quite all of the UCC, see it differently. We honor the Bible as the church’s book, and we take what it says seriously. It is a lamp to our feet and a light to our path, but we do not worship it. We recognize that it is a human document. We recognize that its deepest insights for our lives in this time and place come when we understand it critically and allow its stories, symbols, and metaphors to grasp us and draw us in. We recognize that literalism stifles the truths the Bible has to teach us rather than bring those truths alive in our lives.

The other slogan we use is "uniting faithfulness with discovery." This slogan expresses our openness to new truths and our realization that God’s revelation to us humans did not end when the Bible went to press. This slogan states in different words the truth behind the UCC’s God Is Still Speaking initiative. That’s why it is so natural for us to have a God Is Still Speaking banner outside our building. The idea that God still speaks and that we are called to discovery as well as to faithfulness is as old as Congregationalism itself. In 1620, as the Pilgrims were sailing from Holland for the New World, their pastor John Robinson-one of whose descendants is part of this congregation-famously said: "God hath yet more light and truth to break forth from His holy word." We seek always to be open to that "more light and truth" that God is always striving to reveal to us. We strive to be faithful to the God we know in and through Jesus Christ. To us that faithfulness means not a mechanical reliance on selected Biblical texts but an awareness that the Bible always points beyond itself to a living God, a God that the great contemporary hymn writer Brian Wren has called the "great living God, never fully known...." To this great living God we try to be faithful as we strive to discover God’s truth and God’s call for us in this time and place.

Our commitment to being open to new truth while being faithful to the God who reveals that truth has led us to take a step that more than anything else makes us different from the other churches in this community. In February, 2001, this church adopted its current mission statement. That mission statement includes a commitment to welcoming into the full life of the church all people regardless of, among other human characteristics, sexual orientation. In November, 2003, we sought and received official recognition as an Open and Affirming Church. We are the only such church of any denomination in east Snohomish County. We believe that God’s love and Christ’s grace embrace all people, and we do not believe that a very few, isolated Bible verses that express ancient understandings and prejudices change that fact. And so, taking the Bible seriously but not literally and seeking to unite faithfulness with discovery, we have taken a stand. It is a minority position and among many of our fellow citizens not a popular one. Yet it expresses our core values better than anything else we have done, and more than anything else we have done it is responsible for the current growth and vitality of this congregation. Being Open and Affirming is truly putting our core beliefs into action.

This church has always been different, and it still is. Today is a day to take stock of our current condition, of where we stand right now. It is a day to celebrate our past, to give thanks for the vision and the commitment of all of the people of this church that came before us and for all the ways in which this church has served, nurtured, comforted, and helped them and us. Yet today is not an ending. It is a beginning. It is the beginning of a second century of uniting faithfulness with discovery, of being faithful Christians who open themselves to new light and truth from the Still Speaking God. What will the second century bring us? There is no way to know for sure. All we can say for sure is that whatever the specifics of our future turn out to be certain truths will remain. Let me briefly mention just a few of them.

The Still Speaking God leads all of God’s people into ever greater openness to the God-given humanity of all of God’s people. As we go through our second century may we welcome all who come to us seeking spiritual food and a spiritual home. The Still Speaking God leads always in the direction of greater justice for the poor, the marginalized, the despised, and the rejected. As we go through our second century may we be agents of transformation leading our society and the world toward God’s justice for all people. The Still Speaking God leads always in the direction of peace. God’s will for the entire world is peace. Violence, whether done by individuals or by nations, never expresses God’s will. As we go through our second century, may we be agents of transformation leading our society and the world toward God’s peace for all people.

You might ask: How do we know these things about this Still Speaking God? There’s a simple answer to that question. The answer is that we with Saint Peter have always made and will always make the foundational Christian confession. With Peter we say to Jesus: "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the Living God." KJV We know that the Still Speaking God leads always in the way of inclusiveness, justice, and peace because we confess that it is in Jesus that we see this God and through Jesus that we know God’s will for the world. According to the Evangelist Matthew Jesus told Peter that it was on the rock of that faith that He would build His church. That faith is the rock on which this church stands. This church will stand as long as it stays true to that confession. Jesus Christ, the Son of the Living God, through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, has built and sustained this church in good times and in bad. He will continue to do that as we live through our second century. We can trust Him to do it, and with that trust there is nothing we cannot do. Our future is open before us, and with Christ as our guide it is unlimited.

We have a different vision. We believe that it is a faithful vision. It is a vision of the Realm of God becoming ever more fully realized in God’s world. It is a vision of free Christians freely worshiping, freely seeking, freely finding-finding where our Still Speaking God is leading Monroe Congregational United Church of Christ in her second century. May that vision and our faith in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior sustain us and give us courage, peace, and joy in the years ahead. Amen.