by Elizabeth Ihle
September 7, 2008
When I volunteered to do this service, I didn’t realize what I was getting into. Yes, the end of our mortgages and coming together as a congregation are wonderful things, but what a responsibility to say something memorable and useful to the congregation, especially when we’ve invited former members and friends to join with us this morning!!! Welcome again to everyone!
Let me say at the outset that what I say is entirely mine. I’ll be naming names a bit this morning, and if I’ve omitted someone important it’s pure oversight or ignorance on my part, and I’ll ask forgiveness ahead of time. I’ll offer a couple ideas for our future too, and again it’s me talking. I’m not someone else’s mouthpiece.
Today is our in-gathering, our homecoming, our celebration of being a congregation again as many of us scattered for summer vacations and other travels and as we start our new HUU year.    Waters ebb and flow, and I think this congregation does as well. Some of us move away for a while and then come back. We welcome all to our service this morning and hope for your return.
We are using the symbols of fire and water to illustrate the power of our communal lives. During the service itself, we are going to do an ingathering ritual in which we’ll give everyone a chance to pour water from summer travels into a common bowl as a symbol of showing how individual lives unite after being apart for the summer and the power of uniting our individual offerings to accomplish what we couldn’t have singly. If you forgot to bring your own wter, we have a vase of generic travel water for you to use. Our mortgage burning, outside as the service closes, will symbolize fire.
Part of this sermon title came from Bill Staines’ song “Crossing the Water” which Nan sang so well for us and which we are going to sing all together at the end of the service. “We are crossing the water our whole lives through, making a passage that is straight and true. Every heart is a vessel, every dream is a light, shining through the darkness of the blackest night.” I’m not quite sure that most of us have lived lives that have always had a straight and true purpose; I suspect that many of us have gotten to where we are by roundabout means, but it’s definite that our lives had a birth and will have a death, and that between those two important events we have a lot of living to do and water to cross. Bridges, the second part of the sermon title, help us cross the waters of our lives.
Bridges are supports and transitions. Most of the time we think about physical bridges, crossing waterways and ravines, helping people get or stay together; they are essential parts of any country’s infrastructure. In a country so developed as ours, we tend to take bridges for granted, not thinking about how inconvenient life would be without them. I crossed over four of them and under one of them this morning on the way to church and was scarcely aware. It is a blessing to live in a country where I generally don’t have to worry about my safety when crossing them. When countries fight, bridges are highly guarded and valued targets because of their critical function in human transportation and communication.  The often quoted phrase “United we stand, divided we fall” applies well to the importance of physical bridges in a country’s well-being.
Although physical bridges instantly come to mind with bridge imagery, people also have emotional bridges. Someone once told me that she heard Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge over Troubled Waters” played at a wedding. My first reaction was what an awful song to play at a wedding, but upon further thought it occurred to me that it is really a highly appropriate love song. The singer essentially says when life gets you down-i.e. the waters are troubled, let me be the bridge to take you across them. Isn’t that what love is all about? Being a support? Being a bridge?
Some human bridges are more transitory than others. Pregnancy is certainly a temporary bridge.  Parents serve as bridges, raising children from complete dependence to independent adulthood, and that is a bridge that may not ever disappear but that certainly changes as the parties get older. Friends are bridges as well because they support us in good times and in the bad, but few friendships last a lifetime, very often because of the transitory nature of American society. Spiritual communities are bridges linking people with similar spiritual beliefs into a particular heritage and providing support. That is an important function that we UUs have served in each other’s lives.
Think about bridges as being the means of making transitions. Schooling serves as a transition between childhood and employment; employment is the bridge between young adulthood and retirement, providing a means of livelihood and possibly meaning to life.
We have financial bridges as well-like mortgages. A couple years ago, when the housing market was really tight, one kind of mortgage available was actually called a bridge loan. Folks who found a house they wanted to buy sometimes employed a bridge loan that enabled them to purchase the house they wanted before their own house was sold.
Even traditional mortgages are bridges, allowing us to go into significant debt to have a dwelling -or in our case a meeting place-to use before we have all the money to pay for it. Paying off that debt, that mortgage, is an event to be celebrated, and that’s what we are doing today.
We have that saying about not burning your bridges. Although there’s a lot of wisdom in it, it’s only partly true. Most physical bridges ought to stand, unless they are in danger of collapse, and I like to think that most human relationship bridges should last too, though I recognize that sometimes that’s not always possible. I suspect we all can remember situations when we wanted to tell a boss or lover or a friend or family member what we really thought of them and in most case wisely decided not to do it. Burning a bridge-a physical or emotional one-is destruction that most of us don’t need; often it’s better just to walk away. Sometimes life changes, and maybe later we’ll be glad to know that a certain bridge still stands.
A few bridges, though, of the transitional kind really do need to be burned, as any pregnant woman who has carried a baby to full term would agree. Schooling is another; what parent has not breathed a sign of relief as their kid walked across the stage at their high school graduation and burned the bridge of ever being a high school dropout? Most parents breathe another sign of relief when their child gets a real job and burns the bridge of parental financial support.
Another kind of bridge to be burned is debt. (I wanted to tell you more about the custom of mortgage burning, but Wikipedia severely disappointed me.) The relief of not having credit card debt or a mortgage is great. So here at HUU we’re gonna burn a bridge. Since I don’t want to risk going down in HUU history as the lady who burned down the sanctuary, we’re going to move outside for the end of the service and burn the mortgage there.
We have many generous members and friends who have helped HUU grow. We have been blessed by the wisdom and prudence of our financial committee and our HUU board who have helped us use of assets wisely. Many thanks to all of you for helping bring us to this day..
Both churches and individuals are born and will eventually die, though in many cases, and we hope in the case of HUU, the life of a church is much longer than any individual human life. It would be interesting to know that HUU is still going a hundred years from now.
HUU has come a long way since my early years in Harrisonburg. A few folks here may have longer and more accurate memories of the genesis of HUU than I do,… but I’ve got the podium…. I can remember a very long time ago when a few folks met at the home of Phil and Carol James to discuss the idea of a UU community, but the effort petered out. Later this congregation began, mainly with the encouragement of Deb and Randy Mitchell, in the late 1980s. We began meeting on Sunday afternoons in the local Temple. It was there that we signed a charter founding the church in 1991. Although I was a charter member, I must fairly tell you that I was an unenthusiastic and inactive one, joining mainly to please my spouse.
When HUUs decided to move to a Sunday morning time, we started meeting in a building on south 42 which for lack of a better name, which we nicknamed the OK Corral because it was a venue for country and line dancing on Saturday evenings and then served as our sanctuary on Sunday mornings. I always wondered and never knew who stored and distributed those HUU hymnals which we had bought by that time.
I can remember when we began looking for a meeting place to buy. One choice was a large house behind the Valley Mall. It really wasn’t all that suitable for a church property and we wisely didn’t purchase it, but what a killing we might have made as that property increased in value! Our current sanctuary was once a school, of course, but then belonged to the Lutherans. One objection made to its purchase was the possibility of odor from nearby poultry houses, but that problem has never seriously materialized.
In our nearly twenty-year history our congregation has had a bank mortgage on the sanctuary and acreage and a loan from UUA headquarters for the RE building. It’s not quite clear to me when we paid off the UUA loan, but it’s been in the past couple years. Since we didn’t have a ceremony for paying it off, we can have a double celebration this morning. We bought the sanctuary building and acreage in 1994. While we liked the space, we realized that it didn’t allow for much room for an RE program. John Reeves, who is now a former member, provided a rough design for an RE building, and members Norm Lawson and Watt Bradshaw did lots of work on its construction in 1995 and 1996. We took a risk-sort of a  field of dreams kind of thing- in building a place for some freethinking spiritual folks to meet, and the health of the HUUs today is proof that our risk-taking paid off. Our aesthetics committee, especially Beryl and Norm Lawson, Merle Wenger, and Cathy and Charlie Strickler, have done wonders in transforming our sanctuary space to improve our spiritual home.
Our mortgage has been a bridge giving us fourteen years of housing and allowing us to reach the milestone of owning our own property. It’s now time for us as a congregation with the help of our able board to decide where to go next.
I am not on the board and don’t especially want to be and I am not a spokesperson for it, and so what I’m going to say next are my own thoughts. The fact that we have funds that aren’t paying a mortgage means that maybe we can expand in other ways. We can begin to build new bridges. I’d like to see the congregation grow, and I think that’s going to take a minister. Maybe one possible new bridge would be to set aside some money to serve as a kind of endowment, so that we’ll have some interest at a later date to draw from to help pay a minister a living wage. Another very important bridge is social justice locally, nationally, and internationally. That might start locally by making our building a better model for energy conservation. Having just priced a new front door for my own home, I know that replacing our lovely front door with something far more energy-efficient won’t be cheap but would be a prudent and responsible thing to do. The world is hurting, our community is hurting, people are hungry everywhere, and opportunities for the HUUs to do good abound. Just because we no longer have a mortgage is not an indication that we can slack off our pledges. We have lots more bridges to build reaching out in our community, the nation, and the world.
We’re coming together again this morning from our travels of the past year. In a minute, j please come forward and pour your travel water into this pitcher and tell us briefly where you’ve been. After we’re all done, believe or not, I’ve got a little bit more to say.
Ann and I visited Niagara Falls the other week. Thirty-four million gallons of water pour over Horseshoe Falls every minute, and power of that falling water was truly awe-inspiring. The individual portions of water poured into our pitcher are alone pretty insignificant, but when joined with all the rest they become more powerful. One joined with others symbolizes our power to build more bridges collectively than alone.  We’re going to take this water-the symbol of our joined power-and use it in a few minutes to extinguish the fire of our burned mortgages.
Let’s adjourn outside.