Back in the day, church buildings like this one in the winter were cold. This was before central heating and before the benefits of global warming that we’re enjoying today. If a church had a furnace of some kind, the richer people paid for the right to sit closer to it. The rest of us just sat there and shivered and probably couldn’t wait for the service to be over. Here at First Unitarian, people used to keep warm by bringing “foot warmers” – little boxes full of burning coals. It was B.Y.O.H. – bring your own heat. Everyone lived in the neighborhood. And it wasn’t much trouble to scoop some coals from your home furnace into a foot warmer and bring it along with you to church. It wasn’t really any trouble at all.
And then technology evolved and central heating became available, and some folks started saying, “Hey, that sounds great! We should get that here!” They were invariably met with resistance. “Why would we do that? The foot warmers work perfectly well. That would be an irresponsible use of our operating budget.” What seems like excess and luxury to one generation can seem like a baseline index of civilization to the next. Imagine if we still had foot warmers here today. Maybe you’d get handed one along with your order of service when you walked into the sanctuary. It just wouldn’t fly today. (On the other hand, maybe it would be so retro and ironic that it would make us the hottest thing in New York.)
If you had been able to interview one of these people in the 19th century about their resistance to splurging on a heating system, I imagine they would have said something like, “What we are doing here is so important, spreading the good news of Jesus Christ…” (Unitarians were Christians back then) “…building character in our children, caring for the sick and the needy, it would be a sin to spend any of our resources on something that is merely for our own comfort.” Their motivation was absolutely noble. Although we can now look back with 20-20 hindsight and say that they were wrong about what was best for the church and its growth, their hearts were in the right place. Their hearts were exactly where you’d want them to be. They wanted the money they contributed to the church to produce only intangible spiritual benefits.
It turns out that on this point, they and the IRS agree. You’ll see on your 2016 tax statement from First U it will say something at the bottom to the effect that in return for your contribution here you’ve received no goods or services; you’ve received nothing other than “intangible spiritual benefits.” This is standard language used to convince the IRS that you shouldn’t be taxed on the money you gave because you haven’t been able to buy anything with it. You no longer have it, but you don’t really have anything else in exchange for it either – except for intangible spiritual benefits, which don’t count. From the IRS’s perspective, that money has evaporated.
There’s a built-in awkward relationship between the financial and material infrastructure that we need to keep this place running and what’s actually produced here. If you imagine this place like a giant machine, we put in very tangible things – money and material resources and people’s labor time, volunteer and paid – at one end and we all churn it up and process it and combine it in various ways. And what comes out the other end after all that? Intangible spiritual benefits. They don’t count to the IRS because you can’t count them. You can’t measure them. It’s hard to really even define them.
In our Moments of Witness here, some of our members have tried to define exactly what gets produced here… what are the benefits and why it means so much to them. Joy Gabriel talked about how, when she really needed it, the choir sang to her and we all held her without even knowing we were doing it. Danny DiGiacomo and Chris Singh spoke with joy about their upcoming wedding here and asked, “where else would a nice Guyanese, South American gay Hindu from Long Island get to walk down the aisle with a nice Sicilian-Italian gay Catholic from Brooklyn?” Where else indeed. And Sam McKelvie, in her Moment of Witness today said that she has found family here. She said, “…the most amazing family. I have close friends who are a generation older than me and their knowledge and experience is exciting and invaluable.”
Members have also written to us about how being here at First U has transformed the way they see and act in the world outside these walls. Katie Trossello, one of our members who is a nurse practitioner working with mostly Latino patients, wrote to me about how she looks at medical care differently now. She gives the example that when professionals in her field look at trends – say they’re looking at the rates at which pediatric x-rays are ordered – they will often ask themselves, “Why are kids getting so many more x-rays here than there? Is it insurance status? Large hospitals versus small clinics? A lot of new doctors who are nervous and over ordering?” But Katie now, from her time at First U, also sees other factors. She writes, “It’s widely known that people of color are repeatedly under screened and receive less care. So with my understanding of disparities in the world… I’m able to take this information …and see a bigger picture. Could there be rationing of resources? Are these decisions being based on race and provider bias?” Katie now brings a different lens to her work and this informs how she works with her patients. She has grown so passionate and courageous about issues of inequality that she is leaving next week for a trip to the Arizona desert with a Unitarian Universalist group called No Mas Muertes (No More Deaths), where she will help provide water and lifesaving supplies to immigrants making the perilous trip through the desert.
I’ll tell you something that is probably heresy on Stewardship Sunday: all of that juicy, spiritually rich, deep stuff that’s coming out of this place? All those relationships? All of the personal transformation that ripples outward and changes the world? Money can’t buy any of it. And yet I guarantee you that if we had an unheated building – if we were still expecting people to bring their own heat from home by schlepping foot warmers to church – none of it would happen. We need this home – this literal, material home – in order for the magic of what we do to happen. We need heat, we needs lights, we need all the boring stuff like insurance and regular gutter cleaning. We need to pay our staff. In the old days everything was volunteer. The minister’s wife ran the Sunday school. (Good luck getting the minister’s wife to do that now!) These days we need to pay our staff and we need to invest in our building for the future. We need our spaces to be clean, functional, accessible, and welcoming. And so well cared-for that we never have to think about them. We need to be able to say to our members and friends, “Come in. Be warm. Don’t worry: we’ll provide the heat.” And when we do this, we create the conditions of possibility for those intangible spiritual benefits to accrue.
Our Sabbath quote for today that’s at the top of your order of service is by the architect Louis Kahn. It gets at the irony of we’re talking about here: “A great building must begin with the unmeasurable, must go through measurable means …and in the end must be unmeasurable.” He’s talking about the strange, mystical process that we witness here. Because what we start out with is kind of intangible. It’s the individual life energy of everyone in this room. It’s our talents and work ethic and passion. And we work and turn it into money – a material product of our life energy. And we feed that money into the machine here. And it gets transformed into heat and lights and insurance and salaries. And then those things get re-transformed into something intangible. But it’s something new – something greater than the sum of its parts; different than what we each had individually before; something we could never have accomplished on our own. What we do collectively here outlasts and outreaches us as individuals. It touches the realm of the spirit.
It seems strange, this journey from intangible to tangible to intangible, but in a sense, that’s how life works in general. The intangible things that we value most in the world – like love – can only be expressed in concrete ways. Love is always communicated through action – you make a nice meal for your partner when they come home from a hard day; you work three minimum-wage jobs so your kids can have a place to live; you hold your mother’s hand as she dies; you tutor a child who’s struggling with English as a second language; you gently clean a bird whose feathers are covered in crude oil. Love is always expressed tangibly. You take the love you feel and transform it into concrete actions that then transform back into love when they are received. It’s the constant flow of life energy between the material and the spiritual and back again. It’s one of the wonderful mysteries of life.
One of our longtime members, John Pritchard, wrote about this mystery: “Fellowship, social interaction, spirituality. It is difficult to explain these concepts to those who have not experienced them. It seems a trivial thing to some folks, but for those of us who have lived it, they are the most important things in one’s life. I give financially the best I can and am proud to do so. It is hard to explain why, but I know deep inside that it is important for me to do.” I hope each of you will come to our Stewardship Brunch downstairs after the service, share a meal, and make a pledge to transform some of your love, some of your life energy, into the building blocks of our home here. I ask you to do it joyfully, generously, and very intentionally knowing that there is a sacred mystery to this process where we build something together that transforms lives. We give money for the mundane nuts and bolts of this place and somehow people benefit in intangible spiritual ways. We give in recognition of this mystery.
We give for John Pritchard, Sam McKelvie, Danny DiGiacomo, Chris Singh, and all those who have spoken and written about how much First U means to them. We give for those in the wider communities whose names we will never know but who will be somehow touched by the work we do. We give for the people who sat in these pews with foot warmers in the 19th century, praying for this to be a place of salvation for all. We give for those who will sit in these pews in the future with hearts full of hope and pain, living in some unimaginable world. And we give, of course, also for ourselves, so that our spiritual home here can continue to nurture us and sustain us. I ask you to give to First U because, in the lives of all of these people, we make a difference that is real, unique, and – don’t tell the IRS – but definitely tangible.