In my career as a minister, I have had the good fortune to work with talented, dedicated professionals who helped design and orchestrate the religious education (or "RE") programs at my previous church and here. These days, the RE staff here at the First Parish includes our Associate Minister, Kimi Riegel, half of whose time is thus devoted; Irene Praeger, our RE Administrator; Brad Harmon, who is serving this year as our Youth Director; our nursery staff, Robin Coutu and Peeky Abbott; as well as our Music Director, Polly Oliver, and our intern, Robin Zucker, in some of their work here.

 But, of course, that only begins to tell the story, for the success of the program is much due to the volunteers who serve on the RE and the Adult Education Committees, especially their chairs, who this year are Cathy Gast and Laura Harmon, respectively. And the success of the program depends most of all on our host of volunteer teachers.

But the list goes on. The success of our Sunday school and that of the youth programs on Sunday evening depend on the importance that parents attach to their children’s religious training, and the support and encouragement they provide to their children’s involvement. The success of our adult education program depends on the importance that some people attach, in any given season, to their own religious training.

And the success of the entire religious education enterprise depends on the enthusiasm with which the congregation as a whole embraces it as one we hold to heart, endorsing it with our generosity of interest and support, both of money and affection.

That generosity shows up in a thousand ways: in the truly curious questions a parent asks a third grader on the ride home from church, and the interest and honor paid the child’s report. It shows up in the loving pride in many eyes -- those of the parents but of others, too -- when a child is dedicated, when the children’s choir sings, when children come up class by class for the flowers in June, or just watching the children depart for their classes any week, and recognizing some.

I am talking about the enthusiasm with which the congregation as a whole embraces the religious education enterprise as one we hold to heart, endorsing it with a generosity of interest and support. That generosity shows up in our concern that those who work with our children and youth be compensated in a way that reflects our high regard for the importance of their work.

It shows up in cards of thanks we write to our children’s Sunday school teachers or youth group leaders, perhaps cards we write or at least sign along with our children. It shows up in thoughtful consideration of the opportunities offered in every season for one’s own spiritual or intellectual development, and in the decisions to attend one or more.

For those of us here at the First Parish, clergy and laity alike, we are very, very lucky that this is a congregation that has been enthusiastic for a good long while about religious education, both in the sense that we seek to foster religious development for persons of all ages, and in the sense that we love the inclusion of children in our sense of our community and mission.

As regards our Sunday school, it would be hard to overestimate its importance among us. I have heard people say that they joined this congregation because of the strength of its musical tradition, the beauty of its buildings, or even (go figure) the quality of the preaching. But many people, maybe most, come here in search of a great program of religious education for their children, and stay here because that is exactly what they find.

The numbers reflect this. The new denominational directory is out, with lots of numbers. To me, two of them stand out: There are 248 UU societies in the continental northeast, which is to say, in New England and the Canadian Maritime Provinces. Of those 248, Wayland’s RE program for children and youth is the fourth largest.

Numbers of this sort are fuzzy, of course. With other people reporting, we might have been second, or we might have been fifth. But there are five programs that are clearly the largest in size among the 248, and we are in that company. I take that as an affirmation of our generosity of interest and support, both of money and affection.

The money, we’ll have to wait until March’s canvass to express, except for the weekly chance the collection provides. But the affection, it shows up over and over. One could feel its power at the 5:00 service on Christmas Eve service, as the over-filled house delighted in the children’s performance of the story and music. I can see it in the eyes of parishioners as they watch each child dedication.

 How that affection, how our interest and support for our children’s religious development, as well as our own, might best be expressed and embodied, is always the subject of much consideration. This very week ahead, many members of the parish will be gathering on Saturday to re-envision our mission and goals. Hence the timing of this sermon.

 But I do not come to offer expertise or even guidance of any specific sort. I come to wish them well; to assure them the task at hand is as important as they imagine, and to us all (even if not all of us always remember that’s so); to hope that their day is one of inventiveness, excitement, good feelings, and fun; to re-assure them, in the light of my last sermon ["Is ‘Good Enough’ Good Enough?"], that high expectations must be tempered with a realistic sense of the possible (having in mind a comment I heard from one of the best of our Sunday school teachers from the boom days of the early ‘60s, when the classes were still in the old, Victorian parish house across the street, that she considered any class a success if none of the boys made it out on the roof); and to offer my own testimonial as one who grew up attending – and loving, I might add – Unitarian Sunday school classes.

 In almost any group of Unitarian Universalists,  born UUs comprise a fairly small minority. Most UUs began life in some other religious tradition, or, increasingly, in none. As glad as we are to have been so attractive to others, one troubling observation is that there is such a high percentage of come-outers because so many who were part of our movement as children must have dropped out along the way.

On the other hand, that observation does not seem to apply well to us here in Wayland, where by now there are something like twenty people who went through our program, beginning with George Lewis back in the ‘30s, who now attend the church as adults. Given all the pressures to move away, and how hard it is to afford to live nearby, this is truly remarkable.

Another group to whom the observation about lapsed UU youth does not apply is the UU clergy, many if not most of whom grew up in our movement, or in one of the two pre-merger movements, as a Unitarian or a Universalist. Look around: besides me, the category includes our associate minister, Kimi Riegel, too, and the other ordained member of the congregation, Deborah Pope-Lance, who preached here last week. At least two people who attended the Wayland Sunday school program are currently UU ministers, Linc Holmes and Tom Yondorf; and two more are now in seminary, Ben Hall and Barbara Ives.

I suppose the connection is not surprising, that many of us who spend our lives in the service of churches are folks grew up liking to go to church. We liked what they cared about there, and how they cared about it. One of my colleagues put it this way:

"I grew up in [a] Unitarian fellowship in the Midwest. And that little religious community really left its mark on me.

 "For one thing, the grown-ups there believed that we ought to use our heads. They encouraged us to ponder the big questions of beginnings and endings and anger and love and what was before and what comes next and what helps and what hinders. They thought we were smart kids, they listened to our ideas, we believed we were good thinkers. Now of course I know that the use of reason is a cornerstone of our long religious heritage; but then I just thought it was the way we did things at the Unitarian Church.

 "And then in another mode we planted daffodils, we looked at the stars, we searched for guppies, we held a worship service at the river. These days we would call it spirituality I suppose, or earth-centered religion, but then we called it ‘miracle’ and ‘wonder.’ And that rootedness is in my blood as a Unitarian.

 "Finally, back then, we children knew that we were part of a congregation who loved us. They taught us Sunday School. They doled out the cookies at coffee hour. They chaperoned the Youth Group. They wanted to know what we would do after graduation. They wrung their hands; they clapped their hands – for us, for one another. Now we call it community; now we call it connection. But for me, back then, it was just Unitarian Universalism." [Jane Rzepka]

 George Lewis has told the congregation about his experiences here, as I hope he will again. I’m thinking it would be fun to have an evening when everyone who’s been UU since childhood could share their stories.

 Myself, the first Sunday school I can remember I started attending before I began kintergarden. It was in Urbana, Illinois. By the end of first grade, I had moved with my family back to New Jersey, where I was born, and I attended Sunday school regularly right through sixth grade in Summit. Then we moved to the Jersey shore, and I attended the youth groups of a new fellowship that met at various locations, for the longest time in the YMCA.

 I suspect that for a few of you, I am rekindling memories of experiences like my own, UU or otherwise; but that for a far greater number, I’m kindling a fire of indifference. But if you’ll forgive me, I do want to share some elements of the litany of my Sunday school experience, not so much as personal memoir as to confirm that there is a strong tradition that still has the power to inform and inspire our efforts today, in newer, better forms.

 Think of the three elements my colleague cited: children studied and learned, their sense of wonder and reverence was evoked, and they came to think of themselves as part of a loving, caring, accepting community. My memories suit that pattern well.

 The grown-ups in my Sunday school thought that we were smart, as well; and I mean that in a particular way, not that we had to be kids who excelled in school or knew all the answers, but that we could understand in our own ways religion of a thoughtful sort.

We started out with the Martin and Judy books, whose stories tried to deal with the religious matters of concern to pre-school kids: nature, the mystery of life itself, birth and death, pain and illness, and the like. We went on to learn about Jesus, the carpenter’s son, and Moses, and the first great monotheist, Ahknaten: child of the sun  (those were the titles of the books we read). We learned the wonderful myths that people have told to try to explain where the universe and the people in it came from, or what happens when we die.

Eventually, as teens, we hit the road and learned first-hand about the faiths of other traditions, and how they were practiced. By those years, we were pondering ethics, too, and how to make good choices, faced with complex dilemmas.

Throughout those years, we learned about values and heroes, about Schweitzer, and Ghandi, Clara Barton, Dorothea Dix, and Ralph waldo Emerson. At various Sunday school rites of passage, I was given first a Bible, then a copy of Emerson’s essay on Self-Reliance, and finally The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran. We learned to value knowledge and insight, peace and justice, bravery, beauty, and our own individualism, integrity, and power of thought.

But we were planting daffodils where I was, too, and learning to appreciate the wonder of green life springing from bulbs and from seeds. We knew that for people like us, religion was not so much about doctrine and dogma as it was about reverence and wonder, mystery and awe, the love of the night sky’s still, black immensity, the ocean’s smell and power, the forest’s deep-shaded green.

And we knew that when we came to that place, church, on that day, Sunday, it was to become part of a group that cared about us and each other, that worked to make things nice – the properties and what happened in them. If we wanted, there were things that we could do to help as we got older. And as we got older still, caught up in new ideas in the larger world, they instead of cutting us off, they retained their interest and affection.

I like to think my own children felt some large measure of that affection, freedom, caring, wisdom, community, knowledge, and spirituality from their days here, and that the children who gather Sundays today do still. I like to think it has been and still is, in Channing’s words, a place where their souls were awakened, and their spiritual lives excited and cherished.

 In fact, I like to think that that true for us all, in the adult education programs and in the rest of our life together, too. The church’s great challenge and promise is just that, to awaken our souls, our sense of life in all its wonder and wisdom, beauty and need, zesty excitement and restorative calm; to elicit and treasure our spiritual lives, our awareness of values and meanings deeper than the merely material.

It is something we do together, in community, like the animals in this morning’s story. The author himself [Ken Collier] introduces it with these words: "The church must encourage us to spiritual growth, for where else will we discover a community, a context, and a model for the ability to invest in others so that our own selves become enriched, fulfilled, and new? Where else can we find the support and the understanding that make it possible to change, to grow our selves? The great Unitarian minister A. Powell Davies defined religion as the opportunity to grow a soul…. And where shall we grow our souls, become more deeply human, if not in religious community?" [Our Seven Principles in Story and Verse, 49-50]

 In families, one might answer, but even the family at its most hale can succeed so much better in a place like we have been for so long, go on being, and will be for many a year ahead, if our generosity of interest and support continues strong.

 This is our place for the growing of souls, our own and those of the children of our community – our children, all of ours. All of us, young and less so, can study and learn; have our sense of wonder and reverence evoked; and come to think of ourselves as part of a loving, caring, accepting community, one that includes us, every one.
 
 
 
 
 

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