If you leave today with only one message I would like for it to be this one: We are ourselves the weavers of the future of this congregation and we can choose to create a tapestry of beauty, color, diversity and caring, a well crafted work of art of which we can be proud or we can leave the loom empty, the warp lacking the binding threads that will hold it all together. It really is up to us.

The loom is this community and it is our individual hopes and dreams that will bind it together, that and our commitment to make those visions come true. Many of us Unitarian Universalist are great visionaries and we can probably come up with some wonderful hopes for this congregation. But of course these are only dreams until we act upon them in some way so today I ask for your commitment also. Make no mistake about this: We need you! This church exist today because of you, its members and friends, that have given freely and generously of your time and money as well as of your caring hearts. Without these eager and clever weavers, without their hard work, planning and dreams there would be no tapestry here at all.

And the world would be poorer for it. Let no one tell you otherwise. In a world where people kill for religious reasons, where divisions and ideological walls are built ever higher, separating the saved from the unsaved, the believers from the unbelievers, the pure from the impure we need all the voices of reason and tolerance, we can possibly get. We who affirm the dignity of every human being, we who strive to understand, to find the unity behind the heated rhetoric and angry words, we are needed now more than ever. In this sanctuary I can stand here at our free pulpit and call upon the mercy of Allah if I choose to. I can ask the Christian God of love that the Universalists believed in to bless every one of us. I can invite you to find the Buddha’s loving kindness opening as a Lotus blossom in your hearts. I can call for the liberation of the Exodus or quote the Jewish prophets. Or I can speak of science and reason and the Universe and urge you to work in this world and not worry about the next. I can dance with the Goddess and celebrate the Earth in a Native American Chant. Why I can even quote from Winnie the Pooh or Alice in Wonderland, if I choose to. In this sanctuary all this and more is possible. And you, sitting there listening to my words are not expected to agree with me. In fact I would be surprised if you all did. For this freedom we have I am deeply grateful. And quite willing to live with a bit of ambiguity and the difficulty some of us have in explaining our religion to others. No, I tell my interfaith colleagues I do not address my prayers to whom it may concern. And I have never once had a question mark burned in my front yard.

But I am grateful for the freedom to serve this free faith and the creative force for good. We embody at our best a real hope for this world, we free thinking mystics with hands as Tom Owen Towle calls us.

This September our faith has been put to the test. A cruel month it has been, a sad and terrifying month. I do not need to convince you of how much we need each other and how important that sense of belonging to a caring community is. For a little while it seemed as if the whole nation had become one large shocked and grieving family. Candles, vigils, flowers and songs gave us solace and hope. Yes, we said, even in the midst of all this horror there is still hope and beauty.

But now some of that unity is passing by and people are afraid. I saw a young woman on TV buying gas masks and full body suits for herself, her 10-month-old baby and her husband. The anger, the just anger can unite a community. Used wisely it can help prevent future acts of terror. Unity sometimes comes from facing a common enemy, which in this case seems to be fear. But fear can do terrible things to us. Fear divides us as a people and a nation into us and them and then every stranger can become the enemy.

The original root meaning of the word religion is to bind together, to re-link a community. If you like you can call it re- weaving the torn web of life. We Unitarian Universalists will be needed in the months ahead. We can each of us be voices of reason and tolerance and guardians of our hard won freedoms. That is our special role. We know something about holding a community together by seeing past our differences and find in each other a precious humanity even when we deeply disagree with each other.

And when it comes to the future of this congregation, one-year, five years or ten years from now it looks bright indeed. We have so much to be grateful for. We have our young people, our children that will continue this liberal religious tradition. We have teachers that give up their Sundays to nurture those same free spirits. There is the gift of music, for those who make a joyful noise and those who listen. Healing sounds that carried us through the sorrows will always be part of my memory of these difficult days. And music that made us laugh and play and forget for a while as when we did our Cabaret. Oh, we know how to play too around here too. We have willing and capable, far- sighted leaders who pitch in, plan and move this community forward. We are becoming more and more involved in the larger ministry outside these walls. We have a wonderful team in our entire hard working staff, they are honestly the best I have ever worked with in my ministry. We have people who greet our visitors, make coffee, make sure the microphone works and that the sanctuary looks visually beautiful. This is a caring congregation, a vibrant living creative place with a deep peace at its core. It is a very good place to be.

But what it will become is up to you. For yes, all this takes money and energy. You might ask yourself what your special gifts are that you can bring to this quest. To become all we can be we must share our dreams with each other. Back in 1963 when a few Tempe UUs began meeting at the Village Inn Pizza parlor on Sunday mornings for a discussion group. I wonder if they had any idea of what this small group would one day become? We are now the keepers of their dream.

We have a golden opportunity to leave a living legacy here. And that is what I want to invite you to take part in. Join us in our great adventure, our quest and our good work that will benefit others far beyond our walls.

What will people say about us some 29 years from now? What will be our legacy to future generations of Unitarian Universalist in the Valley of the Sun? It will take real generosity, open hands and hearts and time too to make this the kind of place that we want. But where it not for the dreams of a few we surely would not have gotten this far. William Blake wrote that we become what we behold and so we should look well to what we are doing for it will transform us.

We represent Unitarian Universalism here in the Valley. If someone were to judge our beliefs from what they find here, as will the newcomers here today, what would they say? Last Sunday someone told me that she would come back because this felt like such a warm and welcoming place. We have a good foundation here in these Buildings. But we do not have enough space to hold all who want to come every Sunday. If this had not been the Luni-tarian weekend I could not have done this participatory service. Great problem to have but do we really want our visitors to feel like salmons swimming upstream?

If you doubt the value of this congregation just imagine a Sunday without it. What if each of you would have to (as Thomas Jefferson did) be a Unitarian Universalist, a religious liberal all by yourself! There would be no safe haven to go to, no friendly faces to greet you, no affirmation of your beliefs to be found. Sure there would still be all the other churches and synagogues who insist that you first ascribe to their dogma before you are one of them. Do you realize how unique we are? That ever since we first came into being as a religion we have insisted upon the freedom to search and find our own faith. Our only king in history, King Sigismund of Transylvania issued a decree of toleration declaring that everyone should be able to worship according to their conscience without fear of persecution. This was back in the turbulent 16th century at a time when other religions were eager to stamp out dangerous heresy with torture and with fire. There are still those who would like to do that today. Sadly religious freedom is far from universal some 500 years later. Let us never take our freedoms for granted.

I had a conversation once with a minister from another denomination. He was complaining as ministers sometimes do to each other. Oh, he said, I am sick and tired of all those couples who come into my church wanting to do their own ceremonies. It was he said, not their wedding, but the church's and as far as he was concerned they could just go elsewhere. As he spoke I remembered all the interfaith couples I have married and how we had carefully crafted a wedding that expressed their feelings and beliefs. Well to him that was a travesty, even an affront. It was as if we lived in two different universes. We certainly had very different ideas about whose service it was and who owned the church. This church belongs to you its members, not to me alone nor to my idea of God, and a wedding or service of union certainly belongs to the couple. To him that was secular, to me that was what exactly what made it sacred. The conversation reminded me of why I cannot be anything other than a Unitarian Universalist. This is where I find the sacred here among us, in nature, in good deeds, in caring people, in our long tradition, in all that work toward the creative good. This world could use some good, life affirming, soul satisfying, joyful and liberating theology for a change. That is part of our mission to be a faith shaping, meaning making workshop for our members and to give our children and youth a sound religious and inquiring foundation upon which to build their faith. When people ask me if we are a religion my answer is always yes, we are a religion in the best sense of binding and linking together, making sense and finding meaning in our lives. Ours is a far more radical faith than many realize. We believe that human goodness is possible. We believe that each of us embody such possibilities. One of the most liberating and demanding thing about this faith is the freedom we have to do our own theology in a place where others, fellow searchers, can help us to see if it is good, for ourselves and the world. The Rev. Terry Swetser had this imaginary conversation with Jerry Falwell. This by the way was written before September 11. He said: Mr. Fallwell, you frighten us because we sense hatred in your dogmatic condemnation of human behavior. But it is not your hate we fear as much as it is our own. We all here have known hate and the systematic hatred called prejudice. We know we are not above it, but our presence in a Unitarian Universalist church is silent testimony to our struggle to overcome hate...I too have known fear of those who are different from me. It is for me a daily struggle to take that fear and turn it into love. When I hear you proclaim a dogmatic condemnation of feminists, of homosexuals, of anyone who is different from you, I fear for the precious love I have wrestled from fear and am afraid the tide may once again turn toward prejudice. Sweetser may have been prophetic as fear and hatred multiply but as I look at your faces this morning, at your presence here I feel a sense of hope. Your commitment tells me that there is hope.

Our vision of what we think is going on shapes our behavior. If we are fearful we will create fear. If we think small we will act small. If we are, as in the fairy tale by my countryman Hans Christian Andersen The Ugly Duckling, a swan growing up among ducks we will unsuccessfully try to be a good duck until we discover who we really are. Think back on why you came here the first time. What were you looking for? Did you find it? Or if you are a visitor, what would keep you coming back to this community? But then you also have to answer this question: what are you willing to give?

Before I ask you to share your hopes for the future let me ask you to imagine that it is ten years from now and you have just arrived here on Sunday morning. What does the place look like as you drive up? How is the outside? How are you greeted at the door? Are there many children there? What does their space look like? You go into the service. Look around, what does the sanctuary look like? Is there music? Are the seats comfortable? Can you see and hear what is going on? Afterwards, how do you feel?

And then I ask you to think of the larger community. How are we helping to heal the world? How are we participating in making this a better community? Are we helping this Valley become a welcoming, caring place where children are cherished, well educated, where poverty and racism is a thing of the past. Sure that is a dream. It may seem impossible! But someone has got to dream such dreams and we are blessed with the freedom and the honesty to do so. You may wonder what the difference is between vision and mission. Vision is the dream, what we would like to see happen, the ideal we hold up to strive for. Mission is what we do to get there. So take some time to think of your own hopes and dreams. Think of what you have to be grateful for. Complete the statement made famous by Martin Luther King, Jr., I have a dream that……"How would you complete that sentence for this congregation?

Then write that on the slip of paper in your order of service. If you need pens or a slip of paper please raise your hand and we will get it to you. Ryan will play some meditative music to help you with this process. Later you will drop these papers into the collection plate and we will weave them into our community loom.