The three-legged stool is a classic piece of furniture as well as a classic metaphor. It's seemingly so simple. A seat is situated on three legs. As long as the weight is distributed evenly over all three legs, and they're positioned on a level surface, it's very stable and supportive. To be assured of stability, however, you need to attend to all three of the stool's legs.

When I was young, I spent a lot of time on my grandparent's farm in New Hampshire. I loved being on the fahm and being a New Hampsha fahmah. I would get up early in the morning with my grandfather to milk the cows. Usually, he used a milking machine, but sometimes he would milk them by hand. He positioned himself on the three-legged stool, his head leaning into the soft side of the cow, as he murmured, "Ho Boss." His big hands pulled on the cow's teats with a steady rhythm, and the sweet-smelling milk splashed and foamed in the bucket. I remember it as a lovely and gracious experience.

I remember, too, the first time he let me give it a try. That was not a graceful experience. I carefully placed the bucket under the cow's udder. Then, stroking her side with one hand and pulling up the three-legged stool with the other, I was so focused on what I was about to do I did not notice what I was doing. I did not see the third leg of the stool dangling over the shallow gutter into which the cows deposited their excess water and feed. To be sure the gutter was not very deep. It was just deep enough so when I sat my bottom on the stool, over I tumbled. Friends, I'm here to witness that rolling around in the rear end of cows' stalls can be pretty unpleasant. I learned at a young age that you need to attend to all three legs of a three-legged stool. Getting two out of three right doesn't cut it.

We might compare the life of our congregation to the structure of a three-legged stool. In this comparison one leg represents our shared worship life. It includes our Sunday morning services as well as all else we do that explicitly focuses our attention on that which we hold to be of real worth. The second leg represents our participation in lifespan religious education. It comprises our children's and youth's programs, as well as our ongoing endeavors to educate ourselves as adults. The third leg, which is the one I will focus on now, symbolizes our social justice efforts. This leg constitutes all we do within our religious community and out in the larger community to bring into being greater equity and justice. It's one of the crucial ways we manifest in the world that which we worship as well as that about which we educate ourselves. Before moving on, I will complete my stool as congregation metaphor by identifying the seat as that which holds the three legs together. It's the way we care for one another, and more generally, it represents the ways we gather in relationship.

What comes to mind when you think about social justice in the context of religious community? Your vision may hearken to the prophetic voice of, for example, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. issuing a clarion call for justice. I would not be surprised, however, if your images were more mundane. Perhaps you think of the few dedicated souls constituting a social justice committee who occasionally muster a measure of the congregation's support for some justice effort. Maybe you equate social justice with the seemingly tireless eccentric who is always approaching you with another petition."What's this one…'Save the slugs from the onslaught of gardeners?' All right, I'll sign it, just don't show it to my wife." Or possibly you associate social justice with guilt. Your image is that of a minister standing at the pulpit, telling you that some aspect of your life is wrong and needs to be changed. I will admit I am not above using guilt as a motivator for change. I have a New Yorker cartoon of a couple in an auto dealership's showroom, looking at a new car. The sales representative is saying: "It runs on its conventional gasoline-powered engine until it senses guilt, at which point it switches over to battery power." Guilt can have a role, but social justice efforts that essentially arise from guilt, are misguided and may lead us to self-righteousness and arrogance.

Over the next few minutes I will suggest another way to understand the place of social justice in religious community. Returning to my three-legged stool metaphor, it's important to remember that the three legs are joined at the seat. While each leg has its particular role of worship, education or social justice, each of the three informs and supports the other two at the place of their juncture within the congregation's relations. Within a vital congregation social justice is not simply a vehicle for a few members to vent their political ideals or frustrations. Rather it arises from and informs the congregation's way of being community even as it shapes the congregation's participation in the larger society. For our community to be in that kind of relationship with social justice, then, it must arise from an understanding of its theological grounding.

In last week's sermon I said that "life acquires its meaning through our ability to live our lives' journeys faithfully, that is, by our learning to live in a way that is true to the particular human beings we are. But that doesn't mean we are self-made individuals, more exactly the opposite is true. We only become the particular human beings we are through our relationships with other human beings. And not just any human beings, but other human beings who similarly have the freedom and resources to be faithful to their own lives' journeys. The meaning and well-being of each of our lives resides in the well-being of all other lives."

The Unitarian Universalist theologian, James Luther Adams, took this understanding of the development of our humanity vis-à-vis our relationships yet a step further when he wrote: "Human beings, individually and collectively, become human by making commitments, by making promises. The human being as such, as Martin Buber says, is the promise-making, promise-keeping, the promise-breaking, promise-renewing creature. The human being is the promise-maker, the commitment maker."
[from Richard Gilbert's Prophetic Imperative, p. 112]

When people ask me about our being a religious community without a shared creed, they sometimes ask, "What keeps you together if you don't have a common belief?" I try to explain to them that ours is a covenantal community. A covenant occurs when two or more parties make promises to one another. An example of a covenantal relationship in our society is marriage or holy unions. I explain that we gather as a covenantal community in which we promise to support one another in our quests to live our lives faithfully.

Now, if you've been paying attention, you may be saying to yourself, "I don't remember making a covenant with this 'something' when I became a member." What I said just a moment ago is that when we become a member of this congregation, we are implicitly acknowledging our covenant with life. You see, you don't enter into a covenant with life by joining this congregation,
for we're already in that relationship with life by simply being alive. The question is, how well do we recognize and honor it? As Joan Chittister said in the reading shared earlier, "There is one thing that every one of us can bring to life and that is the commitment to do our best to make it a better place when we leave it than it was when we came." [Joan Chittister, "The Monastic Way," May 1999]

When we join this community, we are entering into a covenant with one another that we might help each other more faithfully fulfill our individual covenants, and so we can participate in a community that seeks to fulfill its covenant as community. We do this as community because we know how hard it is to do as individuals. Fulfilling our part of the covenant means in part working with the creative and transforming aspects of this "something" until all people have the freedom and the resources to live their lives' journeys faithfully.

I have an old Far-Side cartoon that a colleague sent me back in 1988. It still tickles me. The caption on it reads, "In God's Kitchen." It shows a mixing bowl on the counter beside a box of Earthquick. The robed and bearded God is removing a steaming earth from the oven, and he is thinking, "Something tells me this thing's only half-baked." The cartoonist, Gary Larson, is on to something. The notion that Earth is only half-baked could be viewed as a humorous take on a theological perspective known as process theology.

Essentially, process theology maintains that creation isn't a done deal, but it's an ongoing process. Creation is not something that once happened and now we are responding to it. We are part of the ongoing creation. In a sense it is half-baked. According to this view there was never a Golden Age or a Garden of Eden or a state of perfection from which we have fallen, rather there is a continuing, unfolding creation, and we are active agents in this unfolding.

While we are not ultimately responsible for creation, that is, we're not in control, -or as Sister Chittister reminded us in the reading, "He was never happier than the day he resigned as general manager of the universe."- all the same we do have our roles to play. We, too, have responsibility for creation's unfolding, for that's part of our covenant. If meaning and justice are to be part of this evolving earth and universe, then we are responsible for helping to create it.
Social justice is not simply another activity of this congregation, but if we are to be faithful to ourselves, to our religious tradition, to Life itself, then we will insure that social justice is woven into the fabric of our community's existence. How do we do that?

We have already taken the first step in that it's part of our congregation's mission. The second sentence of our mission statement reads: "We promote a loving, just and sustainable world through service, learning and action." That is a clear statement about how we perceive our responsibility to fulfill our covenant. A second step is to create a strong social justice committee. Now, the social justice committee that I envision doesn't function in a way that relieves the rest of us from our participation in social justice work and play, rather its role is to integrate social justice into the life of the congregation so we actually have three legs on our stool. And the third leg is on solid ground so we are not continually finding ourselves rolling around in the manure of narcissism. Presently, our committee is trying to determine how to do this. It meets again on Tuesday, April 23, at 7:00 pm.

If it's to do it successfully, it will need people with varied abilities and interests -not just those who are willing to witness or demonstrate for or against issues, important as those forms of social justice can be- but also people who seek service; people who want to integrate education about issues into our shared life; people who want to write letters; people who want to incorporate the work of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee into our congregation's life; people who want to insure that we are faithful to the values we espouse, such as the work assumed by one member, Leslie Romer, who is seeking to introduce us to the Unitarian Universalist Association's Green Sanctuary program which will help us attend to that part of our mission statement in which we challenge ourselves to promote a sustainable world.

Yes, we need people of various interests and abilities who can help us learn how to speak the truth in our hearts, for as Joan Chittister wrote, "It's when we speak the truth in our hearts that we become real adults." I believe that it's largely through our social justice efforts that the life of the spirit becomes manifest in the world. It's often when we experience ourselves as making a difference, as actually participating in and not simply observing creation's unfolding that we're likely to hear the singing of angels to which Howard Thurman referred in the reading.

It is this that throws "all the rest of life into a new and creative relatedness," he wrote. "A crown is placed over our heads that for the rest of our lives we are trying to grow tall enough to wear." My friends, may we seek to bless the world with the gifts we've been given so more people might hear the singing of angels. "Despite all the crassness of life, despite all the hardness of life, despite all the harsh discords of life, life is saved by the singing of angels." [Howard Thurman, "The Singing of Angels"]