In last Sunday’s sermon, I talked about figuring out what each of us is willing to do in this time of … oh gee, what are we calling it now? Unrest? Attacks on Democracy? (Checks news, sees article about threats made by the president to … Canada?)

I don’t know what to call this epoch. But the question is vital, what are you willing to do? And how will you live a full and fulfilling life during this (sigh) unprecedented time?

In the sermon and afterwards with several people, we talked about differentiating between what we want to do versus what we’re willing to do. I think willingness is for when you believe it serves a purpose (even if it’s just to support a friend) and it provides a way to live out your guiding principles.

There are many ways to put your moral code into action in advocacy, community organizing, resistance, and support for those being attacked and marginalized. Here is a list of 198 options.

One thing we are doing already: building and strengthening community. What might it look like, for you, to work toward that goal?

James Luther Adams, the most influential UU theologian of the twentieth century wrote extensively about the power of voluntary associations. He was in Germany during the buildup of the Holocaust and came to see that the power to resist Nazism came from voluntary communities of purpose, writing:

“We must overcome the moribund and routine conventions of activity in the parish and the denomination. Here the dynamics are already evident outside the churches as well as inside, in the professions and in the prophetic associations in the community. All of these mandates are already burgeoning among us. But none of the strategies mentioned goes to the roots. The fundamental mandate is the renewal of covenant within the churches, the reaching down to the covenant of being itself where mutuality and sacrifice alone free us from the universal monstrosities, the reaching out to the promise making and promise keeping that constitute the substance of response to the covenant of being, the substance of faith and hope. And the greatest of these is love. The alternative is to batten on the grotesque. In short, the alternative is death, even though it be living death.” — “The Grotesque and Our Future,” James Luther Adams

As you think about what you are willing to do and how, even in such as time as this, you will live a full and fulfilling life, consider the role of community in your life. How may it provide you with greater purpose and joy? And what might we do, what might we accomplish, as one voluntary association?