Flower celebration, 2006

This flower celebration was led by Rev. Dan Harper and Emma Mitchell, Director of Religious Education. As usual, the material below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Homily and story copyright (c) 2006 Daniel Harper.

Story for all ages — The Story of the Flower Service

83 years ago, Norbert and Maja Capek were ministers of a Unitarian congregation far away from here in Europe, in Prague, Czechoslovakia. Most members of their congregation had left other religions to become Unitarians, and many of these people did not want to be reminded of the religions they had left behind. So Norbert and Maja Capek decided to create a new ritual for their congregation — a Flower Ceremony.

One Sunday in June, they asked everyone in the congregation to bring a flower to the worship service. When people arrived on Sunday morning, all the flowers were gathered together in vases, and Norbert Capek said a short blessing over the flowers. It seems to me that the flowers became symbols of what it means to be a human being: every flower was different, every flower was beautiful in its own way. And at the end of the worship service, everyone went up and took a flower, a different flower from the one that they had brought, took that flower home with them as a symbol of their connection to everyone else in the congregation.

We are going to have our own Flower Celebration, or Flower Communion, right here in our own congregation. In just a moment, we will all have a chance to come forward and place a flower in the vases on the table here. If you forgot to bring a flower with you this morning, or if you didn’t know that you were supposed to bring a flower, you will find extra flowers on the table over there, and you can come up, pick a flower you like, and place it in the central vase.

Because we value our children highly — for our children represent new beginnings and new possibilities — I am going to let the children be the first ones to place their flowers in the vase here. I invite the children to come forward now, and you may bring an adult along if you wish….

[Children come forward]

And now I invite everyone to come forward and place a flower in the vase here.

[All come forward]

This short blessing was written by Norbert Capek:

Infinite Spirit of Life, we ask your blessing on these, your messengers of fellowship and love. May they remind us, amid diversities of knowledge and of gifts, to be one in desire and affection, and in devotion to your will. May they also remind us of the value of comradeship, of doing and sharing alike. May we cherish friendship as one of your most precious gifts. May we not let awareness of another’s talents discourage us, or sully our relationship, but may we realize that, whatever we can do, great or small, the efforts of all of us are needed to do your work in this world.

[All come forward during this.]

Now that we have gathered all the flowers together, I will read a short prayer written by Norbert Capek:

In the name of Providence, which implants in the seed the future of the tree and in the hearts of men [and women] the longing for people living in [human] love; in the name of the highest, in whom we move and who makes the mother [and father], the brother and sister what they are; in the name of sages and great religious leaders, who sacrificed their lives to hasten the coming of [peace and justice];– let us renew our resolution sincerely to be real brothers and sisters regardless of any kind of bar which estranges [one from another]. In this holy resolution may we be strengthened, knowing that we are [one] family, that one spirit, the spirit of love, unites us, [that we] endeavor for a more perfect and more joyful life. Amen.

Readings

The first reading is from a short biography of Norbert Capek, written by Richard Henry for the Unitarian Universalist Historical Society.

“On the 28th of March, 1941, [Norbert] Capek and his daughter, Zora, aged 29, were arrested by the Gestapo and taken to Pankrac Prison. Zora was accused of listening to foreign broadcasts and distributing the content of some BBC transmissions; Capek himself of listening to foreign broadcasts and of “high treason.” Several of his sermons were cited as “evidence” of the latter charge. Listening to foreign broadcasts was a capital offense under the Protectorate. Two separate trials were held, the first at Pankrac Prison soon after their arrest; the second, an appeal of the original decision, at Dresden in April 1942. The appeals court found Capek innocent of the treason charge, recommending that, given his age, the year between his arrest and the appeals trial be counted toward his jail time. The Gestapo, ignoring the court’s recommendation, nonetheless sent Capek to Dachau, Zora to forced labor in Germany. Capek’s name appears among prisoners sent on an invalid transport on October 12, 1942 to Hartheim Castle, near Linz, Austria, where he died of poison gas.”

Not long before he was put to death by the Nazis, Dr. Capek wrote this prayer:

It is worthwhile to live and fight courageously for sacred ideals.
Oh blow ye evil winds into my body’s fire; my soul you’ll never unravel.
Even though disappointed a thousand times or fallen in the fight and everything would worthless seem,
I have lived amidst eternity.
Be grateful, my soul,
My life was worth living.
He who was pressed from all sides but remained victorious in spirit is welcomed into the choir of heroes.
He who overcame the fetters giving wing to the mind is entering into the golden age of the victorious.

HOMILY — “Maja Capek, Flowers, and Totalitarianism”

You all probably know that our congregation dates back to 1708. It started out as one of the established Puritan congregations of the Massachusetts theocracy, but eventually the congregation gradually moved towards a more liberal Unitarian theology. So it is we often think of our congregational history as a single long chain of existence from those early beginnings nearly three hundred years ago; and so it is that we post bronze plaques at the front and the rear of this room listing all the ministers who have served this congregation.

Of course, life is rarely that simple; and the history of our congregation is more complex than the list of ministers would have it seem. For in fact, our congregation today is the carrier of the institutional existences of two other New Bedford area congregations: First Universalist Church, which had its start in the 1820’s, became a part of our church in 1930; and North Unitarian Church, founded by First Unitarian as a settlement house in the North End in 1894, affiliated with the American Unitarian Association as separate congregation in 1941, but when their building burned down in 1974, they essentially merged back into First Unitarian. Therefore, our single list of ministers should really be three lists of ministers: the ministers of First Unitarian, the ministers of First Universalist, and the ministers of North Unitarian.

I wish we had those other two lists of ministers posted on bronze plaques here in this room, because if we did I could point to the name of the minister whom I consider to be the most remarkable minister who ever served one of the three root congregations of our present congregation. That minister’s name is Maja Capek, who was minister of North Unitarian Church for the first three years of its existence as a congregation.

Maja Oktavek was born in Bohemia on April 8, 1888. She came to the United States in 1907 when she was 19 years old, obtained a degree in library science from Columbia University, and went to work for the New York Public Library. There in the library she met Norbert Capek, a liberal minister affiliated with the Union of Baptist Churches of Moravia and Slovakia. (In 1910, he had tried to get the American Unitarian Association to support his efforts to promote liberal religion, but to no avail.) Capek had escaped the Austro-Hungarian Empire because of his writings which promoted Czech nationalism, and were critical of the state-supported Roman Catholic church. Norbert and Maja were married on June 23, 1917.

Norbert tried to continue working as a Baptist minister in this country, but he and Maja were becoming increasingly liberal in their religious views. Then in 1920, they decided to send their children to the Sunday school of the First Unitarian Church of Essex County, New Jersey. The children loved it so much, Maja and Norbert attended the church; and Norbert and Maja liked it so much they became members of the congregation in 1921.

By this time, the Capeks had decided to return to their homeland. After the end of the first world war, Czechoslovakia had achieved independence, and once the Roman Catholic church was no longer supported by the state, many people left Catholicism, searching for a new and more liberal alternative. Maja and Norbert Capek founded the Prague Congregation of Liberal Religious Fellowship; I say that Maja and Norbert founded the congregation together, even though the standard histories give all the credit to Norbert; because we all know perfectly well that in those days, the wives of male ministers did as much work as their husbands while receiving none of the credit. And the Prague congregation, and Norbert, recognized Maja’s contributions, for Maja was ordained in 1926.

The Prague congregation searched for alternatives to the Roman Catholic worship that had dominated them before national independence. It was in response to that search that Norbert — probably with help from Maja — developed the Flower Celebration. The very first Flower Celebration was celebrated on June 23, 1923. The celebration was seen in part as a replacement of the Roman Catholic communion service:– stripped of all the weighty Catholic theological baggage, stripped of the Biblical references to bread and wine, the Flower Celebration became instead a way to celebrate the essential connection of all persons to one another.

During the next decade and a half, the Prague Unitarian congregation became the largest Unitarian congregation in the world, with over 3,200 members. That is more than twice as large as today’s largest Unitarian Universalist congregation. I believe liberal religion in Czechoslovakia in those years between the two world wars represented a new sense of freedom for Czechs; it represented the end of domination by the outside forces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, by the Roman Catholic church. But soon a new spectre of domination would rise over Europe.

In 1939, Maja Capek came to the United States to raise money to assist refugees trying to escape Nazi Germany. Not long after she left, the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, ending that small nation’s brief history as an independent country. It was not safe for her to return to occupied Czechoslovakia, and in 1940 she wound up settling in the North End of New Bedford, where she found a vibrant community of people from central and eastern Europe. Of course she immediately became involved in the Unity Chapel affiliated with First Unitarian’s settlement house, and soon she had arranged for North Unitarian Church to have separate institutional existence; and she became the first minister of North Unitarian Church.

But Norbert and their youngest daughter Zora remained trapped in Nazi Germany. Norbert and Zora were arrested on March 28, 1941; and Norbert was executed by the Nazis in the Dachau concentration camp on October 12, 1942.

I cannot help but think that the Capeks’ Unitarianism represented a threat to the tyranny and totalitarianism of Nazi Germany. Any religion that preaches the essential connection of all human beings must be a threat to tyrants; for tyrants maintain their power by driving people apart. Any minister who preaches that one spirit of love unites us all must also be a threat to tyrants; for tyrants push hatred on us, and love is always a threat to manipulative hatred.

I cannot help but believe that even today the Flower Celebration developed by the Capeks remains a threat to totalitarianism. When we celebrate flowers, we celebrate a spirit of beauty that feeds our souls, a spirit of beauty that encourages us to be better human beings, a spirit of beauty that encourages us towards new life. But the would-be tyrants try to seduce us with a lesser beauty:– an empty beauty that cuts us off from other people, a selfish beauty that tries to get us to consume selfishly, a hateful beauty that divides us along the lines of race and gender and class.

In this spirit we celebrate our own Flower Celebration this morning. We celebrate the true beauty of the world, as symbolized by flowers. We celebrate a beauty that seems fragile; but it is a beauty which is vibrantly alive, and like the grass that grows through concrete, it is a beauty that can quietly resist tyranny. We celebrate beauty, and we celebrate the freedom inherent in liberal religion: not just a freedom of mind, but the freedom of our hearts, the freedom of our spirits, the freedom of our bodies; we celebrate freedom from want, freedom from fear, freedom from violence.

The symbolism of this Flower Celebration is simple: we commit ourselves to spreading beauty in the world; a wild, free, raging beauty that will brook no tyranny, that will not allow domination of body or spirit or mind. May it be so.

Music service

On May 7, instead of a sermon, our music director, Randy Fayan, played an extended piece on the organ — J. S. Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor (BWV 582). Unfortunately, we are not able to present a recording of this worship service. However, here is Rev. Dan Harper’s introduction to the music:

Today, instead of hearing a sermon, Randy Fayan, our music director, will play an extended piece of music. I shouldn’t say he will play the music instead of a sermon: it will be the sermon. And instead of a reading this morning, I’d like to say a few words about music in churches.

As I was talking with Randy about this worship service, I asked him what his thoughts w ere about music in churches. Randy pointed out that In Unitarian Universalist churches, people brings many of their own ideas to church; as a non-creedal religion, we Unitarian Universalists have a great openness to a variety of religious ideas. And nowhere is that more obvious than when music — because when you’re listening to music, you have to bring yourself into contact with the music; you have t o bring your own ideas, your spirit, to the music; for only then can it make sense.

Randy put it this way: “The more you invest in listening to the music, the more you get out of it.”

At this point, I said to Randy that this sounds a lot like religion. Not only that, I said that more and more these days I believe that both listening to music and doing religion are more meaningful when they are done in community.

To which Randy responded that he listens to recorded music less these days; there’s something about listening to live music, with all its imperfections, that is superior to even the best recorded music. I believe t he same is true of religion: you need to be there in the room with other people.

This helps explain why we come to church to listen to Randy’s music. We could just as easily stay home and listen to a CD of the exact same music: but something would be missing. We could even drive to Boston or Providence or New York and hear some famous performer play the same piece of music: but while this would be better, it would still be different. Part of the difference is that when you listen to music in a church, you are listening to music in the way it’s really meant to be played: for listening to and playing music is always a sacred act. And music is meant to be heard, not in some big anonymous group, but in a crowd with people you know and care for.

Here in a worship setting is where music is meant to be heard. Here, you can invest yourself into the music, let it move you, knowing that you are surrounded by people who care. Here you don’t have to applaud — in fact Randy has asked that you completely refrain from applause until after the postlude is over — you don’t have to applaud, because in a community like this, everyone knows that we appreciate Randy’s music, and we don’t have to show him that by applauding — and that way, too, we’ll hear the music as it is meant to be heard: as a prelude to meditation, as an accompaniment to your own soul-work. So during the sermon, when Randy is playing, you can sit and let the music move you and take your spirit places you may not have known existed.

Transcendental Ecology

This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Sermon copyright (c) 2006 Daniel Harper.

Readings

The first reading this morning is from the book Walden, by Henry David Thoreau, from the chapter titled, “Sounds”:

“What is a course of history or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer? Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity.

“I did not read books the first summer [I lived at Walden Pond]; I hoed beans. Nay, I often did better than this. There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands. I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sing around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveller’s wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time…. The day advanced as if to light some work of mine; it was morning, and lo, now it is evening, and nothing memorable is accomplished. Instead of singing like the birds, I silently smiled at my incessant good fortune.

The second reading is from the Hebrew prophets, the book of Isaiah, chapter 24, verses 5 and 6:

The earth lies polluted
under its inhabitants;
for they have transgressed laws,
violated the statutes,
broken the everlasting covenant.

Therefore a curse devours the earth,
and its inhabitants suffer for their guilt….

SERMON — “Transcendental Ecology”

In case you haven’t noticed, the historically liberal churches have been shoved off to the margins in the United States. Historically liberal churches such as the Episcopalians, the Congregationalists, the Methodists, the northern Baptists, the Disciples of Christ, the Presbyterians, the Quakers, and yes the Unitarian Universalists, have been losing members and influence for some forty years now. We used to be at the center of things. Forty years ago, during the Civil Rights movement, when Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., called on church leaders to come stand beside him, we in the historically liberal churches went and stood. Some religious liberals even died for Civil Rights, including two Unitarian Unviersalists: Rev. James Reeb, and Viola Luizzo. At that time, we engaged with the outer world, and our opinions actually mattered.

Since that time, Unitarian Universalists and all the other historically liberal churches have been steadily losing membership and influence. (We Unitarian Universalists have actually been gaining members in the past twenty years, at about one percent a year; which however is not enough to keep up with population growth but at least we’re not shrinking like all the other liberal churches.) I sometimes feel that we religious liberals have spent the last forty years in a kind of a daze; we have spent the last forty years gazing at our navels. Sure, individual religious liberals work harder than ever to make this a better world — but as a group, as a liberal religious church, we are far from the centers of power and influence.

Of course, you know who is at the centers of power and influence. While we religious liberals have been gazing at our navels, the Religious Right, a loose coalition of many of the fundamentalist churches, some of the evangelical churches, televangelists, billionaires, and other conservative Christians, has gained in power and influence. The Religious Right has enormous influence in Congress and in the White House. The Religious Right is extremely well-funded. The Religious Right has charismatic preachers, some of whom have built churches of upwards of thirty thousand members. We are shrinking and increasingly irrelevant; they get to elect presidents.

I think it’s time for us to change. For the past forty years, we religious liberals have been coming to our beautiful church buildings, politely sad because global warming and massive species extinctions are destroying living beings that we consider sacred. Perhaps we even gently wring our hands, and we say we don’t quite know what to do. We know that environmental destruction is a religious issue. We know that one of the roots of the ecological disaster we face today is the simple religious fact that Western religion has mis-interpreted that passage in the Bible, the one where God gives us dominion over all other living beings, to mean that we can rape the earth and destroy at will. We know, too, that the Religious Right is happy for their God to have dominion over the United States, and for men to have dominion over women, and for men in the United States to have dominion over all over living beings — and when they say dominion, they don’t mean it in a nice, polite way, they mean domination. We religious liberals know all that, and when we leave our beautiful churches after coffee hour, we seem to forget all this until we next come to church, maybe four weeks from now. We conveniently forget that the ecological disaster we are now facing has deep religious roots.

I think it’s time for us to change. We no longer have the luxury of sitting quietly in our beautiful liberal churches. We no longer have the luxury of chatting politely with our friends at coffee hour about everything except the religious roots of the ecological crisis (to say nothing of the religious roots of gay-bashing, the religious roots of the widening gap between rich and poor, and so on). We no longer have the luxury of being able to separate our polite religion from the rough-and-tumble of real-world events; we no longer have the luxury of hiding our religious faith from the world.

That being the case, I’m going to try to set an example here this morning. I’m going to speak here publicly about my deeply-held religious faith, a religious faith that drives me to try, against all hope, to save what’s left of the natural world from further destruction. Maybe what I say seems a little raw; maybe I’m making one or two people feel uncomfortable. We have gotten out of the habit of speaking of our deeply-held religious beliefs here in our liberal churches; we have, in fact, gotten out of the habit of being religious. But that’s what ministers are for: to set the best example we know how to set, and to call people to be religious.

So let’s talk religion.

I’m a Transcendentalist. When I was about sixteen, I had a transcendental experience. I was sitting outdoors at the base of Punkatasset Hill in my home town of Concord, Massachusetts, with my back against a white birch tree. There was this alley of white birches that someone had planted along an old farm road, and the fields on either side were still, at that time, mowed for hay twice a year. So I was just sitting there on a beautiful late spring day, and I was suddenly overwhelmed by a sense of the oneness of everything. I mean, this was an overwhelming experience, I really don’t have the words to describe it. Since then, I’ve had numerous other transcendent experiences, some more powerful than others.

What do these transcendental experiences mean? Well, I suppose I’m still trying to make sense out of those experiences. When I was about twenty, I found William James’s book Varieties of Religious Experience, in which he describes the various mystical experiences that people have. James said that perhaps a quarter of the population have mystical experiences of one sort or another, and in his descriptions of the various kinds of mystical experiences I could see the outlines of my own mystical experiences. But James’s book didn’t tell me about the meaning of my mystical experiences.

I found something of the meaning of my transcendental experiences in a book by my fellow townsman, Henry Thoreau. I had always disliked Thoreau when I was a child; when you grow up in Concord, and go to the Concord public schools, you get force-fed Thoreau and Emerson, and Alcott and Hawthorne for that matter. I don’t take well to force-feeding and so dismissed Thoreau. But at last I found that Thoreau’s book Walden probably described what I had been experiencing better than anything else, especially when he writes:

“I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, …until by the sun falling in at my west window… I was reminded of the lapse of time.”

I discovered that I, too, love a broad margin to my life. That broad margin is a margin to my life in which I have the time and the space to be able to be rapt in a revery, to reflect on the ultimate meaning of the universe. It is also a margin to my life where I can reflect on the difference between real religion, and religion as it is imperfectly practiced in the world around me.

When I have been able to sit “rapt in a revery,” I have come to the inescapable conclusion that there is a unity which binds all human beings together, which binds all living beings together — which, indeed, binds us human beings to the non-living world as well, to the sun and the moon and the stars above and the rocks under our feet.

I can put this into scientific terms if you’d like: all parts of the ecosystem are interconnected, these interconnections can be modeled in terms of systems theory using feedback loops and non-linear relationships; and to harm one part of an ecosystem will have wide repercussions throughout the ecosystem. I find I am quite comfortable with scientific language. I can also put this into the language of Christianity if you’d like: God’s creation consists of earth, moon, sun, and stars; of the ocean and all the creatures that live there; of the birds of the air; of the plants that grow and the animals that live on the earth; of human beings. And to harm one part of God’s creation is to do violence to God. I find I am reasonably comfortable with Christian language. Or if you like, I can also put this into the one of the dialects of neo-paganism, which might sound something like this: the Goddess who is Gaia, earth mother, mother of all that lives; the Goddess who is the Moon Goddess who sets the rhythms of the seasons; it is she whom we love and must respect, and to harm the ecosystem is to harm the Mother Goddess. I find I am reasonably comfortable with neo-Pagan language, too!

Right now, the specific language is less important than the fundamental underlying insight. In fact, we could even put this in words that the Religious Right might recognize:

The earth lies polluted
under its inhabitants;
for they have transgressed laws,
violated the statutes,
broken the everlasting covenant.

Yes, we have broken our covenant, our promises, to the earth.

I am told by some religious liberals that in speaking this way, I’m not being decorous, I’m not being polite. My religious faith sets me on fire; I know that my faith can transform the world; I know that my faith can change the religious attitudes that lead to dominion theology and global ecological catastrophe; but I am told by some Unitarian Universalists that I am not polite, because I’m trying to change this nice comfortable little religion we’ve had for the past forty years.

Maybe that’s the problem: mine is not a comfortable faith. I have not been made comfortable by having transcendental experiences that cause me to sit rapt in a revery on a summer morning; I have not been made comfortable by the religious realization that my contribution to global warming and habitat destruction is morally wrong; I have not been made comfortable in the knowledge that our churches must grow quickly or sink into complete and total irrelevancy as the Religious Right gains more and more influence in the United States; I am not comfortable knowing that it is up to me and other religious liberals to combat the misguided religion of domination that is the Religious Right.

I suspect that I’m probably passing along some of my discomfort to you. I keep challenging you, I know; I am not the warm, cuddly pastor that I would kind of like to be. I would love to be able to stand up here week after week, and be able to preach warm, comforting sermons. I would love to be able to sit with you each week and pass on comfortable religious thoughts as you live out your life. It would be so much easier if we could just keep on with our small, comfortable little church; for after all, growth just means more work for us. I wish I could be a warm comfortable cuddly pastor, in a nice relaxed sleepy little church; but I don’t think either you or I have that luxury.

My friends, the world is changing around us. Very rapidly. Ten years ago, I would have laughed at the idea that these United States could turn into a theocracy run by a Religious Right who distorts Jesus of Nazareth’s message of love into a message of hate and intolerance, who use the Bible to justify ecological disaster. Ten years ago I would have laughed at this idea; now I believe such a theocracy is a remote but all-too-real possibility. It will be a theocracy based on a religion of domination: men dominating women, the rich dominating the poor, straight people dominating gays and lesbians, and above all humanity dominating and destroying the rest of the natural world. Because, they will say, it is God’s will.

If such a theocracy comes, we in the liberal churches will have no one to blame but ourselves. We have let our religion become optional, sort of like joining a country club, or supporting National Public Radio. We have let the Religious Right steal the moral and ethical teachings of Jesus and the other Jewish prophets away from us. We have let the political liberals to completely separate environmentalism from religion. We have let our churches dwindle in size, even though we are told that our churches get more newcomers and visitors, relative to our size, than the churches of the Religious Right. And we have been coming to church when we feel like it, staying comfortable, looking always inward.

My friends, I know that many of you are facing serious personal challenges. There are people in this congregation who have are facing so much that they don’t have any energy left over for anything except staying alive. But that, too, is a very different thing from having a country-club church; when life is that overwhelming, you are not in a position to have a safe comfortable religion; life is not letting you have safety and comfort. If we could start remembering that the world is not a comfortable place for most people, maybe we could offer each other a lot more comfort.

I’d like to invite you to join me in remaking liberal religion; in remaking this liberal church. I invite you to be on fire with your liberal religious faith. I invite you to feel your religion so deeply that when life overwhelms you, your religion becomes a source of strength. I invite you let your religious convictions of love, compassion, and justice draw you into passion and commitment to heal the world. I invite you to be moved by your deeply-held religious belief that all living beings are sacred, that the whole ecosystem is sacred.

If we did that, this church, First Unitarian in New Bedford, would once again become a force to be reckoned with. As it stands now, a few people are impressed with our beautiful building, and maybe with our past exploits; but aside from that, our little congregation of less than a hundred people is safely ignored. But if we choose to do so, we could change the world. We could do it, if you choose to….