Our Third Principle is the only one that sounds like two. Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations. Two promises, stitched together by the smallest word in the sentence. And. I have come to believe that little word is doing the heaviest lifting in our whole tradition.
Because acceptance without growth is not love. It is a shrug. It says, you are fine as you are, now please stay put where I can predict you. And growth without acceptance is not love either. It is pressure wearing a kind face. It says, I will embrace you fully, just as soon as you become someone else. Every one of us has been on the receiving end of both counterfeits. The shrug that felt like abandonment. The improvement plan that felt like rejection. Neither one ever grew a soul.
Our faith makes the harder promise, the double one. You are received here exactly as you arrive, and you will not be left there. The soil holds the root without conditions. The sun keeps calling the green thing higher. A garden needs both, and so does a congregation. So does a marriage. So does a friendship. So does the conversation you keep meaning to have with yourself.
Notice, too, where the principle says this work happens. In our congregations. Spiritual growth, in our tradition, is a team sport. We do not hand you a creed and check your recitation. We hand you a community, people rooted in different soils, reaching toward different patches of light, and we trust that the reaching itself, done side by side, is the curriculum. The humanist sharpens the mystic. The doubter deepens the believer. The newcomer’s question wakes up the elder’s certainty. Nobody grows alone here, because nobody can.
Andie Arthur will be preaching, with Jenna Way leading worship beside her. And I want to tell you plainly why I leave town with a full heart. This is the Third Principle in action. A congregation only lives when its people step into leadership, bring their own questions to the pulpit, and add their voices to the marketplace of ideas that is UU Miami. We are not a faith of one voice and many listeners. We are a chorus that keeps making room for another part. When lay leaders rise, the congregation is doing exactly what the principle promises: encouraging one another’s growth and trusting what grows. Andie has been asking better questions than mine for years. Go hear hers.
So this Sunday, while I am away, do the double work without me. Accept somebody exactly as they arrive. Then encourage them one honest inch. And let Andie and Jenna do for you what this congregation has always done for me. Hold the ground steady, and point toward the light.
Peace,
Rev. Dr. Harold Marrero