While service and activism, particularly among students and young adults is surging (see the student-led climate strikes), the problems and challenges of the world can seem so daunting as to paralyze others. In this sermon, I explore how simple, ordinary forms of service are do-able and, when considered in combination with others, are immensely powerful. I also explore the role of small, democratic faith communities, like churches, mosques, and synagogues as places where the virtues of democracy can flourish (as subversive agents amid tyranny) and people can learn that if “each one does one thing” we can effect real change. Small communities can be incubators of larger society transformations. The sermon is based on Paul’s Letter to the Romans 12.3-13 and the Acts of the Apostles 2.43-47. Find the audio recording here.

Today is the third and final sermon in a series we do each fall called “The Three Practices.” Each fall, as the year comes to a close and we look toward the year to come, we renew our commitment to the three basic spiritual practices:

Self-care—remembering that if we tend our wellbeing, chances are we’ll be better able tend the wellbeing of others and the world.

Sabbath—remembering that we want to practice resistance to the greed, drivenness, and disorder that messes with our lives and screws up the world; instead, we want to abide in the nature of God and participate consciously in the rhythms of nature that foster goodness, beauty, and justice; and

Service—remembering that we all thrive when each of us finds at least one way to give back to the community that sustains us.

That’s our focus today: what it means to practice service, what I’ll call “the quieter activism,” in ways that help all of us thrive because each of us does at least one thing that gives back to the community that sustains us.

In the Christian tradition, service is guided by at least two assumptions:

One assumption comes to us in the writing of Saint Paul in the Letter to the Romans. Paul wanted the first Christian communities to think of themselves as if they were a human body.

“Each of our bodies,” he wrote, ‘has many members, but not all the members have the same function.” Each part of the body has a gift to share with the rest of the body, and no part of the body, no matter how small, is insignificant. All are necessary. So also in human communities—whether families, schools, businesses, villages, cities, churches, synagogues, mosques, or temples.

Every member works together with every other member so that the whole body thrives. When each member exercises its gift for the whole, it is valued, it belongs, it is no longer isolated and therefore no longer powerless. It contributes to the greater good.

When this happens in a human community—a family, a church, a democracy—something like what we heard from today’s story from the Acts of the Apostles can happen. “All were together and shared everything; if anyone had a need, the congregation found a way to meet it. So everyone around them took notice of this revolutionary community and many were drawn into their way of life—for their way of life was contributing to the common good; it was sustained by the ultimate renewable resource—love.” (My paraphrase of the passage from the Acts of the Apostles)

This is the second assumption about the Christian practice of service—service flows from love.

Today, we welcome twelve people into the membership of the church.

Twelve people have found themselves drawn into the way of life we share, a way of life that brings meaning, a sense of belonging, safety, value, and a sense of agency—the sense that, in this body, they matter and can do more together than alone.

Emily Henderson is one of them. she grew up here at Davis Community Church. She came back to Davis after college and has orbited DCC for a number of years. She’s already given her gifts of creativity, advocacy, and courage in so many ways—this year by going to the border several times to advocate for immigrants, and recently helping with our 150th year anniversary celebration. Now she’s joining. When I asked her why she said, “Because joining a community of faith is a political act. There are clearly forces in the world clamoring to divide us. To come together, to commit to love across and amid differences, to dare to hope and work for something better, this is so important, so powerful. I need the collective power of this find of faith community.”

Cory Osburn is another. He’s married to Laura. They’re from Texas; here because Cory’s doing a PhD in linguistics at the university. They’re anchors in our growing young adult community; they host a Bible study in their home; they’ve helped organize the Contra for a Cause dance for three years running now as a fundraiser supporting work among area refugees and immigrants. They only have a couple more years in Davis, but have chosen to join. Last week, when the whole group met with our elders, I asked Cory “why he was joining the community.” Cory smiled his big Texan grin and said, “We’ve been invited so many times to join, but we figured that since I’ll finish my PhD in the next couple years, it just didn’t seem to make sense. But then we realized that joining this community is a way we can say, ‘We love you too.”

Loved into this community, he says that joining is a response to what they’ve received—a way to say, “We love you too.”

When we are loved, we can’t help but love too. Love, and the truth that we are all valued, all needed—together, as a body, so much more than we can ever be alone, as individuals— is the heart of the Christian practice of service.

When each of us, for whom this church is a sustaining community, finds one thing we can give toward the common good, we create a larger legacy than any of us can do alone. As Emily says, we experience something revolutionary and needed today—we practice “the collective power of a spiritual community.”

“All were together and shared everything,” our Bible reading says to us today. And "if anyone had a need, they found a way to meet it.” Loved by others, opened to the divine love that’s always flowing in and around us, they “loved too”—they gave back so that all could thrive. “And,” the Bible says, “everyone around them took notice of this revolutionary community and many were drawn into their way of life—for their way of life together was changing lives.”

Each one did one thing—something they could contribute to the common good. Their lives became a legacy of love, and from that spiritual endowment, we have all received an inheritance.

What if each one of us does just one thing for the common good, if each of us “loves too?” What kind of legacy could we create here and now that makes a real difference in our lives? What kind of spiritual endowment of goodness, and justice, and beauty might we create that could sustain the spiritual revolution the world so desperately needs?

If each one of us finds one thing we can do to give back to this community, we would all have more hope, a more enduring sense of belonging, value, safety, and empowerment to affect the transformation of our lives, our society, our planet.

Each one do one thing—

Rock babies in the nursery
Water plants
Feed the hungry on Fridays
Trim a tree
Sell fair trade, justice-oriented, Cafe Justo coffee
Buy fair trade, justice-oriented, Cafe Justo coffee
Hook up the oven in the new youth kitchen upstairs
Offer a class on something you’re good at
Provide a scholarship for a student to attend Advocacy Days in Washington, DC
Build an access ramp for a person who’s had hip surgery
Run an errand for someone who’s homebound
Serve a meal at our overnight shelter
Cook something to share at the overnight shelter
Sing in the choir, the worship band, or ring with the bell choir
Help with childcare or teach Sunday School
Volunteer with our youth group
Give your expertise with organizing to help us create structures for people to get involved
Pick up trash or sweep the steps on Sunday before worship
Hand out bulletins
Serve communion
Join a study group, ministry team, prayer or meditation group
Greet new people and make sure they feel welcome

If you don’t know what you can give but want to say, “I love you too,” explore your interest with me or any of our leaders or other volunteers [have elders, ministry chairs, staff, or anyone who volunteers in any way to stand]

Give your time.
Give your talent.
Give your money.
A dollar. Ten dollars. A hundred. A thousand. Ten thousand dollars.

Do something that’ll last far into the future: tell us you’ll put DCC in your will; bestow a legacy gift from your estate that’ll help sustain our mission and ministry for years to come.

Each one do one thing.

It doesn’t matter how small or how big.

Alone we have such little power. But together we can do far more than we can do alone. Together we belong to something bigger than when we’re isolated. We feel safer. We feel valued. And we create a legacy of love, a spiritual endowment that has collective power to do good.

Giving something of yourself to this dynamic community is revolutionary. “When we come together,” says Emily Henderson, “when we love across divides and despite our differences, when we dare to hope and work for something better, when we participate in the collective power of spiritual community,” things change.

When we give, when we participate, when we each do one thing, we say, as Cory Osburn says, “I love you too.” And love grows. And when love grows the world is changed . . . for the better.

And that’s a legacy worth giving toward, a legacy worth living for.