Speakers: Mr. A. Drake BaerMs. Abi Harper
Ms. Jennifer Channin
Ms. Sarah Foster
Mr. Brian Schor
Order of Worship
- Prelude
- Lighting of the Chalice: Abi Harper
- Opening Words: Jennifer Channin
- Homily - "Qualities of Silence": Sarah Foster
- Meditation, from "...Notes of a Broken Person" by Douglas Copeland: Drake Baer
- Sermon, "Without Hope on the Bridge of Our Differences": Drake Baer
- Closing Words, from "Four Quartets" by T.S. Eliot: Brian Schor
Morning worship on Monday was led by Abi Harper, Jennifer Channin, Sarah Foster, and Brian Shor. All are current or former members of the youth group of the Unitarian-Universalist Church of Princeton. Drake Baer, a youth advisor to local, district-level, and continential Young Religious Unitarian Universalists delivered the sermon.
"To honor those of us who don't have titles and maybe never will, to encourage us to burn as bright as we are brave enough to burn, I light this chalice with the words of Tony Morrison: 'Paradise exists in the agitated spaces between the definitions'."
In her opening words, Jennifer Channin reminded us that aside from spoken language, we all speak a language of the soul. That language may be illogical to the ear but it is important in that it makes us unique. When trying to make sense of it all, she happened upon the thought that perhaps much of our struggle comes from the youth of the universe, a univers perhaps so young, that it will be be wonderful when we learn to breath.
Sarah Foster shared the beauty that she sometimes calls God, in the beauty of 
environment around her. She noted how quickly that connection can easily be shattered by the difficulty of a failed communication; A "Hello" that didn't communicate can easily push her in to an aloneness that requires an act of faith to overcome. Silences can be full and exquisate, as on a cold night during an intimate swim. She concluded, "I am silent in the faith that I might see you and in that silence we might know each other.
Meditation
I'd like the adults who are here this morning to take a deep breath, close your eyes, 
and reestablish contact with your adolescence. Pick a particularly meaningful age from your 14th to your 18th year: Who were you? Remember how you looked in the mirror and how you felt about your body. Remember how your house felt to you. Remember your feelings toward your parents. Focus on your two closest fiends. How did you feel about them, and how sure were you that they liked you? Did you like yourself? Remember an embarrassing moment. Remember a moment of triumph. If you thought about it, what was god like for you?
Sermon
The full text of this sermon is available.
Baer's sermon was a description of the transformative power of miracle. 
He began with his own experience as a 15-year-old searching for answers to questions that felt more difficult than he could bear. Born-again Christians offered that kind of miracle, in the form of salvation. "The next year and a half of my life was magical," he recalled. But there were aspects of the born-again Christian faith that grated against his nature, most particularly the demonization of the word "Why." Painfully, he realized that he had to separate himself from the community that had loved him as he needed to be loved, and follow his own conscience.
Life led Baer to being the advisor to his local YRUU group, and led there as well a youth in need of a miracle of that same kind. Many late night phone conversations with the youth were punctuated by the youth's comment: "You're ugly." Despite misgivings as to whether this youth could participate constructively to a youth con, Baer accompanied him to one. As was his typical way, the youth engaged in a fair amount of constructive destruction at the conference, but by the end, in the final sharing he shared his realization that that no one was ugly, "by which of course he meant he learned he wasn't ugly." At that con, "our liberal religious institution, so comfortable with the gods of ambuguity, gave him that miracle."
Miracles, Baer reminded us, are not the common currency of the religious left; miracles require courage and "tolerance of risk on the part of everone they touch...but they remind everyone in the community of what is best about the principles and faith behind the community."
YRUU offers our youth this kind of transforming love and community. And many of our youth find that love and community missing as they test out the environment of the adult church. Some of that is, no doubt, a function of the period of life in which adolescents find themselves. But as a result, many of them leave our churches.
Despite our rhetoric, Baer commented, we really don't support our youth all that 
deeply. We reward adult ministry, and to a lesser extent, ministry to children in the form of MRE's and DRE's, but with rare exceptions, we don't reward youth ministry at all. Youth are marginalized in our congregations as well as in our society at large. "Even here in the land of Political Correctness, ... we routinely use words like 'responsible adult' to underscore our distrust of a culture, youth culture, with orientations that can seem alienating and threatening to us grownups, who, for better or worse, define the terms of power in our churches."
He concluded, "The next time you find yourself reluctant to engage one of our possibly wild-haired and body-pierced youth in conversation or to accept her or him as a full member of our church community, I would gently challenge you with one of God's most sacred words. A word which birthed our Unitarian and Universalist
traditions and which often finds its least compromised, most miraculous, and, yes, most crazy-making expression in adolescence. I offer you this morning the word, 'Why.'"
Brian concluded the service with a reading from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets.
