I love this tradition of ours for a couple of reasons. I love that it invites us to get up and move our bodies together, to share in a ritual as one body made of many parts. I also love it as a celebration of who we are, and all the gifts we have to share with one another. It’s a celebration full of powerful symbols, symbols that remind us of the beauty around us, our many interconnections, and our rich diversity.

The first time I celebrated Flower Communion as a new UU, my congregation celebrated with cut flowers. They could be something from your garden, or the iris-patch in front of the church, or perhaps something from the side of the road or sidewalk that you saw on your way. We built a bouquet with all of these offerings, and we each took a flower home to remind us of the beauty of our community. But years later I realized, I find the symbol of a cut flower a little empty.

A few years ago, a minister of mine shared a different way of doing Flower Communion. Instead of using cut flowers, they asked us to each bring a seedling - something that we will continue nurturing after our service was over. A cut flower is beautiful, but its beauty is short-lived. Unless it is a flower that dries particularly well, it will grow limp and withered. Then we will dispose of it, after it no longer flourishes and its beauty is gone.

But a seedling has promise. With attention, sunlight, water, and love, it will continue growing with the possibility of flowering and fruiting, one day producing seedlings of its own. It is the possibility of life which nurtures more life. It carries the promise of feeding creatures big and small, of building alliances with the plants and animals around it, and the fungi among its roots. It becomes part of an ecosystem, in tender relation with the world around it.

That is the kind of community we are building here. We don’t put in all the effort to care for this community just to pluck its most striking parts, and then let them wither away in isolation. Our faith’s values call us to grow something more resilient. It reminds us that we are all in this garden together, and we have the opportunity and responsibility to help one another flourish. It calls us to nurture one another’s growth, and to recognize that we each need different things in order to grow. And when we can meet everyone’s needs, our garden will be all the more abundant. This community discerned its own part of our faith’s call to these values when you adopted a new mission statement last fall: to be a sanctuary for spiritual growth, community, and connections, building the world we dream about together. This mission describes the kind of garden we’re planting.

Our world has never been static and unchanging. As individuals and communities, we change with its ebbs and flows. We can’t always choose how our lives shift around us, but we can choose how to respond, and how to cultivate the transformation we wish to experience. We choose growth when we embrace change purposefully, looking for the emerging edges that it brings. This spiritual community is the place where we sustain that growth, learning and sharing new practices and perspectives that deepen our roots. As a community, we cultivate one another’s faith through stories and sermons, classes and small groups. We learn and grow together as we put our values into action within these walls and beyond. The whole church, everything we do here, is the curriculum through which we form our faith.

Learning and growing together, our capacity to live out our faith as individuals is not the only thing we deepen. We deepen our connections with one another, and the communities which are parts of this greater community. Reinforcing these connections and building richer community are acts of deep caring for one another. We share the joys of our lives and the sorrows, too, in small groups, requests for pastoral care, during coffee hours and potlucks. We build communities where we can get to know each other more intimately, sharing the joy of a mutual hobby or spiritual practice. These acts of community-building stem the loneliness we feel in life, and ward off despair. They strengthen our ability to care more deeply for one another, for ourselves, and for the world around us.

All these efforts make our garden more resilient. Growth, community, and connection give us the strength and the vision to bring the world we imagine to be possible into reality. These acts inspire us with the resolve to take further action when the world sets us back. In pastoral care, ethical discernment, and justice work, there is a framing practice I keep encountering. Practicing our endeavors in a cycle of action, reflection, and action allows us to be more sustainable and resilient. This practice works like this. Say you take action to start a new group, or join a coalition, or organize an event. When it’s all said and done, reflect on what worked well and what could be different. Imagine your most desired outcome, and what it will take to bring it into reality next time. This process grounds us to act in new and more considered ways, to respond to our world with more care and attention. This garden we are planting together gives us the space and resources to build this world we know is possible.

This year has taught and tested us in many things. I will leave you with one more we can easily forget. We are not a bouquet of cut flowers - a beautiful dead end. Our faith does not call us to put all of our beauty, strength, and diversity into a pretty vase of stagnant water, to disappear with the end of a season. It calls us instead to be gardeners, to find joy and pleasure in the hard work of getting our hands dirty. It calls us to know our place and power in the world, to share and nurture its abundance. Our living faith calls us to celebrate living, growing, and thriving.