A Labour of Love: Dedication it's What You Need

I love ministering to the communities I serve. It is a labour of love. What I love the most is that they don’t expect perfection from either myself or one another. As I so often say we are the church, we are the chapel, we are the community where everything goes wrong. Now despite this and maybe because of this we are a place of dedication, of welcome, of acceptance and most of all love. I think sometimes people are a little surprised by the informality. I hope that thy sense the care and concern, I believe that they do. I hope that they feel the warmth and the friendliness. I will always remember something that Margaret Darbyshire, a member from Urmston who died during the pandemic, said to me when she had been coming for a couple of years, “this is a church like no other I have ever been to, but I like it, it is how a church should be.” She came to us almost by mistake by accident, she is not the first and hope she won’t be the last to so. She stayed because as she said it was what she had been looking for all of her life.

Nothing works perfectly, something always seems to go wrong, I don’t think we have ever had a Sunday where everything has gone smoothly, or there has not been a seeming disaster at some point in the week. We are perfectly imperfect communities. The things we get wrong, our mistakes aren’t the most important parts of us. What matters more is what is at the heart of us; what matters the most is kindness and compassion. This is what I have witnessed and continue to witness more and more over the years. I have felt it oh so powerfully these last few weeks, it has touched me in those places that really count.

There is such love and deep dedication in these two communities. People show their love by blessing them with their presence. It is made holy by becoming sanctified by loving dedication. What I see is love in action, love alive in common humanity, love in tangible form. Here’s a little verse on that by Susan Karlson

“Love In Tangible Form” by Susan Karlson

Looking at the overflowing cup,
Seeing from another perspective,
Witnessing life in all its fullness,
We share from a place of hope and dedication
And put our love into tangible form.

Following this Sunday’s service, in Altrincham, we will be acknowledging the dedicated service of Martin West to the congregation, by unveiling a plaque in his honour at the organ. I will not embarrass Martin, he is a humble man, by listing all that he has done for the congregation and the wider Unitarian movement, it would take a long time to do so. Most of what he has done has been behind the scenes as he has for other causes too. He has done so much for others, often anonymously.

There is a similar plaque at Urmston in honour of Robert Haslem. He served the congregation in so many ways. The plaque reads “A labour of love”. This seems appropriate, as such dedication is most certainly done from love.

“Labour of Love” is an interesting phrase. I think I first became aware of it in the late 1980’s. It was a song by the Scottish group “Hue and Cry”. The phrase comes from translations of the King James version of the Bible, that was no doubt influenced by Shakespeare’s “Loves Labour Lost”, although he never actually used the phrase. It is to be found though in two verses in Thessalonians and Hebrews. It is the verse in Hebrews 6:10, that speaks to me: “For God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labour of love, which ye have shewed toward his name, in that ye have ministered to the saints, and do minister.”

Ministry for me is a labour of love. That said I am not the only person who ministers, we minister as a community of people. To minister literally means to serve, something I often want to remind those of a political persuasion about at times, particularly the Prime Minister, who ought to see himself as the number servant of the people, I suspect he does not. Do any of them?

I see examples of these labours of love all around, people serving from love, people ministering in their own ways, adding what they can to make the flavour and substance of the community, the ministrone of this ministry. Ministrone and minister both mean to serve.

I have seen wonderful examples of this in Urmston in recent weeks as folk have gone out of their way to ensure that we get the work done on the ceiling, so that we can function and survive and hopefully one day thrive again. We need to be here to offer a free religious community, to those who seek. I have witnessed that same dedication in Altrincham too. I have witnessed so much love and dedication here, during lockdown and as we have opened up again. We saw it last summer as Gwyneth ensured that we got the wind telephone installed to help with those in grief. Or in the Andrea’s insistence on getting those benches installed so we could meet outside, we will dedicate them to her memory and we will honour her after the service as we scatter half of her ashes in the Garden of Remembrance and place her name on the wall. The family will take the rest back to Aberdeen with them. She was such a blessing to us all, to this community.

People give their heart in love in many ways. There are so many labours of love. People dedicate themselves in so many ways and bless life in so many ways. I have witnessed this for years in the small schoolroom at Altrincham, which has been a home for Alcoholics Anonymous for nearly 50 years. Thanks in no small part to Andrea’s efforts it now houses 8 meetings a week. The dedicated service, the ministry in its many forms that goes on there has led to the transformation of so many lives. That little building, that humble building, truly is a temple of love, of dedication and of transformation, it truly is holy ground, although there is no need to shake off your shoes, when you step over the threshold.

Dedication is how we show our love through blessing the lives we touch and the places we visit with our loving presence. Places are made holy when we sanctify them with loving dedication.

“Dedication” is one of those words that has changed in meaning over time. It comes from an old French word “dedicacion which meant “concecration of a church or chapel”, coming from the Latin word “dedicare” meaning to concecrate, proclaim, affirm or set aside. It later came to mean to give yourself to a purpose. This is what the folk do in the communities I serve, I witness such dedication. We carry that love into our world, that is the purpose of my blessing each and every Sunday at the end of worship. For if we live in dedication to love and life we begin to bless all life, we make the ground at our feet holy ground as we consecrate it with our loving presence.

To me this is the true meaning of church, a place of transformation, a place where we recognise the sacred uniqueness of ourselves and one another, that we recognise the blessings that we are and the blessings in life and where we learn to go out into the world and bless it with our sacred uniqueness. The world awaits our blessing, for it surely needs it.

If we live in dedication to love and life we begin to bless all life, we make the ground at our feet holy ground as we consecrate it with our loving presence. Like Moses in Exodus who is told to “shake of his shoes” for he is standing on holy ground, in the presence of “I am”.

We can all hear the call of the Holy from deep within us and from all around us, we can all bless life with our holy presence. All we have to do is live with dedication, to consecrate the ground at our feet and the people who we meet, all we have to do is live with dedication and become the blessing that we have all been searching for. In so doing we will find ourselves instantly in the “Promised Land”

To live in dedication all we have to do is shake off our shoes and live our lives recognising that this truly is a holy place. Sacred living, holiness, dedication is about being fully alive. Holiness is a life fully alive, a life where we truly pay attention.

All we have to do to awaken the holy is to truly pay attention to the world and the people around us and truly inhabit the space in which we live and breathe and share our being. All we have to do is come to believe that we all walk on holy ground. All we have to do is wholly live our lives. All we have to do is live our lives in dedication to the holiest of holy purposes, to live in love. To love one another and to serve life in whatever way we can.

All we need is dedication…

Dedication, dedication, dedication, that’s what you need. If you want to be the best and if you want to beat to the rest, dedication is what you need.

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