How Do You Want to Bloom Here?

This is the text of the reflection I offered to the congregation I serve on Sunday, April 25th, 2018.  (If you prefer, you can listen to it.) 

I want to thank those of you – both here and not here this morning – who have taken the step of formalizing your membership in this community.  The two things I like to say to new members are:  congratulations (because you’ve joined a wonderful congregation), and thank you (because by your joining, and by bringing the gifts and spirit only you have, you are making it more wonderful still).  So, congratulations and thank you.

I must say, though, that you’ve picked an … interesting … time to take this step.  There’s supposedly an ancient Chinese saying, “May you live in interesting times,” said not as a blessing, but a curse.  “May you live in … interesting … times.”  It turns out that it isn’t a bit of ancient Chinese philosophy, yet we certainly can understand using the word “interesting” as an ironic euphemism for … well … for the kind of times we’re living in.  And while I could be talking about “the times we’re living in” in relation to this time in our nation, or this time in our city, this morning I’m most interested in the … interesting … times we find ourselves in here in our congregation.

This is a time when many people are questioning whether or not this is the right congregation for them, or who don’t know if they want to, or even if they can, go with it in the direction it seems to be going.  This is a time when people are even wondering about whether Unitarian Universalism, as a faith tradition, is what they’d thought it was, and whether they can honestly and with integrity continue to call themselves UUs.  As I said, this is very much an … interesting … time to be joining TJMC.  You’re joining just as a lot of people are wondering about, and fearing for, the future of the congregation.  There are those who are saying that we’re in a time of crisis.

Not me.  Not me.  I believe firmly that his disconcerting disquiet and disequilibrium we’re experiencing right now is not a problem.  I think it’s a good thing, something to lean into it. I see it as an opportunity. 

My Mother-in-Law, herself a retired Methodist minister (and well versed in the ways of congregational life), asked me just the other day if what has been happening at our church had “calmed down” at all.  I told her that I certainly hope things haven’t calmed down too much.  I reminded her of the Rev. Dr. King saying that there are some things to which we all should be “maladjusted.”

I want to be clear that I don’t think being uncomfortable just for the sake of feeling uncomfortable is a good thing.  Nor have I forgotten that while the famous description of religion’s purpose is about “afflicting the comfortable,” it also says that our work as a faith community is about “comforting the afflicted.”  I know that; I do.  Yet don’t we all know how easy it is to move from comfort to complacency?  And sometimes it can be hard to keep track of who, in our culture, needs comforting and who’s in need of some afflicting.  This isn’t another sermon about our racial justice work, or even about the current controversies surrounding us.  I’m really talking this morning about how our faith invites us to live our lives, you and me.

Unitarian Universalist unequivocally calls us to reject complacency in all its forms.  At its best, and perhaps more than any other of the organized religious responses to life we humans have developed, it calls on us to refuse to be too settled, too satisfied.  It calls on us to question … everything … and to keep on questioning.  As one of our hymns puts it, we believe that, “to question is the answer,” or as an old bumper stick said, “Unitarian Universalism – leaving no answer unquestioned.”  We are famously not bound by creed or dogma; we are charged with searching for truth and meaning – on our own and in community – and understand this to be a life-long search.

One of my favorite spiritual teachers is the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.  (If you’ve never seen the video of him giving a talk that’s usually described as “the greatest sermon ever,” it’s well worth Googling when you get home.)  He has said that for a real scientist is kind of disappointing if an experiment proves their hypothesis, because then it’s all over and done with.  The excitement comes when an experiment doesn’t prove your hypothesis and opens up a whole new host of questions.  According to Tyson, it’s the questions, not the answers, which drive the scientific enterprise; scientists are much more interested in exploring the currently-still-mysterious, rather than simply creating a catalogue of the known.

I love this so much because I think that it’s the purpose of our Unitarian Universalist faith as well.  When we’re at our best, it’s the enterprise our congregations exist to help each of us, and all of us, engage.  We are not supposed to be satisfied with the answers we found ten years ago, fifteen years ago, twenty years ago, or even, necessarily, last year.  We believe in evolution not just in biology, but in our understanding as well.

Years ago, while serving another congregation, I had a sign on the board in front of the church for several months.  It said: “If you can’t change your mind, how do you know you still have one?”  The Christian theologian, and Catholic Saint, Augustine of Hippo said way back in the 5^th century, si comprehendis non est Deus.  (One of the few bits of Latin I remember.) That translates as, “If you understand it, it’s not God.”  And I’d say that whatever terms or images we use to describe Ultimate Reality, that Spirit of Life we sing about most Sundays, our faith calls us to have that same awareness and attitude:  if we understand it, it’s not … It.  That’s why we’re called to the search for truth and meaning, and not to the celebratory party for truth and meaning discovered.

But this is hard.  It is hard to keep questioning our answers.  It’s hard to keep looking for new ways of seeing, listening for new ways of hearing, finding new ways of being in the world – especially when the laundry’s been piling up, and the fridge is getting a little empty.  With so much … chaos … swirling around us it would be nice to have something solid to hold on to.  Yet just as comfort can change to complacency, something solid can easily become something stagnant.

This is why I think that this … interesting … time of disquiet and discomfort is not a crisis but an opportunity.  It is an opportunity, for us as individuals and as a congregation, to really wrestle with – or, as I prefer to say – to dance with our principles, our values, and our understandings of things.  It’s an opportunity to re-examine what we really believe, something our faith doesn’t dictate to us but, rather, invites us to discover for ourselves.  It is an opportunity to ask questions:  What does it mean to be truly welcoming if in welcoming some people we unavoidably exclude others?  What does it mean to be committed to being a truly safe place for people who have historically been, and are being still, marginalized if it means things we’re accustomed to have to change?  What does it mean to disagree with others, risky though that might feel, yet still be one community?  (Can we trust each other enough to do that?  What does it mean if we can’t?)  What does my “belonging” to this community mean?  What expectations can I reasonably have, and what can be expected of me?  Do my wants, my perceived needs, my desires, my preferences have to be met for me to say that things are “going well”?  (What is the measure of the “success,” if you will, of our mutual ministry?)  What are the limits – or are there limits – to my commitment to this place and these people?  Do I really belong here? 

These are the kinds of questions people say that they’re dancing with these days precisely because of the … interesting … times in which we find ourselves.  Yet the truth is, these are the kind of questions we ought to be dancing with all the time!

Mickey ScottBey Jones, an anti-racist organizer, has written about real, deep, transformative relationships with perhaps a surprising metaphor.  Deep, transformative relationships are the kind I hope we’d agree we ought to be striving to create here, and we might think of them as cool and comforting, soothing and supportive.  Yet Mickey ScottBey Jones wrote:

[R]elationship is the sandpaper that wears away our resistance to change. Relationship is the abrasion that agitates enough to make a way forward … it smooths the way for the sacred, even as it rubs us raw.

Relationship is the sandpaper of life.

We are being offered an opportunity – again, as individuals and as a community – to ask ourselves deep and fundamental questions about our faith tradition, our own faith, the purpose of this community (and others like it), and about the meaning of our membership in it.  At its best, a faith community offers us an opportunity to discover the way into our fullness, an opportunity to truly bloom.  In our faith tradition we are challenged to discover that way for ourselves, and to keep discovering new dimensions of that “way,” so that our blooming can become ever more beautiful and fragrant. 

For me, the most important question in all of this is whether we will make good use of this opportunity.  The question to that is something that only you, and all of us together, can answer.

[The Parting Words were the well-known quotation about question by Rainer Maria Rilke from Letters to a Young Poet.  They are well worth remembering in just about any times, be they ... interesting ... or not.]

Pax tecum,

RevWik

The Making of a People of Prophecy: the book report

In the sermon I delivered (and posted) yesterday I said that I'd actually written another sermon which I came to realize was not the sermon I needed to deliver.  For what it's worth, here's that first version:

After coming home from General Assembly this past summer, our Director of Faith Development, Leia Durland-Jones, told me that I should watch the Sunday morning service and, particularly, to listen to the sermon that had been given by the Rev. Nancy McDonald Ladd.  Not that much after, our Director of Administration and Finance, Christina Rivera, told me that I needed to hear it –  “You’ve really got to listen to this sermon!” she said.  It’s really, really powerful.”  That was in early July.

Well … a week or so ago, while I was home sick, I finally cued it up and watched.  And they were right.  Oh my goodness, they were right.  I put a link to the video of the sermon – and the whole service, actually – in the insert in your Order of Service, and I strongly encourage you to watch it, because it isn’t just Nancy’s words, but her delivery – and not just her tempo, tone, and body language, but her presence as she delivered it – that makes it so powerful.

I mention all of this because in this powerful, and truly prophetic, sermon, Nancy says some really important things about just what it takes to make “a people of prophecy,” and, perhaps more specifically, what it will take to make us – Unitarian Universalists – able to live into this role. 

She grounds her prophetic charge in the importance of relationship for building up our communities into places where real change, real transformation, can come about.  She quotes the anti-racist organizer MickeyScottBey Jones – whom she calls “wonderful” and “deep-spirited” – as saying:

relationship is the sandpaper that wears away our resistance to change. Relationship is the abrasion that agitates enough to make a way forward.  Relationship, consistent and ongoing encounter with people and perspectives different than our own - it smooths the way for the sacred, even as it rubs us raw.

There is a holy abrasion of the spirit born in deep relational encounters across differences.  We, as congregations and as a movement, exist to be instruments of those very encounters. 

Let me say that again – “We, as congregations and as a movement, exist to be instruments of those encounters.”  You may have seen the bumper sticker that says, “The most radical thing we can do is introduce people to one another.”  The Rev. Mark Morrison-Reed has said, “The task of religious community is to unveil the bonds that bind each to all.”  In other words, as Nancy said, we exist to facilitate these kinds of deep, real, and, yes, raw-rubbing encounters. 

And yet we know [Nancy continues] that there are so many ways to hide from the discomfort inherent in a holy abrasion. There are plenty of opportunities presented each and every day in the life of the church to back away from the hard work of continually and repeatedly relating meaningfully to one another and the world.

And one of them is to insist [she says], at any possible juncture, that you get what you want out of the experience of congregational life, as if church is a short order menu and community is a product to be consumed on your terms, in your time, without making you uncomfortable or demanding a whole lot of you in the first place. 

One of the ways to block the holy abrasion that brings change is to imagine that both congregational life and religious liberalism itself are contests compete with winners and losers and if we don’t get our way – well – we are wanderers, worshipers – and lovers of leaving, are we not?

Does any of that resonate with you?  I can tell you that as I was watching the sermon, when I’d reached this point, I was glad I don’t wear mascara.  She’d brought me to tears.  There she was, behind that pulpit, speaking to a couple of thousand of us UUs, and speaking truth to us.  Hard truth.  Challenging truth.  Truth we need to hear.

One of the ways we hobble ourselves – as a movement, and here in our own “local franchise” – one of the ways we hobble ourselves is by spending … wasting … so much of our time and energy on trying to make sure that everything is arranged just so … just so that I feel comfortable and affirmed. 

When we hear – as Christina reminded us just a couple of weeks ago – that one task of the religious enterprise is to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” we give a deep sigh of gratitude that there is a place like this that will offer us such comfort.  We rarely, though, if ever, see ourselves as the ones in need of afflicting.  As I said last week, we’d like them to change so that we can just get on doing what we’ve been doing, the way we’ve been doing it.  But, as I also said last week, that’s just not the way things work. 

Nancy got even more specific, and offered us language that will no doubt be used for years to come:

[T]he greatest impediment to the efficacy of the liberal church today [she said] is not the real fights and real failures we get into when we’re doing hard work – it is the fake fights [that’s the phrase!] we waste our time on while our own people and the people all around us struggle to survive. 

I worry literally every day [she continued], that in this moment of utmost urgency - we, the very ones the world has been waiting for, are wasting our capacity to build change on fake fights that distract us from the work at hand.

We go over and over again who’s a humanist and who’s a theist and who got their way in what bylaw discussion and what color we should paint the church bathroom - so protected by our busyness that the real fights, the honest conversations, and the transformative sandpaper of real relationship presented to us Sunday after Sunday, week after week, slip right past us and we remain thoroughly agitated but fundamentally unchanged.

“Thoroughly agitated but fundamentally unchanged.”  As I watched the video I sat there, weeping at the power of this prophetic preacher who was speaking truth to us – to me – with such love.  Yet I was weeping, too, because her words were unveiling in me a deep sense of cynicism, revealing to me my own crisis of faith.  “Thoroughly agitated but fundamentally unchanged.”  “Thoroughly agitated but fundamentally unchanged.” 

Again and again, that crowd of a couple of thousand Unitarian Universalists applauded and cheered as Nancy challenged them with hard truths.  I’ve preached hard-truth sermons here, as well, and people have afterward told me how brave I was to do so, commended me for taking such a risk.  Yet as I listened to Nancy do just this, I was struck by the idea that, really, there is so little risk involved.  Those people in that hall that Sunday morning wanted to be challenged – they ate it up.  You all want me to challenge you – I’ve also received applause and affirmation whenever I’ve spoken “hard truths with love.”  We want to be challenged, but I fear that we want to be challenged because, on the one hand, we know – know in our bones – that something is wrong, and it fills us with anxiety, stress … with agita.  On the other hand, though, I fear that we want to be challenged because we know – know beneath our consciousness of our knowing – that by listening to these hard truths our agitation can be assuaged, and that by affirming them we can allow ourselves to remain, “fundamentally unchanged.”

Nancy told me that when she looked out at that crowd of thousands of Unitarian Universalists from around the country and around the world and said she worries, “literally every day that [we] are wasting our capacity to build change on fake fights” that she meant exactly that.  She meant that she worries about this all the time, that we, as a movement, are far too often “thoroughly agitated and fundamentally unchanged.”  She told me that she understood my frustrations, but she also said that she did not share my despair. 

Instead, in her sermon she’d decided to take advantage of that bully pulpit to publicly declare:

I tell you what, I’m tapping out.  Right now.  And I invite you to join me.  I’m tapping out of every fake fight in our congregations and our movement about getting what I want or what you want or what we think we want - because in this age the stakes are too high and we don’t have time for fake fights anymore. […]

[T]he world does not need another place for like-minded  liberal leaning people to hang out together and fight about who’s in charge.  The world does not need a place where you or I or any single one of us is going to get what we want.

What the world needs is a movement like ours to step more fully into our higher calling - to serve as an instrument for encounter - with one another, with the holy and with the world.  So that we might love more fully, and speak more truly and serve with greater efficacy, in such a time as this.

More tears poured down my cheeks, my friends.  New tears.  Because her faith had reignited mine; her hope had brought my own back to life.  Having lived with this sermon – its vision, its challenge, its truth, its hope – I can honestly say that I feel thoroughly less agitated, and can feel the stirrings of change.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

The Making of a People of Prophecy

This is the text of the sermon I delivered to the congregation I serve-- Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church Unitarian Universalist -- on Sunday, January 29, 2017.  As always, you can listen if you've prefer.

After coming home from General Assembly this past summer, our Director of Faith Development, Leia Durland-Jones, told me that I should watch the Sunday morning service and, particularly, to listen to the sermon that had been given by the Rev. Nancy McDonald Ladd.  Not that much after, our Director of Administration and Finance, Christina Rivera, told me that I needed to hear it –  “You’ve really got to listen to this sermon!” she said.  It’s really, really powerful.”  That was in early July.

Well … a week or so ago, while I was home sick, I finally cued it up and watched.  And they were right.  Oh my goodness, they were right.  I put a link to the video of the sermon in the order of service.  (Or you can watch the whole service.) I strongly encourage you to watch it, because it isn’t just Nancy’s words, but her delivery – and not just her tempo, tone, and body language, but her presence as she delivered it – that makes it so powerful.  (And please, please don't wait half a year to watch it!)

Her sermon called out a sermon from me.  Two, actually.  The first one I’d written a little earlier in the week, so it was all done and I was feeling pretty good about it last night when I decided to re-watch Nancy’s.  Afterward, I realized that that first sermon was really only a little more than a book report, and that the real sermon hadn’t made its way to the surface yet.

Nancy begins by lifting up the importance of relationship in building up our communities into places where real change, real transformation, can come about.  She quotes the anti-racist organizer Mickey ScottBey Jones – whom she calls “wonderful” and “deep-spirited” – as saying:

relationship is the sandpaper that wears away our resistance to change. Relationship is the abrasion that agitates enough to make a way forward.  Relationship, consistent and ongoing encounter with people and perspectives different than our own - it smooths the way for the sacred, even as it rubs us raw.

There is a holy abrasion of the spirit born in deep relational encounters across differences.  We, as congregations and as a movement, exist to be instruments of those very encounters. 

Let me say that again – “We, as congregations and as a movement, exist to be instruments of those encounters.”  You may have seen the bumper sticker that says, “The most radical thing we can do is introduce people to one another.”  The Rev. Mark Morrison-Reed has said, “The task of religious community is to unveil the bonds that bind each to all.”  In other words, we exist to facilitate these kinds of deep, real, and, yes, raw-rubbing encounters. 

“And yet,” and I’m quoting Nancy again here, “we know that there are so many ways to hide from the discomfort inherent in a holy abrasion. There are plenty of opportunities presented each and every day in the life of the church to back away from the hard work of continually and repeatedly relating meaningfully to one another and the world.”

The first she names is our misunderstanding that congregational life is going well when we’re happy.  When we’re getting what we want out of it.  She says:

One of the ways to block the holy abrasion that brings change is to imagine that both congregational life and religious liberalism itself are contests complete with winners and losers and if we don’t get our way – well – we are wanderers, worshippers – and lovers of leaving, are we not?

Ours is a religious movement that is part of the “free faith” tradition, and many of us interpret that to mean that we are free to come and go as we please.  If things get unpleasant, or not to our liking, there’s nothing saying that we have to come, is there?  Even if we did have a hell to threaten you with, most of us are such questioners of authority that we wouldn’t take it seriously anyway.  For many of us, here and in our wider movement, we take full advantage of the escape clause we see in our “free faith,” and feel no compulsion to show up when we get busy or things here get hard.

Yet this work of “continually and repeatedly relating meaningfully to one another and the world,” that is our work takes showing up again and again, even when we don’t particularly want to.  Even, truth be told, when we’d really rather not, because we know it’s going to be messy and we know it’s going to be hard, and we know we’re not going to get what we want.

Yet there’s an even more pernicious way we undercut the possibility of that sandpaper of relationship bringing about that holy abrasion that may rub us raw at times but which ultimately and inevitably smooths the way for change.  In her sermon, Nancy put it this way.:

[T]he greatest impediment to the efficacy of the liberal church today is not the real fights and real failures we get into when we’re doing hard work – it is the fake fights we waste our time on while our own people and the people all around us struggle to survive. 

I worry literally every day [she continued], that in this moment of utmost urgency - we, the very ones the world has been waiting for, are wasting our capacity to build change on fake fights that distract us from the work at hand.

We go over and over again who’s a humanist and who’s a theist and who got their way in what bylaw discussion and what color we should paint the church bathroom - so protected by our busyness that the real fights, the honest conversations, and the transformative sandpaper of real relationship presented to us Sunday after Sunday, week after week, slip right past us and we remain thoroughly agitated but fundamentally unchanged.

“Thoroughly agitated but fundamentally unchanged.”  I will confess that as I listened to this prophet in our midst speaking truth to our movement I felt … depressed and discouraged.  A cynicism overtook me, and I discovered a despair that we, as a movement, as a congregation, and as individuals, may well simply and forever remain stuck being “thoroughly agitated but fundamentally unchanged.”

A couple of days later, I had a dream.  I was an observer, not a participant, and what I observed is what I took to be a Jewish congregation about to begin its worship.  The Rabbi – who undoubtedly not coincidentally looked exactly like Nancy McDonald Ladd – was feeling anxious about what she knew was going to happen.  And just before she entered the sanctuary she had an idea, and called over a few of the congregation’s children.  She gave each a small, flat piece of wax and asked them to bring it to her when she called on them.

I don’t remember anything about the beginning of the service, but during the sermon portion, the Rabbi held up a small, think, black-bound book that was clearly one of their sacred texts.  She called it “the Tishuba,” and she began a litany saying, “the Tishuba calls us to <this>, and the Tishuba calls us to <that>.”  I don’t remember all of the this-es and that-s, but I do recall her saying that the Tishuba called them to welcome people from the transgender community, and to work with undocumented immigrants and refugees.  And after she named each of these callings, she asked one of the children to come up and melt their wax onto the cover of the book, so that in not too long the face of it was complete obscured with blobs of differently colored wax.  When it was, she held it up and said that this was no longer a generic Tishuba, it was now their Tishuba, they had made it their own, so that now, instead of saying, “the Tishuba calls us to …”, she would say, “our Tishuba call us …”

I woke from this dream with tears pouring down my face.  And that day I got to wondering what our “Tishuba” might be.  We don’t have a sacred book to point to, we share no holy writ.   We don’t even share all that many rituals and traditions throughout our movement.  And then I thought about the flaming chalice.

As we prepare to light the chalice at the beginning of the service I often say that it is “a sign and symbol of our faith.”  During World War II, the Unitarian Service Committee was in Europe, among other things helping Jews and other persecuted people to find safety.  Other organizations there had a logo, something to put on business cards and letter heads, but also something to signify who they were.  The Service Committee commissioned a man named Hans Desutsch, a German cartoonist who’d fled German, to create for them a symbol, and he created the first flaming chalice.

This symbol, this flaming chalice is more than just, as someone once disparaged it, “a candle in a martini glass.”  And it’s more than just a light to illuminate and affirm the views and positions we already hold, or to provide warmth for us to bask in in our self-satisfied complacency.  No.  It is a beacon, a beacon that should be leading us forward, out of our sanctuaries, out of our congregational buildings, out, even, of our devotion to our false fights, and out into the world that so desperately needs its light.  It is our Tishuba.

And our Tishuba calls us to leave behind the false fight of who has the authority to make what decision to have, instead, the real conversation about what the right decision is;

Our Tishuba calls on us to leave behind the false fight of whether Joys and Sorrows and spoken, or written, or eliminate completely to have, instead, the real conversation about whether we are really listening to one another – not just for those things we agree on but where we truly differ;

Our Tishuba calls on us to leave behind the false fight of Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter to have, instead, the real conversation about the system of White Supremacy that saturates our society and in which we are all complicit, and what we can do to dismantle it and build a new way in the world;

It calls on us to leave behind the false fight of whether to use God language, or not use God language, and to have, instead, the real conversation about what is holy, and what is sacred, and what the holy and sacred call us to do;

Our Tishuba calls us to leave behind the false fight of who’s right and who’s wrong, so that we might have, instead, the real conversation of who we are and how we can be together and how can model this for the world.

When I woke from my dream I thought that the word “tishuba” sounded familiar, so I looked it up.  Google told me that Gora Tish Uba is a city in western Kazakhstan.  But the similar sounding word “teshuvah,” is a Hebrew word which means “repentance,” or, “returning.”  The days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are sometimes called The Days of Teshuvah, and it is said that an observant Jew will do teshva each and every day, searching for the ways they have fallen short, committing to not make the same mistakes again, and making amends when amends are appropriate.  (Those are the three aspects of teshuvah.)

I find it meaningful that that which was calling that congregation – and which is calling ours – is the idea of repentance, or returning to our true selves, of emptying ourselves of our hubris so that we might humbly engage with that holy abrasion we experience in real relationship.  To paraphrase the Reverend McDonald Ladd, this holy abrasion of the spirit is only born in deep relational encounters across differences, and we, as congregations and as a movement, exist to be instruments of those very encounters. 

The stakes are high, my friends – higher than many of us have had any idea – and there simply isn’t time to waste on our fake fights – no matter how important they may seem – and our instance on having things the way we want them to be.  We must leave these behind – must leave these behind – so that we can do the oh so necessary work the world calls us to.

I’m going to give Nancy the last words:

[T]he world does not need another place for like-minded  liberal leaning people to hang out together and fight about who’s in charge.  The world does not need a place where you or I or any single one of us is going to get what we want.

What the world needs is a movement like ours to step more fully into our higher calling - to serve as an instrument for encounter - with one another, with the holy and with the world.  So that we might love more fully, and speak more truly and serve with greater efficacy, in such a time as this.

Pax tecum,

RevWik