a homily delivered by the Rev. Dr. Tim Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle MA
Sunday October 30th, 2005
This is a time of year when the Realm of the Living and the Realm of Death seem especially close together. It is the season of harvest, when growing things that have ceased to grow are gathered from the fields and into barns. It is also the traditional season of slaughter, when animals fattened on the abundance of summer were butchered and “cured” in anticipation of winter. It is the season of autumn, the twilight of the year, when the trees drop their leaves and the weather grows cold, and the earth shifts into survival mode. And it is also the time of year when we seize back that extra hour of sleep in the morning that we sacrificed the previous spring, in exchange for an extra hour of recreational daylight in the evening.
This is also a season when many societies set aside time to remember their departed loved ones. All Saints Day, All Souls Day, Halloween, the Day of the Dead...occasions when we come together to recall the lives of those who went before us, and to whom we owe so much. We celebrate their lives, and grieve their deaths, clean up the cemetaries where their bodies now rest, come together as families to renew connections, and revitalize our relationships with one another. Because this is a season when the Realm of the Living and the Realm of Death seem especially close together.
In just a few moments we will begin reading the names of our own loved ones who have passed away, and whose memory remains dear to us. And there are a couple of names on that list I’m pretty sure are familiar only to me, so I thought I’d say a few words about them now, just so all of you will know who they are. The first name is John McClure. The Thanksgiving after I had moved back to the Pacific Northwest from West Texas to start working as a new congregation organizer, I found myself urgently in need of a plumber, having foolishly tried to stuff all the potato peelings down the disposal at the same time, only to have them revolt and refuse to go. So I desperately opened up the yellow pages and started letting my fingers do the walking: Roto Rooter, Rescue Rooter, Reliable Rooter...and then I saw an ad that simply said “The Sewer Man With a Conscience.” It even had a picture of a little angel working a drain-cleaning snake. So that was the number I called, not at all sure that anyone would even answer; but when someone miraculously did I told him my problem and where I lived and what my name was and as we approached the end of our conversation this unfamiliar, disembodied voice on the other end of the phone unexpectedly asked “Now, are you the same Tim Jensen who is the new Unitarian minister?”
Well, that kind of caught me off guard, as you might imagine. It’s one thing when something like that happens in a little town like Carlisle, but Portland, Oregon, is a pretty big city. But it turned out that “the Sewer Man with a Conscience” was actually one of my new parishioners, who had just started attending church a few weeks earlier, and as we got to know one another better, it also turned out that John and I had the same birthday: October 22nd. I eventually left the ministry of that church, and a few years later John stopped attending there also, but we continued to live in the same part of town, and occasionally we would run into one another at the supermarket or a High School basketball game or our local brewpub. We were friends, although we didn’t really see one another that much. I was back in school working for my Ph.D. and traveling all over the Pacific Northwest on weekends preaching and consulting with small, lay-led fellowships; John was working day and night trying to support his growing family and keep his small business afloat. John was also a very talented musician, who was constantly trying to organize small, pick-up bands to go out and perform in clubs, following his passion and supplementing his income at the same time; while (as you all know) I can hardly carry the tune of a simple hymn unless I’ve heard it about a million times. My daughter was an athlete who played competitive Volleyball for four years of High School and four years of College, and I was the parent with a flexible schedule and a reliable car; John’s son competed in the Special Olympics, and John was his basketball coach. So our lives were similar, but they were also very different; mostly though we just kind of liked one another, and enjoyed each other’s company, even though we didn’t really get together very often.
And then four years ago, the week before I left Portland to move out here, I got a message on my answering machine from a mutual friend telling me that John was dying of lung cancer, and that he had just come home from the hospital and was under the care of hospice. So naturally, I phoned his house, and went over there that same afternoon to visit with him and his family, and to say goodbye. And sometime that following week, while Parker and I were driving across the country on our way to Nantucket, John passed away. And I think of him every year now around this time, in this season of our shared birthday. He truly was a very remarkable guy; I feel privileged to have known him, and know the world is a lesser place without his presence in it.
The second name is Bob Vail. Bob was a retired Coast Guard officer who served for two years as the President of the Olympic Unitarian Fellowship in Port Angeles Washington while I was working with them to help grow that congregation and eventually to purchase land and build a place of their own. Bob and I were a great team: he had a vision of what that congregation could become, and the determination to “make it so;” I had the education, the experience, and the expertise to help them get there. Once a month I would finish teaching my morning class at Oregon State University and then drive six and a half hours to the “Homeport Homestead” on South Bagley Creek Road, where I would have dinner with Bob and his wife Mickie, and we would finalize the plans for the weekend: typically breakfast with the leadership team, followed by some sort of training workshop on a subject we had agreed upon earlier, perhaps a committee meeting or some pastoral visits in the afternoon, some sort of fellowship event Saturday evening, the Sunday morning worship service, and then a little time to tie up loose ends before heading home again sometime Sunday afternoon: this time generally by ferry through Seattle, so that I could have a little time on the boat to decompress and write in my journal. That first year in particular, Bob and Mickie were my regular hosts. Later on other members of the congregation started to take turns providing home hospitality for the visiting minister, but by that time Bob and I were fast friends -- he typically attended every meeting I did, and then “held the fort” the rest of the month until my next visit. Between visits we were in regular contact by e-mail, as he kept me up to date with the news of the church, and we strategized about next steps.
I also suspect Bob provided at least some of the inspiration for our own “Gilligan’s Island” ingathering event in September. My final weekend in Port Angeles coincided with the end of Bob’s term as President. That Saturday night we celebrated with a “roast” of Bob, at which I was the final speaker. Earlier speakers had lampooned Bob’s navigation and seamanship abilities, his cooking skills, even his charisma as a public speaker -- a difficult challenge, since Bob actually excelled at all these things. I took a somewhat different approach. I had this Captain’s hat hidden in a brown paper bag, and I casually made sure that Bob could see it without letting on that I was letting him see it, while I began to talk very sincerely about how in a small fellowship people often wear a lot of different hats, but that there was one person in particular who had worn a very important hat...and then I pulled this hat out of the bag, and put it on my head, and of course underneath it was the floppy white “Gilligan” hat for my little buddy, Captain Robert Vail USCG ret. -- who was then serenaded by the entire congregation with an anthem relating his various accomplishments, naturally set to the tune of the Gilligan’s Island theme song. And Bob and I both were laughing so hard tears came to our eyes -- it was truly one of the finest moments of my ministry (and really of my entire life)...and I know that a lot of you have already heard this story often because I like to tell it so much, which is why I suspect at least some subtle inspiration on the theme of last month’s dinner.
Bob later went on to become very involved in the work of the Pacific Northwest district, and was eventually designated as the Lay Chaplain of the Olympic Fellowship by the members of that congregation. As the years went by, we continued to stay in touch although as you might imagine with decreasing frequency, especially after I moved out here. Which was why I was so surprised and delighted to see an e-mail from him in my in-box two weeks ago. Unfortunately, the news was not good -- the message was actually from Mickie, who was informing everyone in Bob’s address book that Bob had passed away suddenly on October 15th at the age of 57. Mickie had been traveling, and had phoned him early that morning to tell him what time she would be arriving at the airport -- when Bob wasn’t there to meet her, she phoned their neighbors who went to the house and found Bob dead -- presumably because of the lingering viral infection he’d been battling for about a week. His Memorial Service was held yesterday, at the small Fellowship Building which I can say without reservation would not have existed without his efforts; carpooling was encouraged, and Bob left explict instructions that no one was to wear black. Bop was also a truly remarkable guy; I feel privileged to have known him, and know the world will be a lesser place without his presence in it.
I share these stories not only because I want to honor my two friends, but because I want to remind all of us all once again that each and every one of the persons whose names we are about to hear has stories like this that can be told about them. None of us will ever know all the stories there are to know, but when we recall them: when we tell them, and hear them, and share them with one another, we evoke our memories of those we have loved and bring their spirits to life again -- and the realm of the living, and the realm of death, grow closer, and more familiar, and less mysterious to one another...and we feel inspired, and revitalized, and no longer quite so frightened or alone....
Sunday, October 30, 2005
Sunday, October 16, 2005
THE PURPOSE DRIVEN UNITARIAN
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at The First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday October 16th, 2005
Just out of curiosity, how many of you already knew who Rick Warren was before you came here this morning? He’s been kinda hard to miss lately. His book The Purpose Driven Life has now sold over 23 million copies, and sales show no signs of slowing down. Earlier this year it was front page news when a single mom from Atlanta, Ashley Smith, convinced an escaped murderer [Brian Nichols] to let her go and turn himself in after she read aloud to him a chapter of the book. Just last month Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, published a flattering eight-page feature article in The New Yorker describing Warren’s twenty-five year old, twenty thousand member, 120 acre campus Saddleback Church in Orange County, California. Among Warren’s many other admirers and collaborators are management guru Peter Drucker, retired General Electric CEO Jack Welch, and publishing mogul Rupert Murdoch.
I first became aware of Rick Warren almost two decades ago, back when I was serving my first little church in Midland Texas, and heard him interviewed (along with another megachurch pastor, Bill Hybels of the Willow Creek Community Church outside of Chicago) on James Dobson’s “Focus on the Family.” (Back in those days, Midland didn’t have a public radio station, so I tended to get my news and information from slightly different sources than I do today). I was fascinated by what I heard, especially since I knew I was about to go to work outside of Portland Oregon as a new congregation organizer myself. So I immediately sent away for a tape of the program (which put me on the Focus on the Family mailing list for about 15 years). But from that interview I learned how, when Rick and his wife Kay first arrived in Southern California in 1979, they spent several months just asking people who were not currently attending church about what they hadn’t liked about their previous experiences, and discovered that many of the people they spoke with felt that most churches were cold, rigid, and unfriendly places, that the sermons were boring and irrelevant to their lives, and that they were way too concerned about asking for money. And so he set out to create a “user friendly” church that would do none of those things: a church which would feature contemporary music, casual dress, practical messages, and where visitors would be treated like guests, and specifically asked NOT to contribute to the offering.
You have to remember that this was a time when the religious landscape was dominated by “televangelists” like Pat Robertson, Oral Roberts, Jerry Falwell, Jimmy Swaggart, and Jim & Tammy Faye Baker, who had learned how to combine the extensive reach of new cable and satellite broadcast technology with the targeted appeal of computer-generated direct mail marketing, and who were beginning to flex their political muscles just as sexual and financial scandal were likewise beginning to chip away at the foundations of several of these so-called “broadcast” ministries. In many ways, the megachurch offered a very different kind of experience from that provided by these high-profile religious broadcasters. At the risk of sounding irreverent, a megachurch is more like Wal-Mart than the Home Shopping Network -- there’s always plenty of parking, someone greets you at the door, and you can pretty much count on finding just about anything you want without having to go anywhere else.
A typical megachurch is organized both from the top down and from the bottom up. Sunday mornings are set aside for large, celebratory “seeker” services featuring lots of contemporary music and drama, multimedia presentations, and of course an inspiring yet practical, down-to-earth message by the charismatic and visionary senior pastor. During the week there are also numerous believer-focused “discipleship” services, typically for groups of about one hundred, which are generally led by one of the many associate ministers. And then there are the cell ministries: small affinity groups of 8-10 which meet in people’s homes and are led by trained volunteers. It all actually looks a little like a Roman Legion, where “cohorts” and “centuries” were the building blocks of a much larger, yet tactically flexible, military organization, which gave the Roman Emperors exactly what they needed to conquer most of the known world.
Megachurches also tend to be independent and non-denominational. And unlike more traditional evangelical churches, they have often jettisoned a theology based on hellfire and damnation for something known as the Prosperity Gospel. In it’s simplest terms, the Prosperity Gospel teaches that God wants human beings to be happy, healthy, and financially well-off, and that these are the “fruits” of a “godly” lifestyle. Yet life itself is full of tests and temptations, “trials and tribulations,” which God sends in order to discipline us, much like a parent would discipline a child, so that we might develop “character” in preparation for the life that is to follow. Those of you with PhDs in 19th century Unitarian history will immediately recognize this as a simplified version of the “doctrine of Probation,” which was very controversial indeed here in Puritan New England, when Henry Ware Sr started teaching it to the students of Divinity at Harvard in 1805. But we are only one of the Prosperity Gospel’s many theological ancestors (and not a particularly appreciated one at that). Still, it helps explain why so much of what comes out of the megachurch movement seems friendly and familiar to us, even if it also feels a little foreign and strange.
Certainly this was my experience when I first picked up my copy of The Purpose Driven Life (back when only 15 million had been sold). I was astonished to discover that Warren’s five purposes: Worship, Fellowship, Discipleship, Ministry, and Evangelism -- were virtually identical to the five “key areas” of Worship, Education, Fellowship, Community Outreach and Pastoral Care -- around which I have come to base my ministry. Then I remembered that about ten years ago I had also read Rick’s earlier book, The Purpose Driven Church (which only sold about a million copies), and realized that I had probably just incorporated some of his ideas into my own without really giving it a second thought. Or maybe we were just reading the same books, or who knows? Maybe he got his ideas from me! But in any event, at least this coincidence wasn’t quite so mysterious after all.
One of the things that has always bothered me about reading books that come out of the evangelical Church Growth Movement like The Purpose Driven Life is that the authors often seem to be speaking literally about realities which I tend to understand metaphorically. But every once in awhile I have to wonder whether I’m really being fair -- just because they don’t nuance and qualify every little statement about God and Faith and Salvation doesn’t mean that their understanding of these very complex and mysterious subjects is any less sophisticated than mine. I’m certain, for example, that someone who didn’t know me very well, who came here to church and heard me praying after the candlesharing, might initially walk away with a very different understanding of what I believe from what I REALLY believe. And at the end of the day, what does it really matter whether you understand something to be literally true, or only metaphorically true? When it comes right down to living your daily life, it’s still true on some level, isn’t it?
At the foundation of the Purpose Driven life is the notion of surrender, of committing yourself wholeheartedly to something larger than yourself. Warren recognizes the problem many American have with this concept. Surrender is for losers; it’s an admission of defeat. Yet until we become capable of giving ourselves fully to something larger than ourselves, we remain incapable of transcending our own limitations, or achieving anything larger than ourselves as well. Through surrender comes liberation, and the freedom to trust, to help (and be helped), to find a greater meaning than the mere satisfaction of our appetites until we die. We lose ourselves in order to find ourselves, and to become a part of something that is larger than ourselves. Surrender doesn’t make us less than we are now. It makes us more, because it connects us in relationship to one another, and to the powerful spirit of life which has created us all.
The five purposes can all be understood as elaborations on this basic insight. If you have a little trouble with the traditional theological language, try thinking of them as Celebration, Community, Study, Service and Affirmation. Celebration is not confined strictly to Sunday morning. According to Warren, worship is anything that “makes God smile.” He even quotes one of my favorite lines from the movie “Chariots of Fire,” when Eric Liddell explains to his sister why he is first going to compete in the Olympic Games before returning to China as a missionary. “I believe God made me for a purpose. But he also made me fast. And when I run, I feel God’s pleasure.” He also asserts something that would have been very familiar to 19th century Unitarian Transcendentalists like Theodore Parker, when he notes that “worship is a universal urge, hard-wired by God into the very fiber of our being....” Fellowship -- or the experience of being in Community -- is the recognition that we are all part of the same “family,” or what we sometimes describe as an “interdependent web of all existence.” The experience of Community is one of reciprocity: sometimes we give and sometimes we receive, sometimes we lead and sometimes we follow. We learn to participate as part of a group, a team, where together we learn to acknowlege our dependence on one another, and how to create together something greater than any one of us might have done alone. Likewise, the act of Study is not merely a process of self-improvement, it is also one of self-discovery, as we explore that part of ourselves which the scripture tells us was created “in the image of God,” and discipline ourselves to follow our best instincts, rather than our worst ones. We become disciplined learners in order to become effective teachers, assisting others in their own process of learning.
Service, or Ministry, is the fulfillment of our calling (or, in Latin, our “vocation”) as people of faith. The highest purpose in life for our 19th century Unitarian forebearers was “to be of use.” Our Puritan ancestors believed that every individual had both a general and a particular vocation: some unique and special gift or talent which God had given us which we are to use in order to make the world better, to be of service to others, and to make God smile in the process. When we seek to serve others, we expand our lives in ways that we can’t even begin to imagine or anticipate before starting down that path. Not all ministry is the responsibility of the minister. We each have a vocation to which we have been called, and through which we find fulfillment by becoming the person God intends for us to be. Or to put it another way, how do you know who you really are until you’ve discovered what you can do, and not just for yourself, but for those who need what only you can give them?
The notion of Evangelism, on the other hand, is something that many contemporary Unitarian Universalists are not especially comfortable with. So we call it something else: Community Outreach, Social Responsibility, Public Witness, Testimony, Affirmation....but the basic responsibility is still to profess our faith, to share with others as freely as we have received, rather than keeping it a secret all to ourselves. It’s true that some of us are both professors and professional Unitarian Universalists. But that doesn’t mean that everyone else should keep their mouths shut, while we do all the talking. What kind of UU church would that be? Sharing our “good news,” announcing to the world by both word and deed that we believe something of value which is worthy of wider proclamation -- this is nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to feel shy about, even if we do sometimes feel a little sensitive about the insensitive ways that others may have shared their faith with us. But we don’t need to be arrogant, and we don’t need to be defensive, when it comes to sharing with those we care about something that has been very meaningful to us. We just need to be honest, and sincere, and maybe just a little humble and a little proud, about something which potentially has the power to change both our lives and the world for the better.
I’m going to be returning to many of these same themes again and again in the weeks and months to come. But I want to leave you today with one very practical thought which I hope will make all your lives just a little better. In your participation in this church, and really in everything you do in life, I want you to choose one thing that you do just for yourself, whether it’s a class, or perhaps attending some other activity or program that you find meaningful and enjoyable; and I want you to choose one other thing to do just to be of service to someone else, or to the larger community. And try to keep them roughly in balance. And I think if you practice that one simple rule: one hand for the ship, and one hand for yourself (as the old-time sailors would have put it), you’ll find that you get a lot more out of your experience here, or whatever else you chose to participate in, than you might otherwise. So don’t be afraid to roll up your sleeves, and let your hair down, and work and play just as hard as you can. Because then you will also feel God’s pleasure flowing through you, as She smiles while watching you run....
at The First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday October 16th, 2005
Just out of curiosity, how many of you already knew who Rick Warren was before you came here this morning? He’s been kinda hard to miss lately. His book The Purpose Driven Life has now sold over 23 million copies, and sales show no signs of slowing down. Earlier this year it was front page news when a single mom from Atlanta, Ashley Smith, convinced an escaped murderer [Brian Nichols] to let her go and turn himself in after she read aloud to him a chapter of the book. Just last month Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, published a flattering eight-page feature article in The New Yorker describing Warren’s twenty-five year old, twenty thousand member, 120 acre campus Saddleback Church in Orange County, California. Among Warren’s many other admirers and collaborators are management guru Peter Drucker, retired General Electric CEO Jack Welch, and publishing mogul Rupert Murdoch.
I first became aware of Rick Warren almost two decades ago, back when I was serving my first little church in Midland Texas, and heard him interviewed (along with another megachurch pastor, Bill Hybels of the Willow Creek Community Church outside of Chicago) on James Dobson’s “Focus on the Family.” (Back in those days, Midland didn’t have a public radio station, so I tended to get my news and information from slightly different sources than I do today). I was fascinated by what I heard, especially since I knew I was about to go to work outside of Portland Oregon as a new congregation organizer myself. So I immediately sent away for a tape of the program (which put me on the Focus on the Family mailing list for about 15 years). But from that interview I learned how, when Rick and his wife Kay first arrived in Southern California in 1979, they spent several months just asking people who were not currently attending church about what they hadn’t liked about their previous experiences, and discovered that many of the people they spoke with felt that most churches were cold, rigid, and unfriendly places, that the sermons were boring and irrelevant to their lives, and that they were way too concerned about asking for money. And so he set out to create a “user friendly” church that would do none of those things: a church which would feature contemporary music, casual dress, practical messages, and where visitors would be treated like guests, and specifically asked NOT to contribute to the offering.
You have to remember that this was a time when the religious landscape was dominated by “televangelists” like Pat Robertson, Oral Roberts, Jerry Falwell, Jimmy Swaggart, and Jim & Tammy Faye Baker, who had learned how to combine the extensive reach of new cable and satellite broadcast technology with the targeted appeal of computer-generated direct mail marketing, and who were beginning to flex their political muscles just as sexual and financial scandal were likewise beginning to chip away at the foundations of several of these so-called “broadcast” ministries. In many ways, the megachurch offered a very different kind of experience from that provided by these high-profile religious broadcasters. At the risk of sounding irreverent, a megachurch is more like Wal-Mart than the Home Shopping Network -- there’s always plenty of parking, someone greets you at the door, and you can pretty much count on finding just about anything you want without having to go anywhere else.
A typical megachurch is organized both from the top down and from the bottom up. Sunday mornings are set aside for large, celebratory “seeker” services featuring lots of contemporary music and drama, multimedia presentations, and of course an inspiring yet practical, down-to-earth message by the charismatic and visionary senior pastor. During the week there are also numerous believer-focused “discipleship” services, typically for groups of about one hundred, which are generally led by one of the many associate ministers. And then there are the cell ministries: small affinity groups of 8-10 which meet in people’s homes and are led by trained volunteers. It all actually looks a little like a Roman Legion, where “cohorts” and “centuries” were the building blocks of a much larger, yet tactically flexible, military organization, which gave the Roman Emperors exactly what they needed to conquer most of the known world.
Megachurches also tend to be independent and non-denominational. And unlike more traditional evangelical churches, they have often jettisoned a theology based on hellfire and damnation for something known as the Prosperity Gospel. In it’s simplest terms, the Prosperity Gospel teaches that God wants human beings to be happy, healthy, and financially well-off, and that these are the “fruits” of a “godly” lifestyle. Yet life itself is full of tests and temptations, “trials and tribulations,” which God sends in order to discipline us, much like a parent would discipline a child, so that we might develop “character” in preparation for the life that is to follow. Those of you with PhDs in 19th century Unitarian history will immediately recognize this as a simplified version of the “doctrine of Probation,” which was very controversial indeed here in Puritan New England, when Henry Ware Sr started teaching it to the students of Divinity at Harvard in 1805. But we are only one of the Prosperity Gospel’s many theological ancestors (and not a particularly appreciated one at that). Still, it helps explain why so much of what comes out of the megachurch movement seems friendly and familiar to us, even if it also feels a little foreign and strange.
Certainly this was my experience when I first picked up my copy of The Purpose Driven Life (back when only 15 million had been sold). I was astonished to discover that Warren’s five purposes: Worship, Fellowship, Discipleship, Ministry, and Evangelism -- were virtually identical to the five “key areas” of Worship, Education, Fellowship, Community Outreach and Pastoral Care -- around which I have come to base my ministry. Then I remembered that about ten years ago I had also read Rick’s earlier book, The Purpose Driven Church (which only sold about a million copies), and realized that I had probably just incorporated some of his ideas into my own without really giving it a second thought. Or maybe we were just reading the same books, or who knows? Maybe he got his ideas from me! But in any event, at least this coincidence wasn’t quite so mysterious after all.
One of the things that has always bothered me about reading books that come out of the evangelical Church Growth Movement like The Purpose Driven Life is that the authors often seem to be speaking literally about realities which I tend to understand metaphorically. But every once in awhile I have to wonder whether I’m really being fair -- just because they don’t nuance and qualify every little statement about God and Faith and Salvation doesn’t mean that their understanding of these very complex and mysterious subjects is any less sophisticated than mine. I’m certain, for example, that someone who didn’t know me very well, who came here to church and heard me praying after the candlesharing, might initially walk away with a very different understanding of what I believe from what I REALLY believe. And at the end of the day, what does it really matter whether you understand something to be literally true, or only metaphorically true? When it comes right down to living your daily life, it’s still true on some level, isn’t it?
At the foundation of the Purpose Driven life is the notion of surrender, of committing yourself wholeheartedly to something larger than yourself. Warren recognizes the problem many American have with this concept. Surrender is for losers; it’s an admission of defeat. Yet until we become capable of giving ourselves fully to something larger than ourselves, we remain incapable of transcending our own limitations, or achieving anything larger than ourselves as well. Through surrender comes liberation, and the freedom to trust, to help (and be helped), to find a greater meaning than the mere satisfaction of our appetites until we die. We lose ourselves in order to find ourselves, and to become a part of something that is larger than ourselves. Surrender doesn’t make us less than we are now. It makes us more, because it connects us in relationship to one another, and to the powerful spirit of life which has created us all.
The five purposes can all be understood as elaborations on this basic insight. If you have a little trouble with the traditional theological language, try thinking of them as Celebration, Community, Study, Service and Affirmation. Celebration is not confined strictly to Sunday morning. According to Warren, worship is anything that “makes God smile.” He even quotes one of my favorite lines from the movie “Chariots of Fire,” when Eric Liddell explains to his sister why he is first going to compete in the Olympic Games before returning to China as a missionary. “I believe God made me for a purpose. But he also made me fast. And when I run, I feel God’s pleasure.” He also asserts something that would have been very familiar to 19th century Unitarian Transcendentalists like Theodore Parker, when he notes that “worship is a universal urge, hard-wired by God into the very fiber of our being....” Fellowship -- or the experience of being in Community -- is the recognition that we are all part of the same “family,” or what we sometimes describe as an “interdependent web of all existence.” The experience of Community is one of reciprocity: sometimes we give and sometimes we receive, sometimes we lead and sometimes we follow. We learn to participate as part of a group, a team, where together we learn to acknowlege our dependence on one another, and how to create together something greater than any one of us might have done alone. Likewise, the act of Study is not merely a process of self-improvement, it is also one of self-discovery, as we explore that part of ourselves which the scripture tells us was created “in the image of God,” and discipline ourselves to follow our best instincts, rather than our worst ones. We become disciplined learners in order to become effective teachers, assisting others in their own process of learning.
Service, or Ministry, is the fulfillment of our calling (or, in Latin, our “vocation”) as people of faith. The highest purpose in life for our 19th century Unitarian forebearers was “to be of use.” Our Puritan ancestors believed that every individual had both a general and a particular vocation: some unique and special gift or talent which God had given us which we are to use in order to make the world better, to be of service to others, and to make God smile in the process. When we seek to serve others, we expand our lives in ways that we can’t even begin to imagine or anticipate before starting down that path. Not all ministry is the responsibility of the minister. We each have a vocation to which we have been called, and through which we find fulfillment by becoming the person God intends for us to be. Or to put it another way, how do you know who you really are until you’ve discovered what you can do, and not just for yourself, but for those who need what only you can give them?
The notion of Evangelism, on the other hand, is something that many contemporary Unitarian Universalists are not especially comfortable with. So we call it something else: Community Outreach, Social Responsibility, Public Witness, Testimony, Affirmation....but the basic responsibility is still to profess our faith, to share with others as freely as we have received, rather than keeping it a secret all to ourselves. It’s true that some of us are both professors and professional Unitarian Universalists. But that doesn’t mean that everyone else should keep their mouths shut, while we do all the talking. What kind of UU church would that be? Sharing our “good news,” announcing to the world by both word and deed that we believe something of value which is worthy of wider proclamation -- this is nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to feel shy about, even if we do sometimes feel a little sensitive about the insensitive ways that others may have shared their faith with us. But we don’t need to be arrogant, and we don’t need to be defensive, when it comes to sharing with those we care about something that has been very meaningful to us. We just need to be honest, and sincere, and maybe just a little humble and a little proud, about something which potentially has the power to change both our lives and the world for the better.
I’m going to be returning to many of these same themes again and again in the weeks and months to come. But I want to leave you today with one very practical thought which I hope will make all your lives just a little better. In your participation in this church, and really in everything you do in life, I want you to choose one thing that you do just for yourself, whether it’s a class, or perhaps attending some other activity or program that you find meaningful and enjoyable; and I want you to choose one other thing to do just to be of service to someone else, or to the larger community. And try to keep them roughly in balance. And I think if you practice that one simple rule: one hand for the ship, and one hand for yourself (as the old-time sailors would have put it), you’ll find that you get a lot more out of your experience here, or whatever else you chose to participate in, than you might otherwise. So don’t be afraid to roll up your sleeves, and let your hair down, and work and play just as hard as you can. Because then you will also feel God’s pleasure flowing through you, as She smiles while watching you run....
Sunday, October 9, 2005
TIKKUN OLAM
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religous Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday October 9, 2005
READING: "Return" by Rachel Barenblat, weblogger of The Velveteen Rabbi
I've been thinking a lot this past week about last Sunday's drumming service. Whenever I meet a young person like Matt Meyer, who grew up in our movement, and who has found the courage to pursue his passion and become truly accomplished at something he truly loves, I feel proud. And like many of you, I suspect, I was also quite taken by the sensitivity and sophistication of his statement about racial privilege and cultural appropriation -- clearly this was a topic he had thought about a great deal, and I thought that his remarks both reflected that thoughtfulness, and also a genuine sense of gratitude and humility regarding the privileges he has enjoyed, and the opportunities he now has to share his gifts with others.
And the reason I feel proud is that our Unitarian Universalist faith turns out a lot of kids like Matt. In my opinion, it's one of the things that we do best, although we don't always see and appreciate it as much as perhaps we should. It's not easy either, although let's face it -- most of the credit has to go to the kids themselves. We can provide safe space (which may be physical, emotional, intellectual or spiritual); we can provide encouragement and support; we may even be able to provide a certain amount of wisdom and guidance, and a plethora of good examples (and, who knows, maybe even a few cautionary bad ones) -- but ultimately it is our young people themselves who seize the liberty our liberal faith provides, and follow their vision and their values wherever they may lead. And sometimes I know it may seem like they meander quite a bit before they find their way, but the confidence we show in them gives them confidence in themselves to go to new places where we've never been. So we have a lot to learn from our young people as well, who like young people everywhere, enjoy the privilege of seeing (and exploring and discovering) the whole world as if it were being seen (and explored and discovered) for the very first time, through fresh eyes different from yours or mine.
Matt also got me thinking about the difference between talking about the "Judeo-Christian Tradition" as opposed to the "Jewish and Christian traditions." The first phrase emphasizes the commonalities between these two great historical religions, but it also seems to imply a continuity -- implicitly suggesting that Christianity not only developed out of Judaism, but that it has also in some way superseded it. The second phrase not only acknowledges the distinctiveness of both faiths, but also potentially encompasses the particularities that exist among the various branches of the each. These distinctions may just seem like meaningless semantics, but they are potentially significant for Unitarian Universalists as we explore our own relationship to our historical forebearers. Is Unitarian Universalism a part of the Judeo-Christian tradition? Are we a Christian denomination? Christian heretics? A post-Christian faith? A return to a radical, Jewish (or for that matter, Moslem)-style monotheism? Or perhaps something entirely different altogether?
I'm not going to try to answer these questions today, mostly because I'm not really sure that there IS a right answer, much less that I know what it is. But the questions themselves do point toward a couple of interesting insights about the nature of religious faith itself. The first of these is that religious traditions are dynamic: they change and evolve over time. You may or may not think that this is a good thing, but it's still a fact: the Christianity and the Judaism of today are in many ways very different than they were 500 or 1000 years ago, never mind the even more distant days of Jesus or Moses. Obviously much has been preserved -- most of which is undoubtedly important, yet some of which is also doubtlessly trivial. But personally, I'm most intrigued by what is innovative, and represents progress. The relationship between the traditional and the progressive, between conservatives who wish to preserve the wisdom of the past, and liberals who embrace the freedom to explore the future, is likewise a dynamic one. The Protestant Reformation, for example, was about both protest and reform. Our current so-called "Culture War" is much more complicated than merely a conflict between Revolutionary Radicals who want to turn everything upside-down simply for the sake of change, and Reactionary Radicals who want to take us all back to a time that never was. Figuring out what to preserve and what to change is what makes meaningful progress possible: both in religion, and in ever other aspect of life.
The second insight hits even closer to home than the first. But for better or worse, we now live in a time when individuals are basically free to pick and choose from a variety of different religious traditions all at once. Spirituality has become a commodity; nowadays people go "shopping" for churches in much the same way they would shop for any personal service, like a gym or a school for their children. Some folks are still relatively loyal to the brand they grew up with, while others are more interested in convenience, or a certain style or the particular range of services offered; and still others are attracted by a sense of associative prestige, or perhaps the exoticism of something novel and foreign. (I suspect there are even some folks who make their decision based solely on price, although when it comes to the care and nurture of one's immortal soul, quality still seems to be the determinative factor). And of course there are many people who have decided that they can do without any sort of formal religious affiliation whatsoever. These "spiritual, but not religious" do-it-yourselfers browse among a wide variety of choices and options, selecting whatever seems to suit them at the moment, and then moving on to something new when whatever they've chosen doesn't suit them any longer. The technical name for this phenomenon is "syncretistic eclecticism" -- the belief that all religious traditions are basically the same underneath, and that individuals have the freedom to select whatever combination of values and practices seem to make most sense to them at the time.
Once again, I don't know whether this is good or bad, but it's a very real part of the world we live in. And there is a compelling logic to it. If something is "True" with a capital "T" it's going to be equally true for everyone, whether we believe in it or not. And yet, because each individual is in some way different and unique, that "Truth" is also going to impact each of our lives uniquely and in different ways. Furthermore, no single individual is possibly capable of seeing and understanding the entire Truth from every different possible perspective -- or if they are, they sure are an awfully lot smarter than I am. But more likely, they just THINK that they know it all, which makes those of us who "know that we know nothing" actually a lot smarter than them. How could any God worthy of the name possibly care what religion we are, or even whether we believe that the whole idea of "God" itself is simply something we've made up in the attempt to talk sensibly about an aspect of our experience which is ultimately beyond our ability to know and fully understand? Our beliefs about God are not really God, and yet from time immemorial human beings have experienced something that they have called by many names: "the Sacred," "the Holy," "the Divine." And that experience has the power to changes people's lives. And then through our changed lives, to change the world as well.
It's in this connection that I want to talk about the Jewish concept of Tikkun Olam, a Hebrew phrase which means Repairing or Restoring or Perfecting the World. In the Mishnah, Tikkun Olam was often used as a justification for rules or practices which are not really part of the Torah, but which are followed because they help to avoid bad social consequences. But the concept really took on a much wider significance in the 16th century, thanks to the Kabbalistic Rabbi Isaac Luria, who taught his followers that God created the world as a sort of vessel or mirror in order to reflect His Glory...but that the emanations of this Divine Light were so brilliant and powerful that the world was catastrophically shattered into countless shards, each of which contains or reflects a small portion of the divine spark, but which together (like the pieces of a shattered mirror) reflect back only a distorted image of God's original light. And so the purpose of human life is Tikkun Olam -- to Repair the World by bringing together and mending the broken pieces which are our individual souls, so that Creation might once more accurately reflect the glorious brilliance of its Creator.
And how is this done? In all the usual ways, of course: through study, meditation, and prayer, through the doing of Mitzvoth, or goods deeds, and more specifically through the faithful practice of Peace, Justice, and Compassion, not just on an individual, but on a societal level. We repair the world by repairing our relationships with one another and with God. We allow our lives to reflect the divine spark which illuminates all creation, then join together with other enlightened individuals in order to mend the breaks, bridge the gaps, and heal the wounds that divide and estrange us.
This week Jews all over the world are observing their High Holy Days, which began with Rosh Hoshana -- the Jewish New Year -- and will conclude next Thursday with Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement -- an all day fast, combined with several lengthy prayer services, which actually begins an hour before sunset on Wednesday, and will end 25 hours later with a single, long lingering note on the Shofar. Yom Kipper is a day of introspection and repentance, as well as a day of reconciliation and forgiveness -- a time to make peace not only with God, but also with your neighbors, whom you have likely also sinned against over the course of the year, and from whom you should also therefore seek forgiveness. And yet as difficult (and even painful) as this may sound, the Talmud actually considers Yom Kippur a happy day, because if people have properly observed the holiday, by the time the fast ends they will feel both a great catharsis, and also a deep sense of serenity from having been restored to right relationship with both the Creator, and with everyone they know.
The task of Atonement, and the challenge of Repairing the World, are intimately connected. We begin with the optimistic enthusiasm of youth, which believes that all things are possible for those who are faithful to their vision and their values, and in the end we turn that vision on ourselves as we explore the enduring value of a single human life. There's a story told about the Hasidic master Rebbe Chaim of Tzanz, who in his old age remarked that over the course of many decades, he had first given up his youthful ambitions to change the whole world, and then later, his bold plans to transform his community and family. He was, in the end, hoping merely to better his own self somewhat before his time to leave this earth arrived. We repair the world one person at a time, beginning with our own personal efforts to heal, to be reconciled, to forgive and be forgiven. And the only real question is:
How to make it new:
each year the same missing
of the same marks,
the same petitions
and apologies.
We were impatient, unkind.
We let ego rule the day
and forgot to be thankful.
We allowed our fears
to distance us.
But every year
the ascent through Elul
does its magic,
shakes old bitterness
from our hands and hearts.
We sit awake, itemizing
ways we want to change.
We try not to mind
that this year's list
looks just like last.
The conversation gets
easier as we limber up.
Soon we can stretch farther
than we ever imagined.
We breathe deeper.
By the time we reach the top
we've forgotten
how nervous we were
that repeating the climb
wasn't worth the work.
Creation gleams before us.
The view from here matters
not because it's different
from last year
but because we are
and the way to reach God
is one breath at a time,
one step, one word,
every second a chance
to reorient, repeat, return.
at the First Religous Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday October 9, 2005
READING: "Return" by Rachel Barenblat, weblogger of The Velveteen Rabbi
I've been thinking a lot this past week about last Sunday's drumming service. Whenever I meet a young person like Matt Meyer, who grew up in our movement, and who has found the courage to pursue his passion and become truly accomplished at something he truly loves, I feel proud. And like many of you, I suspect, I was also quite taken by the sensitivity and sophistication of his statement about racial privilege and cultural appropriation -- clearly this was a topic he had thought about a great deal, and I thought that his remarks both reflected that thoughtfulness, and also a genuine sense of gratitude and humility regarding the privileges he has enjoyed, and the opportunities he now has to share his gifts with others.
And the reason I feel proud is that our Unitarian Universalist faith turns out a lot of kids like Matt. In my opinion, it's one of the things that we do best, although we don't always see and appreciate it as much as perhaps we should. It's not easy either, although let's face it -- most of the credit has to go to the kids themselves. We can provide safe space (which may be physical, emotional, intellectual or spiritual); we can provide encouragement and support; we may even be able to provide a certain amount of wisdom and guidance, and a plethora of good examples (and, who knows, maybe even a few cautionary bad ones) -- but ultimately it is our young people themselves who seize the liberty our liberal faith provides, and follow their vision and their values wherever they may lead. And sometimes I know it may seem like they meander quite a bit before they find their way, but the confidence we show in them gives them confidence in themselves to go to new places where we've never been. So we have a lot to learn from our young people as well, who like young people everywhere, enjoy the privilege of seeing (and exploring and discovering) the whole world as if it were being seen (and explored and discovered) for the very first time, through fresh eyes different from yours or mine.
Matt also got me thinking about the difference between talking about the "Judeo-Christian Tradition" as opposed to the "Jewish and Christian traditions." The first phrase emphasizes the commonalities between these two great historical religions, but it also seems to imply a continuity -- implicitly suggesting that Christianity not only developed out of Judaism, but that it has also in some way superseded it. The second phrase not only acknowledges the distinctiveness of both faiths, but also potentially encompasses the particularities that exist among the various branches of the each. These distinctions may just seem like meaningless semantics, but they are potentially significant for Unitarian Universalists as we explore our own relationship to our historical forebearers. Is Unitarian Universalism a part of the Judeo-Christian tradition? Are we a Christian denomination? Christian heretics? A post-Christian faith? A return to a radical, Jewish (or for that matter, Moslem)-style monotheism? Or perhaps something entirely different altogether?
I'm not going to try to answer these questions today, mostly because I'm not really sure that there IS a right answer, much less that I know what it is. But the questions themselves do point toward a couple of interesting insights about the nature of religious faith itself. The first of these is that religious traditions are dynamic: they change and evolve over time. You may or may not think that this is a good thing, but it's still a fact: the Christianity and the Judaism of today are in many ways very different than they were 500 or 1000 years ago, never mind the even more distant days of Jesus or Moses. Obviously much has been preserved -- most of which is undoubtedly important, yet some of which is also doubtlessly trivial. But personally, I'm most intrigued by what is innovative, and represents progress. The relationship between the traditional and the progressive, between conservatives who wish to preserve the wisdom of the past, and liberals who embrace the freedom to explore the future, is likewise a dynamic one. The Protestant Reformation, for example, was about both protest and reform. Our current so-called "Culture War" is much more complicated than merely a conflict between Revolutionary Radicals who want to turn everything upside-down simply for the sake of change, and Reactionary Radicals who want to take us all back to a time that never was. Figuring out what to preserve and what to change is what makes meaningful progress possible: both in religion, and in ever other aspect of life.
The second insight hits even closer to home than the first. But for better or worse, we now live in a time when individuals are basically free to pick and choose from a variety of different religious traditions all at once. Spirituality has become a commodity; nowadays people go "shopping" for churches in much the same way they would shop for any personal service, like a gym or a school for their children. Some folks are still relatively loyal to the brand they grew up with, while others are more interested in convenience, or a certain style or the particular range of services offered; and still others are attracted by a sense of associative prestige, or perhaps the exoticism of something novel and foreign. (I suspect there are even some folks who make their decision based solely on price, although when it comes to the care and nurture of one's immortal soul, quality still seems to be the determinative factor). And of course there are many people who have decided that they can do without any sort of formal religious affiliation whatsoever. These "spiritual, but not religious" do-it-yourselfers browse among a wide variety of choices and options, selecting whatever seems to suit them at the moment, and then moving on to something new when whatever they've chosen doesn't suit them any longer. The technical name for this phenomenon is "syncretistic eclecticism" -- the belief that all religious traditions are basically the same underneath, and that individuals have the freedom to select whatever combination of values and practices seem to make most sense to them at the time.
Once again, I don't know whether this is good or bad, but it's a very real part of the world we live in. And there is a compelling logic to it. If something is "True" with a capital "T" it's going to be equally true for everyone, whether we believe in it or not. And yet, because each individual is in some way different and unique, that "Truth" is also going to impact each of our lives uniquely and in different ways. Furthermore, no single individual is possibly capable of seeing and understanding the entire Truth from every different possible perspective -- or if they are, they sure are an awfully lot smarter than I am. But more likely, they just THINK that they know it all, which makes those of us who "know that we know nothing" actually a lot smarter than them. How could any God worthy of the name possibly care what religion we are, or even whether we believe that the whole idea of "God" itself is simply something we've made up in the attempt to talk sensibly about an aspect of our experience which is ultimately beyond our ability to know and fully understand? Our beliefs about God are not really God, and yet from time immemorial human beings have experienced something that they have called by many names: "the Sacred," "the Holy," "the Divine." And that experience has the power to changes people's lives. And then through our changed lives, to change the world as well.
It's in this connection that I want to talk about the Jewish concept of Tikkun Olam, a Hebrew phrase which means Repairing or Restoring or Perfecting the World. In the Mishnah, Tikkun Olam was often used as a justification for rules or practices which are not really part of the Torah, but which are followed because they help to avoid bad social consequences. But the concept really took on a much wider significance in the 16th century, thanks to the Kabbalistic Rabbi Isaac Luria, who taught his followers that God created the world as a sort of vessel or mirror in order to reflect His Glory...but that the emanations of this Divine Light were so brilliant and powerful that the world was catastrophically shattered into countless shards, each of which contains or reflects a small portion of the divine spark, but which together (like the pieces of a shattered mirror) reflect back only a distorted image of God's original light. And so the purpose of human life is Tikkun Olam -- to Repair the World by bringing together and mending the broken pieces which are our individual souls, so that Creation might once more accurately reflect the glorious brilliance of its Creator.
And how is this done? In all the usual ways, of course: through study, meditation, and prayer, through the doing of Mitzvoth, or goods deeds, and more specifically through the faithful practice of Peace, Justice, and Compassion, not just on an individual, but on a societal level. We repair the world by repairing our relationships with one another and with God. We allow our lives to reflect the divine spark which illuminates all creation, then join together with other enlightened individuals in order to mend the breaks, bridge the gaps, and heal the wounds that divide and estrange us.
This week Jews all over the world are observing their High Holy Days, which began with Rosh Hoshana -- the Jewish New Year -- and will conclude next Thursday with Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement -- an all day fast, combined with several lengthy prayer services, which actually begins an hour before sunset on Wednesday, and will end 25 hours later with a single, long lingering note on the Shofar. Yom Kipper is a day of introspection and repentance, as well as a day of reconciliation and forgiveness -- a time to make peace not only with God, but also with your neighbors, whom you have likely also sinned against over the course of the year, and from whom you should also therefore seek forgiveness. And yet as difficult (and even painful) as this may sound, the Talmud actually considers Yom Kippur a happy day, because if people have properly observed the holiday, by the time the fast ends they will feel both a great catharsis, and also a deep sense of serenity from having been restored to right relationship with both the Creator, and with everyone they know.
The task of Atonement, and the challenge of Repairing the World, are intimately connected. We begin with the optimistic enthusiasm of youth, which believes that all things are possible for those who are faithful to their vision and their values, and in the end we turn that vision on ourselves as we explore the enduring value of a single human life. There's a story told about the Hasidic master Rebbe Chaim of Tzanz, who in his old age remarked that over the course of many decades, he had first given up his youthful ambitions to change the whole world, and then later, his bold plans to transform his community and family. He was, in the end, hoping merely to better his own self somewhat before his time to leave this earth arrived. We repair the world one person at a time, beginning with our own personal efforts to heal, to be reconciled, to forgive and be forgiven. And the only real question is:
How to make it new:
each year the same missing
of the same marks,
the same petitions
and apologies.
We were impatient, unkind.
We let ego rule the day
and forgot to be thankful.
We allowed our fears
to distance us.
But every year
the ascent through Elul
does its magic,
shakes old bitterness
from our hands and hearts.
We sit awake, itemizing
ways we want to change.
We try not to mind
that this year's list
looks just like last.
The conversation gets
easier as we limber up.
Soon we can stretch farther
than we ever imagined.
We breathe deeper.
By the time we reach the top
we've forgotten
how nervous we were
that repeating the climb
wasn't worth the work.
Creation gleams before us.
The view from here matters
not because it's different
from last year
but because we are
and the way to reach God
is one breath at a time,
one step, one word,
every second a chance
to reorient, repeat, return.
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