a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at The First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday March 19th, 2006
There was a small item in the news a few weeks ago which I’ve been ruminating about ever since I first saw it. But apparently more Americans (which is to say, a LOT more Americans) can name the judges on “American Idol” or the members of the cartoon “Simpsons” family, than can correctly identify the five fundamental freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment. Here are the percentages: 22% can name all five Simpsons (Bart, Lisa, Maggie, Homer and Marge) and 52% can name at least two; 25% can name all three American Idol judges, and 41% name two out of three -- but only 8% of Americans could name more than two of their First Amendment Rights, and only one in a thousand (one-tenth of one per cent -- or approximately the same percentage as there are Unitarian-Universalists in the general population) could correctly identify all five.
For my own part, I can both name all five Simpsons and all five of my First Amendment rights (although in the past I’ve often lumped the Right to Petition the Government for a Redress of Grievances right in with the Right of the People to Assemble Peaceably, since they naturally go together in my mind); but I could only identify one American Idol judge (Paula Abdul -- although I could also probably pick out the obnoxious British guy in a police line-up if I had to).
When you start to look at the actual data from this survey however, you’ll quickly discover that the situation isn’t nearly so bleak as we’ve been led to believe. Two-thirds of Americans could correctly name Freedom of Speech as a First Amendment Right (and isn’t Freedom of the Press pretty much the same thing?); while 24% could also correctly identify the Free Exercise of Religion. And on some level, what difference does it make to anyone but a lawyer (or maybe a historian) whether or not they know that the right to a jury trial is covered by the Seventh Amendment rather than the First, or if they can correctly identify the Fifth Amendment as the source of their right to avoid self-incrimination when “taking the Fifth” in front of a Cop, or a Judge, or a Congressional hearing?
The most interesting part of the survey though (at least for me) was that 21% of Americans also incorrectly believe that the First Amendment guarantees them the right to own and raise pets, and about the same percentage believe that it guarantees them the right to drive (even though the automobile wouldn’t even be invented for another century after the Bill of Rights was ratified).
We Americans cherish our Constitutional Rights, even if we aren’t always exactly sure of what they are. In many ways, the civil liberties protected by the Bill of Rights are what define us as a people, and as a nation: conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that we are all created equal, and endowed by our creator with the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; an indivisible nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all.
I may be idealistic (or maybe hopelessly naive), but I still like to believe that when it comes to the important task of protecting and defending our Constitutional freedoms, there are no Democrats or Republicans, no liberals or conservatives -- we are all liberals, we are all conservatives. The desire to preserve our God-given liberty -- even when we may not all precisely agree about what that means, even when we may not like what other people SAY it means, even when we aren’t exactly certain that we believe in the same God (or even that we believe in God at all) -- is the reason America exists in the first place: both as a nation, and as an idea.
Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, the Free Exercise of Religion (which is actually the first freedom mentioned in the First Amendment), the Right to Assemble Peaceably and to Petition the Government for the Redress of Grievances, and all of our other rights and liberties as well (including our unenumerated ninth amendment rights to own pets and drive automobiles) -- these are the freedoms that make America the envy of the world. So when we deny them to others in order to preserve them for ourselves, what kind of a nation does that make us?
We all may enjoy the right to remain silent, but that doesn’t mean that we have to use it. More than half a century ago now Martin Luther King Jr. warned us that a threat to freedom anywhere is a threat to freedom everywhere. In 1759 Benjamin Franklin observed that “they that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety,” while it was Vladimir Lenin who cynically remarked that “it is true that liberty is precious -- so precious it must be rationed.” When we discover ourselves destroying our own freedoms in order to “save” them, it really is time to take a long, hard look at where we are going, and how we got here in the first place.
Notwithstanding the First Amendment’s “wall of separation” between Church and State (another phrase that actually appears nowhere in the Constitution, but instead was coined by Thomas Jefferson to describe his views on the appropriate relationship between theology and government), American historians are well aware of the role that religion played in the formulation of American democracy. The principle of a separation of church and state was originally intended to keep churches free from government interference, rather than the other way around. Precursors of the US Constitution, such as the Mayflower Compact, were likewise modeled on Puritan church covenants, by which congregations organized themselves into local, self-governing communities of faith grounded in relationships of mutual accountability and support, united by the promise “to walk together according to God’s Holy Ordinances, insofar as they should be made clear to us in His Blessed Word of Truth” (to use language typical of these documents). Or to put it another way, the congregational polity of seventeenth-century Puritanism is the god-parent of the American ideal of political liberty, and many of the same principles of participatory democracy we now take for granted were born and nurtured in Meeting Houses just like this one all across New England.
But congregational polity also has another, outlaw step-child we don’t generally hear that much about. Three hundred years ago, the swashbuckling pirates who plundered merchant shipping throughout the Caribbean and all along the Eastern seaboard also organized their shipboard communities in a manner inspired by the familiar church covenants of Puritan congregations on both sides of the Atlantic. Having chosen to live outside the law, and as sworn enemies of both civil government and civilized society itself, they created instead a law and a society all their own, which was perhaps the most democratic, egalitarian, and ethnically pluralistic social order of its era (and perhaps of any era), notwithstanding the fact that it was also based on violence and theft of the most base and brutal sort.
According to historian Marcus Rediker, these pirate crews were formed from what one contemporary official called “the outcasts of all nations.” Convicts, debtors, vagabonds, escaped slaves and indentured servants, religious radicals and political prisoners, demobilized soldiers from Cromwell’s New Model Army and refugees from French Peasant revolts, “all men of unfortunate condition” who had either migrated or been exiled to colonial settlements “beyond the line” in the West Indies.
Escaping the brutal conditions of the New World plantations, they chose “to go upon the account” -- electing their officers and drawing up ship’s articles by which “crews allocated authority, distributed plunder, food, and other resources, and enforced discipline” (such as it was). Captains were generally granted unquestioned authority only in matters of “fighting, chasing, or being chased;” all other decisions were determined by a majority vote of the “Common Council,” who also elected a second officer unique to pirate crews, known as the Quartermaster, whose powers counterbalanced those of the Captain, and who was responsible for seeing to it that both provisions and treasure were fairly and equally distributed.
Captains were generally chosen for their personal courage, fighting skill, and knowledge of seamanship, as well as for their ability to inspire those around them to follow them into battle; while the Quartermaster was typically the most trusted individual on the ship -- a “social leader” who used his personal influence and reputation in an attempt to keep harmony as best he could among a group of heavily-armed (and often intoxicated) “masterless men,” who had little patience for even the hint of privilege or arbitrary authority.
One method that pirate crews used to minimize the danger of violence among themselves was to prohibit individuals from striking one another while aboard ship. No matter what the provocation, it simply wasn’t allowed. Instead, quarrels between shipmates were to be settled ashore with sword and pistol. “By taking such conflicts off the ship (and symbolically off the sea),” Rediker notes, “pirates promoted harmony in the crowded quarters belowdecks.” Anyone who violated this rule (or any of the other democratically-determined rules governing shipboard behavior) would be made “Governor of an Island” -- marooned alone on a deserted spit of sand, with only a flask of water and a pistol containing a single charge.
Yet eighteenth-century pirates also invented the world’s first Workers Compensation system. In sharp contrast to the harsh punishment reserved for those pirates who were chronically transgressive and disruptive, Ship’s Articles typically spelled out in very precise terms exactly how much was to be paid for every injury suffered by a pirate who was wounded in the exercise of their duty. One of my very favorite cartoons is of a pirate with an eye patch, a peg leg, and a hook for a hand saying to a shipmate “I’ve got half a mind to retire.” But for the real-life Pirates of the Caribbean, each of those injuries would have been worth a specific monetary stipend, paid out by the Quartermaster right off the top before any other distributions of treasure were made.
This rudimentary social welfare system helped to reinforce crew solidarity, and contributed to the sense of shared risk and shared reward so essential to the egalitarian pirate social order. Pirates were partners “who valued and respected the skills of their comrades,” and who recognized that they were engaged in very hazardous work which required both loyalty and cooperation if they were to succeed and survive. Knowing they would be provided for if luck turned against them made it that much easier for individual pirates to face those risks, and to share the inherent dangers of their profession equally with their shipmates.
Of course, this so-called “Golden Age of Piracy” truly was a Hobbsean world where life by its very nature tended to be nasty, brutish, and short -- a perpetual war of all against all, in which the strong and the powerful routinely took from the weak and the helpless at every opportunity, regardless of which side of the law they were on. Within the world’s first emerging global economy, piracy in many ways represented a rebellion of the human spirit against the oppressively overpowering forces of mercantile capitalism, which reduced human labor to a fungible commodity to be used up and then discarded in the relentless quest for ever greater profits.
Dressed in flamboyant clothing and exhibiting a “devil may care” attitude, pirates were often as greatly admired and romanticized as “social bandits” by the members of the laboring classes from which they had come as they were despised and feared by the wealthy merchants and ship captains they preyed upon. Their brief, violent lives of libertine indulgence, which ended more often than not at the end of a rope or at the bottom of Davey Jones’ locker, was the stuff of both legend and popular ballad -- a reputation which they have maintained down to this day thanks to actors like Errol Flynn and Johnny Depp, and writers ranging from Daniel Defoe to Howard Pyle.
Yet these fanciful images of swashbucklers, freebooters, and buccaneers tends to diminish our recognition that pirates were also real men (and in some cases, women) who desperately yearned for a freedom they felt had been denied them, and who seized that freedom in the only way available to them. And like the Pilgrims who crossed that same Atlantic ocean in search of religious freedom in the New World, and the Revolutionary Patriots descended from them, who fought a war and founded a new nation in order to secure the blessings of liberty to themselves and their posterity, these pirates drew their strength and support from the covenant they formed with one another, and to which they pledged, such as it was, their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor....
Sunday, March 19, 2006
Sunday, March 12, 2006
Living By Mission
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at The First Religious Society in Carlisle Massachusetts
Sunday March 12th, 2006
OPENING WORDS by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
I stepped from Plank to Plank
A slow and cautious way
The Stars about my Head I felt
About my Feet the Sea.
I knew not but the next
Would be my final inch--
This gave me that precarious Gait
Some call Experience.
READING: “IF” by Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream--and not make dreams your master,
If you can think--and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings--nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And--which is more--you'll be a Man, my son!
****
For some reason all this past week I’ve been thinking about a Saint Patrick’s Day not so many years ago when my kids thought it would be “clever Ha-Ha funny” to dye the dog florescent green. I use the word “kids” somewhat guardedly, since they were both in their twenties and old enough to know better. Stephenie was home from college for Spring Break, and Jacob had flown up from California with his girlfriend, Shelly, just to see his sister and help celebrate his mom’s birthday, which was only a couple of weeks away. Parker was still a puppy, and the apple of both Margie’s and my eyes -- the adorable little “infant” we had never been able to have together, and a tangible focus for the nurturing love of two middle-aged “empty nesters” trying to adjust to the surprisingly difficult challenge of being a couple rather than a family.
I honestly to this day don’t know what the kids were thinking. Or maybe they weren’t thinking. Surely you’ve heard the old adage: one kid, one brain; two kids, half-a-brain; three kids, no brains. My father certainly said it often enough to me, and maybe I should have repeated it more often to my kids, since this may well have been one of those situations. When Margie and I woke up the following morning, there was little Parker at the foot of our bed, frantically wagging her tail and appearing only slightly traumatized, but apparently with no real idea whatsoever of just how ridiculous she looked, which made her even more pathetic than she was already.
For my own part, I could appreciate the attempted humor of the situation; but I was afraid to show any sign of my amusement, because Margie was furious. Furious, and outraged. Not only was she ashamed of how ridiculous SHE was going to appear walking a florescent green dog around our neighborhood; but after three or four attempts to wash the dye out, Parker started hiding under the bed every time she saw Margie coming or heard the water running, which only added to the humiliating indignity of the offense. Margie decided that it wasn’t enough that the kids understood that what they had done was wrong. They also needed to FEEL bad about it. In short, Margie decided that she wouldn’t be satisfied until she had made both kids cry, and it became her mission to make certain that it happened.
Stephenie was a pushover. To this day Steph swears that she wasn’t even the culprit; that it was all Jake and Shelly’s idea, and she was merely an innocent bystander who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. This apology by itself would have doubtlessly been enough to earn her absolution from the minister of the family, but Margie is a trial lawyer who doesn’t place much stock in such feeble alibis. About twenty minutes of “what could I have POSSIBLY said or done as a parent to make you think that treating a small, helpless animal this way was in ANY way acceptable” and Steph was sobbing tears of remorse, and ready not only to make a sincere act of contrition, but also to join with her mother in exacting some sort of horrible vengeance on her brother and his girlfriend for getting her into this mess in the first place.
Jacob was a much harder case. Not only is Jacob a boy, and therefore socialized by popular culture not to pay any attention to his personal feelings or let them in any way interfere with his doing whatever it is that needs to be done, but Jacob and Shelly had also already left the scene of the crime and fled the jurisdiction, crossed state lines and returned home to California, forcing Margie to pursue her objective entirely by long distance telephone. For over a week she phoned him several times a day, and often late at night as well, just to let him know that the dog was still green and how upset she still was about it. And then suddenly she stopped phoning, and instead returned home one evening with the satisfied look of someone who has just crossed something important off of her “To Do” list. And of course Jacob and I, both being boys, have never spoken since of the incident.
And then it was my turn. Apparently I had not been quite as supportive of this mission of emotional retribution as my now former wife thought I ought to have been, and therefore needed to be taught my own lesson in emotional sensitivity as well. But fortunately at this point fate intervened in the form of Margie’s legal assistant, who borrowed the photo of Parker Margie kept on her desk, scanned it and photo-shopped it, then installed it on Margie’s computer as a screensaver which changed color every time the screen refreshed. And with this, Margie was finally able to appreciate the underlying humor of the situation (or at least see that she was in danger of appearing a little ridiculous herself), and so even though she was still angry (and the dog stayed green for months), I was off the hook, at least for the moment.
Now I realize that most of you know Parker, and some of you may even have met Jacob and Stephenie, but so far as I know, none of you have ever met Margie; so just let me say in her defense that she’s not nearly so obsessively driven and vindictive as I’ve probably made her sound, and (as you might imagine) she is a fantastic lawyer, and she and I are still pretty close friends, and she knows that I was planning to use this story as a sermon illustration this week and even helped me recall some of the key details. And the point of this whole story (if I can boil it down to a single sentence) is that Not all Missions are Created Equal.
It’s good to have a purpose in life, something that gives us focus and meaning, and helps us to achieve the things we feel are important. But often HOW we choose that mission is just as important as successfully carrying it out. A worthwhile mission encompasses values and principles, and not just a purpose. It identifies real needs and recognizes them as opportunities, builds upon our existing strengths, and reinforces our commitment to something larger than ourselves. And sometimes the most worthwhile missions of all are the ones that will never be completely accomplished.
When I first started thinking about this topic I came up with a slogan I thought I’d share with you. “Mission: it’s not just for Missionaries (or the Marine Corps) any more.” Or perhaps you might prefer the same insight in the form of a riddle: What do Mormons and Navy Seals have in common? Some years ago I read a provocative article by a well-known church consultant which described several dozen similarities between ordained clergy and commissioned military officers. Among these, both occupations can be recognized by their distinctive clothing, which sets them apart from the general population; both attend specialized schools administered by members of their own profession; both generally experience multiple, firsthand encounters with death much earlier in life than the majority of their peers, and are often expected to serve overseas and to put the needs of the organization ahead of their own personal ambitions and preferences, or even their own comfort and safety. And for both the Warrior and the Priest, the Mission Comes First.
Missionaries are individuals who have deliberately and self-consciously chosen to devote some portion of their lives to spreading their religious message to people who would otherwise never hear it at all; and even though they often get a bad rap from folks who DON’T necessarily share those beliefs, the commitment exhibited by missionaries in general is certainly remarkable. And like soldiers, even today missionaries sometimes end up sacrificing their own lives in the attempt to fulfill their mission.
The word “mission” (like so many of the words I’ve been talking about lately) comes from a Latin root, missio, which means “a sending away.” It’s the same root as the word “missile” (which is basically a weapon that is launched toward its target from a distance) and also “missive” meaning a letter which one sends in order to communicate important information to someone far away. So not only are there religious missions and combat missions, but also diplomatic missions, trade missions, and all of the other activities for which “emissaries” are “sent away” in order to accomplish. An embassy is a form of mission, and an ambassador simply a missionary in more formal attire, who represents a government rather than a church.
One of the reasons that the missionaries of bygone days have such a bad reputation in our present time is that they were not especially diplomatic when it came to spreading the Word of God. They expected the heathen savages to conform to the standards of Christian civilization, and made little effort to adapt their message to the people they hoped to “convert.” On the other hand, the most successful missionaries were the ones who made the effort and took the time to understand the people they hoped to serve, and were often profoundly influenced by them in return.
Of course nowadays the idea of mission is everywhere, and every organization from the largest multinational corporation to individual human beings have their own “mission statements.” How many of you have every attended a meeting, or a workshop, or a retreat, or served on a committee or task force, where developing a “Mission Statement” was the principal task on the agenda? I’m a great believer in the importance of this sort of activity, but I’m also afraid that over the years I’ve gotten a little cynical about it. The problem with many mission statements is that the work seems to end once the statement is completed, when that ought to be when the work really begins. If the mission of the organization is merely to revise its mission statement every once in awhile, what’s the benefit of that?
Furthermore, at least in the business world, the underlying mission of developing a mission statement has more to do with increasing profitability than it does with spreading a prophetic message of hope and salvation (unless, of course, you happen to see increased profits AS the source of your hope and salvation, which I suppose in some respects is a perfectly reasonable thing to do). But the notion of personal sacrifice, and that the mission comes first, can become profoundly exploitive when the mission itself is merely material profit rather than spiritual witness. The question of who sacrifices and who benefits from that sacrifice is of critical importance. Matthew’s Gospel cautions us to beware of false prophets, who come in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous as wolves, and advises “by their fruits shall ye know them.” Living by Mission means valuing sacrifice in the original sense of the word, as something made sacred by being offered to God, rather than cheapened in the pursuit of some mundane objective.
Of course nowadays even religious organizations are encouraged, and indeed often encourage themselves, to understand their Mission in terms of numerical growth. In many ways numerical growth is a terrific mission because it’s so easy to set objective (if often arbitrary) goals, and then to measure one’s tangible progress against them, which leads to either a palpable sense of achievement and accomplishment, or perhaps at times frustration and disappointment, depending on how “well” you see yourself doing at the time.
And yet, there is also a price to be paid for equating numerical growth with the mission of the church, a price which is often invisible until the bills start to show up, and everyone starts glancing around waiting for someone else to reach for their wallet. Growth requires change, which means learning to do things differently: changed habits, changed attitudes, the loss of comfortable, familiar routines and the ever-increasing presence of new and unfamiliar strangers who have different assumptions, and often different objectives as well, or who may simply like to do things differently than the way they’ve always been done before. Church growth typically requires increased financial expenditures as well, as the costs of new activities and expanded program gradually filter back into the system. The expectation that somehow the newcomers will pay these increased costs themselves is terribly naive. Membership growth is above all else an act of hospitality; nobody invites their neighbors to a party and then sticks them with the check.
So I’ve started to look at the mission of “growing the church” in a slightly different way. I believe in the growth of Wisdom; growth in Understanding of both ourselves and others, as well as the growth of Compassion, the growth of Generosity, of Gratitude and Forgiveness and Humility and Trust and all of the other virtues associated with a spiritually rich and authentically optimistic life. I also believe in growing the ability of a congregation to serve the needs of its members and the surrounding community. Growth in Leadership, growth in Stewardship, growth in Fellowship, and the ability to Communicate and to Cooperate with one another, to dream big dreams and then work together to carry them out.
And here’s the trick: if a congregation learns how to do all these things well, it will also grow in size; and continue to grow and grow and grow until it reaches its natural plateau, wherever that may be. To approach growth in any other way is to put the cart before the horse, and practically a guarantee that nothing important will never really change
I’ve also started to wonder lately about whether the entire traditional understanding of Mission isn’t hopelessly combative and “heroic,” and in a deeply gendered way; which is to say that it is far too dependent upon a culturally-conditioned understanding of service and commitment and sacrifice which encourages both men and women to suffer in silence, and to keep their personal feelings out of it, and instead stoically accept without complaint whatever fate and circumstance may cast upon them as the burden of their faithfulness. So I want to contrast the reckless “pitch and toss” of Kipling’s “If” with Emily Dickenson’s “slow and cautious way,” and ask whether it isn’t just as noble to be a faithful missionary of the word in an upstairs room in Amherst as it is to serve as an emissary of Empire on the Indian subcontinent.
And I also wonder whether my former wife wasn’t really on to something when she realized that it was important that Jacob and Stephenie really FEEL bad about what they had done wrong when they dyed our beloved little dog green, just as they should feel GOOD whenever they did something right, rather than simply being expected to “know” it without needing to be told.
Living by Mission is not only about selfless service to a higher purpose. Living by Mission is about passionate sacrifice -- a passion which suffers, and yet is redeemed by that suffering, because it cares so strongly and feels so deeply about the importance of its mission that it is able to endure pain and disappointment, not in stoic silence, but with an agonizing cry of ecstatic suffering which transcends the limits of both tears and fears, and embraces a mission which (dare I say it?) boldly goes where no man has gone before....
And yet even as I say this, I also wonder whether the most important characteristic of Living by Mission is simply the ability to let go of the past (and all the old grudges and assumptions that go with it), to embrace the change we hope to see, and above all else, to listen and learn from one another, and to laugh at ourselves and the foolishness we all share, when we dream of a world made sacred by our sacrifice.
at The First Religious Society in Carlisle Massachusetts
Sunday March 12th, 2006
OPENING WORDS by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
I stepped from Plank to Plank
A slow and cautious way
The Stars about my Head I felt
About my Feet the Sea.
I knew not but the next
Would be my final inch--
This gave me that precarious Gait
Some call Experience.
READING: “IF” by Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream--and not make dreams your master,
If you can think--and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings--nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And--which is more--you'll be a Man, my son!
****
For some reason all this past week I’ve been thinking about a Saint Patrick’s Day not so many years ago when my kids thought it would be “clever Ha-Ha funny” to dye the dog florescent green. I use the word “kids” somewhat guardedly, since they were both in their twenties and old enough to know better. Stephenie was home from college for Spring Break, and Jacob had flown up from California with his girlfriend, Shelly, just to see his sister and help celebrate his mom’s birthday, which was only a couple of weeks away. Parker was still a puppy, and the apple of both Margie’s and my eyes -- the adorable little “infant” we had never been able to have together, and a tangible focus for the nurturing love of two middle-aged “empty nesters” trying to adjust to the surprisingly difficult challenge of being a couple rather than a family.
I honestly to this day don’t know what the kids were thinking. Or maybe they weren’t thinking. Surely you’ve heard the old adage: one kid, one brain; two kids, half-a-brain; three kids, no brains. My father certainly said it often enough to me, and maybe I should have repeated it more often to my kids, since this may well have been one of those situations. When Margie and I woke up the following morning, there was little Parker at the foot of our bed, frantically wagging her tail and appearing only slightly traumatized, but apparently with no real idea whatsoever of just how ridiculous she looked, which made her even more pathetic than she was already.
For my own part, I could appreciate the attempted humor of the situation; but I was afraid to show any sign of my amusement, because Margie was furious. Furious, and outraged. Not only was she ashamed of how ridiculous SHE was going to appear walking a florescent green dog around our neighborhood; but after three or four attempts to wash the dye out, Parker started hiding under the bed every time she saw Margie coming or heard the water running, which only added to the humiliating indignity of the offense. Margie decided that it wasn’t enough that the kids understood that what they had done was wrong. They also needed to FEEL bad about it. In short, Margie decided that she wouldn’t be satisfied until she had made both kids cry, and it became her mission to make certain that it happened.
Stephenie was a pushover. To this day Steph swears that she wasn’t even the culprit; that it was all Jake and Shelly’s idea, and she was merely an innocent bystander who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. This apology by itself would have doubtlessly been enough to earn her absolution from the minister of the family, but Margie is a trial lawyer who doesn’t place much stock in such feeble alibis. About twenty minutes of “what could I have POSSIBLY said or done as a parent to make you think that treating a small, helpless animal this way was in ANY way acceptable” and Steph was sobbing tears of remorse, and ready not only to make a sincere act of contrition, but also to join with her mother in exacting some sort of horrible vengeance on her brother and his girlfriend for getting her into this mess in the first place.
Jacob was a much harder case. Not only is Jacob a boy, and therefore socialized by popular culture not to pay any attention to his personal feelings or let them in any way interfere with his doing whatever it is that needs to be done, but Jacob and Shelly had also already left the scene of the crime and fled the jurisdiction, crossed state lines and returned home to California, forcing Margie to pursue her objective entirely by long distance telephone. For over a week she phoned him several times a day, and often late at night as well, just to let him know that the dog was still green and how upset she still was about it. And then suddenly she stopped phoning, and instead returned home one evening with the satisfied look of someone who has just crossed something important off of her “To Do” list. And of course Jacob and I, both being boys, have never spoken since of the incident.
And then it was my turn. Apparently I had not been quite as supportive of this mission of emotional retribution as my now former wife thought I ought to have been, and therefore needed to be taught my own lesson in emotional sensitivity as well. But fortunately at this point fate intervened in the form of Margie’s legal assistant, who borrowed the photo of Parker Margie kept on her desk, scanned it and photo-shopped it, then installed it on Margie’s computer as a screensaver which changed color every time the screen refreshed. And with this, Margie was finally able to appreciate the underlying humor of the situation (or at least see that she was in danger of appearing a little ridiculous herself), and so even though she was still angry (and the dog stayed green for months), I was off the hook, at least for the moment.
Now I realize that most of you know Parker, and some of you may even have met Jacob and Stephenie, but so far as I know, none of you have ever met Margie; so just let me say in her defense that she’s not nearly so obsessively driven and vindictive as I’ve probably made her sound, and (as you might imagine) she is a fantastic lawyer, and she and I are still pretty close friends, and she knows that I was planning to use this story as a sermon illustration this week and even helped me recall some of the key details. And the point of this whole story (if I can boil it down to a single sentence) is that Not all Missions are Created Equal.
It’s good to have a purpose in life, something that gives us focus and meaning, and helps us to achieve the things we feel are important. But often HOW we choose that mission is just as important as successfully carrying it out. A worthwhile mission encompasses values and principles, and not just a purpose. It identifies real needs and recognizes them as opportunities, builds upon our existing strengths, and reinforces our commitment to something larger than ourselves. And sometimes the most worthwhile missions of all are the ones that will never be completely accomplished.
When I first started thinking about this topic I came up with a slogan I thought I’d share with you. “Mission: it’s not just for Missionaries (or the Marine Corps) any more.” Or perhaps you might prefer the same insight in the form of a riddle: What do Mormons and Navy Seals have in common? Some years ago I read a provocative article by a well-known church consultant which described several dozen similarities between ordained clergy and commissioned military officers. Among these, both occupations can be recognized by their distinctive clothing, which sets them apart from the general population; both attend specialized schools administered by members of their own profession; both generally experience multiple, firsthand encounters with death much earlier in life than the majority of their peers, and are often expected to serve overseas and to put the needs of the organization ahead of their own personal ambitions and preferences, or even their own comfort and safety. And for both the Warrior and the Priest, the Mission Comes First.
Missionaries are individuals who have deliberately and self-consciously chosen to devote some portion of their lives to spreading their religious message to people who would otherwise never hear it at all; and even though they often get a bad rap from folks who DON’T necessarily share those beliefs, the commitment exhibited by missionaries in general is certainly remarkable. And like soldiers, even today missionaries sometimes end up sacrificing their own lives in the attempt to fulfill their mission.
The word “mission” (like so many of the words I’ve been talking about lately) comes from a Latin root, missio, which means “a sending away.” It’s the same root as the word “missile” (which is basically a weapon that is launched toward its target from a distance) and also “missive” meaning a letter which one sends in order to communicate important information to someone far away. So not only are there religious missions and combat missions, but also diplomatic missions, trade missions, and all of the other activities for which “emissaries” are “sent away” in order to accomplish. An embassy is a form of mission, and an ambassador simply a missionary in more formal attire, who represents a government rather than a church.
One of the reasons that the missionaries of bygone days have such a bad reputation in our present time is that they were not especially diplomatic when it came to spreading the Word of God. They expected the heathen savages to conform to the standards of Christian civilization, and made little effort to adapt their message to the people they hoped to “convert.” On the other hand, the most successful missionaries were the ones who made the effort and took the time to understand the people they hoped to serve, and were often profoundly influenced by them in return.
Of course nowadays the idea of mission is everywhere, and every organization from the largest multinational corporation to individual human beings have their own “mission statements.” How many of you have every attended a meeting, or a workshop, or a retreat, or served on a committee or task force, where developing a “Mission Statement” was the principal task on the agenda? I’m a great believer in the importance of this sort of activity, but I’m also afraid that over the years I’ve gotten a little cynical about it. The problem with many mission statements is that the work seems to end once the statement is completed, when that ought to be when the work really begins. If the mission of the organization is merely to revise its mission statement every once in awhile, what’s the benefit of that?
Furthermore, at least in the business world, the underlying mission of developing a mission statement has more to do with increasing profitability than it does with spreading a prophetic message of hope and salvation (unless, of course, you happen to see increased profits AS the source of your hope and salvation, which I suppose in some respects is a perfectly reasonable thing to do). But the notion of personal sacrifice, and that the mission comes first, can become profoundly exploitive when the mission itself is merely material profit rather than spiritual witness. The question of who sacrifices and who benefits from that sacrifice is of critical importance. Matthew’s Gospel cautions us to beware of false prophets, who come in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous as wolves, and advises “by their fruits shall ye know them.” Living by Mission means valuing sacrifice in the original sense of the word, as something made sacred by being offered to God, rather than cheapened in the pursuit of some mundane objective.
Of course nowadays even religious organizations are encouraged, and indeed often encourage themselves, to understand their Mission in terms of numerical growth. In many ways numerical growth is a terrific mission because it’s so easy to set objective (if often arbitrary) goals, and then to measure one’s tangible progress against them, which leads to either a palpable sense of achievement and accomplishment, or perhaps at times frustration and disappointment, depending on how “well” you see yourself doing at the time.
And yet, there is also a price to be paid for equating numerical growth with the mission of the church, a price which is often invisible until the bills start to show up, and everyone starts glancing around waiting for someone else to reach for their wallet. Growth requires change, which means learning to do things differently: changed habits, changed attitudes, the loss of comfortable, familiar routines and the ever-increasing presence of new and unfamiliar strangers who have different assumptions, and often different objectives as well, or who may simply like to do things differently than the way they’ve always been done before. Church growth typically requires increased financial expenditures as well, as the costs of new activities and expanded program gradually filter back into the system. The expectation that somehow the newcomers will pay these increased costs themselves is terribly naive. Membership growth is above all else an act of hospitality; nobody invites their neighbors to a party and then sticks them with the check.
So I’ve started to look at the mission of “growing the church” in a slightly different way. I believe in the growth of Wisdom; growth in Understanding of both ourselves and others, as well as the growth of Compassion, the growth of Generosity, of Gratitude and Forgiveness and Humility and Trust and all of the other virtues associated with a spiritually rich and authentically optimistic life. I also believe in growing the ability of a congregation to serve the needs of its members and the surrounding community. Growth in Leadership, growth in Stewardship, growth in Fellowship, and the ability to Communicate and to Cooperate with one another, to dream big dreams and then work together to carry them out.
And here’s the trick: if a congregation learns how to do all these things well, it will also grow in size; and continue to grow and grow and grow until it reaches its natural plateau, wherever that may be. To approach growth in any other way is to put the cart before the horse, and practically a guarantee that nothing important will never really change
I’ve also started to wonder lately about whether the entire traditional understanding of Mission isn’t hopelessly combative and “heroic,” and in a deeply gendered way; which is to say that it is far too dependent upon a culturally-conditioned understanding of service and commitment and sacrifice which encourages both men and women to suffer in silence, and to keep their personal feelings out of it, and instead stoically accept without complaint whatever fate and circumstance may cast upon them as the burden of their faithfulness. So I want to contrast the reckless “pitch and toss” of Kipling’s “If” with Emily Dickenson’s “slow and cautious way,” and ask whether it isn’t just as noble to be a faithful missionary of the word in an upstairs room in Amherst as it is to serve as an emissary of Empire on the Indian subcontinent.
And I also wonder whether my former wife wasn’t really on to something when she realized that it was important that Jacob and Stephenie really FEEL bad about what they had done wrong when they dyed our beloved little dog green, just as they should feel GOOD whenever they did something right, rather than simply being expected to “know” it without needing to be told.
Living by Mission is not only about selfless service to a higher purpose. Living by Mission is about passionate sacrifice -- a passion which suffers, and yet is redeemed by that suffering, because it cares so strongly and feels so deeply about the importance of its mission that it is able to endure pain and disappointment, not in stoic silence, but with an agonizing cry of ecstatic suffering which transcends the limits of both tears and fears, and embraces a mission which (dare I say it?) boldly goes where no man has gone before....
And yet even as I say this, I also wonder whether the most important characteristic of Living by Mission is simply the ability to let go of the past (and all the old grudges and assumptions that go with it), to embrace the change we hope to see, and above all else, to listen and learn from one another, and to laugh at ourselves and the foolishness we all share, when we dream of a world made sacred by our sacrifice.
Sunday, March 5, 2006
The Divine Profession of Living
A sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at The First Religious Society in Carlisle Massachusetts
Sunday March 5th, 2006
OPENING WORDS: “Our experience is not what happens to us, but what we make of what happens to us.”
-- Aldous Huxley
READING: THE SUMMER DAY by Mary Oliver
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean --
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down --
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
***
A minister was out shopping for groceries when he ran into one of his parishioners in the supermarket check-out line.
“How come I never see you in church anymore?” the minister asked.
“Well Pastor,” came the reply, “there are so many sanctimonious, self-righteous hypocrites in that congregation, I just don’t feel comfortable there.”
The minister thought about this for a moment, and then responded: “Don’t worry. I’m sure we can always find room for one more.”
Today is the first Sunday in Lent, which in the traditional Christian liturgical calendar is the forty-day period (excluding Sundays) between Ash Wednesday and Maundy Thursday: a time when (in olden days at least) folks had pretty much eaten through most of their winter supplies, and therefore conveniently observed a season of fasting and repentance in anticipation of Easter. These forty days are said to correspond to the forty days which Scripture tells us Jesus spent fasting in the wilderness following his baptism in the River Jordan, which were (as you may recall) a time of temptation and trial, during which Jesus himself questioned the veracity of the call he had heard from God, and also explored how he might most appropriately and authentically respond to that call.
Seen in this context, Lent can best be understood as an annual opportunity to do a little soul-searching: a fruitful and powerful season of doubt and discernment, followed by a renewed affirmation and commitment to a disciplined life of faith. This is the season when converts to Christianity traditionally studied the tenets of their new faith, in preparation for their baptism and first communion during Holy Week. And it is also a tradition typically NOT observed by Universalists, Unitarians, and the various other theological descendants of the Radical Reformation: Puritans, Pietists, Anabaptists, Mennonites, Quakers, Shakers, Dunkers, Hutterites, the Old Order Amish, and a host of other small Christian sects too numerous to enumerate here.
Yet the spirit of Lent -- a season of uncertainty, temptation and renewal; a journey which begins with doubt and travels through regions of discernment and affirmation to a place of deep commitment -- is something I suspect many contemporary Unitarian Universalists would find quite congenial. Lent is not about giving something up. It’s about taking something on: something new and perhaps a little challenging, which may even initially tempt you to doubt yourself and your own abilities, but leads you to a place of better and deeper understanding, and more meaningful activity.
This is also the conclusion of this informal little series of sermons I’ve been preaching inspired by the words of the Theodore Parker benediction (number 683 in the hymnbook, if you want to look it up) that I use each Sunday to conclude our service. I use the word “series” somewhat loosely, since it’s really just been kind of a vehicle for me to talk about some of the basic ideas of a liberal religious faith, and you don’t really need to have heard any of the others in order to enjoy the rest. But they are all posted now on the church website (as is every other sermon I’ve ever preached here, thanks to the dilligent work of our webmaster, Bob Luoma), just in case anyone wants to do a little homework and review. And today I want to try to wrap everything up in a tidy little package, by talking about Parker’s idea that our “profession of faith” is “divine living.”
When I hear this phrase, there are three closely-related questions that immediately occur to me. First, what does it really mean to make a “profession” of faith? Second, what does it mean to live “divinely?” And then finally, to look at these same two questions from a slightly different perspective, how do we make divine living not just our vocation, but our “profession” -- and what, if anything, is the difference?
Let’s start with this last. Nowadays when we use the words profession and vocation we are typically talking about our jobs: our occupations or careers. A professional is typically anybody who does something specialized for money -- it could be a professional athlete, or a member of the world’s “oldest profession;” you can be a professional hairdresser, a professional dogsitter, a professional teacher, actor, engineer, accountant, musician, soldier, journalist...whatever you like, really. There is still some notion of advanced education (or at least a certain degree of excellence and expertise), as well as a vestige of the ideal of disinterested service to others (which we sometimes call “professionalism”), but the idea that there are basically only three “learned” professions: law, medicine, and the ministry, is pretty much a thing of the past. We are all professionals now, provided that our performance rises to a certain level of competence, and we are able to make an honest living (or at least get paid) for doing whatever it is we do.
The word vocation is likewise basically just a synonym for profession, but with slightly different connotations. One attends a vocational school to learn how to build a house or repair a car engine, not how to try a lawsuit or perform open heart surgery. It is a “technical” education, which creates “technicians” skilled in the techniques of their craft or trade, rather than “experts” who “practice” for a living. And yet nowadays these differences are mostly superficial. Auto mechanics need to be able to diagnose a problem before they can repair it, while the technical skill required of a surgeon (which is perhaps not the best example, since in the olden days surgery was simply considered a sideline for barbers, who already had razor-sharp cutting instruments close at hand anyway) is certainly as great as that of any other occupation I can think of.
Old distinctions between blue collar and white collar and pink collar; between manual labor, knowledge workers, and the service industries, are all passing away. And yet, within this “new economy” -- where we are ALL professionals, where we are all service workers, and where we are all self-employed -- we are also all in danger of being reduced to our skills and our occupations: no longer real people, but personal “brands” which we “market” in order to sell our “services” to the highest bidder.
And the irony, of course, is that both the words “vocation” and “profession” are originally religious in meaning. The term Vocation (as I know some of you have heard me say many times before) means “calling” -- specifically, a call from God to serve a Divine Purpose. Our faith tradition teaches that human beings have both a general and a specific vocation: the first a call to be good, honest, and faithful souls; the second a challenge to discern and act upon our own unique gifts and skills for service.
The word Profession means literally “to speak in front of” -- or, more precisely, to make a vow in front of witnesses, or before the altar of God. You might contrast it with the word “confession,” which means to admit something to someone else. A person who professes something is not really a professional, but rather a Professor; a professional is actually someone who practices what the professor preaches. The three original “learned professions” were all considered such because they required a knowledge of ancient languages (Latin for the Law; Latin and Greek for Medicine; and Latin, Greek and Hebrew for the Ministry): a knowledge which could only be acquired by attending University and listening to the lectures of the professors there. But once you had learned how to read the books yourself, you were basically on your own, (which is where we get the notion that professionals “practice”). And of course, in the olden days, the practitioners of these professions were all basically clergy, since the church held a monopoly on education, and its professors were first and foremost Doctors of Theology (or perhaps Philosophy), who were qualified by virtue of their scholarship to profess religious doctrine.
Now I realize this may all seem a little arcane and perhaps even of questionable relevance, which is why we have to talk about it on a Sunday morning rather than Monday through Friday from 9 to 5 (or, in the case of some professions, from four or five in the morning to nearly midnight). We are all so busy figuring out how to make a living that it’s easy to forget we also have a life, and that there’s more to life than coming out ahead everyone else in our attempt to make a killing. To quote Mother Theresa (or was it Billy Graham?): “God does not call us to be successful; God calls us to be faithful” -- to Trust that we can choose to do the right thing, and that we will eventually be happy that we did. And this is what I think Theodore Parker was talking about when he talked about “divine living” -- about making a choice to commit your life to a slightly different set of values than the values dictated by the marketplace, and to trust that your decision will prove worthwhile in the end.
I know for my own part, when I was a kid growing up in Seattle, becoming a minister wasn’t exactly at the top of the list of things I saw myself doing when I became an adult. In fact, I don’t think it was even ON the list. Cowboy, Firefighter, Astronaut, Pirate...these were the sorts of avocations I imagined for myself when I was finally big enough to do whatever I wanted. Later on, as I got a little older, my range of potential occupations expanded a little: writer, TV star, professional athlete. But the only real grown-ups I ever actually observed working for a living were my teachers, and people like the barber where my grandfather took me to get my hair cut on Saturdays, or the guys who bagged my mother’s groceries at the supermarket. Teaching didn’t seem like such a bad way to make a living...even if it did mean that you had to go to school every day. But then it occurred to me that the school librarian had an even better job, checking out all those books about cowboys, and firefighters, and astronauts, and pirates.
I suppose if I hadn’t had my nose in a book all the time, I might have noticed a lot of other potential vocations and professions which were all around me, even when I was a kid: plumbers, carpenters, and electricians, doctors and dentists, bus drivers, cooks, mail carriers, retail clerks, plus all the guys dressed like my dad in suits and ties and carrying briefcases. But I was pretty sure I didn’t want to do what my dad did for a living. He was always traveling, hardly ever at home; and when he was home, I could see the stress in his eyes, and feel how tired he was from the constant pressure to perform, perform, perform. This contrast became even more obvious on those rare occasions when he really was able to get away from his job, to stop thinking about his next sale and take us sailing instead, or show us how to fly a kite, or bake the salmon we’d bought from the Indians after failing to catch any ourselves.
My father had wanted to be a physician, and served three years in the army just to be able to go to college, but by the time he graduated from the University of Washington he had a wife and two young children to support, so he went to work as a pharmaceutical sales rep instead. The more successful he became in his career, the less he was able to enjoy the rewards of his success. It’s a pretty common story, really. I’m sure it resonates with many of you as well. My dad’s hard work provided my brothers and me with a lot of advantages and opportunities in life, but it also deprived us of something that was doubtlessly even more valuable.
And then there was the pressure my brothers and I felt to become successful, high achievers ourselves. To “fulfill our potential.” I knew I wasn’t smart enough to be a physician, and I was pretty sure I wasn’t mean enough to succeed as an attorney, but I thought I might just have a big enough mouth to become a fairly decent preacher, assuming I could also find somewhere within me the kindness, the compassion, the courage, the humility, the curiosity, the generous spirit and the faithful soul, to do God’s work in the world. And believe me, it hasn’t been easy, because none of those things (except maybe the curiosity, and a basic predisposition toward compassionate kindness) really come naturally to me. I’ve had to work at it, as does everyone else I know who follows this same path.
But what really sold me on this profession -- this vocation, this “career” -- was the idea of the church. A relatively small, human-scale organization, a democratically-run community of committed seekers, exploring meaningful ideas and attempting to live faithfully in relationship with one another in accordance with a shared set of values, while working together to make the world a better place for everyone living in it. Not only did I want to be a member of that kind of community, I wanted to try to become one of its leaders: a teacher, a scholar, a counselor, a “coach” -- someone who had answered the call, and developed enough expertise, that I could make an honest living helping others find greater meaning and purpose in their lives too.
The “divine profession of living” isn’t really something you have to go to school to learn. It doesn’t require any special credentials or certification, you don’t have to pass a qualifying exam. But you do have to be willing to answer a call, and to work very, very hard to develop a certain level of expertise. And it takes a fair amount of practice too: practice in paying attention, practice at falling down in the grass, kneeling down in the grass, strolling through fields, being idle and blessed. But tell me, what else do you plan to do, with your one wild and precious life?
at The First Religious Society in Carlisle Massachusetts
Sunday March 5th, 2006
OPENING WORDS: “Our experience is not what happens to us, but what we make of what happens to us.”
-- Aldous Huxley
READING: THE SUMMER DAY by Mary Oliver
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean --
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down --
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
***
A minister was out shopping for groceries when he ran into one of his parishioners in the supermarket check-out line.
“How come I never see you in church anymore?” the minister asked.
“Well Pastor,” came the reply, “there are so many sanctimonious, self-righteous hypocrites in that congregation, I just don’t feel comfortable there.”
The minister thought about this for a moment, and then responded: “Don’t worry. I’m sure we can always find room for one more.”
Today is the first Sunday in Lent, which in the traditional Christian liturgical calendar is the forty-day period (excluding Sundays) between Ash Wednesday and Maundy Thursday: a time when (in olden days at least) folks had pretty much eaten through most of their winter supplies, and therefore conveniently observed a season of fasting and repentance in anticipation of Easter. These forty days are said to correspond to the forty days which Scripture tells us Jesus spent fasting in the wilderness following his baptism in the River Jordan, which were (as you may recall) a time of temptation and trial, during which Jesus himself questioned the veracity of the call he had heard from God, and also explored how he might most appropriately and authentically respond to that call.
Seen in this context, Lent can best be understood as an annual opportunity to do a little soul-searching: a fruitful and powerful season of doubt and discernment, followed by a renewed affirmation and commitment to a disciplined life of faith. This is the season when converts to Christianity traditionally studied the tenets of their new faith, in preparation for their baptism and first communion during Holy Week. And it is also a tradition typically NOT observed by Universalists, Unitarians, and the various other theological descendants of the Radical Reformation: Puritans, Pietists, Anabaptists, Mennonites, Quakers, Shakers, Dunkers, Hutterites, the Old Order Amish, and a host of other small Christian sects too numerous to enumerate here.
Yet the spirit of Lent -- a season of uncertainty, temptation and renewal; a journey which begins with doubt and travels through regions of discernment and affirmation to a place of deep commitment -- is something I suspect many contemporary Unitarian Universalists would find quite congenial. Lent is not about giving something up. It’s about taking something on: something new and perhaps a little challenging, which may even initially tempt you to doubt yourself and your own abilities, but leads you to a place of better and deeper understanding, and more meaningful activity.
This is also the conclusion of this informal little series of sermons I’ve been preaching inspired by the words of the Theodore Parker benediction (number 683 in the hymnbook, if you want to look it up) that I use each Sunday to conclude our service. I use the word “series” somewhat loosely, since it’s really just been kind of a vehicle for me to talk about some of the basic ideas of a liberal religious faith, and you don’t really need to have heard any of the others in order to enjoy the rest. But they are all posted now on the church website (as is every other sermon I’ve ever preached here, thanks to the dilligent work of our webmaster, Bob Luoma), just in case anyone wants to do a little homework and review. And today I want to try to wrap everything up in a tidy little package, by talking about Parker’s idea that our “profession of faith” is “divine living.”
When I hear this phrase, there are three closely-related questions that immediately occur to me. First, what does it really mean to make a “profession” of faith? Second, what does it mean to live “divinely?” And then finally, to look at these same two questions from a slightly different perspective, how do we make divine living not just our vocation, but our “profession” -- and what, if anything, is the difference?
Let’s start with this last. Nowadays when we use the words profession and vocation we are typically talking about our jobs: our occupations or careers. A professional is typically anybody who does something specialized for money -- it could be a professional athlete, or a member of the world’s “oldest profession;” you can be a professional hairdresser, a professional dogsitter, a professional teacher, actor, engineer, accountant, musician, soldier, journalist...whatever you like, really. There is still some notion of advanced education (or at least a certain degree of excellence and expertise), as well as a vestige of the ideal of disinterested service to others (which we sometimes call “professionalism”), but the idea that there are basically only three “learned” professions: law, medicine, and the ministry, is pretty much a thing of the past. We are all professionals now, provided that our performance rises to a certain level of competence, and we are able to make an honest living (or at least get paid) for doing whatever it is we do.
The word vocation is likewise basically just a synonym for profession, but with slightly different connotations. One attends a vocational school to learn how to build a house or repair a car engine, not how to try a lawsuit or perform open heart surgery. It is a “technical” education, which creates “technicians” skilled in the techniques of their craft or trade, rather than “experts” who “practice” for a living. And yet nowadays these differences are mostly superficial. Auto mechanics need to be able to diagnose a problem before they can repair it, while the technical skill required of a surgeon (which is perhaps not the best example, since in the olden days surgery was simply considered a sideline for barbers, who already had razor-sharp cutting instruments close at hand anyway) is certainly as great as that of any other occupation I can think of.
Old distinctions between blue collar and white collar and pink collar; between manual labor, knowledge workers, and the service industries, are all passing away. And yet, within this “new economy” -- where we are ALL professionals, where we are all service workers, and where we are all self-employed -- we are also all in danger of being reduced to our skills and our occupations: no longer real people, but personal “brands” which we “market” in order to sell our “services” to the highest bidder.
And the irony, of course, is that both the words “vocation” and “profession” are originally religious in meaning. The term Vocation (as I know some of you have heard me say many times before) means “calling” -- specifically, a call from God to serve a Divine Purpose. Our faith tradition teaches that human beings have both a general and a specific vocation: the first a call to be good, honest, and faithful souls; the second a challenge to discern and act upon our own unique gifts and skills for service.
The word Profession means literally “to speak in front of” -- or, more precisely, to make a vow in front of witnesses, or before the altar of God. You might contrast it with the word “confession,” which means to admit something to someone else. A person who professes something is not really a professional, but rather a Professor; a professional is actually someone who practices what the professor preaches. The three original “learned professions” were all considered such because they required a knowledge of ancient languages (Latin for the Law; Latin and Greek for Medicine; and Latin, Greek and Hebrew for the Ministry): a knowledge which could only be acquired by attending University and listening to the lectures of the professors there. But once you had learned how to read the books yourself, you were basically on your own, (which is where we get the notion that professionals “practice”). And of course, in the olden days, the practitioners of these professions were all basically clergy, since the church held a monopoly on education, and its professors were first and foremost Doctors of Theology (or perhaps Philosophy), who were qualified by virtue of their scholarship to profess religious doctrine.
Now I realize this may all seem a little arcane and perhaps even of questionable relevance, which is why we have to talk about it on a Sunday morning rather than Monday through Friday from 9 to 5 (or, in the case of some professions, from four or five in the morning to nearly midnight). We are all so busy figuring out how to make a living that it’s easy to forget we also have a life, and that there’s more to life than coming out ahead everyone else in our attempt to make a killing. To quote Mother Theresa (or was it Billy Graham?): “God does not call us to be successful; God calls us to be faithful” -- to Trust that we can choose to do the right thing, and that we will eventually be happy that we did. And this is what I think Theodore Parker was talking about when he talked about “divine living” -- about making a choice to commit your life to a slightly different set of values than the values dictated by the marketplace, and to trust that your decision will prove worthwhile in the end.
I know for my own part, when I was a kid growing up in Seattle, becoming a minister wasn’t exactly at the top of the list of things I saw myself doing when I became an adult. In fact, I don’t think it was even ON the list. Cowboy, Firefighter, Astronaut, Pirate...these were the sorts of avocations I imagined for myself when I was finally big enough to do whatever I wanted. Later on, as I got a little older, my range of potential occupations expanded a little: writer, TV star, professional athlete. But the only real grown-ups I ever actually observed working for a living were my teachers, and people like the barber where my grandfather took me to get my hair cut on Saturdays, or the guys who bagged my mother’s groceries at the supermarket. Teaching didn’t seem like such a bad way to make a living...even if it did mean that you had to go to school every day. But then it occurred to me that the school librarian had an even better job, checking out all those books about cowboys, and firefighters, and astronauts, and pirates.
I suppose if I hadn’t had my nose in a book all the time, I might have noticed a lot of other potential vocations and professions which were all around me, even when I was a kid: plumbers, carpenters, and electricians, doctors and dentists, bus drivers, cooks, mail carriers, retail clerks, plus all the guys dressed like my dad in suits and ties and carrying briefcases. But I was pretty sure I didn’t want to do what my dad did for a living. He was always traveling, hardly ever at home; and when he was home, I could see the stress in his eyes, and feel how tired he was from the constant pressure to perform, perform, perform. This contrast became even more obvious on those rare occasions when he really was able to get away from his job, to stop thinking about his next sale and take us sailing instead, or show us how to fly a kite, or bake the salmon we’d bought from the Indians after failing to catch any ourselves.
My father had wanted to be a physician, and served three years in the army just to be able to go to college, but by the time he graduated from the University of Washington he had a wife and two young children to support, so he went to work as a pharmaceutical sales rep instead. The more successful he became in his career, the less he was able to enjoy the rewards of his success. It’s a pretty common story, really. I’m sure it resonates with many of you as well. My dad’s hard work provided my brothers and me with a lot of advantages and opportunities in life, but it also deprived us of something that was doubtlessly even more valuable.
And then there was the pressure my brothers and I felt to become successful, high achievers ourselves. To “fulfill our potential.” I knew I wasn’t smart enough to be a physician, and I was pretty sure I wasn’t mean enough to succeed as an attorney, but I thought I might just have a big enough mouth to become a fairly decent preacher, assuming I could also find somewhere within me the kindness, the compassion, the courage, the humility, the curiosity, the generous spirit and the faithful soul, to do God’s work in the world. And believe me, it hasn’t been easy, because none of those things (except maybe the curiosity, and a basic predisposition toward compassionate kindness) really come naturally to me. I’ve had to work at it, as does everyone else I know who follows this same path.
But what really sold me on this profession -- this vocation, this “career” -- was the idea of the church. A relatively small, human-scale organization, a democratically-run community of committed seekers, exploring meaningful ideas and attempting to live faithfully in relationship with one another in accordance with a shared set of values, while working together to make the world a better place for everyone living in it. Not only did I want to be a member of that kind of community, I wanted to try to become one of its leaders: a teacher, a scholar, a counselor, a “coach” -- someone who had answered the call, and developed enough expertise, that I could make an honest living helping others find greater meaning and purpose in their lives too.
The “divine profession of living” isn’t really something you have to go to school to learn. It doesn’t require any special credentials or certification, you don’t have to pass a qualifying exam. But you do have to be willing to answer a call, and to work very, very hard to develop a certain level of expertise. And it takes a fair amount of practice too: practice in paying attention, practice at falling down in the grass, kneeling down in the grass, strolling through fields, being idle and blessed. But tell me, what else do you plan to do, with your one wild and precious life?
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