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?