a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Earth Day, Sunday April 23rd, 2006
OPENING WORDS:
“We are called to assist the earth, to heal her wounds and in the process, heal our own -- indeed, to embrace the whole creation in all its diversity, beauty, and wonder. This is our hope: That the child born today may still have a bit of green grass under their bare feet, a breath of clean air to breath, a patch of blue water to sail upon, and a whale on the horizon to set them dreaming.”
--Wangari Maathai (from her Nobel Prize acceptance speech)
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When I was still married, my father-in-law (who I saw in person precisely half-a-dozen times in 18 years of marriage) would occasionally phone our home just to check-in with his daughter and find out how things were going out in our neck of the woods. My former wife was not exactly close to the rest of her family. Her brother (who lives in rural Pennsylvania about an hour outside of Pittsburgh) I have only seen once, and I never did meet my mother-in-law, who passed away a decade before I ever met Margie. The anniversary of that death was typically a catalyst for one of these infrequent calls, which almost always ended in exactly the same way -- with my father-in-law lovingly reminding his daughter and grandchildren not to expect too much from him in the way of an inheritance when he finally passed away, since he was planning to leave his entire estate to buy ice for the Polar Bears at the Kansas City Zoo. It was kind of a family joke, endearing in an eccentric sort of way, which suited my father-in-law to a “T.”
My father-in-law was (and remains) an avid woodworker, a dedicated golfer, and a diehard fan of the Chicago Cubs. For much of his career he was employed as an early pioneer in the field of data processing, and even in retirement he still kept an IBM mainframe in the basement of his home and did freelance work for local businesses, back in the days when an Apple II Plus was a state-of-the-art desktop computer.
He is also a direct descendent of Captain James Weddell, the Antarctic explorer who discovered and named both the Weddell sea and the Weddell seal. On Sunday afternoons when his own children were little, Ray used to take them regularly to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, where he would stand in front of the exhibit of the stuffed seal bearing his family’s name, and lecture Margie and her brother Jim (in a voice just a little too loud to be intended for their ears alone) about the illustrious exploits of their notorious ancestor: a lecture which always ended in exactly the same way. “So remember children, it’s a proud name and a proud heritage. Never let anyone misspell it, never let anyone mispronounce it, and never EVER forget that you are a WEDDELL.” Margie used to tell me that often the people standing around them would break into spontaneous applause at the conclusion of this speech, while she and her brother tried to make themselves as small as possible, so they might attempt to slip between the cracks in the floor.
I’m not exactly certain how or why my father-in-law developed his commitment to the Polar Bears, but I suspect it followed the same lines as his other passions. And I know that while our own kids were still at home, Margie and I often used to take them to the Washington Park Zoo in Portland, Oregon, where the Polar Bears were one of our favorite exhibits. They are impressive, magnificent creatures -- so huge and yet so graceful (especially in the water); potentially so dangerous, and yet so compellingly attractive at the same time. The exhibit in Portland is designed like an aquarium, so that you can actually walk along below the surface of the water and view the animals as they swim, through a series of large, Plexiglas windows. It’s no wonder my father-in-law plans to bequeath them his entire estate. Once you’ve seen a Polar Bear up close, it’s hard to imagine a more deserving heir or a more worthy legacy.
Of course, the reason I’m telling you all this is that my former father-in-law’s idiosyncratic cause has now become front page news. The Polar Bears are running out of ice -- not the ones who are living in zoos, but those who still inhabit their natural habitat in the Arctic, whose very survival as a species is increasingly threatened by the effects of Global Warming.
I don’t really think I’m going to have to preach very hard or will have much trouble convincing those of you here in this room that Global Warming is real. The hard part is knowing what to do about it. The problem seems so immense, and the potential consequences so catastrophic, that the whole issue easily becomes a little mind-numbing. Graphs and statistics and molecular calculations based on measurements in the parts per million; elaborate computer models of changing climate patterns, ocean currents, and feedback loops; apocalyptic “worst case” scenarios predicting mass extinctions and sea levels 200 feet higher than they are today...the facts and figures -- the observations, measurements, calculations and projections -- are both emotionally overwhelming and difficult to grasp.
Scientists tell us that 19 of the 20 warmest years on record have occurred within the last quarter century, but what does that really mean to someone who associates “warmth” with “comfort?” We see with our own eyes the devastating effects of hurricanes like Katrina, which seem to grow stronger and more numerous every year; but there have always been hurricanes, and they have always been disastrous. Yet somehow, the image a polar bear perched on the edge of a melting ice flow, along with reports that these magnificent animals are now drowning in unheard of numbers as they attempt to navigate a diminishing polar ice pack, has a vividness and an urgency that is easy to understand. What once seemed solid and unchanging is literally disappearing beneath their feet. And beneath our feet as well.
Those of us who are trained to do grief counseling are taught that individuals who receive catastrophic news or are otherwise forced to cope with some sort of trauma will typically react by moving through five predictable mental and emotional stages. These stages are most frequently associated with the work of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross on the experience of Death and Dying, but they can actually be observed surrounding any Change of Circumstance which produces an Experience of Loss and thus evokes a Sense of Grief, from the news that you or someone you love is afflicted with a terminal illness to the discovery that your battery is dead and your car won’t start on a cold winter morning.
The intensity of the reaction is a function of how significant the potential loss is perceived, but the five stages remain the same. Our first response is typically one of DENIAL -- this isn’t really happening to me. You turn the key again, and then again; you check the lights, the heater, you turn off the radio; you turn the key one last time and still there’s no result....
So you move on to the next stage, which is ANGER. You curse the car, you curse the weather, maybe slam your hand against the wheel or the dashboard; curse anyone and anything else you can think to curse, including perhaps the entire economic system which has you awake and out of your warm bed on a cold winter morning trying to start your car so you can commute to a job you don’t especially like in the first place.
Then, as you start to realize that there are potential consequences to the failure of your car to start, you begin BARGAINING. If only the car will start one more time you promise to buy a new battery, get a tune up and flush the cooling system, replace the tires, belts and hoses, and never miss a scheduled oil change again.
When you finally recognize that the car isn’t going to start and that you are powerless to change that fact, you give up hope and instead DEPRESSION makes its appearance. The battery is dead and there is nothing you can do about it...and because of that you are probably going to end up being late to work as well.
But with any luck, this Depression will quickly be followed by ACCEPTANCE -- you go back inside, call the Auto Club, and make other plans to move forward with your day. In the case of something relatively trivial, like a dead battery, this whole process may only take five or ten minutes. Depending on your personality and how often you have experienced things like this before, you may even skip a stage, or move through two or three of them simultaneously.
But more serious losses typically take much longer to resolve. And the real “Grief Work” doesn’t actually begin until one has both accepted the reality of their loss and allowed themselves to feel the pain of it, and then started the challenging process of adjusting to a new environment without the lost object, and reinvesting themselves in that new reality. (*)
The potentially catastrophic change represented by Global Warming, and the traumatic losses that accompany it, represent a serious need for “grief work” on a global scale. Many of us have been in deep Denial for decades. Many more of us are profoundly Angry, and some of us are now Bargaining furiously: if only we could get more people to turn out the lights when they leave the room, and to drive hybrid cars instead of SUVs; if only we could build more wind turbines and stop burning fossil fuels, then all would be right in the world again. The Depressing news is that it may already be too late. We may already be powerless to turn back the rising tide, and reverse the runaway Greenhouse Effect that the uncontrolled Carbon Dioxide emissions of our modern industrial economy has already created.
Only Time will Tell. But Acceptance of this possibility does not mean we must surrender to it. No matter how overwhelming the problem may seem, or how helpless we may feel about our ability to change things, there is always one thing over which we have complete control. We can always control how we CHOOSE to respond. We can choose to ignore the fact that our past actions have consequences and continue on as we always have; we can choose to feel helpless and simply give in to the inevitable. Or we can choose to act as if our future actions have meaning, responding in the way that we know we should respond, even though we have no real assurance that our actions will be effective.
And this is where the problem of Global Warming ceases to be a question of science and economics, and becomes instead a moral and a spiritual issue.
The Hebrew scriptures tell us that God created the earth in six days, and that He gave humanity dominion over it, along with a mandate to go forth and subdue it. And there are many conservative theologians who read this passage in Genesis as a blank check for human beings to do whatever they wish to the Earth; to exploit it and all its creatures for their own personal pleasure and profit, without regard to any other consideration.
But there are other, more enlightened theologians, who interpret this mandate in a dramatically different light. Human beings are the custodians of the earth, charged with the responsibility of sustaining and renewing it, so that all God’s creatures might be fruitful and multiply. And these competing world-views, both grounded in Scripture, perhaps have more to say about the ultimate survival of our planet than any scientific insight or technological innovation.
It is not so much the changes in our climate we must grieve and ultimately learn to accept, as it is the change in our lifestyles that must come to pass if we ever hope to arrest and reverse the trend. In a word, we must learn to think of prosperity differently than we do at present. Our current economic system is based on concepts of increasing productivity and maximizing return, within an unregulated marketplace which efficiently matches the demands of Buyers to what Sellers can supply, and holds down prices by holding down costs (or in many cases simply pushing them off on those who cannot afford to object or are not powerful enough to resist).
An improved economic system must somehow incorporate the idea of Sustainability into this equation. It sounds so simple, and yet it appears so elusive, especially here in the wealthiest nation in the history of the planet, where a mere 4% of the world’s [human] population consumes far more than our fair share of the world’s resources, and produce a full 25% of the world’s Greenhouse gasses.
In the Earth Day materials distributed this year by the UU Ministry for the Earth, one writer observes that “We Americans suffer from a “Gratitude Deficit Disorder’ -- we keep trying to make ourselves happy through more stuff, but it never works, so we have to grab for even more stuff. It’s a never ending escalation, this addiction to stuff. We must break the cycle, remembering that happiness comes from relationships, connections, [the] satisfaction of worthwhile endeavors.... If we pay attention, the Earth will teach us gratitude instead of grasping, simple joy instead of compulsive consumption, openness to life instead of a driven (and fruitless) attempt to control everything. Thoughtlessness needs to give way to awareness, arrogance to compassion, addiction to balanced calm. A deep and abiding connection with nature can be that antidote to the compulsiveness and stresses of a life spent chasing the materialism of our post-modern American Dream....”
Which brings us once again back to the subject of Polar Bears. A Polar Bear is a predator. And unlike its closest (and more efficient) cousin, the Kodiak Grizzly (whose favorite food is salmon, but who also eats nuts, berries, roots, bulbs, ground dwelling rodents, and in a pinch even one of us), Polar Bears basically eat seals and perhaps an occasional walrus. They’ve also been known to snack on eggs (and the birds who lay them), kelp, and the carrion of various other marine animals, but (like all predators), Polar Bears live in a brutal but delicate harmony with their principle source of food.
When seals are abundant and hunting is good, they eat their fill of the choicest blubber and leave the rest of the seal carcass for scavengers like ravens, arctic foxes, and (of course) their own cubs, who depend on the adult bears for their own livelihood. And when seals are scarce and times are hard, the bears starve... beginning with the youngest and most vulnerable. All things being equal, the natural limitations of the bear’s own appetites and a fluctuating supply of food keeps the entire system in rough balance, although it remains a cold, cruel world “red in tooth and claw,” in which the bears must instinctively either kill or die.
The difference between a Polar Bear and a Human Being is that Homo Sapiens theoretically have the wisdom to control our instincts, to anticipate the consequences of our actions, and to change our behavior before it is too late. And the problem is that we have instead used this same ability to consume far beyond the ordinary limits of our natural appetites, and then to shift our predatory attention to other potential sources of “food” as we abandon once-plentiful resources we have ruthlessly and methodically exhausted through our greed.
But our efficiency is catching up with us. We are just too darn clever for our own good. And until we recognize and acknowledge that adopting and practicing an Ethic of Sustainability is the principle duty of responsible “dominion,” we will be continually skipping from catastrophe to catastrophe, one step ahead of the Polar Bear.
When we do become Mindful of the Duty of Sustainability, we begin once more to restore balance and harmony to our planet. It begins with individuals like you and me, who first change our own behavior, and then band together and organize in order to support one another, to educate those around us, and to influence the decisions of the people who make policy. It means holding ourselves accountable for the true cost of our own lifestyles, and changing our definition and understanding of “success.”
But perhaps most importantly, it means learning to see ourselves as the one part of this planet that is capable of seeing the bigger picture, and assuming the responsibility to behave appropriately: to replace our “natural” instinct to act only in our own short-term, short-sighted, selfish self-interest, and instead to take a more “global” perspective.
It means moving beyond our denial and our anger, our bargaining and even our depression, to accept the realization that we do indeed have a responsibility to provide ice for the polar bears...not because it is profitable, not even because it benefits us directly, but simply because it is the right thing to do...and to do otherwise would be to leave a very bitter legacy indeed.
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(*) Thanks to the TLC Group of Dallas, TX for use of their material on the stages of grief.. “TLC Group grants anyone the right to use this information without compensation so long as the copy is not used for profit or as training materials in a profit making activity such as workshops, lectures, and seminars, and so long as this paragraph is retained in its entirety.”
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READING from Day of Promise by Linda M. Underwood
All this talk of saving souls.
Souls weren't made to be saved,
like Sunday clothes that
Give out at the seams.
They're made for wear; they
come with lifetime guarantees.
Don't save your soul.
Pour it out like rain on
cracked, parched earth.
Give your soul away, or
pass it like a candle flame.
Sing it out, or
laugh it up the wind.
Souls were made for hearing
breaking hearts, for puzzling dreams,
remembering August flowers,
forgetting hurts.
These men who talk of saving souls!
They have the look of bullies
who blow out candles before
you sing happy birthday,
and want the world to be
in alphabetical order.
I will spend my soul,
playing it out like sticky string
into the world,
so I can catch every
last thing I touch.
Sunday, April 23, 2006
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
The Flesh Made Word
an Easter Homily delivered by the Rev Dr. Tim W Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Easter Sunday April 16th, 2006
OPENING WORDS: from A Passion for the Possible by William Sloane Coffin
As I see it, the primary religious task these days is to try to think straight. Seeing clearly is more important even than good behavior, for redemptive action is born of vision. Religious faith, far from being a substitute for thought, makes better thinking possible.
***
“In the beginning, there was the Word. And the Word was with God, and the Word WAS God....And the Word became Flesh, and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.” These few lines from the first chapter of John’s Gospel, like numerous other passages from that provocative Second century document, contain some of the most theologically sophisticated ideas to be found anywhere in the New Testament.
And fortunately for us, by the time the Fourth Century Church Fathers also figured out that many of these same ideas were not, strictly speaking, entirely in accordance with the emerging definition of Christian Orthodoxy, it was too late; the Fourth Gospel had already become a well-established part of the New Testament canon. And so John became the so-called “spiritual” gospel, which offers to its readers a very different perspective on the events and meaning of the ministry of Jesus than those provided by Matthew, Mark and Luke.
These first three Gospels all basically agree on what Jesus said and the things that he did, a coincidence which modern Biblical scholars now believe derives from the likelihood that the anonymous authors of Matthew and Luke both copied from Mark in the preparation of their manuscripts. But this in turn leads us to another, more important insight into the true nature of Scripture. You can’t always take everything you read in the Bible as “the Gospel Truth.” To paraphrase the words of the famous 19th-century Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing: the Bible is a book written by human beings, for human beings, and in the language of human beings; and its meaning is to be found in the same manner as that of other books -- through the constant exercise of reason.
Modern Bible scholars sometimes like to distinguish between “the Jesus of History” and “the Christ of Faith.” The first is supposed to be a real person, like Shakespeare or Beethoven or Socrates, who had an actual life that we can study and learn about just like we would the study the biography of any other historical figure. The Christ of Faith, on the other hand, has more to do with one’s theological beliefs about the MEANING of that life, and especially one’s beliefs about what happened on that first Easter Sunday three days after Jesus had been arrested, crucified and killed by the Romans nearly 2000 years ago, and what that event has meant in the lives of those who call themselves Christians ever since.
But when you stop to think about these things a little more carefully, this careful distinction between faith and history doesn’t really hold up. To begin with, the idea of a “Christ of Faith” can mean just about anything or nothing. Most human beings have experiences that might be thought of as “spiritual” just in the normal course of everyday living. But whether we talk about them in terms of “Christ” or “Brahma” or “Buddha” or even simply “Nature” says a lot more about who we are and how we were taught than it does about the experience itself.
And when it comes to our knowledge of the historical Jesus, things become even more problematic. To put it in context, we have much better objective, verifiable scientific proof for both Global Warming and the “theory” of Evolution than we do tangible evidence for the proposition that Jesus of Nazareth ever even lived, much less that he said or did any of the things the New Testament says he did. When it comes to the biography of this obscure first century Jewish rabbi, there is very little that we can say for certain, or even with much confidence. We aren’t really sure precisely when he was born, or where, or even who his parents were; we don’t know what he looked like, how tall he was, what color his eyes were, whether he was right- or left-handed, and so on and so on. Many of the things he is said to have taught were also taught by other people, and many of the things he is said to have done (like walking on water or turning water into wine) quite frankly seem impossible.
What we do have is Words, in the form of a book, the New Testament, and God knows how many other books, letters, sermons, lectures, hymns, inscriptions, poems, parchment and papyri fragments, graffiti, gossip, half-remembered stories and conversations repeated and handed down from generation to generation. What we have is the memory of a life, transformed into language. The Flesh made Word: a spoken (and later written) tale which has survived long beyond that moment in time when the flesh itself has passed away, and which takes on a life of its own which is essentially immortal so long as life itself endures.
And when you DO stop to think about it, this is pretty amazing in its own right. Because these Words also have the power to change people’s lives, usually for the better (although not always). They can give people hope and comfort in times of trouble; they can help them overcome problems, teach them to be kind and generous and compassionate and forgiving; but they have also started wars, and created conflict and enmity and hatred between people as well, even though most people who actually study them find a very different message there.
These words can inspire us to think important thoughts of our own, and help us to understand our own experience of living. And we don’t necessarily have to believe or agree with every word we read or hear in order to learn something from it. Because even if it isn’t all True, someone once saw some Truth in them somewhere. And if we learn to look closely and listen carefully to the Words themselves, we just might see and hear it too.
Which brings us at last to Easter. What exactly IS the Miracle of Easter? Frederick Buechner offers us a long list of things the Resurrection isn’t, and to that list I will add one more. Resurrection is NOT Resuscitation. Resuscitation is something that physicians and firefighters try to do to a corpse. They pound on its chest, they shock it with electricity, they try to breathe new life into flesh that has already given up the ghost; and sometimes they actually succeed in their task (although not nearly so often in real life as they appear to on TV).
But even a successful resuscitation is only a temporary measure. It may give you a few more months, or a few more years; it may even give you an entire lifetime; but at some point it no longer really matters, because every living thing eventually succumbs to the fate to which all flesh is heir.
Resurrection is something different than that. Different from Memory, different from Poetry; different from the Renewal of Hope in the despairing heart, or the Rebirth of New Life from the cold earth in Spring; different even from the undying Power of the Spirit of God’s Love to transform our lives by grounding our souls in a profound sense of the Eternal (although this is perhaps a little closer than the others).
Resurrection is both Miracle and Mystery: something we will never fully understand, even when we feel we have experienced the miracle ourselves. But still we try to put the experience into words, because this is one way human beings attempt to communicate to one another the things that are most important to us. We speak, we sing, we write things down; and in doing so, our words survive us, and also potentially change the lives of people we will never see or meet ourselves.
William Willimon, a professor of Christian Ministry and Dean of the Chapel at Duke University, once wrote: “in an age of anxiety and dislocation, we think it impossible to live without ‘absolute truth.’ But what the God of Israel and the church promises us is not absolute truth reduced to propositions but the reality of the kingdom of God and eternal communion with the One who is the way, the truth, and the life. There is a sense in which we cannot know the truth without first being made truthful. Our problem with the gospel is moral before it is intellectual. We will use anything -- even intellectual discussions about the truth -- in a last-ditch attempt to keep Christ from us. So knowing the truth is a matter of being transformed, forgiven, born again before we can acknowledge the lies on which our lives our based, before we can care to entrust our lives to the One who is the way, the truth, and the life.”
Most Unitarian Universalists I suspect might feel a little uncomfortable talking about the Truth of our lives in the same kind of language used by Professor Willimon. Yet the realization that “Truth” is not merely a question of intellectual discussion or logical propositions, but rather a matter of being transformed and learning to trust, is just as important for Religious Liberals as it is for any Born-Again Christian.
And so we come on a Sunday morning, young and old, rich and poor, wise and foolish, happy and sorrowful, to a place we find empty except for our presence here. And we hear the stories, and we sing the songs, and we pray that someday we too may learn how to make the words living flesh again....
***
READING: from Listening to Your Life by Frederick Buechner
WE CAN SAY THAT the story of the Resurrection means simply that the teachings of Jesus are immortal like the plays of Shakespeare or the music of Beethoven and that their wisdom and truth will live on forever. Or we can say that the Resurrection means that the spirit of Jesus is undying, that he himself lives on among us, the way that Socrates does, for instance, in the good that he left behind him, in the lives of all who follow his great example. Or we can say that the language in which the Gospels describe the Resurrection of Jesus is the language of poetry and that, as such, it is not to be taken literally but as pointing to a truth more profound than literal. Very often, I think, this is the way that the Bible is written, and I would point to some of the stories about the birth of Jesus, for instance, as examples; but in the case of the Resurrections, this simply does not apply because there really is no story about the Resurrection in the New Testament. Except in the most fragmentary way, it is not described at all. There is no poetry about it. Instead, it is simply proclaimed as a fact. Christ is risen! In fact, the very existence of the New Testament itself proclaims it. Unless something very real indeed took place on that strange, confused morning, there would be no New Testament, no Church, no Christianity.
Yet we try to reduce it to poetry anyway: the coming of spring with the return of life to the dead earth, the rebirth of hope in the despairing soul. We try to suggest that these are the miracles that the Resurrection is all about, but they are not. In their way they are all miracles, but they are not this miracle, this central one to which the whole Christian faith points.
Unlike the chief priests and the Pharisees, who tried with soldiers and a great stone to make themselves as secure as they could against the terrible possibility of Christ’s really rising again from the dead, we are considerably more subtle. We tend in our age to say, “Of course, it was bound to happen. Nothing could stop it.” But when we are pressed to say what it was that actually did happen, what we are apt to come out with is something pretty meager: this “miracle” of truth that never dies, the “miracle” of a life so beautiful that two thousand years have left the memory of it undimmed, the “miracle” of doubt turning into faith, fear into hope. If I believed that this or something like this was all that the Resurrection meant, then I would turn in my certificate of ordination and take up some other profession. Or at least I hope that I would have the courage to.
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Easter Sunday April 16th, 2006
OPENING WORDS: from A Passion for the Possible by William Sloane Coffin
As I see it, the primary religious task these days is to try to think straight. Seeing clearly is more important even than good behavior, for redemptive action is born of vision. Religious faith, far from being a substitute for thought, makes better thinking possible.
***
“In the beginning, there was the Word. And the Word was with God, and the Word WAS God....And the Word became Flesh, and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.” These few lines from the first chapter of John’s Gospel, like numerous other passages from that provocative Second century document, contain some of the most theologically sophisticated ideas to be found anywhere in the New Testament.
And fortunately for us, by the time the Fourth Century Church Fathers also figured out that many of these same ideas were not, strictly speaking, entirely in accordance with the emerging definition of Christian Orthodoxy, it was too late; the Fourth Gospel had already become a well-established part of the New Testament canon. And so John became the so-called “spiritual” gospel, which offers to its readers a very different perspective on the events and meaning of the ministry of Jesus than those provided by Matthew, Mark and Luke.
These first three Gospels all basically agree on what Jesus said and the things that he did, a coincidence which modern Biblical scholars now believe derives from the likelihood that the anonymous authors of Matthew and Luke both copied from Mark in the preparation of their manuscripts. But this in turn leads us to another, more important insight into the true nature of Scripture. You can’t always take everything you read in the Bible as “the Gospel Truth.” To paraphrase the words of the famous 19th-century Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing: the Bible is a book written by human beings, for human beings, and in the language of human beings; and its meaning is to be found in the same manner as that of other books -- through the constant exercise of reason.
Modern Bible scholars sometimes like to distinguish between “the Jesus of History” and “the Christ of Faith.” The first is supposed to be a real person, like Shakespeare or Beethoven or Socrates, who had an actual life that we can study and learn about just like we would the study the biography of any other historical figure. The Christ of Faith, on the other hand, has more to do with one’s theological beliefs about the MEANING of that life, and especially one’s beliefs about what happened on that first Easter Sunday three days after Jesus had been arrested, crucified and killed by the Romans nearly 2000 years ago, and what that event has meant in the lives of those who call themselves Christians ever since.
But when you stop to think about these things a little more carefully, this careful distinction between faith and history doesn’t really hold up. To begin with, the idea of a “Christ of Faith” can mean just about anything or nothing. Most human beings have experiences that might be thought of as “spiritual” just in the normal course of everyday living. But whether we talk about them in terms of “Christ” or “Brahma” or “Buddha” or even simply “Nature” says a lot more about who we are and how we were taught than it does about the experience itself.
And when it comes to our knowledge of the historical Jesus, things become even more problematic. To put it in context, we have much better objective, verifiable scientific proof for both Global Warming and the “theory” of Evolution than we do tangible evidence for the proposition that Jesus of Nazareth ever even lived, much less that he said or did any of the things the New Testament says he did. When it comes to the biography of this obscure first century Jewish rabbi, there is very little that we can say for certain, or even with much confidence. We aren’t really sure precisely when he was born, or where, or even who his parents were; we don’t know what he looked like, how tall he was, what color his eyes were, whether he was right- or left-handed, and so on and so on. Many of the things he is said to have taught were also taught by other people, and many of the things he is said to have done (like walking on water or turning water into wine) quite frankly seem impossible.
What we do have is Words, in the form of a book, the New Testament, and God knows how many other books, letters, sermons, lectures, hymns, inscriptions, poems, parchment and papyri fragments, graffiti, gossip, half-remembered stories and conversations repeated and handed down from generation to generation. What we have is the memory of a life, transformed into language. The Flesh made Word: a spoken (and later written) tale which has survived long beyond that moment in time when the flesh itself has passed away, and which takes on a life of its own which is essentially immortal so long as life itself endures.
And when you DO stop to think about it, this is pretty amazing in its own right. Because these Words also have the power to change people’s lives, usually for the better (although not always). They can give people hope and comfort in times of trouble; they can help them overcome problems, teach them to be kind and generous and compassionate and forgiving; but they have also started wars, and created conflict and enmity and hatred between people as well, even though most people who actually study them find a very different message there.
These words can inspire us to think important thoughts of our own, and help us to understand our own experience of living. And we don’t necessarily have to believe or agree with every word we read or hear in order to learn something from it. Because even if it isn’t all True, someone once saw some Truth in them somewhere. And if we learn to look closely and listen carefully to the Words themselves, we just might see and hear it too.
Which brings us at last to Easter. What exactly IS the Miracle of Easter? Frederick Buechner offers us a long list of things the Resurrection isn’t, and to that list I will add one more. Resurrection is NOT Resuscitation. Resuscitation is something that physicians and firefighters try to do to a corpse. They pound on its chest, they shock it with electricity, they try to breathe new life into flesh that has already given up the ghost; and sometimes they actually succeed in their task (although not nearly so often in real life as they appear to on TV).
But even a successful resuscitation is only a temporary measure. It may give you a few more months, or a few more years; it may even give you an entire lifetime; but at some point it no longer really matters, because every living thing eventually succumbs to the fate to which all flesh is heir.
Resurrection is something different than that. Different from Memory, different from Poetry; different from the Renewal of Hope in the despairing heart, or the Rebirth of New Life from the cold earth in Spring; different even from the undying Power of the Spirit of God’s Love to transform our lives by grounding our souls in a profound sense of the Eternal (although this is perhaps a little closer than the others).
Resurrection is both Miracle and Mystery: something we will never fully understand, even when we feel we have experienced the miracle ourselves. But still we try to put the experience into words, because this is one way human beings attempt to communicate to one another the things that are most important to us. We speak, we sing, we write things down; and in doing so, our words survive us, and also potentially change the lives of people we will never see or meet ourselves.
William Willimon, a professor of Christian Ministry and Dean of the Chapel at Duke University, once wrote: “in an age of anxiety and dislocation, we think it impossible to live without ‘absolute truth.’ But what the God of Israel and the church promises us is not absolute truth reduced to propositions but the reality of the kingdom of God and eternal communion with the One who is the way, the truth, and the life. There is a sense in which we cannot know the truth without first being made truthful. Our problem with the gospel is moral before it is intellectual. We will use anything -- even intellectual discussions about the truth -- in a last-ditch attempt to keep Christ from us. So knowing the truth is a matter of being transformed, forgiven, born again before we can acknowledge the lies on which our lives our based, before we can care to entrust our lives to the One who is the way, the truth, and the life.”
Most Unitarian Universalists I suspect might feel a little uncomfortable talking about the Truth of our lives in the same kind of language used by Professor Willimon. Yet the realization that “Truth” is not merely a question of intellectual discussion or logical propositions, but rather a matter of being transformed and learning to trust, is just as important for Religious Liberals as it is for any Born-Again Christian.
And so we come on a Sunday morning, young and old, rich and poor, wise and foolish, happy and sorrowful, to a place we find empty except for our presence here. And we hear the stories, and we sing the songs, and we pray that someday we too may learn how to make the words living flesh again....
***
READING: from Listening to Your Life by Frederick Buechner
WE CAN SAY THAT the story of the Resurrection means simply that the teachings of Jesus are immortal like the plays of Shakespeare or the music of Beethoven and that their wisdom and truth will live on forever. Or we can say that the Resurrection means that the spirit of Jesus is undying, that he himself lives on among us, the way that Socrates does, for instance, in the good that he left behind him, in the lives of all who follow his great example. Or we can say that the language in which the Gospels describe the Resurrection of Jesus is the language of poetry and that, as such, it is not to be taken literally but as pointing to a truth more profound than literal. Very often, I think, this is the way that the Bible is written, and I would point to some of the stories about the birth of Jesus, for instance, as examples; but in the case of the Resurrections, this simply does not apply because there really is no story about the Resurrection in the New Testament. Except in the most fragmentary way, it is not described at all. There is no poetry about it. Instead, it is simply proclaimed as a fact. Christ is risen! In fact, the very existence of the New Testament itself proclaims it. Unless something very real indeed took place on that strange, confused morning, there would be no New Testament, no Church, no Christianity.
Yet we try to reduce it to poetry anyway: the coming of spring with the return of life to the dead earth, the rebirth of hope in the despairing soul. We try to suggest that these are the miracles that the Resurrection is all about, but they are not. In their way they are all miracles, but they are not this miracle, this central one to which the whole Christian faith points.
Unlike the chief priests and the Pharisees, who tried with soldiers and a great stone to make themselves as secure as they could against the terrible possibility of Christ’s really rising again from the dead, we are considerably more subtle. We tend in our age to say, “Of course, it was bound to happen. Nothing could stop it.” But when we are pressed to say what it was that actually did happen, what we are apt to come out with is something pretty meager: this “miracle” of truth that never dies, the “miracle” of a life so beautiful that two thousand years have left the memory of it undimmed, the “miracle” of doubt turning into faith, fear into hope. If I believed that this or something like this was all that the Resurrection meant, then I would turn in my certificate of ordination and take up some other profession. Or at least I hope that I would have the courage to.
Sunday, April 9, 2006
The Meaning of Membership
a homily by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
delivered at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Palm Sunday April 9th, 2006
The By-Laws of the First Religious Society state that: “Any person may become a member of the Society who is in sympathy with its purpose and program, and who has signed the Church Roll Book in the presence of the Minister, or in the Minister’s absence, in the presence of a member of the Parish Committee. Neither the covenant nor any other statement shall serve as a creedal test for membership.” That’s 62 words by my count, but there are really only three things you need to keep in mind.
WHAT are the requirements for becoming a member of this church? Sympathy. That’s it. Sympathy for the purpose and program of the Society. I’ll be coming to what that purpose and program are in just a moment, but for the time being all you need to remember is that it’s your Sympathy that truly matters.
HOW do you become a member of the Society? It’s easy. You sign up. Enroll. Subscribe. Enlist... However you want to think of it, it all means the same thing. You write your name in the book alongside the names of all the other people you see sitting all around you.
And then the final, most important thing: this is a Covenant that you are signing on to, and not a Creed. A Covenant is basically a promise of mutual accountability and support, rather than an agreement to all believe the same thing. To answer the question posed by the Prophet Amos, “Can two walk together lest they be agreed?” -- it is an agreement to walk together, rather than the refusal to walk at all unless we all agree.
Of course, folks can join this church any time they like, but once a year we like to set aside a small part of our service to recognize and honor the people who have become members of the Society in past twelve months, and also to invite anyone who would like to join today to come forward and be honored right along with them.
And if you are a little shy about being honored, don’t worry...you can always just stay in your pew and then discretely slip upstairs with me during the coffee hour and sign in private. Because the physical act of joining this church is (and ought to be) a simple thing -- as simple as signing your name. It’s the spiritual commitment which it represents that is truly important. And this is a very personal (and often a very private) commitment, which means different things to different people.
So what exactly IS the purpose of The First Religious Society? Once again, the by-laws tell us that “The purpose of the Society shall be to maintain services of worship in the Carlisle community and to upbuild in the hearts of its people the high ideals of a rational, progressive and exalting religion, in the laws of God and the service of humanity.”
And then the by-laws point to the language of our Covenant, and the three fundamental values we affirm every Sunday: Love, Truth, and Service. “To dwell together in peace, to seek knowledge in freedom, [and] to serve humanity in friendship, to the end that all souls shall grow into harmony with the Divine.” That’s what we’re here for, and this is the purpose for which we invite your sympathy when we welcome you as members of this Society.
And all of our programs here at FRS: not just our Worship, but also our Educational Programs, our Fellowship Events, our Community Outreach and our ministry of Pastoral Care, are all intended and designed to serve this more basic purpose.
I sometimes like to think of Membership as a combination of four other “ships.” The first of these is Discipleship: the commitment to becoming a Disciplined Religious Seeker, who makes “the free and responsible search for truth and meaning” a high priority in life. The second, of course, is Stewardship: accepting responsibility for the care and support of a religious institution which we have inherited as a legacy from our religious ancestors, and which we hold in trust for our own spiritual descendants.
The third “ship” is Leadership: setting a good example for our “Neighbors and Fellow Creatures,” and blazing a trail forward into a better and more fulfilling future for us all. And the final “ship” is the experience of Fellowship itself: the willingness to BE in a relationship of mutual accountability and support even when we DON’T always agree, even when we aren’t all exactly headed in the same direction, or even too certain that we want to be.
My friend Victoria Weinstein (who some of you may remember from my Installation three years ago -- she was the one who offered the Charge to the Congregation) typically tells the people who join her flock at the First Parish in Norwell: “I commend you for your courage in joining a church which will inevitably break your hearts, because like every other church, it is a human institution trying to live into divine values.“ I agree with Vickie wholeheartedly, and on that note, would now like to invite forward all of the courageous souls who have “signed the book” in the past twelve months, or who would like to sign today....
delivered at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Palm Sunday April 9th, 2006
The By-Laws of the First Religious Society state that: “Any person may become a member of the Society who is in sympathy with its purpose and program, and who has signed the Church Roll Book in the presence of the Minister, or in the Minister’s absence, in the presence of a member of the Parish Committee. Neither the covenant nor any other statement shall serve as a creedal test for membership.” That’s 62 words by my count, but there are really only three things you need to keep in mind.
WHAT are the requirements for becoming a member of this church? Sympathy. That’s it. Sympathy for the purpose and program of the Society. I’ll be coming to what that purpose and program are in just a moment, but for the time being all you need to remember is that it’s your Sympathy that truly matters.
HOW do you become a member of the Society? It’s easy. You sign up. Enroll. Subscribe. Enlist... However you want to think of it, it all means the same thing. You write your name in the book alongside the names of all the other people you see sitting all around you.
And then the final, most important thing: this is a Covenant that you are signing on to, and not a Creed. A Covenant is basically a promise of mutual accountability and support, rather than an agreement to all believe the same thing. To answer the question posed by the Prophet Amos, “Can two walk together lest they be agreed?” -- it is an agreement to walk together, rather than the refusal to walk at all unless we all agree.
Of course, folks can join this church any time they like, but once a year we like to set aside a small part of our service to recognize and honor the people who have become members of the Society in past twelve months, and also to invite anyone who would like to join today to come forward and be honored right along with them.
And if you are a little shy about being honored, don’t worry...you can always just stay in your pew and then discretely slip upstairs with me during the coffee hour and sign in private. Because the physical act of joining this church is (and ought to be) a simple thing -- as simple as signing your name. It’s the spiritual commitment which it represents that is truly important. And this is a very personal (and often a very private) commitment, which means different things to different people.
So what exactly IS the purpose of The First Religious Society? Once again, the by-laws tell us that “The purpose of the Society shall be to maintain services of worship in the Carlisle community and to upbuild in the hearts of its people the high ideals of a rational, progressive and exalting religion, in the laws of God and the service of humanity.”
And then the by-laws point to the language of our Covenant, and the three fundamental values we affirm every Sunday: Love, Truth, and Service. “To dwell together in peace, to seek knowledge in freedom, [and] to serve humanity in friendship, to the end that all souls shall grow into harmony with the Divine.” That’s what we’re here for, and this is the purpose for which we invite your sympathy when we welcome you as members of this Society.
And all of our programs here at FRS: not just our Worship, but also our Educational Programs, our Fellowship Events, our Community Outreach and our ministry of Pastoral Care, are all intended and designed to serve this more basic purpose.
I sometimes like to think of Membership as a combination of four other “ships.” The first of these is Discipleship: the commitment to becoming a Disciplined Religious Seeker, who makes “the free and responsible search for truth and meaning” a high priority in life. The second, of course, is Stewardship: accepting responsibility for the care and support of a religious institution which we have inherited as a legacy from our religious ancestors, and which we hold in trust for our own spiritual descendants.
The third “ship” is Leadership: setting a good example for our “Neighbors and Fellow Creatures,” and blazing a trail forward into a better and more fulfilling future for us all. And the final “ship” is the experience of Fellowship itself: the willingness to BE in a relationship of mutual accountability and support even when we DON’T always agree, even when we aren’t all exactly headed in the same direction, or even too certain that we want to be.
My friend Victoria Weinstein (who some of you may remember from my Installation three years ago -- she was the one who offered the Charge to the Congregation) typically tells the people who join her flock at the First Parish in Norwell: “I commend you for your courage in joining a church which will inevitably break your hearts, because like every other church, it is a human institution trying to live into divine values.“ I agree with Vickie wholeheartedly, and on that note, would now like to invite forward all of the courageous souls who have “signed the book” in the past twelve months, or who would like to sign today....
Sunday, April 2, 2006
The Magnificent Seven
(the 2006 “Sermon on the Amount”)
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday April 2nd, 2006
OPENING WORDS:
"We build on foundations, we did not lay.
We warm ourselves at fires, we did not light.
We sit in the shade of trees, we did not plant.
We drink from wells, we did not dig.
We profit from persons, we did not know.
We are ever bound in community." --Peter Raible
Timothy Muldoon lived alone in the Irish countryside, with only a pet dog for company. One day, the dog died, so Muldoon went to the parish priest and said, "Father, my dog is dead. Could ya' be sayin' a mass for the poor creature?"
Father Patrick replied, "I'm afraid not, my son. We cannot have services for an animal in the church. But there is a new denomination down the lane, some Unitarians, and there's no tellin' what they believe. Maybe they'll do something for the creature."
Muldoon said, "Thank you Father, I'll go right away. Tell me, do ya' think $5,000 is enough to donate for the service?"
“Five Thousand Dollars!” Father Patrick exclaimed, "Sweet Mary, Mother of Jesus! Why didn't ya' tell me the dog was Catholic?”
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about something Woody said at my installation. I’m sure you’ll remember it if your were there, because it was such a vivid image. During his “Charge to the Minister,” Woody advised me not to think of myself as a shepherd, but rather to be the sheepdog. Now I didn’t grow up on a farm, so my understanding of sheepdogs is really pretty limited. Basically, when I think of a sheepdog I think of a big, white hairy English sheepdog like the one in the Warner Brothers cartoons -- calm, courageous, quietly dignified, and always a step ahead of Wiley Coyote. A dog with a personality like the Golden Retriever we had when my kids were little -- a dog who let them tug on her ears, and pull her tail, and dress her up in funny clothing, and who never even let out a growl unless she heard something sinister prowling around outside the house in the middle of the night.
Anyway, a few weeks ago I was having lunch with Woody, and I asked him whether this was pretty much the same image he’d had in mind when he’d said what he said nearly three years ago. And he thought about it for a moment and then said No, that actually he’d been thinking of something more along the lines of a Border Collie.
So I’m shifting a little into Border Collie mode today, just to see if whether by barking a little more loudly and nipping at a few heels, I might be able to get our whole flock back grazing in greener pastures again. There were a lot of wonder things said about the ministry and congregational life at my Installation, most of which I know have now mostly passed from memory, but one thing I will never forget is how (notwithstanding my expressed desire for a “low key” celebration) Mary DeGarmo organized a fantastic party -- for months afterwards people referred to it as my “Coronation” -- yet despite having spent two full years in the Ministerial search process, and spending tens of thousands of dollars to find and bring me here, there was nothing in the church budget to pay for an Installation. Basically, all of the out-of-pocket expenses for that entire event were picked up by one very generous, anonymous donor, while many others also pitched-in in various other ways to make certain that the party was successful and that everyone had a good time.
And for me, this points to a profound paradox deep within the soul of the First Religious Society. Individually, the members of this congregation are some of the most generous and most committed, truly “liberal” people I have ever had the privilege of knowing anywhere. But institutionally, this same church often practices the old fashioned New England value of frugality almost (and I say again ALMOST) to the point of parsimony.
I have no real problem with frugality per se -- since I tend to be a pretty frugal guy myself. I drive a ten year old pick-up truck with over 100,000 miles on it; I buy almost all my clothes at Marshall’s (and what I can’t find there I get at Sears)... I don’t have any credit card debt; I don’t take exotic vacations; I don’t own a sailboat or a summer home (although I think someday I might like to); my kids are both through school, and I’ve even paid off all of my own student loans (which for someone who spent seventeen years in college and has five earned degrees is really saying something).
So I feel I understand the importance of getting your money’s worth, and the value of that wonderful old New England adage: “Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.” Yet when it comes to “doing Church,” sometimes this attitude can be a little misdirected. Church budgets ought to grow out of the ability of people to contribute generously, rather than the effort to “do Church on the Cheap.” Sure, we all want to get good value for our money. But the real point of being part of a Church like FRS is to support and promote our good values in the wider world. And who wants to pinch pennies doing that?
Here’s an interesting bit of information for you. Last year the average pledge here at the First Religious Society in Carlisle was about $915/family. That’s certainly nothing to be ashamed of, and I’m certain there are many congregations around the country who would be thrilled to have that high an average. But just down the road at the First Parish in Concord, the average annual pledge is about $1500 per household; and I’m told that the averages in Bedford and Lexington are about the same.
I realize that just looking at averages can sometimes be deceiving; and that our average pledge, for instance, doesn’t include all of the money that people contribute to this church in others ways, such as through our service auction or other fundraising activities, or simply by paying church-related expenses out of our own pockets, and then pocketing the receipts. But then again, the same is also true for these other churches as well. If we really want to understand the significance of the “average” pledge, we need to look a lot more closely at how experienced church fundraisers understand a congregation’s annual pledge campaign.
To make the math easy, lets assume a hypothetical congregation of 100 households with an average pledge of $1200 a year. Nowadays this is pretty much considered the “back of the envelope” benchmark of healthy stewardship for Unitarian Universalist congregations across the country. Anything higher than that is considered exemplary, and anything lower indicates room for improvement (although obviously every situation is unique, and there is a fair amount of regional variation).
But hypothetically, an average pledge of $100 a month in a congregation of 100 households would result in a canvass goal of $120,000. Experienced church fundraisers would divide that $120,000 goal into four equal amounts or “quartiles” of $30,000 each.
The first quartile they would expect to raise from the 5% of the congregation who comprise the largest contributors -- in this example, five contributions averaging $6000 apiece.
The next quartile they would raise from the 10% of the congregation who are the next highest givers: 10 gifts averaging $3000 apiece.
The third quartile consists of the next 20% of contributors, so again 20 gifts averaging $1500 each.
And the fourth quartile they would look to raise from the remaining 65% of the contributor pool, the majority of whom obviously would be pledging somewhere below the average.
Now it’s been my experience that when folks first stumble across this information, one of the first things they ask is “What’s wrong with those people in the fourth quartile? Why don’t they contribute more?”
And the answer is, there is nothing wrong with the people in the fourth quartile, and often they are contributing as much as they feel they can afford. It’s a statistical phenomenon: the 34th largest contribution probably isn’t that much different from the 36th; both are by definition above the Median, and probably above the Arithmetic Mean as well.
But one of those gifts gets averaged in with those of the larger contributors, while the other is averaged with smaller contributions from people who may be living on limited, fixed incomes, or who perhaps are only marginally involved in the life of the church in the first place.
And the more significant point is that every contribution is important in its own way, large or small. This is not a one-size-fits-all organization, and it needs the support of the entire range of potential contributors in order to flourish and thrive.
Personally, I’m much more interested in what inspires someone to become an above-average pledger: part of that elite 35% who do 75% of the work, and pay 75% of the bills, and (if you could actually figure out a way to measure such a thing) probably receive 75% of the spiritual benefit from participating as active members of a faith community as well.
Obviously, one criterion is that you have to be able to afford it. But affluence isn’t nearly as significant a factor as you might imagine. Statistically, Carlisle is one of the most affluent places in the world. I’m told that the median household income here is approximately $130,000 a year. Yet even in a place like this, people of very similar means will give dramatically different amounts to the church, regardless of the relative size of their incomes in comparison to those of their neighbors, or the general population.
A much more important characteristic than financial means is personal motivation, and this is generally something that originates from within the individual contributors themselves. Above Average Givers tend to share certain qualities with one another. The first is that they believe in the mission of the church, and have a vision for its future. This isn’t a private vision which they keep to themselves; it’s a shared, common vision, which they have helped to create in conversation with one another, and which they are committed to making real. Above Average Givers also tend to be committed to the people around them, or (as we like to put it around here) to the “love and regard” of their “neighbours & fellow cretures.” They trust one another, and build upon that trust in order to support something larger than themselves.
Above Average Givers also typically embody the spiritual values of Generosity and Gratitude. They know that they have been blessed in their lives in countless ways, and they are eager to share those blessings with others as best they can. And finally, Above Average Givers also tend to be leaders. They aren’t afraid to be out in front of the rest of the crowd, doing more than their fair share and encouraging others to follow their example. They realize that leadership is more about service and sacrifice than it is recognition or glory -- service in the sense of being a servant to something larger and more important than ourselves, sacrifice in the sense of making the world around us more sacred through our own grateful and generous presence in it.
Now the reason I’ve shared all this boring technical information about “quartiles” and “average pledges” with you is this. When you compare our current pledge profile to the profile predicted by the theoretical paradigm, one very obvious thing immediately jumps out. The paradigm says that this church ought to have five gifts averaging $6000 apiece. We have two. The paradigm also says that we ought to have ten gifts averaging $3000 apiece, and we appear to have nine...but if you assume that three of those actually belong with those of the first quartile givers, we are four short there as well.
Three plus four equals seven (which is math that even an English major with five college degrees can do). And therein lies the tale of the title of this sermon: The Magnificent Seven.
I don’t know who you are, but I have faith that you are here, somewhere, and destined to become important participants in the next generation of lay leadership of this congregation. Your vision will help shape our shared vision, and your commitment will help make that vision real. You may not be ready to step forward today, or this year, or perhaps even for several years. Or it may just be that the only reason you haven’t stepped forward already is that no one has ever really asked you, so you’ve never really thought about it before. But whatever the reason, until you do step forward, this congregation will never be able to achieve its full potential to serve the spiritual needs of this community of high achieving, above average souls.
And don’t think that this lets the rest of you off the hook either (this is the Border Collie barking now). This year the Finance Committee has asked for a 15% across the board increase in congregational giving just to keep up with inflation, and to compensate for the anticipated smaller return on our invested trust funds.
Basically, if your pledge hasn’t changed since the time of my Installation, your contribution is worth about 10% less than it was three years ago.
I know that these are difficult financial times for many of us, and that often it seems like a struggle just to make ends meet. But if we wait until everything is perfect in our financial lives before deciding to be generous, we will never be generous at all. This church needs all of our contributions, large and small, if it is to flourish and thrive in the days and years ahead.
Here’s one concluding thought. I realize that often it can seem easier to act generously ourselves, than it is to be the object of someone else’s generosity. Yet this reluctance to accept the generosity of others can also inhibit it -- because, after all, nobody likes to make other people uncomfortable.
We need to remember, and to remind ourselves often, that this church is a gift that we give to one another, and which we together give to the larger Carlisle community. Our willingness to accept and honor the generosity of our “Neighbours & Fellow Cretures” is perhaps one of the greatest gifts of true gratitude that we can ever give: both to our neighbors, and ultimately to ourselves as well.
*****
READING: by Steve De Groot. Quoted by Rebecca Parker in “Spiritual Practice for Our Time,” in Everyday Spiritual Practice: Simple Pathways for Enriching Your Life, Scott W. Alexander, ed. (Boston: Skinner House, 1999), pp 194-94. Steve was a member of Rebecca’s first congregation, speaking on Stewardship Sunday.
I first began to tithe, because I was taught to obey the teachings of my church, and tithing was one of them. I tithed because I saw obedience as the heart of faithfulness. When I began to understand that obedience was not all that important and could be evil, I continued to tithe because a different reasons had come to me. The people I loved most and admired tithed: my parents and leaders in our church. Their lives challenged me by their goodness. I wanted to be like them so I tithed to model my life on theirs.
But then I matured in my faith: I came to my own reason for tithing. This is why I do it now: I tithe because it tells the truth about who I am. If I did not tithe, it would say that I was a person who had nothing to give, or I was a person who received nothing from life, or I was a person who did not matter to the larger society, or I was a person whose life’s meaning was solely in providing for my own needs. But in fact who I am is the opposite of all those things. I am a person who has something to give. I am a person who has received abundantly from life. I am a person whose presence matters in the world. I am a person whose life has meaning because I am connected to and care about many things larger than myself alone. If I did not tithe, I would lose track of these truths about who I am. By tithing, I remember who I am.
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday April 2nd, 2006
OPENING WORDS:
"We build on foundations, we did not lay.
We warm ourselves at fires, we did not light.
We sit in the shade of trees, we did not plant.
We drink from wells, we did not dig.
We profit from persons, we did not know.
We are ever bound in community." --Peter Raible
Timothy Muldoon lived alone in the Irish countryside, with only a pet dog for company. One day, the dog died, so Muldoon went to the parish priest and said, "Father, my dog is dead. Could ya' be sayin' a mass for the poor creature?"
Father Patrick replied, "I'm afraid not, my son. We cannot have services for an animal in the church. But there is a new denomination down the lane, some Unitarians, and there's no tellin' what they believe. Maybe they'll do something for the creature."
Muldoon said, "Thank you Father, I'll go right away. Tell me, do ya' think $5,000 is enough to donate for the service?"
“Five Thousand Dollars!” Father Patrick exclaimed, "Sweet Mary, Mother of Jesus! Why didn't ya' tell me the dog was Catholic?”
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about something Woody said at my installation. I’m sure you’ll remember it if your were there, because it was such a vivid image. During his “Charge to the Minister,” Woody advised me not to think of myself as a shepherd, but rather to be the sheepdog. Now I didn’t grow up on a farm, so my understanding of sheepdogs is really pretty limited. Basically, when I think of a sheepdog I think of a big, white hairy English sheepdog like the one in the Warner Brothers cartoons -- calm, courageous, quietly dignified, and always a step ahead of Wiley Coyote. A dog with a personality like the Golden Retriever we had when my kids were little -- a dog who let them tug on her ears, and pull her tail, and dress her up in funny clothing, and who never even let out a growl unless she heard something sinister prowling around outside the house in the middle of the night.
Anyway, a few weeks ago I was having lunch with Woody, and I asked him whether this was pretty much the same image he’d had in mind when he’d said what he said nearly three years ago. And he thought about it for a moment and then said No, that actually he’d been thinking of something more along the lines of a Border Collie.
So I’m shifting a little into Border Collie mode today, just to see if whether by barking a little more loudly and nipping at a few heels, I might be able to get our whole flock back grazing in greener pastures again. There were a lot of wonder things said about the ministry and congregational life at my Installation, most of which I know have now mostly passed from memory, but one thing I will never forget is how (notwithstanding my expressed desire for a “low key” celebration) Mary DeGarmo organized a fantastic party -- for months afterwards people referred to it as my “Coronation” -- yet despite having spent two full years in the Ministerial search process, and spending tens of thousands of dollars to find and bring me here, there was nothing in the church budget to pay for an Installation. Basically, all of the out-of-pocket expenses for that entire event were picked up by one very generous, anonymous donor, while many others also pitched-in in various other ways to make certain that the party was successful and that everyone had a good time.
And for me, this points to a profound paradox deep within the soul of the First Religious Society. Individually, the members of this congregation are some of the most generous and most committed, truly “liberal” people I have ever had the privilege of knowing anywhere. But institutionally, this same church often practices the old fashioned New England value of frugality almost (and I say again ALMOST) to the point of parsimony.
I have no real problem with frugality per se -- since I tend to be a pretty frugal guy myself. I drive a ten year old pick-up truck with over 100,000 miles on it; I buy almost all my clothes at Marshall’s (and what I can’t find there I get at Sears)... I don’t have any credit card debt; I don’t take exotic vacations; I don’t own a sailboat or a summer home (although I think someday I might like to); my kids are both through school, and I’ve even paid off all of my own student loans (which for someone who spent seventeen years in college and has five earned degrees is really saying something).
So I feel I understand the importance of getting your money’s worth, and the value of that wonderful old New England adage: “Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.” Yet when it comes to “doing Church,” sometimes this attitude can be a little misdirected. Church budgets ought to grow out of the ability of people to contribute generously, rather than the effort to “do Church on the Cheap.” Sure, we all want to get good value for our money. But the real point of being part of a Church like FRS is to support and promote our good values in the wider world. And who wants to pinch pennies doing that?
Here’s an interesting bit of information for you. Last year the average pledge here at the First Religious Society in Carlisle was about $915/family. That’s certainly nothing to be ashamed of, and I’m certain there are many congregations around the country who would be thrilled to have that high an average. But just down the road at the First Parish in Concord, the average annual pledge is about $1500 per household; and I’m told that the averages in Bedford and Lexington are about the same.
I realize that just looking at averages can sometimes be deceiving; and that our average pledge, for instance, doesn’t include all of the money that people contribute to this church in others ways, such as through our service auction or other fundraising activities, or simply by paying church-related expenses out of our own pockets, and then pocketing the receipts. But then again, the same is also true for these other churches as well. If we really want to understand the significance of the “average” pledge, we need to look a lot more closely at how experienced church fundraisers understand a congregation’s annual pledge campaign.
To make the math easy, lets assume a hypothetical congregation of 100 households with an average pledge of $1200 a year. Nowadays this is pretty much considered the “back of the envelope” benchmark of healthy stewardship for Unitarian Universalist congregations across the country. Anything higher than that is considered exemplary, and anything lower indicates room for improvement (although obviously every situation is unique, and there is a fair amount of regional variation).
But hypothetically, an average pledge of $100 a month in a congregation of 100 households would result in a canvass goal of $120,000. Experienced church fundraisers would divide that $120,000 goal into four equal amounts or “quartiles” of $30,000 each.
The first quartile they would expect to raise from the 5% of the congregation who comprise the largest contributors -- in this example, five contributions averaging $6000 apiece.
The next quartile they would raise from the 10% of the congregation who are the next highest givers: 10 gifts averaging $3000 apiece.
The third quartile consists of the next 20% of contributors, so again 20 gifts averaging $1500 each.
And the fourth quartile they would look to raise from the remaining 65% of the contributor pool, the majority of whom obviously would be pledging somewhere below the average.
Now it’s been my experience that when folks first stumble across this information, one of the first things they ask is “What’s wrong with those people in the fourth quartile? Why don’t they contribute more?”
And the answer is, there is nothing wrong with the people in the fourth quartile, and often they are contributing as much as they feel they can afford. It’s a statistical phenomenon: the 34th largest contribution probably isn’t that much different from the 36th; both are by definition above the Median, and probably above the Arithmetic Mean as well.
But one of those gifts gets averaged in with those of the larger contributors, while the other is averaged with smaller contributions from people who may be living on limited, fixed incomes, or who perhaps are only marginally involved in the life of the church in the first place.
And the more significant point is that every contribution is important in its own way, large or small. This is not a one-size-fits-all organization, and it needs the support of the entire range of potential contributors in order to flourish and thrive.
Personally, I’m much more interested in what inspires someone to become an above-average pledger: part of that elite 35% who do 75% of the work, and pay 75% of the bills, and (if you could actually figure out a way to measure such a thing) probably receive 75% of the spiritual benefit from participating as active members of a faith community as well.
Obviously, one criterion is that you have to be able to afford it. But affluence isn’t nearly as significant a factor as you might imagine. Statistically, Carlisle is one of the most affluent places in the world. I’m told that the median household income here is approximately $130,000 a year. Yet even in a place like this, people of very similar means will give dramatically different amounts to the church, regardless of the relative size of their incomes in comparison to those of their neighbors, or the general population.
A much more important characteristic than financial means is personal motivation, and this is generally something that originates from within the individual contributors themselves. Above Average Givers tend to share certain qualities with one another. The first is that they believe in the mission of the church, and have a vision for its future. This isn’t a private vision which they keep to themselves; it’s a shared, common vision, which they have helped to create in conversation with one another, and which they are committed to making real. Above Average Givers also tend to be committed to the people around them, or (as we like to put it around here) to the “love and regard” of their “neighbours & fellow cretures.” They trust one another, and build upon that trust in order to support something larger than themselves.
Above Average Givers also typically embody the spiritual values of Generosity and Gratitude. They know that they have been blessed in their lives in countless ways, and they are eager to share those blessings with others as best they can. And finally, Above Average Givers also tend to be leaders. They aren’t afraid to be out in front of the rest of the crowd, doing more than their fair share and encouraging others to follow their example. They realize that leadership is more about service and sacrifice than it is recognition or glory -- service in the sense of being a servant to something larger and more important than ourselves, sacrifice in the sense of making the world around us more sacred through our own grateful and generous presence in it.
Now the reason I’ve shared all this boring technical information about “quartiles” and “average pledges” with you is this. When you compare our current pledge profile to the profile predicted by the theoretical paradigm, one very obvious thing immediately jumps out. The paradigm says that this church ought to have five gifts averaging $6000 apiece. We have two. The paradigm also says that we ought to have ten gifts averaging $3000 apiece, and we appear to have nine...but if you assume that three of those actually belong with those of the first quartile givers, we are four short there as well.
Three plus four equals seven (which is math that even an English major with five college degrees can do). And therein lies the tale of the title of this sermon: The Magnificent Seven.
I don’t know who you are, but I have faith that you are here, somewhere, and destined to become important participants in the next generation of lay leadership of this congregation. Your vision will help shape our shared vision, and your commitment will help make that vision real. You may not be ready to step forward today, or this year, or perhaps even for several years. Or it may just be that the only reason you haven’t stepped forward already is that no one has ever really asked you, so you’ve never really thought about it before. But whatever the reason, until you do step forward, this congregation will never be able to achieve its full potential to serve the spiritual needs of this community of high achieving, above average souls.
And don’t think that this lets the rest of you off the hook either (this is the Border Collie barking now). This year the Finance Committee has asked for a 15% across the board increase in congregational giving just to keep up with inflation, and to compensate for the anticipated smaller return on our invested trust funds.
Basically, if your pledge hasn’t changed since the time of my Installation, your contribution is worth about 10% less than it was three years ago.
I know that these are difficult financial times for many of us, and that often it seems like a struggle just to make ends meet. But if we wait until everything is perfect in our financial lives before deciding to be generous, we will never be generous at all. This church needs all of our contributions, large and small, if it is to flourish and thrive in the days and years ahead.
Here’s one concluding thought. I realize that often it can seem easier to act generously ourselves, than it is to be the object of someone else’s generosity. Yet this reluctance to accept the generosity of others can also inhibit it -- because, after all, nobody likes to make other people uncomfortable.
We need to remember, and to remind ourselves often, that this church is a gift that we give to one another, and which we together give to the larger Carlisle community. Our willingness to accept and honor the generosity of our “Neighbours & Fellow Cretures” is perhaps one of the greatest gifts of true gratitude that we can ever give: both to our neighbors, and ultimately to ourselves as well.
*****
READING: by Steve De Groot. Quoted by Rebecca Parker in “Spiritual Practice for Our Time,” in Everyday Spiritual Practice: Simple Pathways for Enriching Your Life, Scott W. Alexander, ed. (Boston: Skinner House, 1999), pp 194-94. Steve was a member of Rebecca’s first congregation, speaking on Stewardship Sunday.
I first began to tithe, because I was taught to obey the teachings of my church, and tithing was one of them. I tithed because I saw obedience as the heart of faithfulness. When I began to understand that obedience was not all that important and could be evil, I continued to tithe because a different reasons had come to me. The people I loved most and admired tithed: my parents and leaders in our church. Their lives challenged me by their goodness. I wanted to be like them so I tithed to model my life on theirs.
But then I matured in my faith: I came to my own reason for tithing. This is why I do it now: I tithe because it tells the truth about who I am. If I did not tithe, it would say that I was a person who had nothing to give, or I was a person who received nothing from life, or I was a person who did not matter to the larger society, or I was a person whose life’s meaning was solely in providing for my own needs. But in fact who I am is the opposite of all those things. I am a person who has something to give. I am a person who has received abundantly from life. I am a person whose presence matters in the world. I am a person whose life has meaning because I am connected to and care about many things larger than myself alone. If I did not tithe, I would lose track of these truths about who I am. By tithing, I remember who I am.
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