THE BREATHTAKING EMPTY SPACE OF AN OPEN DOOR

a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday September 17, 2006

I thought I’d begin my message this morning by sharing with you all an embarrassing story about myself, just so you’ll all know just how monk-like I can let myself get sometimes. And by “monk-like” I mean Adrian Monk, not Thomas Merton or Saint Francis of Assisi. But last Sunday I made a comment about how the title of my sermon should really have been “A Few Plain, Simple Truths about the Most Important Thing in the Universe (part 438).” The purpose of that apparently “off-hand” remark was to indicate that Yes, I have been doing this for quite a long time now, and Yes, I do tend to repeat myself frequently; and also to foreshadow the fact that a little later on in my sermon I was planning to quote at some length from the message I’d presented five years earlier to my congregation on Nantucket on the Sunday following September 11th. Because I want you to know that even though I very work hard to make it sound like I’m just standing up here sharing a bunch of random thoughts with a room full of my closest friends, these sermons are actually subtle and carefully-crafted works of literary composition. (Just don’t ruin the illusion by letting anybody else in on the secret, OK?)

But that number -- 438 -- was basically just something I’d pulled out of the air, after doing a few quick calculations on my fingers. And afterwards, it started to bother me a little (as somebody with a PhD in history from a University which, by the skin of their teeth, still has a top-25 ranked football team) that I actually didn’t know how many sermons I’ve preached in my lifetime....or how many weddings I’ve performed, how many funerals and memorial services I’ve conducted, or even how many babies I’ve christened. I have some rough idea of course, and pretty good records from the times in my life when I’ve actually been serving just one church full-time. But for the first few years of my career (when I was still in Divinity School and for a few years afterwards); and then again during my second incarnation as a graduate student (when I was managing a bookstore while my former wife was earning her law degree, and later working on my own doctorate), my records are a lot more spotty.

So Tuesday afternoon (which is generally my day off anyway) after getting back home from the Harvard Divinity School Field Education supervisor site fair, I sat down on the floor of my upstairs study in the parsonage with my three-foot-high stack of old sermon manuscripts, and my old appointment calendars (which I’m embarrassed to say I’ve also kept), a legal pad and a laptop computer, and about ten hours later I actually had a fairly complete list of all the sermons I’ve preached over the past quarter-century, along with where and when I preached them. It’s still not a perfect list, of course (and probably never will be -- at least not in MY lifetime)...but it’s a lot better than what I had before. And it turns out that last Sunday I actually UNDERESTIMATED my homiletic productivity by approximately 129 sermons (or 29.4% -- not even close enough for government work), not including the double- (and on occasion even triple-) headers, when I’ve preached the same sermon multiple times at multiple services on the same Sunday morning.

Of course, even this number, as I mentioned last week, is still a little deceptive, since it also doesn’t really indicate what percentage of that number represent times I’ve preached the same sermon to different congregations on different Sunday mornings. When I was an intern at University Unitarian Church in Seattle, for example, I preached a sermon I called “The Palace Bridge in Prague” 13 different times to 13 different congregations in Washington, Oregon, Idaho and British Columbia in just nine months...and also in front of a cameraman in a small, local-access cable TV studio so that it could be videotaped and broadcast late at night for the spiritual edification of insomniacs.

And there are a few others (basically, my personal favorites) which, over the years, have received ALMOST as much exposure, although I still have a long way to go before I catch up with the over 5000 times Temple University founder Russell Conwell preached his famous “Acres of Diamonds” sermon. But it was a fascinating experience for me to sit there cross-legged in the midst of all that paper, the physical artifacts of half a lifetime of hard work, and to reflect back upon what it really means.

During that same 25-year period I have also officiated at over 200 weddings, beginning with my brother Kurt and sister-in-law Lynn’s on Queen Ann Hill in Seattle on July 11th, 1981 (exactly a month after my ordination) and most recently Margie Oleksiak and her husband Doug’s right here in this room on August 6th. I still haven’t added up all the christenings or the funerals. The babies, I’m a little ashamed to say, all start to run together in my mind after awhile (since I haven’t really stayed in one place long enough to see any of them grow up); while each funeral and memorial service is unique and special, and generally evokes unexpectedly powerful (and often painful) memories in me, which means that it’s going to take me a lot longer than I’d counted on to sit down and count them all. Still, the entire experience (and this is my point) was a vivid personal reminder of just how much a Church truly is a “cradle to grave” institution, with something different to offer us in every era in our lives.

Today also just so happens to be my father’s 72nd birthday. I feel very fortunate that both my parents are still living (although not with one another), and I’m also grateful that they both seem to be enjoying relatively good health as well. My Dad in particular has been a real inspiration for me with respect to how one can age gracefully while remaining young at heart, and with luck bounce back from adversity and personal disappointment no matter what your age, through hard work, an optimistic attitude, and the willingness to learn from one’s mistakes and move forward rather than dwelling in the past. These lessons have seemed especially important to me as I’ve looked around at all the significant milestones in my own life right now: the 25th anniversary of my ordination as I just mentioned, my own 50th birthday coming up next month, and of course the 250th anniversary of the founding of this congregation, just around the corner on July 1st, 2008.

Contrary to what you may have heard, it’s never really too late for an old dog to learn a few new tricks. This summer I took advantage of an opportunity to spend a couple of days at the Center for Career Development and Ministry in Dedham, getting my 25-year/God-only-knows-how-many-hundreds-of-thousands-of-miles professional tune-up; and then a few weeks later I invested another lovely Summer day at the Glastonbury Abbey in Hingham at a retreat led by my Divinity School classmate Larry Peers on the theme of Ministry in Midlife.

Larry was the one who taught me the Celtic prayer I used to open the service, and from which I took the title of this sermon. “The Breathtaking Empty Space of an Open Door.” It’s an image full of potential and opportunity, yet also one of hesitation and doubt. We stand at the threshold of we know not what, looking out at unexplored territory, and uncertain whether to embrace the risk of change and step through the open doorway, or to remain indoors where at least it feels safe and familiar, effectively closing the door on anything new or different, including the possibility of growth and discovery.

Of course, open or shut are not the only potentialities present in an open door. Most doors actually swing both ways, and sometimes we find ourselves standing outside a door, wondering whether or not we should knock first before entering. We have grown accustomed in our society to thinking and speaking of “spiritual growth” as a journey or pilgrimage: a quest for personal self-discovery leading to greater wisdom and insight. But pilgrims generally depend upon the hospitality of strangers in order to sustain themselves on their journey, and often our most important moments of insight come as we are recuperating from wounds and injuries sustained along the road.

Saint Ignatius Loyola began composing his “Spiritual Exercises” while recovering from wounds he had received in battle, and later went on to found the Jesuit religious order. Likewise, wise people of all ages and cultures know that Wisdom itself is generally the product of failure, which forces us to learn the things we need to know in order to transcend it. And without someone to provide them with basic food and shelter, something to eat and a place to sleep, most pilgrims would never make it much farther than a few miles from their own front doors. The ministry of hospitality is an essential compliment to the quest for enlightenment and self-discovery: that “free and responsible search for truth and meaning” which stands at the heart of our Unitarian Universalist Principles and Purposes.

This is one of the reasons I’m so proud of the work this congregation does with Habitat for Humanity. Not only are we helping to provide shelter for people who desperately need homes of their own, but by participating in Habitat we become part of an international partnership of people of faith and good will, which breaks down walls and opens doors, and creates profoundly intimate connections between people of dramatically different backgrounds and circumstances, yet who share a common humanity. We need not always see eye to eye in order to walk together, or to share a meal and a roof over our heads while seeking shelter from the rigors of the road.

In the second volume of his “Tales of the Hassidic Masters,” Martin Buber recounts the story of “Rabbi Bunam,” who

...used to tell young men who came to him for the first time the story of Rabbi Eisik, son of Rabbi Yekel in Cracow. After many years of great poverty which had never shaken his faith in God, he dreamed someone bade him look for a treasure in Prague, under the bridge which leads to the king's palace. When the dream recurred a third time, Rabbi Eisik prepared for the journey and set out for Prague. But the bridge was guarded day and night and he did not dare to start digging. Nevertheless he went to the bridge every morning and kept walking around it until evening.

Finally the captain of the guards, who had been watching him, asked in a kindly way whether he was looking for something or waiting for somebody. Rabbi Eisik told him of the dream which had brought him here from a faraway country. The captain laughed: "And so to please the dream, you poor fellow wore out your shoes to come here! As for having faith in dreams, if I had had it, I should have had to get going when a dream once told me to go to Cracow and dig for treasure under the stove in the room of a Jew—Eisik, son of Yekel, that was the name! Eisik, son of Yekel! I can just imagine what it would be like, how I should have to try every house over there, where one half of the Jews are named Eisik, and the other Yekel!" And he laughed again.

Rabbi Eisik bowed, traveled home, dug up the treasure from under the stove, and built the House of Prayer which is called "Reb Eisik's Shul...."


At the end of every pilgrimage is a homecoming. It may not be the same home we left behind, or it may simply seem like a different place because we have changed so much in our absence. But the experience of arriving where we started, and knowing the place for the first time, is the real treasure we gain at the end of all our exploring. Even so, it was poet Robert Frost, and not T. S. Eliot, who observed that “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in.” And when we decide, as people of faith, to offer hospitality to pilgrims along their journey, we essentially invite them to make our home their own.

Building a House of Prayer with the treasure we discover under our very own noses not only requires that we learn to listen to and trust our own dreams, it also means learning to listen to and trust the dreams of others -- the dreams of people who we haven’t even met, who are still essentially strangers to us. It means learning to listen with our hearts, and letting go our our doubts, our restlessness, our discontent and despair, as we reorganize our lives in the direction of simplicity.

A couple of years ago now, this church struggled far more than it probably needed to over the decision to declare ourselves officially a “Welcoming Congregation.” And something I think was often overlooked in that distressing and sometimes painful struggle was that, by voting to call ourselves “Welcoming,” we didn’t actually decide to change anything about FRS itself. As far as I can tell, it has ALWAYS been the policy at FRS that “All Are Welcome Here.” So the actual conflict was apparently over something else, and the sooner we can figure out what that thing really was, the sooner we can resolve it, and come back together again around our more basic mission of providing hospitality and a spiritual home to ALL the explorers and pilgrims who pass through this community.

Understanding and articulating HOW we hope to be in relationship with one another -- the obligations and responsibilities we owe to one another, and the expectations we have of one another as well, is essential to our well-being as a community of faith. As best I can figure out, much of our struggle over welcoming seemed to be between people who felt that it was a shame that FRS should HAVE to declare itself officially a Welcoming Congregation, and others who felt it was a shame that we hadn’t done so already. And when all was said and done, the one thing we all seemed to have in common is that we were all feeling a little ashamed, so much so that some of us still feel a little uncomfortable about showing our faces here in church on a Sunday morning.

And that’s a real shame. A crying shame...

Shame is an emotion we feel when we know that our actions and our behaviors haven’t really lived up to our ideals. And even though it feels terrible, occasionally feeling a little shame is nothing to be ashamed of. Shame can actually be a good emotion -- because it helps us find our way back to the path we HOPE to follow, rather than getting stuck on the one we’ve wandered off on.

Of course, it’s been my experience that Unitarian Universalists don’t really talk all that much about shame, mostly I think because we tend to believe that all paths are pretty much equally good, provided that they start out in the right direction and end up at a good place. And we don’t really care that much for the straight and narrow path either; we tend to prefer the meandering paths, with lots of twists and turns and different viewpoints as we slowly make our way at our own comfortable pace toward the top of the mountain.

But when we notice that our neighbors and fellow creatures are no longer on the path with us, and possibly even lost in the woods, we really do have a responsibility to seek them out again, and tell them that we’ve missed them It may well be that they have simply chosen to follow a different path for awhile, which may or may not eventually bring them back home again here to FRS. But at the very least, we need to keep the door open, and put the kettle on to boil, and extend to them the same kind of radical hospitality we would offer to a stranger who showed up on our doorstep seeking shelter and something to eat. It’s what we’ve been doing up here on this hill for nearly 250 years now. And what I hope we will continue to do for another 250....


OPENING WORDS:

Lord, help me now to unclutter my life,
to organize myself in the direction of simplicity.

Lord, teach me to listen to my heart;
teach me to welcome change, instead of fearing it.

Lord, I give You these stirrings inside me,
I give You my discontent,
I give You my restlessness,
I give You my doubt,
I give You my despair,
I give You all the longings I hold inside.

Help me listen to these signs of change, of growth:
to listen seriously and follow where they lead
through the breathtaking empty space of an open door.

-a Celtic prayer from the Northumbria Community