THE WISDOM OF OUR FATHERS

a sermon preached by
the Rev Dr Tim W Jensen
at the First Religious Society
in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Father’s Day Sunday,
June 17th, 2007

READING: "Remembering My Father" by Betty Jo Jensen

I want you all to know, notwithstanding the title of today’s sermon and in the spirit of full disclosure, that my own father wasn’t or isn’t an especially wise man. But, like a lot of fathers, over the years he’s developed a reputation for being a lot wiser than he really is -- a reputation no doubt at least in part enhanced by the habit I’ve developed over the years of attributing to him anything wise I happen to overhear that bears repeating in a sermon, regardless of where I may have heard it first.

Think of it as “Sermonic License....”

My father is often opinionated and frequently outspoken -- two characteristics which, as his son, I sometimes fear I have inherited; and since these days our opinions rarely agree, clearly the Old Man’s not as wise as I’ve made him out to be over the years. But my father is also a kind, generous, hardworking man, as well as being someone who is genuinely optimistic about the fundamental goodness of other human beings, and the providential nature of the Universe itself. And he has a fantastic sense of humor. A few weeks ago, when my brothers and I were all together around our mother’s hospital bed during her final hours, he told us “When I die, I want to go peacefully in my sleep like your grandfather. Not screaming in terror like all the passengers in his car....”

My father isn’t perfect...I don’t think any father is. But part of the wisdom of growing up is learning to see and appreciate our parents for who they are in spite of their shortcomings and for all their limitations and imperfections (just as they have appreciated us)...knowing that as mature adults ourselves, we embody both their many faults and their many virtues in ways we may never fully understand (or at least not without years of psychotherapy). But even though our own fathers may sometimes fall far short of perfection, there is also a collective “Wisdom of Fatherhood” which, taken in aggregate, is enough to redeem the reputation of them all.

We don’t always have to look to our own fathers to acquire this Wisdom of Fatherhood for ourselves. The world is full of potential “Father Figures” -- teachers, coaches, mentors, friends -- many of whom are filled with wisdom, many others who are merely full of themselves...and one of the most important gifts our own fathers can give us is the ability to discern who is worth listening to (and learning from), and who is not. Our parents instruct us by both precept and example, and the lessons we learn are not always those they hoped to teach us. And yet ultimately the decisions we chose to make are our own, and we alone are responsible for the lives we end up living.

My own father tried to teach me how to throw a football, catch a baseball, hit a golf ball, and shoot a basketball; how to bait a hook, fly a kite, row a boat and tie a necktie; to open doors for ladies (and to leave the seat down), and so many, many other things I can scarcely begin to remember them all...some of which I actually learned, some of which I NEVER learned, and still others which I’m still learning, or had to go and relearn correctly later. But the three most important things he tried to teach me are so much a part of my consciousness now that sometimes it’s hard to tell where my dad’s teaching leaves off and my learning begins.

And the first of these lessons is about the importance of Integrity. Personal integrity was and remains without a doubt one of my father’s most significant core values. The West Point Honor Code seems mild by comparison: my brothers and I were not only taught not to lie, cheat, or steal, or tolerate those who do; we were also told that we were only as good as our word, that our good reputation was our most precious and valuable possession, and that once it was damaged it was almost impossible to repair. Honesty and Trustworthiness were everything to him; as kids we could screw up in almost every way imaginable (and believe me, we did...mostly my brothers though; not so much me....); but no matter what it was that we had done, my father could always forgive us...provided we didn’t try to lie our way out of it.

It was sometimes OK to keep secrets...provided they weren’t the kind of secrets you should NEVER keep, and we were working diligently to make things right again; because, like for a lot of parents, there came a time when my Dad didn’t really WANT to know everything we were up to. Self-Reliance was a very important value for him also, as were minding your own business and being kind and not cruel. Just because the truth sometimes hurts doesn't mean one should be brutally candid just to be hurtful. But more often than not, when we got in trouble we were a lot better off just “fessing up” and asking for his help. Because as important as Self-Reliance was to my Dad, it was even more important that other people knew that they could rely on us, and that we knew we could rely on him.

And this brings me to the second thing that my Father taught me, which is the importance of Accountability. I suspect there are still a lot of households where the phrase “Just wait until your Father gets home” still strikes terror in the hearts of naughty children. In our home, my mother never even had to say it out loud -- we learned at a very early age that we were responsible for the things we’d done wrong, and my father wasn’t so much the Enforcer as he was a “Disciplinarian” in the truest sense of that word.

I remember the thing I hated most was being sent to my room, not as punishment, but so that I could think about what I had done wrong (and why it was wrong), and then later explain it to my father in such a way that he understood that I understood why I should never do that particular thing again.

It was agonizing. And yet it also taught me that there are natural consequences to every decision that we make, and that we should try to anticipate those consequences BEFORE we act impulsively on our choices, because we will indeed eventually have to live with the result. Or as my Dad sometimes liked to put it “we pay tuition for every lesson we learn in life, and there’s simply not enough time to make all the mistakes we need to make ourselves in order to learn what we want to know by trial and error.”

Learning how to learn from the mistakes of others, and taking responsibility for our own decisions rather than simply going along with the crowd, were also both important components in this process. And as far as my Dad was concerned, when it came to accountability it didn’t really matter whether you were an active participant in the wrongdoing, or simply looking on. He had another saying: “one boy, one brain; two boys, half a brain; three boys, no brains.” No matter what the other kids were doing, we were expected to keep our heads, and to make our own decisions.

Don’t get me wrong; my father was a very forgiving parent, who was proud of his sons and expected his sons to be proud of themselves. Which was why it was so important to him that we take responsibility for our actions and choices, and that we never do anything that we would have to be ashamed of.

And this brings me to the third thing my father taught me, which is the importance of Excellence. Not Perfection, mind you, because perfection is meaningless. We were already perfect in my father’s eyes, and nothing was going to change that. But Excellence: the Ambition, the Aspiration, the Desire to Excel -- to do the very best that we were capable of doing at that particular moment, and to accept nothing less from ourselves.

Perfection is impossible; we all know that. But Excellence is Personal: and the only person who can honestly judge whether you have really given it your all, or simply gone through the motions and phoned it in, is yourself. My Dad had very high expectations for his boys, and he honestly believed (or at least convinced us to believe) that we had unlimited potential. But he was much less concerned that we would let him down than that we would someday feel like we’d let ourselves down.

I don’t think anybody ever really wants to disappoint either of their parents, but the great thing about my Dad is that the only way we could really disappoint him is if we disappointed ourselves. Ultimately, it was up to us to choose our own paths, to set our own goals and standards of success or failure, to determine for ourselves who we were, and what we wanted to do with our lives, and the kind of mark we hoped to leave on the world. And no matter what we chose (and we all chose very differently), he was going to be proud of us...

Which is not to say that while we were growing up, he didn’t insist that we try certain activities whether we thought we’d like them or not. It was a lot like having to eat our vegetables: “how are you going to know you don’t like it if you don’t even try?” And by this he didn’t mean just a toe in the water, or a little nibble at the corner of the artichoke. We had to give it our best shot, no matter how awful it (or we) might be at first; and only once we had pretty much reached the limit of our natural ability were we allowed to decide whether to continue on or opt out.

Of course, the other half of this arrangement was that my father rarely said “no” to anything we wanted to try. He might ask us some hard questions (like “how do you expect to pay for this pony?”), but he always heard us out, and often was able to help us see for ourselves that maybe this wasn’t quite as good an idea as we had originally thought.

My Father’s core values of Integrity, Accountability, and Excellence were the cornerstones for everything else he tried to teach me, and form the foundation for who I am today. But there was one other lesson I learned from my father, and this had to do with the nature of Regret. Even (or perhaps especially) over the course of living a long (and hopefully satisfying) life, we all still end up with things that we regret -- perhaps little things that we wish we’d done differently, or important choices we made which, in retrospect, didn’t quite work out the way that we’d hoped they would.

But my father was never one to linger over his regrets, nor was he the type to let them pile up. And he was also the first to expose me to a question I continually puzzle over even today: in the long run, do we come to regret more the things we’ve done and wish we hadn’t, or the things we didn’t do, and wish we had? I’m not really sure there’s a right answer to this question; or, more precisely, I suspect the answer is often both.... But at the end of the day, we can’t really go back and change the things we wish we hadn’t done; the best we can do is to try to make amends. Yet we can always take a chance and try something new, especially if we are also willing to run the risk of looking foolish while we fail...the first time. Because the only REAL failure is not trying in the first place.

Be true to yourself, be true to your word, follow your dreams, and try to live your life without regret -- not because you never look back, but rather by looking ahead far enough to avoid doing things you will probably regret later, and by looking within yourself to find the courage to take the risk of at least trying to do the essential things you will someday regret not doing when you could.

This is some of the wisdom that my father tried to impart to me; some of the same wisdom I’ve tried to impart to my children... and I suspect that many these same precepts, perhaps in slightly different words, are familiar to most of you as well. The Wisdom of Our Fathers is not rocket science, nor even brain surgery; it’s not mysterious or esoteric or obscure.... Instead, it is simple and down-to-earth, practical, pragmatic, and tested by time: the hard-learned lessons of lifetime after lifetime of hands-on personal experience.

And yet, notwithstanding these simple truths, the most precious gift my father gave me, rivaled only perhaps by the gift of life itself, was the gift of his time and his attention. Knowing that I was the apple of his eye, knowing that I was “Precious in my Father’s sight,” gave me the confidence to pursue my own aspirations, and to be worthy of my father’s confidence in me....

[extemporaneous conclusion and farewells]

THE FAITH OF OUR CHILDREN

some remarks by
the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society
in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Religious Education Sunday,
June 10th 2007


I’ve been thinking a lot about “Family” this past week: and not just my family, but families in general...and also the idea of church as an extended family, or perhaps more accurately, a “family of families.” There’s a reason, you know, that Episcopalians and Roman Catholics call their priests “Father.” And as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago when I lit the candle for my mother, the fact that I have walked this same path with so many other families was a great comfort and resource both to me personally and to my entire family as we shared the experience of my own mother’s final hours.

And this experience has also gotten me thinking again about the the important life lessons we try to teach our children here at FRS. I mean, I think it’s good that our kids understand about “the Circle of Life,” and that every living thing must someday die, and that without this death there can be no new life. But I also realize that sometimes “Grandma has gone to heaven” is a perfectly good explanation of death for children of a certain age, especially if it leaves open the possibility of re-examining what that means as they grow older.

But the plain truth is that Unitarian Universalists have always cared a lot more about ethics than we have metaphysics anyway. The purpose of our Religious Education programs is a lot more about teaching values and moral character than speculating about what happens to us after we die.

We want our children to know the difference between right and wrong: to understand that we are all responsible for our own behavior, and for the consequences of our choices.

We also want our children to care about other people: to understand that there is more to life than simply getting what we want, and that empathy for others and a willingness to share are essential qualities for getting along with others in community. We want them to understand the Golden Rule: to do unto others as we would have others do unto us.

And in addition to these important lessons about Accountability and Compassion, we also want our children to feel good about who they are -- to have that essential center of Self-Esteem which gives them the confidence, the creativity, and the generosity to become fully-functioning members of a community, and of society as a whole.

And yet in addition to these three important life lessons, we also often add the challenge of instructing our children about their Unitarian Universalist identity. And by this I mean something more than just that Unitarian Universalists are individuals who take responsibility for their own choices, care about other people, and feel good about themselves. Because, lets face it, you could also say these exact same things about the members of a lot of other Faith Traditions.

Rather, I’m talking about things like who Unitarian Universalsits are, and where we come from, what we have in common with other Faith Traditions, and what differentiates us from them...and perhaps most importantly, what it truly MEANS to be active members of a Faith Community, and full participants in a Living Tradition of Memory and Hope.

And these, of course, are important questions not only for children, but also for adults. And yet, it seems to me, that as adults there are very two simple lessons we can teach our children about church which don’t really require a lot of specialized theological education, and yet are essentially important to helping them cultivate a sense of their own religious identity.

And the first of these lessons is that church matters to our family. That it’s something we do together, that it’s something we do regularly, and that it’s something that has a high priority in our lives. Because let’s face facts: 80% of just about everything in life is just showing up. If we are present, we benefit. And if we are absent, we miss out.

And then the second simple lesson is that no matter where you may go or what may happen there, you will always be welcome here, you will always have a home. This is that wonderful lesson from Robert Frost -- that home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. And yet it seems to me that in addition to accountability and compassion, acceptance and forgiveness are also essential to our faith tradition, and that they are tangibly expressed in our ability to offer hospitality...not only to strangers, but to our estranged family members as well.

I love the opportunity which ministry has given me to be a member of so many families -- to share your sorrows and your joys, and to witness with you so many of the important milestones along the road of life. This year’s graduating Seniors were all Freshmen when I arrived here -- how much you’ve grown in just four short years! And I’ve even started to recognize many of the Trick or Treaters who come to the door of the parsonage at Halloween....

It’s been a great privilege to be included in your lives this way; a great gift you’ve given to me. So even though I’m a little sad that next year at this time someone else will be standing up here in this pulpit, I want you all to know that as much as I have tried to influence your lives for the better though my ministry here, the influence all of you have had on my life has been even more profound. And for that, I will remember you always, and remain eternally grateful....

THE STATE OF THE CHURCH (2007)

a sermon preached by
the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society
in Carlisle, Massachuesetts
Sunday May 6th, 2007

Those of you who have been around here at least as long as I have know that each year I like to preach an annual “State of the Church” Sermon on the Sunday of the Annual Meeting. This year, though, things are a little different -- this year I’m preaching this sermon two weeks earlier than I usually would, because two weeks from now I’ll be up in Portland Maine awaiting the results of the congregational vote to call me as their next settled minister...

And even though we are already talking about this as if it were a done deal (which it’s not -- the still do actually have to take a vote), it is also a good opportunity to look back at my four years here, and perhaps celebrate some of the things that we have accomplished together in the time I’ve been here, as well as to let go of any disappointments we may be feeling about things we wish we might have done a little differently. And it is also a good opportunity (at least from my perspective) to take a step back, and then from that detached and dispassionate point-of-view, to share with you as objectively and candidly and in as loving and kindly a manner as I can some of the things I have seen and learned about this church in the past four years, in the hope that this information might prove useful to all of you in the months and years ahead.

But first I want to take a moment to dispel a couple of rumors which, if I’ve heard them, I’m pretty sure many of you have heard too. To begin with, I did not decide to move on from here because I was dissatisfied with the size of my paycheck, and wanted more money. Attitudes about money were a factor in my decision (and depending on how the time goes I may have a little more to say about that later when I talk about Stewardship). But in terms of my own compensation package, as I have said many times before, Parker and I have very simple tastes and very modest needs, and have never had any trouble living comfortably within our means. Furthermore, I’m not really going to be earning that much more in Portland than I do right now...although I do suspect I will be able to get a little more for my money “Down East” than I can here in the suburbs of the Hub of the Universe.

As for the second rumor, I didn’t decide to leave Carlisle because (as one of you so eloquently put it the other day) the “turkeys” have finally gotten me down. To begin with, as far as I can tell, there are no real turkeys in this congregation... (although last Sunday we did have a couple of live chickens here in attendance). But the plain and simple truth of the matter is that ministry is simply hard work, and no one really knows or appreciates this more than someone who’s been doing it for as long as I have.

Part of the “mystique” of ministry is that we try to make it look easy, and natural, and effortless -- as though it were actually God working through us, rather than the ministers trying to do it all themselves. And over time one also learns that there are limits to how much any single human being can reasonably expect to do, or how much you can control...that things aren’t always going to turn out exactly the way you’d planned or would want them to, and that you don’t always see people at their very best either (especially at times of crisis in their lives, which ministers see a lot).

And most of all, you learn that you really shouldn’t take it personally, because at the end of the day it really IS God working through you (or at least attempting to, if you can just keep your own ego out of the way), and that no one can do this job for very long without some sort of divine intervention and assistance.

If I did have to characterize my reasons for leaving Carlisle, they would mostly be of a much more personal nature. I’m sure this comes as no surprise to many of you, but I have never really felt as at home here in the land of the bears and the mosquitos as I had hoped to -- and this actually has a lot more to do with the nature of the town than with the church itself, and with my own personality as opposed to any external consideration.

I feared when I first agreed to come to Carlisle that I would feel somewhat socially isolated out here in the woods, and I hoped that I would find ways of adapting. Unfortunately, “adapting” turned out to mean getting in my car and driving somewhere else. As a minister, it’s nice to be able to spend an hour or two in the afternoon getting out of the parsonage and going to the gym, then maybe getting a cup of coffee and reading or writing in a quiet cafe for awhile before coming back to church to attend an evening meeting. But when you have to spend another couple of hours driving back and forth between all those places, it starts to feel a little inconvenient.

Likewise, the kind of work that I came here four years ago expecting to do, and the kind of work I found here waiting for me that desperately needed to be done, turned out to be very different from one another. I tried to do the work that needed to be done, and I like to think that together we’ve made at least a little progress; but I also feel like I’ve done about as much of that work as I am able to, while the other work is still waiting for me.

And this brings me to the real reason I have decided to leave FRS, which is that this opportunity in Portland was simply too good for me to pass up, and those folks weren’t going to wait around for me to finish celebrating the 250th anniversary with all of you, much less taking my scheduled six-month sabbatical the following year, and then returning for a subsequent obligatory year of service afterwards.

And I understand that my work in Portland will probably not be anything like I expect it to be either, and that there will no doubt be many days when I look back nostalgically at the time I spent with this congregation, and think fondly of the many friends I have made here in the past four years. But the truth is, I have always been something of a “restless soul.” And it really does feel like it is time to be moving on.

But as I promised earlier, before I go I do have a few observations and insights about the future of this congregation which I think you may find valuable, especially if you are willing to listen closerly and consider them carefully, and then take it to heart, and accept what I have to say in the same generous and dispassionate spirit in which it is offered. And as I mentioned in my newsletter column this past week, these observations basically fall into the three broad areas of Mission, Vision, and Stewardship.

The basic mission of the church (or perhaps I should say, of religious communities in general) hasn’t really changed all that much in thousands of years. But our understanding of that mission, and our ability to adapt it to different contexts and situations, changes almost constantly.

When I graduated from Divinity School, I had an understanding of the mission of the church that was based on the writings of the 19th century German Sociologist of Religion Ernest Troeslsch (and yes, it’s OK to laugh at both his name and my intellectual pretension), and influenced to a large degree by the interpretations of Troelsch by the Unitarian Social Ethicist James Luther Adams.

I believed that the church was a human-scale voluntary association, in which we intentionally create a beloved community and a sanctuary from the pressures of day-to-day living, so that people might come together and connect with one another in a more profound way, centering themselves both emotionally and psychologically as they devote their attention to exploring more deeply their own spiritual lives, and pursuing that “free and responsible search for truth and meaning” we hear so much about; and then returning to their daily lives possessing both the wisdom and the inspiration to transform the world around them for the better.

I still tend to see the mission of the church this way, but over the years I’ve also become a lot more pragmatic about it. As many of you have heard me say before, for many years now I’ve suggested that the mission of the church can basically be boiled down to five core tasks: Worship, Education, Fellowship, Community Outreach, and Pastoral Care -- tasks which I just recently realized I “borrowed” at some point in my career from ideas contained in the now-famous bestselling author and megachurch pastor Rick Warren’s earlier book The Purpose-Driven Church, and adapted to fit a Unitarian Universalist context. And realizing this, I have also now decided that there are actually seven core purposes: which is to say that two of these tasks are complicated enough that they might easily be subdivided.

Worship is one very obvious mission of the church. There are lots of different theologies of worship, but in my theology Worship is a time when we recreate through ritual the fundamental, life-transforming experience of the church as a whole. We come together at a designated hour in a sacred space -- a space we MAKE sacred by our presence in it -- in order to be together with one another in community, and to devote ourselves to a period of learning, introspection, and self-discovery, so that we might return to the world wiser and inspired to make it better.

The Mission of Education is equally obvious: Church is a place where we learn how to become people of faith, and all the other things we need to know in order to live our lives as good and decent souls. And Pastoral Care is perhaps the mission we intuitively think of first when we ask ourselves the question “what do churches do?” What do Churches Do? They care for people in times of grief, and illness, and spiritual crisis.

It’s the tasks of Fellowship and Outreach that are more complicated than first meets the eye. The term “fellowship” is often understood as a synonym for community itself, that experience of what the Greek New Testament calls koinania or “life in common,” the experience of being a member of the family of God, and thus brothers and sisters to one another.

But there is another aspect of Fellowship which I have come to think of as the Mission of Hospitality, of actively welcoming strangers into our community as our guests. Without an active mission of Hospitality, the experience of Fellowship quickly becomes closed and insular, more like a club than a real church. This is why the Scripture cautions us “Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.” (Hebrews 13: 2)

The same “brotherly love” which we would naturally express to members of our own family should in turn be extended to all God’s children, since we can never be certain what important message these sojourners may be bringing to us. Pilgrims require hospitality in order to safely complete their pilgrimages. And likewise, those who offer hospitality to pilgrims receive the gift of their wisdom, and inspiration.

And the same is also true of the Mission of Outreach. Like a lot of religious liberals, I tend to think of Outreach principally in terms of Social Action -- that ultimate expression of our spirituality by which we attempt to change the world and make it better. But this is only half the story. We also have a mission to proclaim our “Good News,” to participate in a little old-fashioned evangelism as we share our message of “salvation” with others.

In other words, we witness our faith not only through our good works, but also through our willingness to actively invite others into partnership with us. And by partnership I mean FULL partnership -- not just some sort of “associate” status where we still make all the decisions, while they take over the work itself.

Worship, Education, Koinania (or “Community”), Hospitality, Social Action, Evangelism, and Pastoral Care. This is the mission of the church as I see and understand it now. But my personal Vision of how FRS might best achieve this mission doesn’t really matter much any more (if indeed it ever did). It’s YOUR Vision for the future of this church that truly matters. And this has been true right from the beginning of my ministry here.

I know there are people here in this congregation who wish that I had been a little more vocal about articulating my personal hopes and dreams for the future of FRS, who equate that kind of assertiveness with strong leadership and fault me for failing to assert myself more strongly. And I know there are others who feel that I was far too outspoken about these things as it was, and that I would have been a lot better off just keeping my eyes on my own work and my mouth shut. And again, I don’t take any of this personally, because I understand that it just sorta comes with the territory.

But from where I stand now, it appears to me that this church basically has its choice of three different paths...and the good news is that you don’t have to look very far down the road to see where each path leads. The first choice is to do nothing at all: to try to keep things just the way they’ve always been by avoiding change whenever possible. The problem with this path is that even if you could successfully keep the church itself from changing, you can’t prevent the world from changing around it. The decision to do nothing is the pathway to decline...it’s the path that leads toward becoming a small church like Billerica, surviving off of the legacies of the past without the resources either to thrive in the present or to embrace the possibilities offered by the future.

The second path begins with a decision to attempt to grow the church significantly. And by significantly I don’t mean the 15 or 20 additional households I’ve sometimes heard mentioned over the years. I’m talking about an intentional decision to attempt to double or even triple the present size of this congregation, which would require profound and substantial changes indeed.

The goal of significant growth would basically mean significantly expanding each of the seven areas of mission I mentioned earlier, as well as hiring additional staff and acquiring additional space in order to support those expanded activities. It would mean, for example, creating an additional worship service, and dramatically changing the ways in which you do evangelism and hospitality, essentially redesigning the entire program of the church from the perspective and around the needs of newcomers. And it would be expensive, since many of these costs tend to be front-loaded, no matter how much you may try to plan to “pay as you go.”

This is the path that leads toward Bedford or maybe even Concord, although initially by way of Littleton. But successfully following this path is not merely a matter of finding the right minister, and then doing exactly whatever that minister says. It also requires the commitment and hard work of an entire congregation of strong individuals, who share that vision and the desire to make it real. And even then, there is no guarantee of success.

The only other path I see is an attempt to improve the quality of your programs sufficiently enough that you can continue to bring in enough new people to sustain yourselves at approximately the size you are now, while at the same time attempting to adjust to the changing circumstances of the world around you. The trouble with this path is that it starts off in exactly the same direction as the second one, but then often runs in circles and doubles back upon itself, while at the same time it actually turns out to be the most expensive option of all, at least when costs are calculated on a per person basis.

This third path can likewise easily turn into Path One by default, especially when you have to stop and reconsider your direction every time you reach a crossroads. And it can often feel like a wrong turn, at least in those uncomfortable moments when you start to compare yourselves to other, more “successful” churches.

This brings me at last to the topic of Stewardship, which I know many people think of as just a euphemism for “Church Finances,” but which I hope you will grow to understand involves much more than merely money. In my mind, the word “Stewardship” reflects the simple fact that none of us really “owns” the church; rather, it is a gift which we have inherited as a bequest from our spiritual ancestors, and which we hold in trust as a legacy for our spiritual descendants.

Most churches pay for their ongoing operations from some combination of the same four sources. The first is revenue produced by assets given to the church by dead people. Some churches have large endowments, while others don’t have any endowment at all -- but basically, the longer a church has been around, the more likely it is to have accumulated wealth originally contributed by previous generations.

A second source is fundraising, a set of activities which potentially covers a great deal of territory, but rarely these days contributes a significant percentage to the budgetary bottom line.

The third source is through the rental of their facilities to other parties, such as the long-term relationship FRS has enjoyed with the Red Balloon preschool, or the anticipated rental of space in our steeple to cellular phone service providers.

But far and away the most important source of income for any congregation is current member giving. And it doesn’t really matter how much money it can raise from those other sources; without the generous financial support of its current, living membership, a congregation is destined to become lackluster and moribund. And the reason for this is that Stewardship truly is about much more than mere money. It’s about the passionate commitment to care responsibly for a precious gift that has been entrusted to us, and to pass it down to the next generation in better condition than we received it....

I likewise appreciate better than you might think the fact that nobody really likes coming to church on Sunday morning just to be harangued by the minister about money. And quite frankly, nobody should really have to. Because that ought to be YOUR responsibility: to talk openly and honestly with one another about how much it really costs to operate a church like this, about how important it is to you personally, and how much it contributes to the quality of your lives; about your dreams for its future, and its potential role in the larger community; and finally how you are going to share those expenses equitably among yourselves, so that each of you are contributing your fair share based on your own resources, and nobody feels like they have to do it all. Your generosity and willingness to sacrifice are what make the First Religious Society viable. It’s more than just a treasure you hold in trust for the future. It’s also a gift you give to one another.

But I do have one last thing to say on this subject.

It’s relatively easy to talk about the expenses of maintaining an older building, or the rising cost of heating oil and office supplies, or even the importance of funding our social justice ministries as generously as we can afford. But the most expensive line item in any church budget is generally “personnel” -- and this is typically a much more difficult subject to discuss, especially when you know the people personally, and you know that they know you.

But the bottom line is, when a congregation fails to discuss openly and honestly the real costs of operating the church, they inevitably end up compelling their staff to make the kinds of financial sacrifices that the members of the congregation are unwilling to talk about making themselves.

And I thought long and hard about spelling out this morning in actual dollars and cents just how much it has cost me personally to be the minister of this church for the past four years. I’ll spare you that exercise, but trust me -- it’s easily six figures...in fact, I think it might even be more than my entire net worth at the moment.

And I admit, it’s hard for me to take those numbers too seriously -- it’s money I’ve never had, and therefore I don’t really miss it much, even when it does add up to such a large sum. But my point is this. It’s wrong to expect other people to sacrifice so much without being willing to talk about sharing those sacrifices yourselves. And it’s a bad policy for ANY organization to put their key employees in the awkward situation where the only option they see for keeping even with inflation is to change jobs.

Yet even as I say all this, I also want you to know just how much I appreciate the generous spirit among you which makes this church possible at all, and how grateful I am for the privilege of having been invited to serve as your minister here at FRS these past four years. We all know that it hasn’t always been easy, and that it hasn’t always been fun...but is there anything in this life that is always easy and fun? There have been more than enough rewarding moments to compensate for the challenging and difficult ones, as well as memories and relationships which I know I will carry with me the rest of my life.

Parish Ministry is the kind of job I would eagerly do for free if I could afford to (and which I often have in times past). And it is also the kind of job which can’t really be done in isolation; it requires the support and participation of an entire congregation of “faithful souls” to make ministry possible in the first place.

And this, too, is a gift that you have given to me, and to one another... as we have gathered here, in this sacred space, Sunday after Sunday, seeking the wisdom and the inspiration to transform the world, and ourselves, for the better....

NO SNOW ON KILIMANJARO

a sermon preached by the Rev Dr Tim W Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Earth Day, Sunday April 22nd, 2007


I often get kind of a warm feeling in my heart when Earth Day falls on a Sunday, because as some of you know, the very first sermon I ever wrote and preached was for Earth Day back in 1979. That sermon was inspired by my then-recent insight that the word “Economy” and the word “Ecology” have the same root, the Greek word oikos or “house.” Economics is literally the Law of the House while Ecology is a Word about the House, or perhaps more expansively, Ecology is the study of the basic principles by which households function and flourish, while Economics attempts to define the rules for profitable household management. But I remember my entire message that morning basically revolved around a quotation from Socrates found in Xenophon’s Oikonomikos, that “the Earth, being a Goddess, teaches us justice, for she gives the most to those who serve her best.”

Of course, both the natural sciences and the “dismal science” have come a long way in the past twenty-five centuries since Xenophon first recorded those words of Socrates, and even in the quarter-century since I first preached that sermon. But I think that this basic principle, that the Earth teaches us justice, because she gives the most to those who serve her best, is something we ignore only at great peril. It was true back then; it’s still true now -- and those who have been wise enough to see the big picture have always known this, no matter what century they have lived in.

But recently it seems as if this big picture is on everybody’s mind. It’s as if we have reached some sort of “Tipping Point,” and information that was once in the possession of only a knowledgeable few is now common knowledge for everyone. In 1992 then-Senator Al Gore wrote a very important book called Earth in the Balance which was widely ridiculed as evidence of the one-time English major and Divinity Student’s stiff and wonkish erudition. This year former Vice-President Al Gore won an Oscar for his documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” and even influential members of the post-Katrina Bush Administration are starting to take his message seriously. It’s a sea change in public opinion...but what worries me is whether this “Tipping Point” (this point in time after which so many people are aware of something that it can no longer be ignored) may also be a marker of “the Point of No Return” -- an indication that the real issue is no longer how to reverse climate change, but rather one of learning how to live with it.

Some of you may also remember that last year on this Sunday I preached a sermon called “Ice for the Polar Bears,” in which I talked about my former father-in-law’s often-expressed desire to leave his entire estate to the cause of buying ice in the summer for the Polar Bears at the Chicago Zoo, and how this small act of idiosyncratic charity might easily serve as a metaphor for the challenges which face us all as we attempt to come to grips with a world that may well be changing beyond recognition. And I also spoke about the five stages of grief, and how in many ways our society must learn to mourn the death of something we assumed would last forever, by passing through stages of denial, anger, bargaining and depression, until we finally come to an eventual state of acceptance that allows us to move forward with our lives.

And now have have a little bit of an update about the Polar Bear situation, which I believe just goes to show that even when we can start to agree about what the problem is, we can’t always agree on the best solution. As you may have heard, there’s been a lot of discussion lately about whether or not to list Polar Bears as a threatened or even an endangered species. As the polar ice packs shrink, and the ice seals which are the Polar Bears’ preferred food source become more and more difficult to hunt, not only are Polar Bears beginning to starve or to drown as they attempt to swim further and further across open water in search of prey, they have also started migrating closer and closer to human habitat, and some scientists believe that they are even beginning to develop a taste for alternative food sources (although many others would dismiss these assertions as wishful thinking).

But while Americans debate about whether or not to declare Polar Bears endangered, the Russians are beginning to consider allowing legal hunting of Polar Bears again, which has been outlawed in that country for almost 50 years. Their logic (which has also been echoed by the Governor of Alaska), is that without some sort of legalized hunting to thin the population and eliminate nuisance bears, illegal poaching and the collapse of their natural habitat potential pose an even more catastrophic threat to the bears’ survival. Presently in Alaska, legal Polar Bear hunting is already an important part of the Inuit economy, both for their own subsistence and also by providing employment as guides for trophy hunters from other parts of the world. And so, the conundrum: do we hunt the Polar Bears in order to save them, or try to protect them and in doing so, possibly destroy them instead?

On a similar note, six years ago now climatologist Lonnie Thompson of Ohio State University predicted that the world-famous glacier atop nineteen-thousand-foot high Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania (which is situated just three degrees of latitude south of the equator), could all be melted by 2015. Already the ice pack there has diminished by 82% since it was first measured early in the 20th century, over a third of that in the last 20 years.

There are all sorts of potentially unpredictable environmental consequences brought about by No Snow on Kilimanjaro. But the biggest anticipated impact of this dramatic example of climate change is on tourism. Over 20,000 people a year visit Tanzania to see its snowcapped equatorial mountain with their own eyes, making it that country’s largest source of foreign currency. Recently a more extensive and sophisticated study of the mountain suggested that professor Thompson’s estimates may have been unduly pessimistic -- and that the glacier could well last until 2040.

But Kilimanjaro is not the only endangered equatorial glacier. A few hundred miles north, on the border between Uganda and the Congo, the fabled “Mountains of the Moon” (whose snows feed the sources of the Nile), are also melting, while some glaciers in the South American Andes could disappear entirely in as little as five years. Even in the Himalayas, the glaciers are in full retreat, with all kinds of ugly consequences for the folks downstream, many of whom live in some of the poorest regions of the planet, and who now face a “boom-and-bust” scenario when it comes to their water supply.

In his classic short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Ernest Hemingway writes of a middle-aged American writer who has gone on Safari in Africa with a wealthy female companion, and is slowly dying of gangrene from an infected and untreated scratch from a thorn, while his lover waits anxiously for the arrival of an airplane which she hopes will rescue them and save his life. The first few lines of dialog in this story are famous (or at least they’re famous among a certain vintage of one-time aspiring undergraduate creative writing students) for the way they illustrate Hemingway’s brilliant talent for showing you everything you need to know in just a few words, and yet telling you almost nothing at all.

“The marvelous thing is that it’s painless,” he said. “That’s how you know when it starts.”

“Is it really?”

“Absolutely. I’m awfully sorry about the odor though. That must bother you.”

“Don’t! Please don’t.”

“Look at them,” he said. “Now is it sight or is it scent that brings them like that?”

The cot the man lay on was in the wide shade of a mimosa tree and as he look out past the shade onto the glare of the plain there were three of the big birds squatted obscenely, while in the sky a dozen more sailed, making quick-moving shadows as they passed.

“They’ve been there there since the day the truck broke down,” he said. “Today’s the first time any have lit on the ground. I watched the way they sailed very carefully at first in case I ever wanted to use them in a story. That’s funny now.”

“I wish you wouldn’t,” she said.

“I’m only talking,” he said. “It’s much easier if I talk. But I don’t want to bother you.”

“You know it doesn’t bother me,” she said. “It’s that I’ve gotten so very nervous not being able to do anything. I think we might make it as easy as we can until the plane comes.”

“Or until the plane doesn’t come....”

And so it goes on from there. A dying man lies in the shade of a tree while vultures circle overhead, dying of a small scratch he foolishly ignored until it was too late, lying to himself about his fear of death, about his loss of hope, about the significance of a life which once held great promise, but which he now feels like he squandered along with his great talent. All within sight of snowcapped Kilimanjaro, whose imposing presence on the horizon seems eternal.

And now even the snow on Kilimanjaro is melting.

It’s hard to read this Hemingway story today, 70 years after it was first published in Esquire magazine, without reading in to it this additional layer of meaning, and irony. Many of the African animals Hemingway hunted on Safari in the 1930’s are now threatened or endangered; 21st century African explorers shoot photographs of the animals rather than the animals themselves, as if documenting for posterity an aspect of life on Earth which may well have disappeared entirely in another generation or two. Only the poachers (and those who hunt them) carry firearms now -- the former are often impoverished indigenous guerillas heavily armed with automatic weapons and the other tools of modern warfare; the latter typically outgunned and underpaid government officials, who in many cases can do little more than document the slaughter.

For those of us who grew up in the shadow of the Cold War, and read Hemingway as an exemplar of the heroic individual beaten down (yet not defeated) by forces larger than himself: fate or chance, the impersonal horrors of modern industrial warfare, even Nature itself, the idea that the world might truly end not with a bang, but a whimper...from an infected scratch rather than a shotgun blast to the head, can be a little difficult to accept. “ ‘The marvelous thing is that it’s painless,’ he said. ‘That’s how you know when it starts.’ ” It really does stink though, and the vultures do come circling round eventually. And all the writing in the world isn’t going to change that, or make them go away.

And likewise, Global Climate Change itself in many ways merely represents another order of magnitude in the genre of environmental catastrophes which are already far too familiar to us: deforestation and soil erosion, population displacement, species extinction and the loss of biodiversity, economic exploitation in the name of economic “development,”pollution, drought, famine and disease... much of which can ultimately be traced back to human ignorance and human greed, and a political mentality which embraces the path of competition, confrontation and conflict rather than one of clarity, consensus and collaboration.

It’s one thing to recognize that we have a problem, and quite another figuring out what to do about it. And as for actually DOING it: actually making the changes and the sacrifices required to make a difference, that’s a whole new level of challenge in and of itself. But ignoring climate change is no longer an option; the world is changing around us whether we like it or not, and we can either learn to change with it, or die not trying....

It’s a grim, even morbid insight I know; not exactly the sort of thing to inspire a lot of happy feelings on a beautiful and sunny Sunday morning in Spring. But for too long now we have chosen to serve ourselves rather than learning how to serve the earth, and now the earth, being a goddess, is teaching us justice. Let’s hope that we can finally learn that lesson, before it’s too late for us all.

DEATH... AND TAXES....

a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday April 15th, 2007

OPENING WORDS: "We probably could have saved ourselves, but we were too damned lazy to try very hard... and too damn cheap,” -- Kurt Vonnegut, Nov 11, 1922- April 11, 2007

READINGS: Mt 17:24-27; Mk 12:41-44; Lk 20:20-26.


When I first picked out the title for this sermon some weeks ago now, of course I had no idea that author Kurt Vonnegut would pass away just four days before I planned to preach it. I was a huge fan of Vonnegut’s when I was younger -- for a time I even tried to imitate his distinctive narrative voice in my own writing, and his inspiration certainly helped shape my life at a very impressionable age in ways I will probably never fully understand.

I once heard a literary critic describe Vonnegut’s fiction as “bitter coated sugar pills” -- a phrase that has obviously stuck with me, since at this point I haven’t the slightest idea who it was that actually said it, or where I heard it first. As the years went by, I grew less interested in Vonnegut’s fiction, and much more intrigued by what might be thought of as his “occasional” writings: lectures, essays and even at times a sermon or two on topics of social justice and public concern, and especially the issue of Freedom of Expression, which deeply concerns him personally since his novel Slaughterhouse Five was and remains one of the most frequently banned books in America.

A notorious infidel and freethinker as well as an iconoclastic curmudgeon, Vonnegut sometimes liked to quip that he was not raised in any organized religion; that his father was a Unitarian -- an allusion to the fact that the family occasionally attended services at the All Souls Unitarian Church in Indianapolis when Vonnegut was a boy.

And I actually met him in person once, at a booksigning at the 1986 General Assembly in Rochester New York, where Vonnegut had been invited to deliver the Ware Lecture. I remember getting there early and standing in line for over an hour waiting for him to show up, because my wife was also a big Vonnegut fan I was still feeling a lot like a newlywed, and wanted to have the book inscribed to her for our first anniversary later that week.

And then when he finally showed up, and it was my turn in line, I handed him my book and a pen -- a cheap promotional pen I’d had made up to publicize the Unitarian Universalist Church of Midland Texas -- and he inscribed the book for my wife like I’d asked, and then he looked at the pen, read it...and kept it! I didn’t really mind; I had lots of others, and I’ve liked to imagine over the years that he took it home with him and wrote all sorts of amazing things with it...although I kind of doubt it, since it really was a pretty cheap pen, and probably didn’t last him through the end of the day.

But the best thing that happened to me that day is that while I was waiting in line I met one of Kurt’s High School classmates from Indianapolis, the author Dan Wakefield, who IS a Unitarian Universalist, and has written several very good books of his own, including one about “Writing Your Spiritual Autobiography” (which we used here for an Adult Religious Education class not too long ago), and also this book: The Hijacking of Jesus: How the Religious Right Distorts Christianity and Promotes Prejudice and Hate.

This really is a book you can pretty much judge by its cover, especially if you flip it over and read the blurb Kurt Vonnegut wrote for the back of the dust jacket. “Dan Wakefield has had a long career of fair-minded, important, and meticulously researched journalism. And he crowns that career with as complete an account and analysis as one could wish of the capturing of Jesus Christ as a totem for a few powerful Americans, intent on becoming powerful all over the world, and by violent and corrupt means which are anything but Christ-like. The very last words in this fine book are not by Dan Wakefield, but Jesus, his Sermon on the Mount, not what you would want to call Pat Robertson or Dick Cheney stuff.”

The passage Vonnegut refers to reads like this:

Most of the world’s Christians believe that one of the principle gifts of their faith is the message that Jesus gave to the multitudes on the mountain -- a message that many on the Religious Right have declared is no longer a part of their belief:

Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven

Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.

Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.

Blessed are they that do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.

Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.


And now, like the author of these words, and the authors of so many inspiring words before and since, Kurt Vonnegut is dead, and only the words themselves survive as his legacy. And yet the words themselves evoke the spirit of their author whenever we repeat them, and in that way they truly do embody a tangible manifestation of immortality.

We often think of death as a tragic loss -- and often it is, even when it also often means release from prolonged emotional suffering and excruciating physical pain. And I also think it’s significant that we should speak of death today in the same breath that we welcome and recognize two relatively new-born children as part of this community, and dedicate ourselves to sharing with them the enduring values and heritage of our faith tradition.

Transitions can be stressful even in the best of times. Often we hear things like “the only thing constant in life is change,” while in the next moment being told that “the more things change, the more they remain the same.” We realize, for example, that death comes to every living thing, as the inevitable final stage of life which can neither be avoided or changed...and yet death also changes everything: not only for the deceased, but for all of their friends and loved ones as well.

We fear death because it represents in a profoundly disturbing way both the unknown and the unknowable, the uncontrolled and the uncontrollable; while at the same time we learn to accept (and even embrace) death as the common, universal fate of us all. And so we mourn, we grieve, we lament our losses...recognizing that every loss or disappointment is like a “little death,” a manifestation of change which in some significant way is beyond our ability to shape or control.

And then there are taxes. It was Ben Franklin who observed that “in this world, nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” And taxes are certainly on a lot of people’s minds this time of year, especially as those of us accustomed to waiting until the very last minute scramble to fill out our State and Federal income tax forms. Here in Carlisle though, it seems to be the local property taxes that folks are most concerned about. I have kind of an unusual perspective on this whole issue, since because I live in a church-owned parsonage rather than owning a home of my own, neither the church or I pay any property taxes on the assessed value of that house. I guess it’s just one of those odd little quirks in the tax code that goes back to the good old days when clergy were also considered town employees, whose salaries were paid out of local tax revenues.

Of course, not being either a taxpayer or a town employee didn’t keep me from reading with great interest and almost voyeuristic curiosity the front page article in Friday’s Mosquito comparing School Superintendent Marie Doyle’s new compensation package with the paychecks of Concord/Carlisle High School Superintendent Brenda Finn, Carlisle Chief of Police John Sullivan, and Carlisle Town Administrator Madonna McKenzie.

For those of you who didn’t read the article, Doyle’s base salary is now $130,636 a year, along with six weeks paid vacation and another four weeks of sick leave and personal time; while Finn makes $160, 414 to go with her five weeks vacation and 20 personal days. Both superintendents also have a budget of $2500/year for professional travel expenses.

Chief Sullivan earns a total of $102, 025 plus a $2000 allowance for uniforms, and the personal use of a police vehicle, since (according to his contract) he is “always on call in the event of an emergency.” Town Administrator Madonna McKenzie only earns $93,000 a year at the moment, but her salary is scheduled to increase to $105,000 by October, 2008, and she also enjoys an expense allowance of $4000/year, and is reimbursed for the use of her car for work-related travel.

And of course, all of four of these important public servants, as they deserve, enjoy generous pension and medical insurance benefits.

Now obviously, I don’t know how these numbers measure up to what any of you may be earning in your current employment (and I’m not really sure why we’re reading about them in the newspaper either, unless it really is just to get us wondering whether or not our taxes are too high).

But I do know how these salaries compare to mine. Anybody want to hazard a guess at the amount that shows up at the top of my W-2 form was this year? [For God’s sake don’t just blurt it out; just think quietly to yourself about what it might be].

$31,648.82.

Now admittedly, this number is a little deceptive, since I also get to live in the parsonage -- tax free (which of course is very convenient when I happen to be called in an emergency); and I also contribute in addition a fairly significant amount to my pension fund each year (to make up for all those years I was in graduate school earning a PhD, and therefore contributing nothing), which would have otherwise been paid to me as salary. I get four weeks of vacation (provided I take them in the summer), plus another four weeks of “parish leave,” (which means that I am theoretically free of my “routine” pastoral duties can go and do whatever I want, provided I come back at my own expense in the event of a pastoral crisis). And I’m even entitled to at least one Sunday a month out of the pulpit, and can pretty much take a personal day whenever I like...provided that the sermon is ready on Sunday morning, and people can still reach me if they need to.

But here’s the more important question. Why the big disparity? Is it that I’m not as skilled or well-qualified as these other important public servants? I’d be happy to compare my resume to any of theirs, but maybe it has more to do with something about supply and demand, or how much we each contribute to our respective bottom lines. Is it just that I don’t work as hard, or that I am somehow less productive than they are? After all, we all know perfectly well that clergy really only work an hour a week. Or perhaps I simply have fewer, and less-important responsibilities; this is, after all, a tiny little church in a tiny little town, with only a few hundred members and friends, only a fraction of whom show up on any given Sunday.

But whatever the reason, society has come to value the kind of work that I do less than it does the work of these other skilled and dedicated professionals, and this is reflected in the compensation we receive. Two hundred years ago, back when the churches were still tax-supported (and there was no such thing as “public” education), the minister would have doubtlessly been both the best-educated and one of the most highly-compensated individuals in the community. But those days are long behind us.

And just to broaden our perspective for a moment, why do we pay lawyers and physicians so much more than we do schoolteachers and soldiers? Is it simply that we pay the latter less because we can, and the former more because we have to? And never mind the ongoing controversy over the sky-high compensation of certain corporate CEOs.

It’s easy to be concerned that our taxes are too high, or worried that we aren’t earning enough money to make ends meet. But we also want good schools for our kids, safe streets and reliable roads, access to health care when we need it (and for everyone who needs it), clean air and clean water, and a multitude of other public services which we have come to think of as the fundamental benchmarks of life in a modern, civilized society. And the only way we can have these things, is if we all do our share to pay for making them happen.

And as for the value of my work, and that of my colleagues who do this work with me, I doubt that we will ever enjoy again the kind of status, prestige and compensation that clergy here in New England did in the days of the Puritans. The values of humility, service, obedience and sacrifice are so deeply woven into public perceptions of the ministry that even a hint of personal ambition or avarice seems almost to disqualify an individual as an authentic spiritual leader, someone whose interests and attention should be focused on the transcendent rather than the material.

And yet, I also like to think that the work of ministry has an inherent worth and an intrinsic reward which transcends the value of money.

A friend of mine sent me a poem the other day by the Canadian poet Oriah Mountain Dreamer, and I’d like to wrap up by sharing it with you now:

The Invitation

It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living.
I want to know what you ache for
and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.

It doesn’t interest me how old you are.
I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool
for love
for your dream
for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon...
I want to know if you have touched the centre of your own sorrow
if you have been opened by life’s betrayals
or have become shrivelled and closed
from fear of further pain.

I want to know if you can sit with pain
mine or your own
without moving to hide it
or fade it
or fix it.

I want to know if you can be with joy
mine or your own
if you can dance with wildness
and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes
without cautioning us
to be careful
to be realistic
to remember the limitations of being human.

It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me
is true.
I want to know if you can
disappoint another
to be true to yourself.
If you can bear the accusation of betrayal
and not betray your own soul.
If you can be faithless
and therefore trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see Beauty
even when it is not pretty
every day.
And if you can source your own life
from its presence.

I want to know if you can live with failure
yours and mine
and still stand at the edge of the lake
and shout to the silver of the full moon,
“Yes.”

It doesn’t interest me
to know where you live or how much money you have.
I want to know if you can get up
after the night of grief and despair
weary and bruised to the bone
and do what needs to be done
to feed the children.

It doesn’t interest me who you know
or how you came to be here.
I want to know if you will stand
in the centre of the fire
with me
and not shrink back.

It doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom
you have studied.
I want to know what sustains you
from the inside
when all else falls away.

I want to know if you can be alone
with yourself
and if you truly like the company you keep
in the empty moments.

This is the work of a Parish minister, and the work of ministry which we all share. To stand with others in the center of the fire and not shrink back, to feed the children, shout “yes” to the moon, dare to dream, feel the pain, remember our limitations, and know that we truly like the company we keep when we are alone with ourselves in the empty moments...

JOY!

a sermon preached by the Rev Dr Tim W Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Easter Sunday, April 8th 2007

Readings: Phillipians 2: 1-8; Galatians 3: 25 - 4: 7


I think one of the most challenging things about leading an intergenerational service like this, especially at a time like Easter, is figuring out how to craft a message which expresses the subtlety of what I have to say about the subject in a way that is simple enough that the kids can appreciate it too. One solution obviously is simply to keep it short. But it also helps, I think, to try to use familiar stories and metaphors to communicate what one wants to say -- which can sometimes lead to other problems down the road, when the more analytical engineering-types start looking for some sort of logical consistency in a story that was never really logical to begin with.

And this, of course, is the whole problem of Easter in an eggshell. The Fundamentalist Christians want us to believe that the “miracle” of Easter is that a dead body -- which is to say, Jesus’s dead body -- came to life again (or at the very least, turned up missing from its tomb a few days after everyone thought it was safely buried), and then afterwards a few people even claimed that it talked with them. But when I first heard this story as a kid myself, many years ago now, my first reaction was “So What?” I didn’t really know anything about what it meant to be dead in the first place, so the idea that somebody might be “resurrected” from the dead didn’t really impress me that much either. And since I had to take somebody else’s word for it anyway, and couldn’t actually witness it myself with my own two eyes, the whole story didn’t really mean much more to me than any of the other fantastic fairy tales that grown-ups told me when they were trying to pull my leg, or keep me quiet and entertained while they talked among themselves about more important things.

And then, as I got a little older (and a little more theologically sophisticated), I came to the conclusion (all by myself, although I was attending a Unitarian Universalist Sunday School at the time) that the whole story of Easter was pretty much just a red herring anyway. Because it seemed perfectly obvious to me that if the religion TAUGHT by Jesus was any good in the first place, it wouldn’t really matter whether or not he rose from the dead afterwards; while if it WASN’T any good, a little trick like rising from the dead wasn’t going to make it any better. So I decided that I would just focus in on trying to understand what Jesus himself had to say about the things that were interesting to me, and ignore all the other things that other people had to say about him.

But then, as I got even older, and started to read things like Paul’s Letter to the Galatians, I started to think about all these things again in a whole NEW light. And this is the part where I want to tell a little story about something that actually happened to me just this past Friday night. Friday night I went with a friend over to Littleton to hear Fred Small perform at the Firehouse Coffeehouse. I know this may seem a little hard to believe, but I’d never actually heard Fred perform before; I’ve only known him as another Unitarian minister, so I was really kind of anxious to see this whole other part of his life which, for most people, is the part of his life they know him best for.

And Fred was very impressive (just like I’d expected), and I had a really good time (as did everyone else, except maybe the guy who had to leave early because the police were about to tow is car); but the one thing that really impressed me was the way how Fred, at certain key parts of the show, got us to all stand up and hold hands and sing along, just like we sometimes do here in church. Because (as he pointed out), the entire purpose of his music isn’t just for him to be standing up there on stage singing to us. It’s about all of us singing and moving and harmonizing together, and experiencing the Joy, the Ecstasy, of being part of one body singing with one voice.

You know, that word “ecstatic” means literally “to stand outside oneself.” It’s the exact same root (with jsut a different prefix), as the word “anastasis” -- to “stand again,” which we have borrowed into English in its Latin form “resurrection.” The two ideas are intimately related to one another, but it’s hard to see the connection until you stop thinking about resurrection as having something to do with dead bodies getting up and walking around again, and start thinking about the concept in a more sophisticated way.

A couple of weeks ago now, I preached a sermon about Basketball, in which I talked about the experience of playing together as part of a team, and being “in the zone,” where everything just “clicks” and the boundary between being and doing slips away. And afterwards, one of our choir members came up and told me that’s exactly how she feels when she’s singing along with everyone else in the choir, which of course made perfect sense to me. And when you put music and movement together, what you get is Dance, which brings me to this remarkable book by Barbara Ehrenreich I’ve been reading this past week: Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy.

In this book, Ehrenreich writes about the importance of ecstatic experience in the formation of human community, and especially the difference between Festival and Spectacle. Spectacle is an experience of passive observation (perhaps as part of a mass audience) of something so astonishing that it overwhelms our individuality, yet still ultimately leaves us feeling small and isolated, and alone; while a Festival in many ways is just the opposite: a shared celebration in which we actively participate, and which draws us out of ourselves in an ecstatic experience of human interaction, connection and community.

Let me just read to you a few brief passages from the book:

Anthropologists tend to agree that the evolutionary function of the dance was to enable -- or encourage -- humans to live in groups larger than small bands of closely related individuals. The advantage of larger group size is presumed to be the same as it is for those primates who still live in the wild: Larger groups are better able to defend themselves against predators. Unlike most animals -- antelopes, for example -- primates are capable of mounting a group defense, mobbing the intruding predator, threatening it with branches, or at least attempting to scare it off by making an infernal racket. In the case of early humans, the danger may have come not only from predatory animals like the big cats but from other now-extinct hominids or even from fellow Homo sapiens bent on raiding. And of course, in the human case, the forms of defense would have included fire, rocks, and sharpened sticks. But the first line of defense was to come together as a group....

Like primates in the wild today, early humans probably faced off predatory animals collectively -- banding together in a tight group, stamping their feet, shouting, and waving sticks or branches. In our own time, for example, hikers are often advised to try to repel bears they encounter in the wild with the same sorts of behavior, with the arm and stick waving being recommended as a way of exaggerating the humans’ height. At some point, early humans or hominids may have learned to synchronize their stampings and stick-wavings in the face of a predator, and the core of my speculation is that the predator might be tricked by this synchronous behavior into thinking that it faced -- not a group of individually weak and defenseless humans -- but a single, very large animal. When sticks are being brandished and feet stamped in unison, probably accompanied by synchronized chanting or shouting, it would be easy for an animal observer to conclude that only a single mind, or at least a single nervous system, is at work. Better, from the predator’s point of view, to wait to catch a human alone than to tangle with what appears to be a twenty-foot-long, noisy, multilegged beast....

Over time, as...the threat of animal predators declined, the thrill of the human triumph over animals could still be reinvoked as ritual. Through rhythm, people had learned to weld themselves into a single unit of motion meant to project their collective strength and terrify the animals they hunted or that hunted them. Taken individually, humans are fragile, vulnerable, clawless creatures. But banded together through rhythm and enlarged through the artifice of masks and sticks, the group can feel -- and perhaps appear -- to be as formidable as any nonhuman beast. When we speak of transcendent experience in terms of “feeling part of something larger than ourselves,” it may be this ancient, many-headed pseudocreature that we unconsciously invoke....

Which brings me to the metaphor of the risen body of Christ, and Paul’s remarkable assertion in Galatians that we are all children of God, and that “there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Once again, the literalists literally want to turn this passage upside-down, suggesting that what it means is that somehow Christians are better than everyone else, because they are the heirs to God’s kingdom while everyone else is excluded. But Paul is saying that the spirit of Jesus has shown us just the opposite: that their is no distinction or hierarchy in God’s Kingdom, and that we are all heirs to the promise, we’ve all been invited to dance at the party.

Once again, Ehrenreich describes it this way:

Hierarchy, by its nature, establishes boundaries between people -- who can go where, who can approach whom, who is welcome and who is not. Festivity breaks the boundaries down....While hierarchy is about exclusion, festivity generates inclusiveness. The music invites everyone to the dance; shared food briefly undermines the privilege of class. As for masks: They may serve symbolic, ritual functions, but, to the extent that they conceal identity, they also dissolve the difference between stranger and neighbor, making the neighbor temporarily strange and the stranger no more foreign than anyone else. No source of human difference or identity is immune to the carnival challenge; cross-dressers defy gender just as those who costume as priests and kings mock power and rank. At the height of the festivity, we step out of our assigned roles and statuses -- of gender, ethnicity, tribe, and rank -- and into a brief utopia defined by egalitarianism, creativity, and mutual love. This is how danced rituals and festivities served to bind prehistoric groups, and this is what still beckons us today.

The great miracle of Easter is that what we thought was a tragedy turns out to be a party, and that the loss of a single individual in no way means the end of the community, or its ability to move together in rhythm, singing in harmony and speaking as with one voice. The teacher is dead, but the teachings live on, embodied in whoever is willing to stand outside of themselves, and live the life of a child of God.

Like the festival of Passover, by which it was inspired, during which Jews commemorate the escape of their ancestors from slavery in Egypt, and the forty YEARS they spent wandering in the Wilderness of Sinai, until Moses and all of that original generation had passed away, and the children of Israel had become one people, prepared to enter the land of Milk and Honey they had been promised by the God of Abraham, the story of Easter begins on Ash Wednesday, and the forty days of fasting and preparation of Lent.

It continues on Palm Sunday, and the joyous entry into Jerusalem -- a parade of celebration and expectation, which takes an unexpected turn when Jesus is betrayed and arrested on the eve of the Sabbath, and brutally executed by the Romans like a common criminal on a hill outside the city.

But then comes the miracle, which even today, almost 2000 years later, still brings us together in a place like this on Easter Sunday -- to sing, to celebrate, to give thanks for one another, this community of “Neighbours and Fellow Cretures,” this body of the faithful, who know in our hearts that we are all brothers and sisters to one another, and heirs to the promises that the God of Abraham has made to all Her People....

EXPECTATION

a sermon preached by the Rev Dr Tim W Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Palm Sunday April 1st, 2007

“To dwell together in peace, to seek knowledge in freedom, to serve humanity in friendship, to the end that all souls shall grow into harmony with the divine....” That all sounds relatively simple and straightforward, doesn’t it? A shared devotion to the principles of peace, freedom, and friendship grounded in the values of Love, Truth, and Service, and focused on the goal of creating more harmonious relationships between each and every one of us and all creation -- this is basically what you are signing up for when you sign the book to become a member of the First Religious Society in Carlisle. When you look at it in this light, although the task itself sounds relatively simple, the challenge it represents is truly profound. The good news is that we don’t have to accomplish it all in one sitting. In fact, just the opposite. One might easily devote their entire lifetime to this task, and still leave plenty more for others to do after they are gone.

Likewise, the physical act of joining a church like FRS is an easy one, but the spiritual decision to do so in the first place can often be quite life transforming, especially in this day and age, where there are so many other potential activities competing for our attention. Nowadays, the decision to join any church at all is hardly automatic; in fact, if anything, it almost qualifies as an “alternative lifestyle choice.”

Not so many years ago, Work, Home, Church and School were considered the four cornerstones of community life. But nowadays (statistically, at least), most Americans live at some distance from where we work, and spend an increasing portion of our time either in front of a screen or behind the wheel of a car. Rather than sitting down with our families around the kitchen table for a home cooked meal, we eat in restaurants or pre-packaged “convenience” food, or (worst of all) fast food passed to us through the windows of our SUVs as we rush from one place to another.

The number of recreational and entertainment opportunities available to us is staggering. And then, of course, there is always “shopping.” Church has become just another activity to be squeezed into an already crowded schedule of activities, rather than a Sabbath where we set aside time from the “Busy-ness” of our mundane, secular lives in order to contemplate and celebrate the spiritual and sacred dimensions of life itself.

Furthermore, the fact that church membership is increasingly an optional, voluntary lifestyle choice rather than a routine aspect of normal, everyday living has especially interesting ramifications for non-traditional faiths like Unitarian Universalism, whose congregations are organized around a Covenant rather than a Creed.

Most churches define membership according to Belief. There are a particular set of theological doctrines and dogmas which define the “true” faith (and differentiate it from all its competitors); and when you join that church or mosque or temple or synagogue, either through conversion from some other religion, or by baptism and confirmation, or perhaps simply by making a “profession of faith,” you are in effect declaring that you share those particular beliefs as part of the price of becoming a member of that particular faith community.

But Unitarian Universalists see things a little differently. Love is the Doctrine of this Church; our Creed is All Truth, and our Profession of Faith, Divine Living. Rather than asking individuals to subscribe to a Creed, we instead offer a Covenant: an agreed-upon set of obligations and responsibilities which bind us together in a relationship of “mutual trust and support.” The individual members of this “community of memory and hope” obviously may well share a great many beliefs, but it’s not the beliefs themselves which define the parameters and the boundaries of the community. Rather it is the Promises we make to one another (and to God) to pursue, faithfully, our shared Ideals of Love, Truth, and Service through our mutual commitment to the values of Peace, Freedom, and Friendship, that define us as a distinct religious community and faith tradition.

This subtle difference between Covenant and Creed can sometimes seem a little confusing to folks who don’t ordinarily have much occasion to think about these issues at any great length. It may well be, for example, that the first thing someone hears about the Unitarian Church is that Unitarians are so liberal it doesn’t really matter WHAT you believe. And that may even sound pretty good (or at least different and intriguing -- even if it does seem a little random for a “real” church), but then all of a sudden you start to hear all this talk about “obligation” and “responsibility” and “commitment,” and maybe you start to wonder “Just what the H-E-double toothpicks have I gotten myself into now?” So let me try to explain exactly what it is you join when you join a UU Church like FRS, and more importantly, what you should expect from your experience here.

A few months ago, just after the start of the New Year, I preached a brief series of sermons on the topics “Time,” “Talent,” and “Treasure,” and it might help to keep those categories in mind as you listen to what I’m about to say now.

Because the first thing you join when you become a member of FRS is a Congregation. A congregation is simply a group of people who have “congregated” together at a particular time and place for a particular purpose, and the only qualification for membership is showing up. In other words, it’s an investment of Time -- whether it’s just an hour a week (or maybe even every few weeks), or a considerably larger commitment. Not everything that happens at this church happens on a Sunday morning. There are all sorts of occasions when we congregate together to do God’s work in the world: to care for our neighbors and offer hospitality to strangers, or even just to have a little fun, and enjoy the pleasure of one another’s company. But before any of this can happen in your life, first you have to show up. You have to invest your Time.

The second thing that happens when you join a Unitarian Universalist Church is that you also become a member of the “Church Universal.” Our Puritan forebearers sometimes used to refer to the “Church Universal” as “the invisible church triumphant” -- that community of the faithful, both living and dead, which transcends the limitations of time and space and includes all authentic people of faith everywhere.

Of course, the Puritans would have also said that these “saints” were selected by an omnipotent and omniscient God before the beginning of time itself, and were thus were predestined for salvation regardless of any special piety or merit they may or may not have possessed; while Unitarian Universalists today would basically say the same thing, except that we believe that ultimately All Souls shall be harmoniously united with their Creator (insofar as we are capable of understanding what that means).

But the key concept here is one of Church as Ecclesia or the community of those who have been “called out” -- summoned by God to cultivate our talents and fulfill our full potential by answering the call to seek the truth about ourselves and the world we live in. This calling is literally our “Vocation” -- the challenging task of cultivating, within the context of a larger community, the integrity of character which makes us the best possible persons we can be, in relationship to one another as people of Faith.

And then the third thing that happens when you join a church like FRS is that you become a member of a Religious Society. A Religious Society is a voluntary association of individuals who have organized themselves into a legal entity in order to act collectively as the custodians of a public institution which we have inherited from our religious ancestors, and hold in trust as a legacy for our spiritual descendants. This is the part of the sermon when you have to pay attention to the history lesson, but have you ever wondered why all the UU Churches around us: Concord, Bedford, Lexington, Chelmsford, and even Billerica are called “First Parish,” while here in Carlisle we have the First Religious Society?

Back before the First Amendment made the separation of Church and State the norm here in North America, the churches here in New England were tax supported public institutions, just like the schools are today. The advantage of this, of course, was that they enjoyed a much broader base of financial support; but the disadvantage was that often people who didn’t really care that much about the church also held the purse strings, and sometimes tended to vote their own pocketbooks rather than the needs of the institution.

Then in 1758, Timothy Wilkins decided that he and his neighbors needed a Meetinghouse closer to home, so he gifted the portion of his own farm here on this hilltop to “The First Religious Society of Carlisle” -- a newly-formed voluntary association of his “neighbors and fellow creatures” devoted to providing public worship and other religious services right here in the center of what would half a century later become the Town of Carlisle.

I don’t know all the precise historical details of what happened here, but I do understand the general pattern pretty well. As members of a Religious Society, Wilkins and his neighbors would have typically been exempted from paying taxes to support the First Parish in Concord, but they would have also been responsible for paying all of the expenses here. Oftentimes this was done by selling the pews in the Meetinghouse as if they were condominiums, and then taxing each pew annually according to its assessed value in order to pay the minister’s salary and the other expenses of the church. And, of course, there would have been special collections too, as well as bequests from people’s estates and other gifts to support “liberal preaching” here in Carlisle on into perpetuity.

After formal disestablishment of the New England Standing Order in the 1830’s, virtually all of the Churches here in Massachusetts adopted some form of this arrangement, which eventually evolved into what became known as the “Voluntary System” -- in which the pews were free and people could sit wherever they liked, and then were asked to contribute generously based on their own “Providential Good Fortune” and fair share of “God’s Abundant Blessings,” so that people who couldn’t afford to rent a pew might still enjoy the benefits of church anyway. And this is still pretty much the system we use today. We try to pay our own way when we can, and also a little extra, so that our less-fortunate neighbors, and those generations who will come after us here on this hilltop, might likewise enjoy the benefits of our legacy of free and liberal faith.

Of course, all of these same ideas can also be expressed in more traditional Theological language. Taking time to participate enthusiastically in the life and activities of a congregation is an act of Fellowship. Answering the call to develop our talents and follow our own spiritual vocation though membership in the Church Universal is an act of Discipleship. And, of course, accepting the responsibility of investing our treasure and serving as trustworthy custodians of the institutional legacy embodied in a Religious Society is an act of Stewardship. But as those of you who have heard me preach on this same topic in years past know, there is still one more “ship” waiting to come in, and that of course is Leadership.

Leadership typically begins with a Vision, a sense of purpose or mission which sees the world differently and inspires the visionary to try to change things for the better. Leaders also attempt to communicate that vision to others, in a way that likewise inspires them to join in and follow that same path to a better place. And of course, leaders also lead by example -- they literally try to practice what they preach, so that others might see and do likewise.

But the point I’m trying to make today is that when you decide to become a member of this church, you are also volunteering to become a leader in the larger community. Because we are all leaders in this church, just as (in a very real sense), we are all ministers OF this church. And our mission -- our shared ministry -- is to communicate our Vision of a better world in a dynamic and inspiring manner, and to become exemplars of those shared Values of Love, Truth, and Service on which our covenantal faith is based. And so we give of our Time, our Talent, and our Treasure, in the expectation that the value of our vision is equal to the price, and the more abundant life we receive in return is worth everything we give, and more.

IF YOU MEET THE BUDDHA IN THE LANE, FEED HIM THE BALL

a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday March 18th, 2007

I know I don't look it (and although it is certainly no secret, I almost hate to admit it out loud), but for as long as I can remember, I have been something of a closet "jock." Not an athlete, mind you — my daughter Stephenie is an athlete, and I'll have more to say about her a little later. But a jock: someone who from a very early age has spent a good portion of his "free" time throwing, catching, kicking, hitting, bouncing, batting, dribbling and dodging balls of various shapes and sizes in a fairly focused (one might even say passionate) sort of way, and who has continued to do so well after the time that gravity and good sense would have suggested I give it up.

I come, in fact, from a large extended family of jocks: two brothers, three cousins, and countless nephews, spouses and shirt-tail relatives; and when we all get together on the Fourth of July, we play touch football games so intense they make the fabled contests of the Kennedy Clan at Hyannis Port look like, well, childsplay. Or at least we used to, until a few years ago, when my oldest cousin Earl tore up his knee so badly he had to have surgery (again) and missed several weeks of work, and we all kind of decided it was time to start acting our ages. But it was just an act — the following summer we were all out in the driveway again playing half-court basketball, with Earl (his knee in one of those big metal braces) hopping around on one foot and firing up long bricks from well beyond the three-point line.

Football, baseball, basketball, soccer, volleyball, softball, tennis, racquetball, golf…our basements, garages, attics and “wreck” rooms all look like used sporting-goods stores. Except for mine, of course, which looks more like a used book & sporting-goods store. Which brings me to the reason I'm a little embarrassed to be confessing all this to you. Because you see, jockishness is not really encouraged in my line of work. Clergy (and especially liberal clergy) are expected to be bookworms, not ball hogs: spiritual leaders, for whom competition is the work of the devil, and winning or losing are supposed to matter far less than making sure that everybody gets a chance to play.

There are exceptions to these unwritten expectations, of course, but they are minor ones. It's OK, for example, to exercise, to work out, provided it's on something really tedious like a stairmaster or a stationary bike. Real bicycles are OK too, as are swimming, jogging, and hiking, but anything even moderately competitive tends to be taboo, especially if you compete to win. Being a minister is a little like golfing with the President; no matter how poorly your opponent may play, courtesy requires you to play even worse, so as not to hurt their feelings.

Watching competitive sports as a spectator is allowed, especially if it's a summer sport like baseball, or the Olympics, and you're not too fanatical about it. Fanaticism is only allowed if you root for teams like the Chicago Cubs or (of course) the Boston Red Sox — perennial underdogs with proud, long-standing traditions and a heritage of finishing somewhere other than first. In fact, there was a time when you could pretty much tell where a UU minister went to Divinity School by the kind of baseball cap they were wearing at General Assembly. Harvard graduates, naturally, rooted for Boston. Meadville graduates rooted for the Cubbies. And Starr King graduates were allowed to root for whoever they liked, provided they were expansion teams that had never played in a World Series. (My home town Seattle Mariners used to be very popular with Starr King students, at least in the days before Junior, A-Rod, the Big Unit, or Ichiro).

These are unwritten rules, of course; you can't just go to the Weidner library and look them up. Other ministers would probably have a little bit different take on them than I do. But believe me, they're real; and those of us who are closet jocks are intimately aware of them. I use the word "jock" and not "athlete" because in my mind, at least, there is a very subtle yet important distinction between these two concepts, and it's essential that you understand it before we proceed any further.

As I mentioned earlier, my daughter Stephenie is an athlete. Steph started attending summer volleyball camps when she was in the fourth grade. She played three years of varsity ball in High School, competed with a club team at weekend tournaments in the off-season, played intercollegiately four years for Mount Holyoke College (right here in Massachusetts), then went on to Springfield College (the birthplace of Basketball, I might just mention) where she earned a Masters Degree in Exercise Physiology, and discovered her current passion for racing bicycles and competing in Triathlons.

Even now as a working firefighter in Portland, Oregon, she still trains year-round for strength, conditioning, and specific skills; her most recent competition was the Annual Firefighter Stairclimb Challenge, which involves racing up one thousand, three hundred and eleven steps to the top of the sixty-nine story Columbia Tower in Seattle while breathing through an oxygen mask and wearing approximately 60 pounds of firefighting equipment. Steph ran those stairs in 18 minutes and 27 seconds, finishing 243rd overall (and 4th among the women), out of a field of approximately thirteen hundred other firefighters from across the United States and Canada, and as far away as New Zealand.

Now THAT’S an athlete....

But Steph comes by this insanity honestly; her mother began swimming competitively at the age of six, and in 1971, as a student at the University of Kansas, was (for five brief, shining hours between the morning qualifying heat and the Finals later that afternoon), the Women's NCAA National Intercollegiate record holder in the 400 yard individual medley. Margaret competed in and completed her first Marathon at the age of 50; she ran it in 5 hours, 26 minutes and 35 seconds, finishing 80th in her division, and 4712th overall, out of a field of nearly 13,000. Yet neither mother or daughter could hit a baseball if you served it up to them at home plate with a knife and a fork, nor do they seem to have any desire to want to.

Stephenie, at least, has shown some signs of becoming a jock; in college, for instance, she discovered the game of Lacrosse, and learned that it's a lot more exciting to run toward a goal (carrying a weapon) than it is just to run in circles. And she will occasionally consent to play football against the cousins (even though she's not very good at it), as well as volleyball at the beach (where she's far and away better than anyone else, yet sometimes still gets blocked at the net by a 50-year-old guy who is easily 50 pounds over his ideal playing weight (and yes, I still can get up that high; it’s the coming down again that hurts). Even so, she's learning how to play simply for the joy of playing rather than the ephemeral glory of personal triumph.

But like I said, this is a subtle distinction. Jocks still like to play to win, and some degree of athleticism certainly comes in useful in that regard. But real Jocks continue to play, win or lose, long after the last vestige of their athleticism has deserted them. It's not just an activity, nor even a lifestyle, but in many respects an entire way of living and being in the world that borders on the religious, and embodies a spirit all its own, complete with its own ideology, values, and sense of personal identity.

Of course, most Jocks don't think about their lives this way at all. Most Jocks just lace up their sneakers and hit the court, and don't really worry too much about whether what they do is better described as a "lifestyle" or an "entire way of living and being in the world." It takes a real bookworm to be able to appreciate that distinction, and fortunately there doesn't seem to be any shortage of those these days either.

Some contemporary intellectuals have suggested that Sports are really America's Civil Religion: that in order to see clearly who we are as a people, and the values and principles that are ultimately important to us, one must look to the metaphors of athletic competition. Fair play, hard work, a level playing-field, finding a competitive edge, pushing the envelope, going "faster, higher, stronger" — these are the qualities that define the American character, that make us who we are.

Others would say that this overstates the case: that Sports are more accurately characterized as a form of "folk religion" that has strongly shaped our civil religion, but which has also been shaped by it. These scholars point to things like the "muscular Christianity" of the late nineteenth century, the YMCA movement, and the founding of the modern Olympics a century ago, and suggest that whatever "religion" we find in Sports we put their ourselves in order to make organized athletic competition something more than merely an excuse to gamble.

And then there are those who would say that sports are actually the enemy of true religion: that they substitute the pursuit of "victory" and worldly success for the humble, compassionate, contemplative spirituality on which all authentic religious faith is based. It's a complicated debate: far more complicated than merely whether High School football games should begin with public prayers, or if "Drop Kick Me Jesus Through the Goalposts of Life" is a ludicrous parody of a naive religious piety or an inspiring example of indigenous American vernacular hymnody.

But whatever your personal opinion may be in this debate, it seems to me that there are certain observations that can be made which are common to them all. The first of these is that there are indeed, in a strictly sociological sense, elements of the culture of sport as we practice it in this country that resemble a form of folk religion. These elements go far beyond the simple ideology of "a sound mind and a sound body" and the suggestion that somehow athletic participation builds strong character and a sense of fair play. Rather, there is an entire repertoire of symbolic meanings and ritualistic style practices associated with Sports that go well beyond pedagogical considerations regarding values and character. Think about something as simple as “March Madness,” or “playoff fever,” where the fortunes of an entire city or University seem to rise and fall with the success of its athletic team. The historical continuity and sense of tradition created by the ongoing presence of an athletic team serves to create "a community of memory and hope," in which the recollection of past glory fuels future expectations for the coming season.

And this is true of sports teams at every level, and not just professional franchises. I don’t know whether any of you have been watching this new television show, “Friday Night Lights,” but I remember when I was first interviewed as a candidate for the pulpit of the Unitarian Church in Midland, Texas in 1984, I was a little annoyed that in the next room, as I met with the Search Committee on that first Friday night, there was a radio carrying the play-by-play broadcast of the local High School football game between the Midland Lee Rebels and the Odessa Permian Panthers (the team about which Bissinger’s book was originally written). The radio was just loud enough that when the stadium cheered one could concentrate for a moment and hear the announcer explain what had happened, provided one stopped listening to the ministerial candidate first. I later found out that 75,000 people had attended that game (the town itself only had a population of 90,000).

The following year, when these same two teams met again on their way to the State Tournament, the local television station chose to tape-delay broadcast of the World Series in order to air the High School Football contest live. Obviously, there was more going on there than twenty-two young adults chasing an inflated pig bladder for an hour up and down a one-hundred yard long grassy field. For those who participate in the spectacle by dressing in their team's colors, sitting in a certain part of the stadium and shouting encouragement to the players, the events on the field clearly embody a much greater significance that what would merely meet the eye of a visiting Martian anthropologist.

This brings us to what might be thought of as the "demonic" aspects of Sports in America — that is to say, the potential they represent for the corruption of our religious values, and the qualities of character and virtue that we would hope to protect. Organized sports often merely represent money and power, and the competition to obtain greater and greater amounts of these things to the exclusion of all other concerns. Sports is entertainment and that makes it Big Business; combine that with television, and what you get is a self-perpetuating money generating machine.

Ordinary people simply become part of an economic calculation; I’m certainly not the first person to wonder why twenty-something college drop-outs who can run a little faster or jump a little higher or throw a ball a little further than “ordinary” human beings should be paid such extraordinary amounts of money, while someone like myself (with five university degrees) can stand up here and pour out my soul Sunday after Sunday, and earn less (so far) over the course of an entire 25 year career than someone like Tom Brady (whose base salary is only about a million dollars a year, but whose overall contract will pay him about $60 million dollars for his six-year deal) makes in a single Sunday afternoon.

But let’s face facts: it’s simply a matter of supply and demand. So long as people are willing hundreds, or even thousands of dollars to watch these kids play, or even just sit home watching on TV, and then buying millions of dollars worth of chips and beer and cars and sneakers and whatever else “our Corporate sponsors” choose to advertise during those games, it’s worth whatever it costs to pay those astronomical salaries.

And this has nothing to do with religion; rather, it is simply the soul-less process of reducing human beings solely to their economic value alone, whether it's $27 million a year for the only player in the NBA who shoots free throws worst than I do, or the mere pennies a day paid to the Third World sweatshop workers who manufacture the high-priced, highly-promoted shoes Shaq and his team mates play in every night.

It may seem unreasonable (and even unfair) that someone like Michael Jordan should be paid more each year by Nike simply for lending his name to the promotion of their shoes than the entire annual payroll of the Vietnamese factory where the shoes themselves are made, but without the “Air Jordon” brand to drive the product line, nobody gets paid at all. It’s nothing personal; it is merely a reflection of the logic and “winner take all” values of the Business of Sports, where at the end of the day, the only inherent worth that matters is what you can contribute to the bottom line.

And I bet you're starting to wonder when I'm finally going to get to the Buddha.…

The one thing about participation in sports that I personally find intrinsically valuable is the opportunity sports sometimes offers for self-transcendence. Let me explain what I mean by this. By taking the universe and temporarily focusing it down to what happens, say, between the lines in the 94 feet of a basketball court, sport creates a laboratory of concentrated human experience. And in this laboratory it is possible for us to experiment with our lives in two very important, yet interrelated ways. The first of these involves the individual. With disciplined hard work and frequent practice, sport offers its participants the opportunity of achieving true excellence for its own sake — of performing a certain skill at such a high level of perfection that the barriers between who you are and what you do become transparent, and temporarily slip away.

It's an almost mystical feeling, this experience of "being in a zone," and you don't necessarily have to be the best in the world in order to experience it — you just have to give yourself permission to stop striving to do more than you are capable of doing at the moment, but rather let the activity come to you, so that you become free to function without self-conscious inhibition at precisely at the cutting edge of your skill and competence, yet not a whisker beyond it.

The second experience is one of community, and involves the self-transcendence of truly becoming a member of a team. There's even a koan to go with this experience: in "team" there is no "I." When a team has "chemistry," when it comes together in such a way that the individual talents and egos of its members meld together seamlessly into a single, highly-functioning unit, the group becomes more than just the sum of its participants, even though each of the participants themselves may be functioning at a level slightly lower than the "peak" performance they are capable of as individuals. But by giving up a certain part of their individuality, they gain back more in the form of synergy, and this is what it means to be a member of a team. To paraphrase Scripture, You lose your Self in order to find yourself, and thus become connected to those around you in a way that transcends the limitations of individuality.

Which brings us back again to the place where we started, and the words of Bart Giamatti:

"I do not believe human beings have played games or sports from the beginning merely to summon or to please or to appease the gods…I believe we have played games, and watched games, to imitate the gods, to become godlike in our worship of each other and, through those moments of transmutation, to know for an instant what the gods know...."

***

READING from The Joy of Sports by Michael Novak.

Suppose you are an anthropologist from Mars. You come suddenly upon some wild, adolescent tribes living in territories called the "United States of America." You try to understand their way of life, but their society does not make sense to you. Flying over the land in a rocket, you notice great ovals near every city. You descend and observe. You learn that an oval is called a "stadium." It is used, roughly, once a week in certain seasons. Weekly, regularly, millions of citizens stream into these concrete doughnuts, pay handsomely, are alternately hushed and awed and outraged and screaming mad. (They demand from time to time that certain sacrificial personages be "killed.") You see that the figures in the rituals have trained themselves superbly for their performances. The combatants are dedicated. So are the dancers and musicians in tribal dress who occupy the arena before, during, and after the combat. You note that, in millions of homes, at corner shrines in every household's sacred room, other citizens are bound by invisible attraction to the same events. At critical moments, the most intense worshipers demand of the less attentive silence. Virtually an entire nation is united in a central public rite.…