"O" FOR THE "P"

a sermon preached by
the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts Sunday February 25th, 2007


I know I’ve told this story here before, but it’s been awhile and it bears repeating. But about a month after I first saw this fresco of the Good Samaritan in the Unitarian Church in Copenhagen, I had a very vivid lesson in the ethical challenge offered by this parable. My mother was visiting me in Denmark for a few weeks, and we were headed to the train station early in the morning, on our way to do some sightseeing, when a rather frail, elderly woman came up to us started jabbering at me in very rapid, heavily accented Danish. And I was trying to explain to her that we were in a hurry, and that I didn’t really understand what she was saying, but she didn’t seem to understand me either; instead, she just kept grabbing at my arm and pointing to a nearby bus shelter. So I looked over at where she was pointing and saw a person, this body, really, seated on the bench and slumped over against the glass wall on the side of the shelter, with a thin trickle of blood running down the side of his face....

And at that point the conversation suddenly got very animated. I was trying to tell this woman (in a jumble of Danish, English, French, German, Greek and Latin all at once) that she needed to call the police, but she wasn’t having any of it. She’d shown the body to me, an obviously competent and responsible younger person, and now she had to catch her bus, “Tak skal du have” and away she went.

And there I was.

Now this particular bus shelter was right outside a government hospital that had recently closed due to budget cuts, so naturally, being an American, I assumed that this young man had been shot or beaten up in some sort of gang-related drug deal and then dumped by his buddies outside the hospital because they didn’t want to risk involvement with the authorities. I tried to rouse him, just like I had been taught in the Boy Scouts, but I got no response, so I went inside the hospital just to see if I could find anyone there who could help me. Eventually I found a caretaker, who explained to me (in English) about the hospital being closed, and then agreed to accompany me back outside to see the body for himself.

He also tried to rouse this fellow, a little more loudly and aggressively than I had, and sure enough, the body responded... and after a brief conversation between the two of them, the caretaker assured me that the gentleman in question was merely someone who had stayed out a little too late the night before, and had fallen asleep while waiting for his bus, having fallen down and banged his head against something hard earlier in the evening... but not to worry, because [wink,wink] he was feeling no pain. So I was able to explain all this to my mother, who of course had also seen the body, but basically understood nothing else of what had been going on, that everything was OK and that we could continue on our way.

And I honestly don’t know to this day whether or not I would have spent as much time I did trying to help this stranger if I hadn’t seen the fresco of the Good Samaritan in the Unitarian Church just a few weeks earlier. But I do know this...having just seen that fresco, only a few blocks from that bus shelter, I would have felt like a terrible hypocrite if I had simply passed him by.

As a general rule, we Unitarian Universalists don’t ordinarily put much stock in guilt and shame as spiritual and ethical motivators, but I suppose there’s a time and a place for everything. Because yes: I was confused, and also a little afraid, far from home on unfamiliar ground, and in many ways it would have been a lot easier for me to turn my back and walk away. But how was I going to explain that behavior to my mother? (who, in all honesty, would have probably just as soon walked away herself). And, more importantly, how was I going to live with myself afterwards?

And since that day, which was almost seven years ago now, I’ve often thought about just how appropriate a fresco of the Good Samaritan is for a Unitarian Church -- so much more appropriate than so many other stories from the Bible that might have been chosen instead. Even if we weren’t raised in the Christian tradition, we’ve all known the story since we were children. It’s part of our cultural lexicon. A Samaritan is someone who does good deeds, who helps others in need, even if they happen to be strangers. In fact, especially if they happen to be strangers....

But it’s also easy for children to miss the real message of this story, and even for adults the actual context is often a little obscure. A traveler is attacked, robbed, and left for dead at the side of the road. A Priest and a Levite (which was basically just another kind of priest) see him there but pass him by...not necessarily because they are bad people, or even because they are afraid of being robbed themselves, but most likely simply because they assumed he is already dead, and knew that touching a corpse would leave them ritually unclean and therefore incapable of performing their religious duties. In other words, their positions of social privilege and their responsibilities for community leadership caused them to look past the immediate and pressing need right in front of their own eyes, and to continue on their way.

But then a Samaritan -- an outsider, an outcast -- sees the body and takes the time to investigate. He’s not worried about his formal religious duties interfering with his compassion for another human being, nor is he afraid to take the risk of becoming a victim himself. Or at the very least he is willing to face that fear. And all this in the context of the one Great Commandment of both Christianity and Judaism: “Love the Lord Your God With All Your Heart (and all your Soul and all your Strength and all your Mind), and Love Your Neighbor As Yourself.” The lawyers, the priests, the Levites and the Pharisees may wish to quibble about the precise definition of neighbor, if only to reassure themselves of their own wisdom and importance. But the Samaritan knows that if you happen to be in the neighborhood, whoever you see there is your neighbor. Even if he happens to be a stranger, and you yourself are traveling far from home.

In many ways, Dr Paul Farmer is a perfect example of a modern day Samaritan, yet in other ways he is exactly the opposite. “Doktè Paul” (as he is known in Haiti) is a Harvard-educated physician and anthropologist who has essentially devoted his entire adult life to pursuing his compelling mission of providing first world health care to third world people. The Cambridge-based not-for-profit “Partners in Health” and its Haitian counterpart “Zanmi Lasante,” which he founded while still a medical student in the 1980’s, are now the much-admired working paradigms for his philosophy of “solving global health problems through a clear-eyed understanding of the interactions of politics, wealth, social systems, and disease.”

In more specific terms, Farmer’s philosophy combines the scientific discipline and humanitarian concern of the very best of modern medical practice with Liberation Theology’s “preferential Option for the Poor,” and it’s “powerful rebuke to the hiding away of poverty, a rebuke that transcends scholarly analysis.” Farmer’s extraordinary combination of scientific excellence and spiritual commitment in many ways simply reflects the profound contrast between the two worlds of Harvard and Haiti.

“The fact that any sort of religious faith was so disdained at Harvard and so important to the poor -- not just in Haiti but elsewhere too -- made me even more convinced that faith must be something good,” he once explained to author and friend Tracy Kidder. He amplified these sentiments on another occasion while trying to explain why he lives the life he lives. “If you’re making sacrifices, unless you’re automatically following some rule, it stands to reason that you’re trying to lessen some psychic discomfort. So, for example, if I took steps to be a doctor for those who don’t have medical care, it could be regarded as a sacrifice, but it could also be regarded as a way to deal with ambivalence.... I feel ambivalent about selling my services in a world where some can’t buy them. You can feel ambivalent about that, because you should feel ambivalent....”

If you want to know the entire story of Paul Farmer’s remarkable medical career, I’m afraid you’re going to have to read the book yourself. It’s not that I don’t want to tell you about it; it’s just that I can’t. Paul Farmer defies easy summarization; even Kidder’s 300 page New York Times bestseller often seems only to scratch the surface of this incredibly talented and complex individual. He also defies imitation. As his colleague at PIH, Jim Kim, once put it “Paul has created technical solutions to help the rest of us get to decency, a road map to decency that we can all follow without trying to imitate him.... Paul is a model of what should be done. He’s not a model for how it has to be done. Let’s celebrate him. Let’s make sure people are inspired by him. But we can’t say anybody should or could be just like him...because if the poor have to wait for a lot of people like Paul to come along before they get good health care, they are totally....” (and I’ll just leave you to fill in that last word for yourselves).

But this notion of a “road map to decency” is a very intriguing and provocative one. What does it take to inspire brilliant and talented people like Paul Farmer to step off the fast track to wealth and power and privilege, and instead become successful and accomplished on their own terms, by turning their attention to those who have been robbed, beaten and left helpless along the side of the road? How would the World be different if we all shared the assumption that our highest priority should be those with the greatest need? It’s hard to imagine, but it might look a little like this. During a trip to Moscow to consult with Russian doctors about the epidemic of Multi-Drug Resistant Tuberculosis in that country, Farmer shared this anecdote about himself:

“I have been working in Haiti for almost twenty years, ever since I was a young chap, and some years ago I was asked by the state of Massachusetts to be a TB commissioner, and I said ‘What the hell do we do?’ I was in Haiti and I had a couple of MDR-TB patients and I took sputums and I brought them to Boston. And I took them into the lab and I wrote, ‘Paul Farmer, Sate TB Commissioner.’ I wanted them to process my samples from Haiti and they did and never asked any questions, so I did it more and more and then I did it with sputums from Peru, and of course, eventually they asked me why. I said, ‘Massachusetts is a great state, it has a big TB lab, lots of TB doctors, lots of TB nurses, lots of TB lab specialists. It lacks only one thing. Tuberculosis.’ “

Tuberculosis, as Farmer likes to say, asserts its own preferential option for the poor. On the wrong side of what he calls “the great epi divide,” that portion of the epidemiological map where poverty and its associated hunger and malnutrition, overcrowding, poor hygiene, violence and preventable infectious disease reduce average life expectancies by anywhere from a third to a half, TB still kills more people than any other disease but AIDS (with which it shares, in Farmer’s words, a “noxious synergy”), while in more affluent parts of the world, such as here in Massachusetts, it is easily treatable and has all but disappeared. On Paul Farmer’s roadmap, patients always comes first, no matter where they live, just as we would hope we would be treated if we were the patients in question. But this is only the first step.

To borrow terminology from the 19th century German physician Rudolph Virchow (whose writings Farmer first discovered when he was an undergraduate at Duke), it also involves embracing the Politics of Prophylaxis rather than the Politics of Palliation; of practicing real prevention, and not just alleviating suffering. According to Virchow, “It is the curse of humanity that it learns to tolerate even the most horrible situations by habituation” and “medical education does not exist to provide students with a way of making a living, but to insure the health of the community.”

In other words, good medicine, even (and perhaps even especially) in a third world country like Haiti, is not simply about passing out bigger band aids. It involves addressing the underlying economic and public health issues which create the conditions for disease in the first place, as well as confronting the overarching political power structures which keep those conditions in place. It means creating clean and reliable public water supplies, and adequate sewage treatment, training cadres of local public health care assistants, who understand the culture as well as the medicine, and developing top quality medical facilities where they are most urgently needed, rather than merely where they are most easily afforded.

And yet, on Paul Farmer’s roadmap, the distinction between “prevention” and “treatment” doesn’t really exist, and is often just an excuse used by Public Health officials to justify their own inaction. Of course an ounce of prevention worth a pound of cure. But if the patient already has the disease, and the means to cure it exist, the relative cost of these two options is and ought to be essentially irrelevant. This is one of Farmer’s many AMCs (or “areas of moral clarity”). Strictly speaking, as he is fond of saying, all resources everywhere are limited. “But they’re less limited now than ever before in human history,” he continues. It’s just a matter of moving away from an analysis of cost effectiveness to one which puts the needs of the patients first.

His colleague Jim Kim amplifies this sentiment. “There have been fundamental frame shifts in what human beings feel is morally defensible, what not. The world doesn’t bind women’s feet anymore, no one believes in slavery. Paul and I are anthropologists. We know that things change all the time. Culture changes all the time. Advertising people force changes in culture all the time. Why can’t we do that?”

It’s a provocative challenge, not unlike the challenge of the Good Samaritan. But rather than trying to imagine all the details, simply imagine this: how would the United States be viewed differently in the world if our Foreign policy was based on eradicating global poverty and treating endemic communicable diseases like AIDS and tuberculosis and malaria, rather than defeating terrorism of global reach, and defending easy access to Middle Eastern oil?

And perhaps more to the point, how would we feel differently about ourselves?

****

READING: from Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder

The term [triage] comes from the fourteenth-century French trier, “to pick or cull,” and was first used to describe the sorting of wool according to its quality. In modern medical usage, triage has two different meanings, nearly opposite. In situations' where doctors and nurses and tools are limited, on battlefields, for instance, one performs triage by attending first to the severely wounded who have the best chance of survival. The aim is to save as many as possible; the others may have to die unattended. In the peacetime case, however, in well-staffed and well-stocked American emergency rooms, for example, triage isn’t supposed to imply withholding care from anyone; rather, it’s identifying the patients in gravest danger and giving them priority.

[Paul] Farmer has constructed his life around this second kind of triage. What else is a “preferential option for the poor” in medicine. But Haiti more nearly resembles a battlefield than a place at peace. Walking behind him, I say there must always be situations here where the choice to do one necessary thing also means the choice not to do another -- not just to defer the other but not to do it.

“All the time,” he says.

“Throughout your whole career you’ve had to face this, right?”

“Yes. I do it every day. Do this instead of that. Every day all day long, that’s all I do. Is not do things....

“...I have fought for my whole life a long defeat. How about that? How about if I said, That’s all it adds up to is defeat?”

“A long defeat.”

“I have fought the long defeat and brought other people on to fight the long defeat, and I’m not going to stop because we keep losing. Now I actually think sometimes we may win. I don’t dislike victory. You and I have discussed this so many times.”

“Sorry.”

“No, no, I’m not complaining” he says. “you know, people from our background -- like you, like most PIH-ers, like me -- we’re used to being on a victory team, and actually what we’re trying to do in P[artners] I[n] H[ealth] is to make common cause with the losers. Those are two very different things. We want to be on the winning team, but at the risk of turning our backs on the losers, no, it’s not worth it. So you fight the long defeat....”

“...I like the line about the long defeat, “ I tell him.

“I would regard that as the basic stance of O for the P,” he replies. “I don’t care if we lose. I’m gonna try to do the right thing.”

“But you’re going to try to win.”

“Of course!...”

VISION

a sermon preached by the Rev Dr Tim W Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday February 11th, 2007

"Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness." --James Thurber

“Where there is no vision, the people perish...” --Proverbs 29:18



The new arrival was being shown around heaven by Saint Peter, when they came to a room of people sitting in a circle on folding chairs all talking at once.

“What’s going on?” the new arrival asked.

“Oh, those are the Unitarians” Saint Peter replied. “They’re having a meeting to discuss whether or not they’re really here.”

I was at another meeting, a minister’s meeting, this past week, where I heard a colleague talking about the challenges she’d faced leading her congregation through change. “At the start of my second year there,” she told me, “I made a few gentle suggestions about how we might want to try doing things a little differently, and they were universally ignored. The following year, I was a little more insistent in my recommendations, and met with only resistance and resentment. Halfway through my fourth year I became even more forceful and assertive about the changes I wanted to see happen, only to have my ideas rejected outright. But now finally in my fifth year, my parishioners are starting to repeat my ideas back to me as if they were their own, and I don’t have to say anything at all....”

Of course, the whole time I was listening to this I was nodding and smiling to myself, because this certainly wasn’t the first time I’d heard that story, and I also knew from personal experience exactly what she was talking about. Often times things turn out a whole lot better if, rather than trying to persuade other people to see things your way, you simply create opportunities to let them to see things clearly with their own eyes, and then to come up with their own solutions. Real leadership has a lot more to do with asking the right questions and focusing people’s attention in the right direction than it does with always having all the answers. And if you don’t really care who gets the credit either, you can generally accomplish a whole lot more than you might ever have imagined.

Of course, those of you who were here yesterday at the All Church Visioning Event had a chance to see this principle in action with your own eyes. There were about 50 of us in attendance, for all or part of the morning (and early afternoon), and the results (I thought) were very impressive. We invited people to “Bring Your Passion, Create a Plan” and people did both. But before I say too much more about what happened yesterday, I first want to talk a little bit about the idea of Vision itself.

We typically think of Vision as an ability to look ahead -- to gaze out toward the horizon, and see the road before us. Visionaries are people who see the big picture, who perhaps even seem to see into the future...they dream of what might be, and describe it so vividly that it appears as though we can almost reach out and touch it for ourselves. Inevitably we first see the future at a distance; but the more clearly we can bring it into focus, the more obvious the way forward becomes. This is the gift of the true visionary: the ability to see beyond the horizon, and imagine accurately what awaits us there.

But Vision is not just about looking ahead; it is also about looking around, and being able to see what is right in front of our eyes and under our own noses. Often times in life we discover that we have been looking at the same landscape so routinely and for so long that we no longer really even “see” it anymore. It becomes invisible to us, and so we fail to notice the subtle changes that are happening around us all the time. And then one day, we suddenly discover that things have become SO different we can’t ignore them any more. Learning how to see the familiar through fresh eyes, so that we are no longer surprised by gradual change, is a rare gift -- a gift I find is often enhanced by an occasional change of scene, which allows us, in the words of the poet T.S. Eliot, “to arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time.”

Finally, there is also an aspect of Vision that is reflective, and allows us to see ourselves as we truly are. This is generally the most difficult scrutiny of all. Self-examination can often feel like an exercise in placing blame and making excuses: pointing fingers while at the same time covering various other parts of our anatomy. This sort of self-examination is basically nothing but a waste of time. It’s perfectly normal to want to see ourselves in the most flattering light, and to turn a blind eye to our faults. But it’s no more useful than the opposite extreme, which is the merciless self-criticism which only inspires us to beat ourselves up for no good reason. Authentic self-examination needs to be done both honestly and appreciatively, but without the denial and self-deception that is generally the cruelest deception of them all.

Furthermore, often it’s really not enough merely to look at ourselves regularly in the mirror. After awhile our own faces simply become part of that familiar landscape I spoke of earlier. The most useful insights come when we can manage to get even just a small glimpse of ourselves as others see us. This perspective can sometimes be quite startling. For example, I can still remember quite vividly how it felt the first time I got a good look at the top of my own head. I was kinda watching out of the corner of my eye the Public Access Cable broadcast of the Nantucket Town Meeting, where I had been invited to offer the opening Invocation. And I thought to myself “Who is that fat old, bald guy walking up to the podium, dressed in a Crimson Harvard Robe that looks an awful lot like mine?”

And then the next thing I knew, I knew...and it was a bit of a shock. And since that time, I have actually managed to lose both a little more weight and a lot more hair.... But the main thing I lost that day was the illusion that I still possessed my charming and athletic boyish good looks, or that it mattered. And frankly, that was OK with me. Because no matter what we see, it’s always much healthier to be able to see ourselves as we truly are, warts and all, rather than clinging desperately to an illusion that is mostly just delusional....

I also suppose it almost goes without saying that our Vision should be Vivid. It should encompass as broad a perspective, and as much detail, as we can possibly manage. But the truth of the matter is that we can never see or anticipate EVERY possible detail, and so “Realizing our Vision” also embodies a certain amount of Trust regarding the things we do NOT see clearly. This ability to Trust also helps us cope with our inevitable disillusionment, when we finally are able to see things up close, and become aware that the things we thought we saw quite clearly are not quite they way they first appeared. “Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Can’t Lose.” Sometimes even network television gets it right.

I do want to talk a little bit now about what we did yesterday, and to try to summarize (at least in broad terms) a little of what I saw emerging out of that five-hour event. But first let me explain the process for those of you who weren’t there.

[Three Tables: “Marketplace of Ideas” -- break-out rooms, lots of NRG

Four Principles:
1) Whoever Comes is the Right People.
2) Whatever happens is the only thing that could have.
3) Whenever it starts is the right time.
4) When it is over it is over.

The Law of Two Feet -- Bumblebees and Butterflies...

“What really counts is that people truly listen to people really speaking....”]

I was only one person out of fifty. I obviously didn’t see and hear everything, but I did try to get around to as many groups as I could, and I’ve also had a chance to read over the reports, which we plan to have transcribed and publicly available before the Parish Committee meeting next Thursday. Based on my own experience and interpretation, our work basically revolved around four larger themes.

1) Largest of these themes is perhaps best characterized as: What does it mean to “belong” to FRS? What is our identity, and how can we better focus and develop that understanding in order to deepen our sense of connection and relationship with one another, reach out to and involve newcomers, grow the church, and extend our legacy of service (or ministry) to both the larger Carlisle community and the wider world? Like I said, it’s a big theme, and I can’t even begin to summarize all of the conversation that took place around it yesterday, and which I imagine will continue to take place wherever two or three of us are gathered in Our Name.

But I will share with all of you something I said in one of the groups that I attended, which is that I often tend to think of the mission of this church (or any church) in terms of three basic tasks. The first is Hospitality: simply creating a safe and inviting place where people can come and be our guests. There are also certain services we provide as a church, beginning of course with our Worship Service, but also including things like Education and Pastoral Care, as well as various Outreach and Social Action ministries. And then finally, there is an invitation to a Relationship, a covenantal partnership in which we join together to do unto others as we would have others do unto us, and in particular to provide both the hospitality and the specific services I just spoke of a moment ago.

Of course, this isn’t the final word about what it means to “belong” to FRS...but it is kind of a starting point -- making a shared commitment to create for others the same kind of positive experiences that brought us to this place in the first place. It means being the church we wish we’d found when we arrived, so that we might become the church we hope to see here on this hill in the future.

2) A second theme had to do more specifically with our worship service. This is obviously something that is particularly important to me, so perhaps I’m giving it more priority than it really deserves, but I don’t think so. There were two specific ideas which came out of yesterday’s visioning event. The first is simply to schedule more guest speakers, in order to broaden the diversity of views and voices we experience on Sunday morning. The second is to conduct a detailed and comprehensive review of our worship service, with emphasis on exploring what other churches do in their worship, and experimenting with our own in order to determine what style of worship our membership prefers.

I don’t want to say too much more about this, because one of the basic principles of this exploration is that we are not going to begin already knowing what the outcome will be. But basically it will involve members of this church visiting other churches and attending their worship services, and then engaging in conversation with one another and the minister about what they saw there and how it felt.

And out of this process, together with a little further learning about the theory and practice of worship itself, we hope to determine just the right spiritual balance, for our congregation, between the contemplative and the expressive, the reflective and the enthusiastic, the traditional and the contemporary, while at the same time creating enough worship alternatives in both directions on this spectrum that there is enough inspiration to go around for everyone.

If this all seems just a little too abstract to you, it might help to think about the three services we offer on Christmas Eve: an early service specifically for families with younger children, our “main” service of traditional Music, Carols and Readings from Scripture, and then a later, more solemn candlelight service. But talking in an intentional way about what we do on Sunday morning, in an on-going dialog based in a large degree on what we have actually seen and experienced in other churches, can not only allow us to envision a more profound and spiritually satisfying worship service for ourselves, it can also help us to clarify in a larger sense who we are as a spiritual community, and what it means to us to be people of faith.

3) A third major area of discussion had to do with our facilities, and specifically the maintenance and preservation of our historic meeting house, the possible acquisition of the adjacent Tincher property at Seven School Street (and what we might do with it once we own it), the creation of a memorial garden in the space between the two properties, making important and necessary renovations to the parsonage, the possibility of installing photovoltaic solar panels on the roof of our building, and taking other steps to give FRS a “zero carbon footprint,” and then finally the general concept of creating a more inviting FRS “campus” here in the center of town, which could help better link together FRS with other public spaces like the Gleason Library and the Town Common.

4) The fourth theme was a little more eclectic, but in many ways it coalesces together around the occasion of our 250th Anniversary celebration. These ideas included not only a retrospective look at where FRS has been, but also a wide variety of new initiatives, including things like the creation of an FRS Human Rights Commission, and an FRS coffeehouse, writing and publishing a Katrina Cookbook, developing ecumenical activities that might allow the three churches here in Carlisle to discover areas of common ground through civil dialogue, and work together on projects of shared community concern which transcend our theological differences. And then, of course, there is the celebration of the event itself, which will be taking place all next year.

Yesterday was just the beginning. And tomorrow we will start to transcribe the reports of all the working groups, in order to make them widely available to all of us who wish to see them. On Thursday the Parish Committee will receive the originals, and continue this process of identifying and refining the themes, and allocating our resources in order to match our priorities. Some of these ideas we can begin to pursue immediately. Others are going to take a little more preparation and planning. But whatever we chose to do with this material, that decision is in our hands. Because you see, the question isn’t merely “What does it mean to belong to FRS?” The real question is what does it mean when we truly understand, that FRS belongs to us as well...

TREASURE

a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday February 4th, 2007

“Do not store up for yourself treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not consume, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” -- Mt 6: 19-21


[extemporaneous introduction -- Super Bowl Sunday: a celebration of the traditional American Values of Competition, Consumption, and Gambling]

I don’t know how many of you regularly listen to “A Prairie Home Companion,” but last night was the annual Joke show, which naturally featured a good assortment of new Unitarian jokes. Here was my favorite: Unitarian Universalism is a religion which prays “To Whom It May Concern,” and where nobody has to listen to anybody else, and everybody disagrees. Hits a little close to home, doesn’t it?

I heard something else interesting awhile ago, and of course now I can’t even remember where I heard it (although maybe some of you heard it too); but I heard that here in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts our little town of Carlisle has the highest per capita ownership of both the Toyota Prius and the General Motors Hummer. Did anybody else hear this, or did I just imagine it? I remember thinking at the time, that it seemed a little puzzling to me that two so very different vehicles could both be so popular in the same little town; but after further review it started to make perfect sense, especially when I paused to consider that in a community of only 5000 souls, it doesn’t really take that many actual vehicles to have the highest number of them per head. And then, with that conundrum resolved, I simply filed this little tidbit of information away in that part of MY head where I store similar such trivia, such as the familiar statistic that (at over $144,000/year) Carlisle has the third highest median household income in the Commonwealth (trailing only the towns of Weston and Dover), but also the fourth highest average tax bill (behind Weston, Sherborn, and Lincoln).

Personally, I always get a little nervous when I start hearing numbers like this getting tossed around, because I’m never really sure what they really mean. I know, for example, that my annual household income is nowhere near $144,000; in fact, it’s not even half that, but then again, my household consists only and entirely of me and a twelve-year-old, 23 pound dog. Likewise, because I live in a church-owned parsonage I don’t really pay any property taxes either (or perhaps more accurately, the church itself isn’t taxed on the value of that property) -- a tradition which goes back to the days when clergy here in Massachusetts were paid out of general tax revenues, and considered to be just another town employee, like school teachers, police officers, and firefighters. But what really makes me nervous is the way that tossing around these big, six-figure numbers can start to make the rest of us feel like maybe we aren’t making as good a living as we ought to, when in fact (if you pause to think about how a lot of the world lives), we’re all actually doing pretty well for ourselves.

But let me get back to the vehicles for a moment. Personally, I’ve always sorta felt that it takes a lot of chutzpah to drive a Hummer in this era of high gas prices and global warming. And I suspect there are a lot of folks here in the Unitarian Church who would tend to agree with those sentiments. Even if someone desperately desired to express their solidarity with the troops in Iraq by cruising around Carlisle in the same kind of vehicle our soldiers drive daily through the streets of Baghdad, I still think they could make an even stronger statement by driving a Hybrid...or perhaps even just riding their bicycle. But here’s the bottom line. If your sentiments run the way mine do, and you’ve already made up your mind that you wouldn’t really want to be caught dead riding in a Humvee (no matter HOW much money you may have), that still doesn’t put you behind the wheel of a Prius. Taking that next step requires some form of positive action, and not merely the rejection of the undesirable alternative.

Likewise, when it comes to the subject of treasure, until I went away to Divinity School and started reading the Bible more seriously, I’d always sort of associated the term with words like “pirate” and “buried.” A treasure was something Pirates put in a treasure chest and buried on a deserted island: Treasure Island (something which I now know was historically very rare, since most pirates tended to prefer quickly spending their ill-gotten gains drinking and carousing in places like Jamaica or the Bahamas, rather than wasting their time digging holes in the sand to hide something they might easily not live long enough to ever see again if they were foolish enough to leave it behind in the first place).

But thanks to my extensive theological education, I now possess a much more sophisticated understanding of the topic. For example, I know that the word “treasure” in the Greek New Testament -- thesaurous -- and the Greek verb in that same verse which we translate “to store up” -- thesaurizete -- are basically one and the same. A treasury is literally a “storehouse” where we store up the things we have accumulated that are precious to us, and thus worth holding on to. And if you have a good ear, you may have also recognized the root of yet another familiar English word -- Thesaurus -- which is, of course, a treasury or storehouse of words: linguistic synonyms which writers can draw upon in order to communicate a precise nuance of meaning, or perhaps simply to spice up their writing, and vary the tone and rhythm of their narrative voice and discourse.

Most writers I know still treasure a good Thesaurus, although with so many built-in editing tools now written right into most word processing software, my trusty old dog-eared paperback Roget’s now seems like a dinosaur threatened with extinction...or at least it would, if I could still even find it. And yet, as valuable a tool as a good Thesaurus can be in the right hands, many inexperienced writers tend to squander their treasure, by simply looking for a different word instead of the Right Word -- the perfect word which expresses precisely the meaning they wish to convey. And along these same lines, one of my former writing teachers (Annie Dillard) often advised the students in her workshop to think of words as if we were spending money. “Never use a twenty-five cent word when a ten cent word will do,” she’d say. Yet this can be difficult advice to follow, for those of use who love the language, and are easily tempted into showing off our erudition.

When I think about the things I personally treasure most, books would certainly be close to the top of the list. And yet, as Thoreau so eloquently cautioned, there are many times when I do not so much feel that I possess my books as though my books possess me. Often times the things we think we treasure most end up taking over and consuming our lives, and we become prisoners of our possessions. Or as Scripture warns us, we strive to accumulate treasures on earth, which are impermanent and pass away, rather than learning and remembering to treasure the things that are NOT of this world: our spiritual and ethical values, our personal integrity, our interpersonal relationships with friends, family, neighbors and colleagues. For where our treasure is, there shall our hearts be also. And likewise, whatever it is our hearts desire, our treasure will surely follow.

Over the years I’ve come to think of Treasure in terms of three words which my Thesaurus tells me are synonyms, but which in my own mind have three very distinct and precise meanings: Wealth, Worth, and Value.

Let me start with the last word first. The things I value are the things I esteem, which I appreciate and admire and find valuable in their own right, whether or not they are actually in my possession. They reflect my personal values: the standards and principles by which I attempt to live my life, and which give my life its meaning, as well as those things which simply give me pleasure and which make life more pleasant. And believe it or not, it’s a pretty abundant list -- ranging everywhere from Peace on Earth, Goodwill to All to a good plate of BBQ ribs and a nice cold beer on a hot summer day.

Worth, on the other hand, is a measure of those things which are truly worthy of my time and attention. There are lots of things which I value personally which are relatively unimportant in the greater scheme of things, and which are therefore unworthy of my unmitigated devotion. It’s not that they are without value; it’s just that there is only so much of me to go around, and so I have to be selective about what I choose to give myself and my life to.

And then finally, Wealth is basically a measure of my ability to balance these other two priorities -- to match my resources to my values in a worthwhile way, so that my life feels abundant and fulfilling, rather than limited and empty. And I hope it’s clear from what I’ve said so far that these understandings of Wealth, Worth and Value are not limited only to money, or to the things that money can buy. In many ways, how I am able to spend my time and use my talents are even more precious to me than whatever “stuff” I may have accumulated along the way, and I imagine they are for many of you as well.

Last fall I agreed to do something which at the time I thought was very important, but which I’m already beginning to regret. Last fall I agreed to serve as the Treasurer of the Unitarian Universalist Historical Society. I took on this responsibility for two reasons. First, I was the chair of the Nominating Committee, and I couldn’t find anyone else who was willing to do the job. But I also felt that it important for me to get a little different perspective on some of these issues, and that serving as an actual “Treasurer” might be just the thing to help me do that.

I’m sure you’ve figured this out already, but clergy don’t necessarily do math in the same way as other, normal human beings. As ministers, we are encouraged to think about potential and possibility -- to draw upon the promise of God’s limitless blessings, and to lift up our eyes to the horizon, as prophetic visionaries proclaiming our faith in what might someday be, if only we will devote ourselves to the challenge of doing God’s good work in the world. And nothing is ever impossible.

But Treasurers pretty much need to stay focused on the bottom line. And being the treasurer of any organization is pretty much a thankless job, because basically you always find yourself saying “no” to other people who see something exciting that they want, and want you to sign the check that pays for it. As the Treasurer, you know how much money there is in the bank, and you also know that money doesn’t grow on trees: that every dollar you spend today on this or that is a dollar that won’t be available to spend on something else tomorrow.

Fortunately, the responsibilities of the Treasurer of the Unitarian Universalist Historical Society are not especially complicated as Treasurer-responsibilities go. The mission of that organization is basically to republish old books which have gone out of print, and to create opportunities for people like myself to write and talk about other people who are now long ago dead. But it is a good thing (or at least I think it has) for me to catch a tiny glimpse of life on the other side of the ledger.

Ministers can stand up here and talk about Prosperity and Abundance and Generosity to our heart’s content, but when the checks start bouncing, it’s the treasurer who is generally held accountable, and who has to answer all the hard questions. And, of course, both these perspectives are important, even essential, for the on-going health and prosperity of any organization, religious or otherwise. Balancing the available resources to the multitude of potential opportunities is a never-ending challenge. There is never enough money to do everything we dream of doing. Yet somehow we always seem to find enough to do the things we feel are essential, the worthwhile things which we truly value.

I’ve been debating in my own mind for several months now about just how specific I wanted to make this last portion of my message here this morning. And I’m not so sure that I’ve really made up my mind even now. So let me just say that next Saturday I’m hoping that all of you will be back here at church bright and early, to participate in the process of envisioning the future of this congregation, and creating the kind of church you dream of as we approach our 250th year of ministry in this community: a community which in many ways has coalesced around the existence of the church itself, and our on-going mission of service and hospitality to our “Neighbours & Fellow Cretures.” Yet none of these dreams will amount to anything if we can’t come up with the resources to make them come true.

This has been kind of a tight budget year here at FRS. Not that every year isn’t a tight budget year around here. There are a lot of different reasons for this, but the one we rarely talk about is that over the years, our overall level of pledging here hasn’t really kept pace with the rate of inflation. If you compare our average pledge to the average pledges of other UU congregations, both across the country and right here in New England, you’ll find that we fall in the bottom 20%. Of course, in a town as expensive as Carlisle, it’s nice to find an occasional bargain, and one of the reasons we have been able to get away with this for so long is that we are also the beneficiaries of the generosity of our spiritual ancestors, beginning of course with Timothy Wilkins himself. But when the stock market dipped a few years ago, the three year rolling average rate of return on our endowment funds also declined, and with it the amount of revenue we derive from those investments. And then finally there is the thing that we all can see, but would just as soon forget (or at least ignore)...that in the aftermath of the difficult struggle over whether or not to declare ourselves a Welcoming Congregation, there are too many good people on both sides of that issue who, for whatever reason, have decided either to scale back their support and involvement at FRS, or in a few cases have left the congregation altogether.

But it also seems to me that we’ve recently started to turn the corner a little. The Market is back up again, and with it we can look forward to an additional $4000 revenue in next year’s operating budget. The Parish Committee is actively pursuing new outside revenue streams, such as leasing space in our attic and belfry to Sprint/Nextel and T-Mobile, which would not only help our bottom line, but also provide the additional benefit of making it possible for our Neighbours & Fellow Cretures to have reliable cellular telephone service here in Carlisle Center. And of course, if you look around you, you’ll also see there are plenty of new faces here at FRS , people who are hoping to find here the same kind of close, caring spiritual community that so many of us have come to appreciate, and who are no doubt eager to help us make it even better, if only we will set a good example and show them the way.

And it all begins when we simply take the time to LISTEN to one another speak honestly and openly about the things we truly treasure about FRS, and to share with one another our dreams and aspirations for the future of this community. And out of this discussion will come the slightly more awkward conversation, in which we sincerely ask one another to each dig a little deeper into our own pockets, in order to make our collective dreams come true. But I’m confident (or perhaps I should say, I have faith) that if we just give ourselves permission to have this conversation, we will astonish ourselves with the results.

Because I’ve seen with my own eyes that we are a Truly Generous People. I’ve seen with my own eyes how we can help raise tens of thousands of dollars in just a few days for Katrina relief, or the support of the Sharing Foundation. And I’ve also seen the joy and the pride which flow from that generosity, and accompanying the knowledge that together we have achieved something valuable and worthwhile.

Now the time has come for us to learn how to express that same generosity toward one another -- so that together we might generate the resources to find the time to share our talents for the benefit both of one another and the wider world, and in doing so discover that we are indeed Truly Wealthy....