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...