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.
Sunday, April 22, 2007
Sunday, April 15, 2007
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...
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...
Sunday, April 8, 2007
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....
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....
Sunday, April 1, 2007
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.
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.
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