a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday October 17, 2004
I realized that there was probably something seriously wrong with the priorities in my life when it dawned on me this past week that, although I was conversant with the latest head-to-head flash polling numbers from the key battleground states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Iowa, Missouri, and Wisconsin, I had somehow failed to notice that "the Glove," #20 Gary Payton, Oregon State University class of 1990, two-time Olympic Gold medalist, nine-time All Star, and for over a decade the leader and go-to guy for my hometown basketball team the Seattle Supersonics, is now playing point-guard for the Celtics here in Boston. Admittedly, he's 36 years old now and probably nearing the end of his career, so no doubt he's lost a step or two...but he's still one of my favorite players ever, and it's going to be great watching him play on the parquet. There are rumors that he didn't really want to leave the West Coast -- that he failed to show up on time for his team physical, and also that he was arrested for DUI in Los Angeles the night after the trade was announced. But he's here now, and playing pretty good pre-season ball, and I'm just hoping that he'll continue to bring his style of aggressive, tenacious, up-tempo, in-your-face basketball to the Fleet Center night after night, and maybe even that a little of it might rub off on some of these other guys as well. You don't really need to do it all yourself in order to be an effective team leader. You just need to show your teammates how it's done, and convince them that they too are capable of doing it themselves.
But before I get too far away from the poll numbers, I just want to know: how many of you heard yesterday morning on NPR about John Zogby's unusual polling question? Three days before the 2000 Presidential election, Zogby's pollsters asked the question: "If you were a resident of Oz, would you pick the Scarecrow or the Tin Man for mayor?" Given the choice between a candidate with no brains but a heart, and a candidate with no heart but brains, the sample in 2000 split exactly down the middle: 46.2% to 46.2%. (And we all know how THAT election turned out!). This year, however, the Tin Man is leading the Scarecrow by ten points, and among those identified as "persuadable swing voters" the margin is even higher: 48.7% for the Tin Man, and only 13.3% for the Scarecrow....while outraged conservative Bloggers want to know why the Cowardly Lion isn't also listed on the ballot.
Here are some other interesting things that Zogby discovered about these all-important undecided voters. 27.4% of them have seen "The Passion of the Christ," but only 13.1% have seen "Fahrenheit 9/11." (for Kerry supporters those numbers are 15.5% and 65.5% respectively; for Bush supporters 43.4% and 2.7%). 56.2% of these 2.6 million undecideds feel that the country is going in the wrong direction; 55.2% want a President who keeps his religious values out of public business; and 48.4% consider themselves pro-environment. But 57.3% of them say they would rather have a beer with President Bush than with Senator Kerry, while only 9.3% would rather have a beer with Kerry than with Bush...apparently notwithstanding the fact that the President no longer drinks.
Meanwhile, I'm a little disappointed that my own "Joe Six-Pack" poll last week didn't get a little bit bigger response. Zogby's scientific poll determined that persuadable undecided voters are both slightly opposed to more rigid gun control (49.8% to 32.4%) and slightly in favor of either same-sex marriages or civil unions (54.8% to 38%), but I personally felt like my own humorous little survey fell a little flat...and there's really nothing worse than a flat beer gag, unless of course it's a flat beer that makes you gag, which I think might pretty well describe this Molson's Canadian. There are plenty of good beers that come from Canada (including Molson's Golden Ale), but this bi-lingual lager isn't really one of them, although it does possess the interesting feature of coming with pre-printed snappy rejoinders to lame pick-up lines. (This one says "Yes. But not with you"). And I don't mean to sound elitist about this, although I do come from the Pacific Northwest, where we feel like we invented both microbreweries and the espresso cart, and so can often seem a little snobbish about our beverages. And believe it or not, there is actually a point to all this, which I'll get to in just a second.
A Samuel Adams, of course, is always an excellent choice; but if you really want to enjoy a truly excellent local beer, for my money there's none better than this Harpoon IPA, which tastes almost as good as the IPAs we brew out in Oregon, and which I'm now pleased to say I can legitimately claim as a professional expense. (Why should millionaires get all the tax breaks?). But the two beers I really want to talk about are these. As a lot of you already know, my first full-time settled ministry was at the Unitarian Church in Midland Texas (coincidentally, at precisely the same time that George W. Bush was deciding to put down the bottle and pick up the Bible, and also when the events depicted in the recently released movie "Friday Night Lights" actually took place). And then, some years later as a doctoral student, I spent a semester as a visiting scholar at Aalborg University in Denmark. So I've actually had ample opportunities to enjoy both of these beers in their natural environments, and therefore feel well qualified to compare them. This Carlsberg, you'll notice, comes in a green bottle, and if you read the small print here on the label you'll see that it is brewed "by appointment to the Royal Danish Court." This Lone Star, on the other hand, proudly bills itself as "Texas born and brewed," "Pure Texan Beer," and "the National Beer of Texas." In Denmark you can buy a Carlsberg (in a green plastic bottle) from a sidewalk vending machine, while in Texas you have to get in your car and drive to the drive-up window at the local liquor store, where the smallest quantity you can buy is an entire six-pack...for approximately the same price you might pay for a single beer in Copenhagen. A bottle of Carlsberg also comes with a one-and-a-half kroner deposit (which when I was living over there was approximately 18 cents...I think it's even a little more now), and there are actually professional bottle scavengers in Denmark who apparently make their living collecting and returning other people's empties. This bottle of Lone Star, on the other hand, has a little slogan printed on it which says "Don't Mess With Texas," and periodically the county sends out convicted DUIs in orange jumpsuits to pick up the empties from the side of the highway. Also, even though this beer is labeled as a "long neck," you'll notice that both these bottles are basically the same size. And my theory is that this is the result of globalization, which demands a certain level of standardization when it comes to packaging. An authentic long neck is actually about an inch and a half longer that this, and used to be available only at licensed establishments within the Lone Star State itself. But the point I want to make is that if you were to pour each of these beers, ice cold, into a tall, frosted glass on a sweltering summer afternoon, I suspect that most folks would probably have a pretty difficult time telling them apart by taste alone. Two very different cultures enjoying a nearly identical beverage in almost exactly the same way. There is something universal about the experience; the social nuances may differ, but the beer remains the same.
There's a contemporary school of historical scholarship which argues that this delicious fermented beverage may very well be the reason that the human beings living on the fertile lands between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers approximately ten thousand years ago gave up their hunter-gatherer ways, and decided to build and live in cities instead. Large scale grain agriculture made civilization both possible and necessary...more diversified and specialized forms of labor, a more sophisticated seasonal calendar, greater degrees of social organization and centralized planning, the development of systematic techniques for soil cultivation, irrigation, harvesting and crop storage, the creation of an effective military force to defend the fruits of one's harvest from those who would take it for themselves. Religion, government, taxes and the rule of law: all this flowed from the accidental discovery that sprouted barley contains natural enzymes which convert starch to sugar, which when in turn is exposed to more water and airborne yeast is converted to alcohol. Or so the theory goes. From Gilgamesh to George W. Bush -- nearly five thousand years of Western Civilization, all basically because human beings occasionally like to tie one on, and they wanted to make certain of a reliable supply of brewsky.
Of course, even if this theory contains a grain of truth, it would still be a mistake to conclude, in the words of botanist Paul Manglesdorf, that "the foundations of western civilization were laid by an ill-fed people living in a perpetual state of partial intoxication." There are certainly many other plausible interpretations of the historical record. A Marxist historian, for example, might argue that the increasingly complex forms of human social organization made possible by the Neolithic agricultural revolution facilitated the concentration of ever-increasing amounts of wealth and power in the hands of an elite, privileged class of warriors and priests, who then exploited the surplus resources of the entire society in order to consolidate their authority over the class of people who actually performed the hard, physical labor, while at the same time extending their hegemony over neighboring societies. But we all know that Marxist historians are basically just a bunch of crackpots. A more interesting line of inquiry involves the complex ways in which civil and religious authority were intertwined in Ancient Mesopotamia. The Kings of Bronze Age cities like Uruk, Sumer, Nineveh and Babylon were understood to be semi-divine entities, whose political legitimacy was derived from their faithful relationship to the local deities, who granted them the authority to impose equitable laws upon the population, and to demand and enforce obedience to those laws. The King was responsible both for maintaining order within the Society, and for protecting the members of that society from external threats; and to the extent that he was capable of performing those responsibilities, the people of the society owed him both loyalty and respect. The king's word was law, but the legitimacy of that law was not the product of the King's will alone, but flowed from the Gods, and was grounded in a covenant of mutual security and social order. And this Covenant replaced an earlier form of vendetta justice in which families basically exacted their own revenge against their perceived enemies for offenses real or imagined. Hammurabi's famous dictum "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" may sound a lot like the codification of the principle of vendetta, but in reality it mandates proportionality -- JUST an eye for an eye, ONLY a tooth for a tooth. (Although I should point out, just as an aside, that the Code of Hammurabi also calls for death by drowning for beer parlor proprietors who over-charge their customers, or who "fail to notify authorities of the presence of [known] criminals in their establishments.")
The ancient Hebrews appropriated this same idea of covenant to their own social organization. Except that their God was understood to be more than just a small, local deity whose jurisdiction merely extended over a single city. The God of Israel was the Creator and Ruler of the Universe, whose jurisdiction knew no limits, and whose power and authority dwarfed that of Gods fashioned by human hands. And the Covenant which this God entered into with Moses at Sinai held those “chosen†people to a higher ethical standard than their neighbors -- concerns about security and social order were subject to the additional commandment that justice be extended not merely to the members of the tribe itself, but also to outsiders...to strangers and foreigners; and to those who were powerless to protect themselves, like widows and orphans. This God of the Israelites was not merely the protector of the powerful, the pious, and the well-connected. This God cared about the weak, the poor, the marginalized and the forgotten...and insisted that they too be treated with fairness and compassion.
This tradition of ethical monotheism -- a tradition shared by the three great “western†religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, essentially affirms both that God is sovereign and that all souls belong to God -- that all people are God's children and therefore members of one family. This Covenant of All Souls declares that there are NOT two standards of justice: one for "us" and another for "them" -- rather, we are all accountable to the same ethical principles of mercy and even-handedness. And what makes this covenant possible is our own capacity for empathy: the recognition of a common humanity which transcends our various social and cultural differences, and unites us as a single people who are much more alike than we might at first think.
Here in the United States, the architects of our Constitution - our own so-called "founding fathers" -- created a secular form of Government with a strong separation of Church and State because the sophisticated political philosophies of the Enlightenment which they embraced allowed them to understand that even though we may be "One Nation under God," it is "out of many" that we become one -- E Pluribus Unum as well as "In God We Trust." And over the course of the last two centuries so-called "activist judges" (along with legislators, religious leaders, social activists and various other progressive reformers) have continued to encourage our society to expand its vision and become even more inclusive than even our most enlightened founders might have imagined. Because when we are all encouraged to bring our diverse gifts to the table, no one really knows for sure what kind of feast we will create. But we can at least feel confident that it will probably be delicious, because despite our different tastes and backgrounds, we all have much more in common than we know.
Good leadership is a process of bringing out the best in others. Ineffective leadership fails to do this, while bad leadership often succeeds only in bringing out the worst. And it isn't easy, because even when good leaders do their best, they can always control the behavior of those who follow. But if our church, for example, desires to exert spiritual and ethical leadership in a pluralistic society, the first thing we need to do is demonstrate among ourselves how it is done. Tolerance, compassion, civility, fairness, and dialog...these are the qualities which make us moral leaders in the world. These are to foundations of a Covenant through which "all souls shall grow into harmony with the Divine."
Sunday, October 17, 2004
Sunday, October 10, 2004
SERVING HUMANITY IN FRIENDSHIP
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday October 10, 2004
It occurred to me this past week, as I was thinking about what I was going to say here this morning, that after today there are only three more Sundays until the election. We've got one more debate to go, the polls are tightening, in a lot of states voter registration has already closed (although I think here in Massachusetts you still have until Friday to sign up -- does anyone know for certain?) Interestingly enough, I find myself feeling a lot more calm and relaxed than I did even a few weeks ago now that election day is just around the corner. It's not that I don't think the election will be close, or that I've stopped caring about who will win. It's just that I feel like I've already done my bit, and I'm ready for it to be over. I know who I'm going to vote for (and at this point I can't really think of anything that would get me to change my mind), I've contributed all the money that I'm going to contribute, I may still sign up to help people get to the polls on election day or something like that, but I don't really think that the outcome is in any doubt here in Massachusetts, and I'm not really sure that I want to vote absentee just so that I can travel to someplace like Florida or Pennsylvania (like so many of my colleagues are) simply to watch other people cast votes that might actually count if they're actually counted. I feel a little like my son Jacob did back in 1988, when he was only 15 and Michael Dukakis was running against the President's father. I think we might have been watching the World Series [that was the year that the Los Angeles Dodgers beat the Oakland A's, and Kirk Gibson hit that dramatic 9th inning home run to win Game One], or maybe it was just some meaningless football game...but whatever it was, at one point Jake looked up from a particularly vicious attack ad and announced to no one in particular "I'll be so glad when this election is over, and we can go back to watching beer commercials again."
Of course, it's not just the Presidency that's up for grabs on November 2nd. There's a complete slate of State and Local issues and candidates on the ballot, plus (technically at least) the entire House of Representatives and one third of the Senate. Between gerrymandering and the absence of effective campaign finance reform, the power of incumbency is so great these days that there are really very few Congressional races that are actually that competitive...but even so, House Majority leader Tom Delay made certain that before the Congress recessed for the election there were a series of essentially meaningless procedural votes on issues like same-sex marriage and the assault weapons ban, just so that he could get Democratic Representatives from more conservative southern and western states on the record as having voted in favor of gun control, and against traditional marriage.
But think about it for a moment. If you had a choice, where would you rather live: in a place where assault weapons were banned, and it was OK for people to marry whoever they loved; or someplace where everyone had an assault rifle, and it was illegal to be gay? Denmark, or Afghanistan? Canada, or Iraq? Or what about Carlisle, Massachusetts or Midland, Texas? I don't have any trouble knowing how I would answer these questions, and I don't imagine that many of you do either. But we live in a diverse nation, where people are free to have different opinions. And while I may like to believe that it's simply because they don't know any better, or that they've never really BEEN to Midland Texas...it may well be that they've just never been anywhere else.
In any event, it occurred to me that with all the flash polling trying to track likely voters in the so-called "battleground states," and the media pundits talking about NASCAR Dads and "Security" Moms, and which candidate appeared most "Presidential" at the most recent debate, that we've kinda lost track of what good ol' "Joe Six-Pack" really thinks. And so I thought I'd sponsor an informal poll of my own. [take out the empty beer cartons - Sam Adams and Lone Star] Just bring your empties and put them in the appropriate place, and who knows? -- maybe in another few weeks or so we'll all be able to put up our feet and breath a little easier, crack open a cold one, and just enjoy the game.
OK, I suppose it's time now to turn to my real topic for the day.
We say it together out loud every week, but how often do we take just a moment or two to reflect upon what it really means? "Love is the doctrine of this church, the quest for truth is our sacrament, and service is our prayer." These are basically our dogmas (although technically, Unitarian-Universalists aren't supposed to have any dogmas) -- they represent our most profound opinions, the things we believe are ultimately true. And then we follow them with a series of three parallel duties or responsibilities: "To dwell together in peace, to seek knowledge in freedom, [and] to serve humanity in friendship" all working toward our ultimate goal of "the end that all souls shall grow into harmony with the Divine." It's an agreement, a mutual promise or Covenant, that we make "with each other, and with God."
I'll have more to say about the actual "covenant" part of our Covenant next week, but today I want to focus in on the idea of service, and especially these twin notions that helping our fellow human beings is both an act of friendship, and a form of prayer. I hope by now it is abundantly clear that the order in which each of these items appears in our covenant isn't exactly random. There's an obvious, dynamic logic to it it all: our commitment to love and to dwelling together in peace makes us naturally curious about one another's lives, and discovering the commonalities which link us together in community despite our many differences. As our wisdom and knowledge of one another grow over time, we likewise come to recognize our obligation to help one another out in times of trouble or need...and this vocation, this call to be useful, to be of service, is both the culmination and the fulfillment of our free religious quest. It's more than merely an act of friendship, or "neighborliness." It's more than just the tangible satisfaction of rolling up your sleeves and getting your hands a little dirty doing God's work in the world. It's also an act of worship, of faith and faithfulness -- a form of prayer by which we communicate our feelings of devotion and gratitude to our Creator....
The idea of prayer is sometimes a little problematic for Unitarian Universalists. If you're not really certain whether you even believe in God, what's the point in trying to talk to her? You might as well be talking to yourself, or to the Universe, or to thin air. If you look the word up in a good etymological dictionary you'll discover that prayer comes from the Latin verb precari which means "to beg." And this is certainly one very popular understanding of prayer: begging God for something we know we really don't deserve. For a trial lawyer, the "prayer" is a plaintiff's pre-trail request for the legal relief or monetary damages that they would hope to be awarded if the jury finds in their favor on every issue. This is one of the reasons why the current administration hates trial lawyers so much: it's because they realize that sometimes the prayers of deserving people are indeed answered, and they can't quite get it through their heads that litigation is NOT just another form of begging. Or maybe it's because they believe that some people are simply more deserving than others, and forget that it's only a frivolous lawsuit if your weren't the one who was injured in the accident.
But for more sophisticated people of faith, there is another dimension of prayer which reflects the reality that God really does help those who help themselves. Prayer in this sense is an appeal to the values and the principles which we hold most deeply, and the attempt to shape our lives in conformity to those same values and principles. It's not a matter of telling God what WE want, it's a process of discerning what God wants for US, and then asking for (and receiving) the strength, the wisdom, and the persistence to become the kind of person God wants us to be. And this process of discernment generally requires a lot more listening than it does begging. It asks us to look long and hard at who we really are, and what we truly believe. It asks us to question and challenge everything we have been told by others about who we "ought" to be, and what we "should" be doing, and demands instead that we search our souls for that small spiritual part of ourselves created in the image of God, and that we endeavor to make it larger, while at the same time learning to recognize and evoke that same spirit in those around us as well.
Now this isn't to say that there isn't potentially a lot of truth in what others tell us about who we ought to be, or what we should be doing. But if we simply take these pronouncements at face value, without doing the kind of prayerful reflection and contemplation I've just described, our faith will always be a little superficial -- it will be something we imitate, rather than something we live. And likewise, without the element of friendship, of service to others or some great purpose larger than ourselves, our faith potentially becomes too isolated and introspective, perhaps ultimately even narcissistic. Yet even here we must also be careful. There are people in this world who adamantly believe that God wants them to fly airliners into skyscrapers, or to cut off the heads of the infidels who occupy their country. There are people who believe that because they are self-proclaimed servants of God, on a mission from God -- a Crusade, a Jihad (call it what you will) -- that they are free to kill the evil-doers wherever they may find them, or to take them into custody without due process, maybe even torture them a little, because the nobility and the urgency of the Cause Itself does away with the need for any kind of “test:†of legitimacy, of credibility, or even subsequent accountability for the wisdom and appropriateness of their decisions. Yet this is simply wrong. When evil is answered with evil, evil wins...even if it is all done in the name of God, and with the best of intentions, or for the most noble purposes.
But when the obligation is simply "to serve humanity in friendship," the potential for inadvertently doing evil is dramatically diminished. Not that it becomes completely impossible: we human beings are incredibly creative when it comes to rationalizing our bad behavior, and sometimes equally incredibly shortsighted about the true consequences of our choices. Thoreau wrote in Walden that "there is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted," and that if he "knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life." But to serve humanity in FRIENDSHIP, to do good for another human being knowing who they really are, and giving authentically out of the best part of ourselves, is an entirely different matter. "We should impart our courage, and not our despair, our health and ease, and not our disease..." Thoreau continued. "I would not subtract any thing from the praise that is due to philanthropy, but merely demand justice for all who by their lives and works are a blessing to mankind."
This is the ultimate test of prayerful service: do our lives and our works truly represent a blessing to humanity, to mankind? Are we, through our service, God's answer to our prayers? Do our endeavors lead to reconciliation rather than conflict; are we servants of peace, justice, wisdom, mercy, healing and redemption, rather than merely instruments of hatred and revenge? And yes, it IS a complicated business, and yes, we do the best we can. But by simply serving our fellow human beings in friendship, we become better people ourselves. Not just superficially, but deep within ourselves, in our hearts and spirits. We become indeed the people God intends for us to be.
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday October 10, 2004
It occurred to me this past week, as I was thinking about what I was going to say here this morning, that after today there are only three more Sundays until the election. We've got one more debate to go, the polls are tightening, in a lot of states voter registration has already closed (although I think here in Massachusetts you still have until Friday to sign up -- does anyone know for certain?) Interestingly enough, I find myself feeling a lot more calm and relaxed than I did even a few weeks ago now that election day is just around the corner. It's not that I don't think the election will be close, or that I've stopped caring about who will win. It's just that I feel like I've already done my bit, and I'm ready for it to be over. I know who I'm going to vote for (and at this point I can't really think of anything that would get me to change my mind), I've contributed all the money that I'm going to contribute, I may still sign up to help people get to the polls on election day or something like that, but I don't really think that the outcome is in any doubt here in Massachusetts, and I'm not really sure that I want to vote absentee just so that I can travel to someplace like Florida or Pennsylvania (like so many of my colleagues are) simply to watch other people cast votes that might actually count if they're actually counted. I feel a little like my son Jacob did back in 1988, when he was only 15 and Michael Dukakis was running against the President's father. I think we might have been watching the World Series [that was the year that the Los Angeles Dodgers beat the Oakland A's, and Kirk Gibson hit that dramatic 9th inning home run to win Game One], or maybe it was just some meaningless football game...but whatever it was, at one point Jake looked up from a particularly vicious attack ad and announced to no one in particular "I'll be so glad when this election is over, and we can go back to watching beer commercials again."
Of course, it's not just the Presidency that's up for grabs on November 2nd. There's a complete slate of State and Local issues and candidates on the ballot, plus (technically at least) the entire House of Representatives and one third of the Senate. Between gerrymandering and the absence of effective campaign finance reform, the power of incumbency is so great these days that there are really very few Congressional races that are actually that competitive...but even so, House Majority leader Tom Delay made certain that before the Congress recessed for the election there were a series of essentially meaningless procedural votes on issues like same-sex marriage and the assault weapons ban, just so that he could get Democratic Representatives from more conservative southern and western states on the record as having voted in favor of gun control, and against traditional marriage.
But think about it for a moment. If you had a choice, where would you rather live: in a place where assault weapons were banned, and it was OK for people to marry whoever they loved; or someplace where everyone had an assault rifle, and it was illegal to be gay? Denmark, or Afghanistan? Canada, or Iraq? Or what about Carlisle, Massachusetts or Midland, Texas? I don't have any trouble knowing how I would answer these questions, and I don't imagine that many of you do either. But we live in a diverse nation, where people are free to have different opinions. And while I may like to believe that it's simply because they don't know any better, or that they've never really BEEN to Midland Texas...it may well be that they've just never been anywhere else.
In any event, it occurred to me that with all the flash polling trying to track likely voters in the so-called "battleground states," and the media pundits talking about NASCAR Dads and "Security" Moms, and which candidate appeared most "Presidential" at the most recent debate, that we've kinda lost track of what good ol' "Joe Six-Pack" really thinks. And so I thought I'd sponsor an informal poll of my own. [take out the empty beer cartons - Sam Adams and Lone Star] Just bring your empties and put them in the appropriate place, and who knows? -- maybe in another few weeks or so we'll all be able to put up our feet and breath a little easier, crack open a cold one, and just enjoy the game.
OK, I suppose it's time now to turn to my real topic for the day.
We say it together out loud every week, but how often do we take just a moment or two to reflect upon what it really means? "Love is the doctrine of this church, the quest for truth is our sacrament, and service is our prayer." These are basically our dogmas (although technically, Unitarian-Universalists aren't supposed to have any dogmas) -- they represent our most profound opinions, the things we believe are ultimately true. And then we follow them with a series of three parallel duties or responsibilities: "To dwell together in peace, to seek knowledge in freedom, [and] to serve humanity in friendship" all working toward our ultimate goal of "the end that all souls shall grow into harmony with the Divine." It's an agreement, a mutual promise or Covenant, that we make "with each other, and with God."
I'll have more to say about the actual "covenant" part of our Covenant next week, but today I want to focus in on the idea of service, and especially these twin notions that helping our fellow human beings is both an act of friendship, and a form of prayer. I hope by now it is abundantly clear that the order in which each of these items appears in our covenant isn't exactly random. There's an obvious, dynamic logic to it it all: our commitment to love and to dwelling together in peace makes us naturally curious about one another's lives, and discovering the commonalities which link us together in community despite our many differences. As our wisdom and knowledge of one another grow over time, we likewise come to recognize our obligation to help one another out in times of trouble or need...and this vocation, this call to be useful, to be of service, is both the culmination and the fulfillment of our free religious quest. It's more than merely an act of friendship, or "neighborliness." It's more than just the tangible satisfaction of rolling up your sleeves and getting your hands a little dirty doing God's work in the world. It's also an act of worship, of faith and faithfulness -- a form of prayer by which we communicate our feelings of devotion and gratitude to our Creator....
The idea of prayer is sometimes a little problematic for Unitarian Universalists. If you're not really certain whether you even believe in God, what's the point in trying to talk to her? You might as well be talking to yourself, or to the Universe, or to thin air. If you look the word up in a good etymological dictionary you'll discover that prayer comes from the Latin verb precari which means "to beg." And this is certainly one very popular understanding of prayer: begging God for something we know we really don't deserve. For a trial lawyer, the "prayer" is a plaintiff's pre-trail request for the legal relief or monetary damages that they would hope to be awarded if the jury finds in their favor on every issue. This is one of the reasons why the current administration hates trial lawyers so much: it's because they realize that sometimes the prayers of deserving people are indeed answered, and they can't quite get it through their heads that litigation is NOT just another form of begging. Or maybe it's because they believe that some people are simply more deserving than others, and forget that it's only a frivolous lawsuit if your weren't the one who was injured in the accident.
But for more sophisticated people of faith, there is another dimension of prayer which reflects the reality that God really does help those who help themselves. Prayer in this sense is an appeal to the values and the principles which we hold most deeply, and the attempt to shape our lives in conformity to those same values and principles. It's not a matter of telling God what WE want, it's a process of discerning what God wants for US, and then asking for (and receiving) the strength, the wisdom, and the persistence to become the kind of person God wants us to be. And this process of discernment generally requires a lot more listening than it does begging. It asks us to look long and hard at who we really are, and what we truly believe. It asks us to question and challenge everything we have been told by others about who we "ought" to be, and what we "should" be doing, and demands instead that we search our souls for that small spiritual part of ourselves created in the image of God, and that we endeavor to make it larger, while at the same time learning to recognize and evoke that same spirit in those around us as well.
Now this isn't to say that there isn't potentially a lot of truth in what others tell us about who we ought to be, or what we should be doing. But if we simply take these pronouncements at face value, without doing the kind of prayerful reflection and contemplation I've just described, our faith will always be a little superficial -- it will be something we imitate, rather than something we live. And likewise, without the element of friendship, of service to others or some great purpose larger than ourselves, our faith potentially becomes too isolated and introspective, perhaps ultimately even narcissistic. Yet even here we must also be careful. There are people in this world who adamantly believe that God wants them to fly airliners into skyscrapers, or to cut off the heads of the infidels who occupy their country. There are people who believe that because they are self-proclaimed servants of God, on a mission from God -- a Crusade, a Jihad (call it what you will) -- that they are free to kill the evil-doers wherever they may find them, or to take them into custody without due process, maybe even torture them a little, because the nobility and the urgency of the Cause Itself does away with the need for any kind of “test:†of legitimacy, of credibility, or even subsequent accountability for the wisdom and appropriateness of their decisions. Yet this is simply wrong. When evil is answered with evil, evil wins...even if it is all done in the name of God, and with the best of intentions, or for the most noble purposes.
But when the obligation is simply "to serve humanity in friendship," the potential for inadvertently doing evil is dramatically diminished. Not that it becomes completely impossible: we human beings are incredibly creative when it comes to rationalizing our bad behavior, and sometimes equally incredibly shortsighted about the true consequences of our choices. Thoreau wrote in Walden that "there is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted," and that if he "knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life." But to serve humanity in FRIENDSHIP, to do good for another human being knowing who they really are, and giving authentically out of the best part of ourselves, is an entirely different matter. "We should impart our courage, and not our despair, our health and ease, and not our disease..." Thoreau continued. "I would not subtract any thing from the praise that is due to philanthropy, but merely demand justice for all who by their lives and works are a blessing to mankind."
This is the ultimate test of prayerful service: do our lives and our works truly represent a blessing to humanity, to mankind? Are we, through our service, God's answer to our prayers? Do our endeavors lead to reconciliation rather than conflict; are we servants of peace, justice, wisdom, mercy, healing and redemption, rather than merely instruments of hatred and revenge? And yes, it IS a complicated business, and yes, we do the best we can. But by simply serving our fellow human beings in friendship, we become better people ourselves. Not just superficially, but deep within ourselves, in our hearts and spirits. We become indeed the people God intends for us to be.
Sunday, October 3, 2004
TO SEEK KNOWLEDGE IN FREEDOM
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle Massachusetts
Sunday October 3rd, 2004
I honestly believe that of all the characteristics I might point to, the one distinctive quality that most distinguishes Unitarian Universalism from every other religious tradition known to human history is the extraordinary emphasis we place on the task described in the title of this morning's sermon: "To seek knowledge in freedom."I don't know whether to call this a commandment, or a mandate, or merely a "duty" -- but it's an important part of what it means to be a contemporary Unitarian Universalist, an essential component of our denomination's theological "culture." I suspect that most religious organizations welcome Seekers, and I know for a fact that there are plenty who value freedom and knowledge as much as we do, but I also suspect that for a lot of them (or at least a lot of the ones that I'm familiar with) their attitude is something along the lines of "your search is over -- we've got just what you've been looking for. So come on in, sit still and pay attention, while we feed it to you on a silver platter."
Which really isn't such terrible advice, when you stop to think about it. You can generally learn a lot if you are willing to listen just a little. But Unitarian Universalists tend to see things just a little differently. Back in 1819 when William Ellery Channing preached his famous sermon "Unitarian Christianity" at the ordination of Jared Sparks in Baltimore Maryland, he took as his text a passage from Paul's First Letter to the Thessalonians: "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good" and I don't think (as a denomination, at least) that we've looked back ever since.
Unitarian Universalists are curious people who like to ask questions. Lots of questions. Seeking is a way of life for us. We worship our freedom of belief almost as an object of idolatry, and accumulate knowledge as though it were money in the bank. Love is the doctrine of this church, and service is our prayer -- but our sacrament (the place where God's grace and "real presence" is made manifest in the here and now) is "the search for truth." And this same emphasis is reflected as well in our denominational Principles and Purposes statement, which of course begins with the familiar affirmation of "the inherent worth and dignity of every person," and concludes with "respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part." But at the center of this overarching declaration, the keystone if you will which holds it all together, is the "free and responsible search for truth and meaning." Indeed, for a lot of us that freedom IS the most signficant responsibility of our lives. Truth, meaning, knowledge, wisdom -- these things are not just means to some end, they are inherently worthwhile in and of themselves; they are what make our lives meaningful, and allow us to understand who we are and our relationship to everything we see and experience around us.
Of course, these values didn't actually originate with us. You can read about them right in the New Testament: "Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you." (Lk 11: 9-10). And in the Gospel of John we are told "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free" (Jn 8:32). That was probably my favorite verse of Scripture, back when I was in High School and aggressively debating against my born-again Christian classmates in order to preserve my immortal soul in a state of non-salvation. And then, some years later, when I was in Divinity School, that particular verse took on an added poignancy for me, because the verb in the second clause -- luo: "to set free"-- also happened to provide the paradigm for the conjugation of all regular Omega-verbs: luo, lueis, luei, luomen, luete, luousi -- I set free, you set free, he/she/it sets free, we set free, all of you set free, they set free.... And that's just the simple present active indicative...don't ask me to go any further. But one of the things I learned incidentally while trying to memorize all this is that the verb luo more precisely means to "loose" or to "release" (as from bondage). So it's not just that we are created with a God-given freedom to seek the truth, it is also that our acquired knowledge of truth is itself liberating. The freedom to seek, and the freedom that comes from knowing (or even just thinking that we know) are really two very different things, which is why the certainty of those who think that they know things that others don't (especially when the others think that they in fact know better) is so exasperating. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. But perfect knowledge is for God alone. And so, as Socrates so wisely put it, the wisest individual is the one who knows that they know nothing.
And yet, I canâ't very well stand up here with a straight face and tell you that "ignorance is bliss" either. Truth Matters. Knowledge and Wisdom matter. As human beings, we have the freedom to make mistakes; and we have the duty, and the responsibility, to learn from those mistakes and correct them if we can. Seeking knowledge in freedom is often a process of trial and error (or in the case of truly egregious mistakes, error and trial). Likewise, the inability to acknowledge even the possibility of mistake is the most dangerous form of ignorance. And we all know what Jesus had to say about people who are quick to point out their neighbors shortcomings, while turning a blind eye to their own. He called them hypocrites -- people who judge according to a standard which they themselves do not meet. Hypocrisy is perhaps the most frequently condemned sin in all the Gospels. (Actually, to tell the truth, I don't really know that for sure, because I didn't really take the time to count them all up. But it sure gets condemned a lot). But either way, the first thing we need to learn and remember about seeking knowledge in freedom is to do so humbly. There are a lot of things to know in this world. None of us will ever learn them all. A little humility and the ready acknowledgment of the fact that we all make mistakes goes a long way toward liberating us from the bondage of our own ignorance.
People sometimes criticize, or even make fun of Unitarian Universalists, because we are so notoriously tentative about saying what we believe. They say that UUs believe everything, or that we DON'T believe anything...or that we believe one thing one day and something else the next, or that we simply don't know WHAT we believe, which is why we spend so much time "seeking" in the first place. We're often accused of being moral relativists, because we're overheard talking about "my Truth," or suggesting that what is true for one person may not be true for all people, or what is appropriate in some situations may not be appropriate in others. Personally, I feel that these kinds of stereotypes are a profound misrepresentation of who we are and what we believe, but I also recognize that we contribute to this misunderstanding because we laugh at ourselves right along with everyone else whenever Garrison Keillor turns us into a punch-line, and are not always as precise or careful in our use of language as we might be, and therefore leave ourselves open to misinterpretation...especially by people who don't already understand (or who don't WANT to understand) what we really do stand for.
But just assume for a moment that Truth truly is Absolute: that what is True today was True yesterday, and will be True tomorrow and for all eternity. And further assume (just for the sake of argument, since it's a pretty big assumption) that it may even be possible for a human being to know and understand that Truth, perfectly and in every detail, and still further possible for them to communicate it sensibly to another human being. Even if it were hypothetically possible, how often do you think it would really happen? How long do you think it would take to know and understand "the Truth," and how many people would actually take the time to do it? Truth is "out there" but knowledge is "in here" -- it's a much more personal thing; and even if Absolute Truth is eternal and unchanging, each individual still has to discover and learn it for themselves. Patience and Persistence are essential qualities in a Truth-Seeker, and True Wisdom is the understanding that there is a difference between "the Truth" (which may very well be absolute and eternal) and knowing (or thinking you know, or claiming to know) what is true at this particular moment (which is always a little dicey and tentative anyway, since often it seems like the more we know, the more we discover there is to know). Knowledge is something we acquire slowly, over time. When we are free to seek knowledge we may actually be able to acquire it a little more quickly and thoroughly than if we just sit around and wait for knowledge to come to us. But let's face facts: true "know -it-alls" are basically just figments of their own imaginations, often failing to meet even the so-called "laugh test" when confronted with the evidence of their own profound misunderstanding.
Of course, it may also be true that Truth (or at a least certain kind of Truth) is a very simple thing -- something that we seem to know intuitively, as if from birth, and only need to learn to trust. I'm not going to hazard a guess right now as to what these "truths" might actually be, but there are certainly plenty of things in life that I basically just take on faith, because I know that if I doubt EVERYTHING, if I can't Trust ANYTHING, there's no way I'm even going to make it through the day. You'll probably hear me say this a lot from this pulpit if you sit here often enough, but "faith" is not belief in things you know aren't true. Faith is trusting the "truth" of things you know you can never really prove, and will never really have to prove to anyone but yourself. It's the confidence to live your life knowing you will always be a little more ignorant than you might like, but that you'll figure out a way to muddle through. And every time you do, you learn a little more...about yourself. You become more knowledgeable about who you are and what you're made of.
And this is true even if the outcome is less than perfect. I know it's a cliche, but failure can be a magnificent teacher...it teaches us things about ourselves and the world that success never can. Not all of those lessons are positive; some of them can be quite crippling if they rob us of faith in ourselves and the confidence to try again. But when you understand the task to be "seeking knowledge in freedom," it changes the nature of the process itself. The goal is no longer merely to succeed. It is to learn something new about ourselves and the world we live in through our efforts, and to be able to draw freely upon that new knowledge the next time we are confronted with a challenge.
Of course, like a little knowledge, relying too greatly on Force of Will and the Power of Positive Thinking can also be a dangerous thing. There's a profound difference between optimism and wishful thinking, and simply saying something is true doesn't make it so. We may not always choose to be completely candid with the people around us; there is such a thing as Too Much Information, and some things are simply nobody's business anyway. But it is always dangerous to be less than completely honest with ourselves. Only a fool tries to pull the wool over their own eyes, or ignores what is as plain as the nose on their face. Of course, this cuts two ways as well. We can also become too critical of ourselves, underestimating our own abilities or minimizing our own skills. Honesty means Honesty -- the strengths as well as the shortcomings; and often times we don't even know what we can do until we try. We should neither underestimate the power of optimism, nor should we rely on it exclusively. Trust, but Verify. And the verification -- the "truth-testing" -- generally comes only through the effort of honest exploration, or (to put it another way) the on-going process of seeking knowledge in freedom.
Of course, there are also some truths that can never be verified. I know I've talked a lot about God here this morning (maybe not so much recently, but earlier) and I know there are a lot of people who get a little nervous when I use that kind of language, just as I know there are others who find it kind of comforting and reassuring. The experience of God is one of those simple truths that can never really be proved, and never really has to be proved either. But this places that knowledge in a very special category. Even if you haven't had the experience...if you're not a believer, if it's just not part of your own "truth," you can still believe someone who tells you that they have experienced the presence of the divine in their life, and that it has changed their life for the better. You don't have to believe in God yourself in order to believe in the experience of the person who believes, especially if you can see with your own eyes that their life has been changed. (Of course, sometimes it may seem to you as if their lives have been changed for the worse, but that's a topic for another day). But once again, the Scripture tells us "by their fruits shall ye know them"and admonishes "Show me your faith apart from your works, and I, by my works, will show you my faith."
And likewise, even if you have been blessed by a profound, life-transforming experience of the Holy which you simply know without a doubt was the work of God, you need to remember that just because it makes sense for you to talk about that experience in a certain way doesn't mean that those words are going to be meaningful to others. You need to learn how to differentiate between the wisdom, and the insight, and the knowledge that you gained from the experience itself, and the various ways that you might communicate that knowledge to others so that it will be meaningful to them as well. And this represents yet another different kind of knowledge altogether, which relies less on divine revelation than it does simple human connection, and the ability (as I mentioned last week) to find commonalities in even the most diverse human experiences.
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle Massachusetts
Sunday October 3rd, 2004
I honestly believe that of all the characteristics I might point to, the one distinctive quality that most distinguishes Unitarian Universalism from every other religious tradition known to human history is the extraordinary emphasis we place on the task described in the title of this morning's sermon: "To seek knowledge in freedom."I don't know whether to call this a commandment, or a mandate, or merely a "duty" -- but it's an important part of what it means to be a contemporary Unitarian Universalist, an essential component of our denomination's theological "culture." I suspect that most religious organizations welcome Seekers, and I know for a fact that there are plenty who value freedom and knowledge as much as we do, but I also suspect that for a lot of them (or at least a lot of the ones that I'm familiar with) their attitude is something along the lines of "your search is over -- we've got just what you've been looking for. So come on in, sit still and pay attention, while we feed it to you on a silver platter."
Which really isn't such terrible advice, when you stop to think about it. You can generally learn a lot if you are willing to listen just a little. But Unitarian Universalists tend to see things just a little differently. Back in 1819 when William Ellery Channing preached his famous sermon "Unitarian Christianity" at the ordination of Jared Sparks in Baltimore Maryland, he took as his text a passage from Paul's First Letter to the Thessalonians: "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good" and I don't think (as a denomination, at least) that we've looked back ever since.
Unitarian Universalists are curious people who like to ask questions. Lots of questions. Seeking is a way of life for us. We worship our freedom of belief almost as an object of idolatry, and accumulate knowledge as though it were money in the bank. Love is the doctrine of this church, and service is our prayer -- but our sacrament (the place where God's grace and "real presence" is made manifest in the here and now) is "the search for truth." And this same emphasis is reflected as well in our denominational Principles and Purposes statement, which of course begins with the familiar affirmation of "the inherent worth and dignity of every person," and concludes with "respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part." But at the center of this overarching declaration, the keystone if you will which holds it all together, is the "free and responsible search for truth and meaning." Indeed, for a lot of us that freedom IS the most signficant responsibility of our lives. Truth, meaning, knowledge, wisdom -- these things are not just means to some end, they are inherently worthwhile in and of themselves; they are what make our lives meaningful, and allow us to understand who we are and our relationship to everything we see and experience around us.
Of course, these values didn't actually originate with us. You can read about them right in the New Testament: "Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you." (Lk 11: 9-10). And in the Gospel of John we are told "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free" (Jn 8:32). That was probably my favorite verse of Scripture, back when I was in High School and aggressively debating against my born-again Christian classmates in order to preserve my immortal soul in a state of non-salvation. And then, some years later, when I was in Divinity School, that particular verse took on an added poignancy for me, because the verb in the second clause -- luo: "to set free"-- also happened to provide the paradigm for the conjugation of all regular Omega-verbs: luo, lueis, luei, luomen, luete, luousi -- I set free, you set free, he/she/it sets free, we set free, all of you set free, they set free.... And that's just the simple present active indicative...don't ask me to go any further. But one of the things I learned incidentally while trying to memorize all this is that the verb luo more precisely means to "loose" or to "release" (as from bondage). So it's not just that we are created with a God-given freedom to seek the truth, it is also that our acquired knowledge of truth is itself liberating. The freedom to seek, and the freedom that comes from knowing (or even just thinking that we know) are really two very different things, which is why the certainty of those who think that they know things that others don't (especially when the others think that they in fact know better) is so exasperating. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. But perfect knowledge is for God alone. And so, as Socrates so wisely put it, the wisest individual is the one who knows that they know nothing.
And yet, I canâ't very well stand up here with a straight face and tell you that "ignorance is bliss" either. Truth Matters. Knowledge and Wisdom matter. As human beings, we have the freedom to make mistakes; and we have the duty, and the responsibility, to learn from those mistakes and correct them if we can. Seeking knowledge in freedom is often a process of trial and error (or in the case of truly egregious mistakes, error and trial). Likewise, the inability to acknowledge even the possibility of mistake is the most dangerous form of ignorance. And we all know what Jesus had to say about people who are quick to point out their neighbors shortcomings, while turning a blind eye to their own. He called them hypocrites -- people who judge according to a standard which they themselves do not meet. Hypocrisy is perhaps the most frequently condemned sin in all the Gospels. (Actually, to tell the truth, I don't really know that for sure, because I didn't really take the time to count them all up. But it sure gets condemned a lot). But either way, the first thing we need to learn and remember about seeking knowledge in freedom is to do so humbly. There are a lot of things to know in this world. None of us will ever learn them all. A little humility and the ready acknowledgment of the fact that we all make mistakes goes a long way toward liberating us from the bondage of our own ignorance.
People sometimes criticize, or even make fun of Unitarian Universalists, because we are so notoriously tentative about saying what we believe. They say that UUs believe everything, or that we DON'T believe anything...or that we believe one thing one day and something else the next, or that we simply don't know WHAT we believe, which is why we spend so much time "seeking" in the first place. We're often accused of being moral relativists, because we're overheard talking about "my Truth," or suggesting that what is true for one person may not be true for all people, or what is appropriate in some situations may not be appropriate in others. Personally, I feel that these kinds of stereotypes are a profound misrepresentation of who we are and what we believe, but I also recognize that we contribute to this misunderstanding because we laugh at ourselves right along with everyone else whenever Garrison Keillor turns us into a punch-line, and are not always as precise or careful in our use of language as we might be, and therefore leave ourselves open to misinterpretation...especially by people who don't already understand (or who don't WANT to understand) what we really do stand for.
But just assume for a moment that Truth truly is Absolute: that what is True today was True yesterday, and will be True tomorrow and for all eternity. And further assume (just for the sake of argument, since it's a pretty big assumption) that it may even be possible for a human being to know and understand that Truth, perfectly and in every detail, and still further possible for them to communicate it sensibly to another human being. Even if it were hypothetically possible, how often do you think it would really happen? How long do you think it would take to know and understand "the Truth," and how many people would actually take the time to do it? Truth is "out there" but knowledge is "in here" -- it's a much more personal thing; and even if Absolute Truth is eternal and unchanging, each individual still has to discover and learn it for themselves. Patience and Persistence are essential qualities in a Truth-Seeker, and True Wisdom is the understanding that there is a difference between "the Truth" (which may very well be absolute and eternal) and knowing (or thinking you know, or claiming to know) what is true at this particular moment (which is always a little dicey and tentative anyway, since often it seems like the more we know, the more we discover there is to know). Knowledge is something we acquire slowly, over time. When we are free to seek knowledge we may actually be able to acquire it a little more quickly and thoroughly than if we just sit around and wait for knowledge to come to us. But let's face facts: true "know -it-alls" are basically just figments of their own imaginations, often failing to meet even the so-called "laugh test" when confronted with the evidence of their own profound misunderstanding.
Of course, it may also be true that Truth (or at a least certain kind of Truth) is a very simple thing -- something that we seem to know intuitively, as if from birth, and only need to learn to trust. I'm not going to hazard a guess right now as to what these "truths" might actually be, but there are certainly plenty of things in life that I basically just take on faith, because I know that if I doubt EVERYTHING, if I can't Trust ANYTHING, there's no way I'm even going to make it through the day. You'll probably hear me say this a lot from this pulpit if you sit here often enough, but "faith" is not belief in things you know aren't true. Faith is trusting the "truth" of things you know you can never really prove, and will never really have to prove to anyone but yourself. It's the confidence to live your life knowing you will always be a little more ignorant than you might like, but that you'll figure out a way to muddle through. And every time you do, you learn a little more...about yourself. You become more knowledgeable about who you are and what you're made of.
And this is true even if the outcome is less than perfect. I know it's a cliche, but failure can be a magnificent teacher...it teaches us things about ourselves and the world that success never can. Not all of those lessons are positive; some of them can be quite crippling if they rob us of faith in ourselves and the confidence to try again. But when you understand the task to be "seeking knowledge in freedom," it changes the nature of the process itself. The goal is no longer merely to succeed. It is to learn something new about ourselves and the world we live in through our efforts, and to be able to draw freely upon that new knowledge the next time we are confronted with a challenge.
Of course, like a little knowledge, relying too greatly on Force of Will and the Power of Positive Thinking can also be a dangerous thing. There's a profound difference between optimism and wishful thinking, and simply saying something is true doesn't make it so. We may not always choose to be completely candid with the people around us; there is such a thing as Too Much Information, and some things are simply nobody's business anyway. But it is always dangerous to be less than completely honest with ourselves. Only a fool tries to pull the wool over their own eyes, or ignores what is as plain as the nose on their face. Of course, this cuts two ways as well. We can also become too critical of ourselves, underestimating our own abilities or minimizing our own skills. Honesty means Honesty -- the strengths as well as the shortcomings; and often times we don't even know what we can do until we try. We should neither underestimate the power of optimism, nor should we rely on it exclusively. Trust, but Verify. And the verification -- the "truth-testing" -- generally comes only through the effort of honest exploration, or (to put it another way) the on-going process of seeking knowledge in freedom.
Of course, there are also some truths that can never be verified. I know I've talked a lot about God here this morning (maybe not so much recently, but earlier) and I know there are a lot of people who get a little nervous when I use that kind of language, just as I know there are others who find it kind of comforting and reassuring. The experience of God is one of those simple truths that can never really be proved, and never really has to be proved either. But this places that knowledge in a very special category. Even if you haven't had the experience...if you're not a believer, if it's just not part of your own "truth," you can still believe someone who tells you that they have experienced the presence of the divine in their life, and that it has changed their life for the better. You don't have to believe in God yourself in order to believe in the experience of the person who believes, especially if you can see with your own eyes that their life has been changed. (Of course, sometimes it may seem to you as if their lives have been changed for the worse, but that's a topic for another day). But once again, the Scripture tells us "by their fruits shall ye know them"and admonishes "Show me your faith apart from your works, and I, by my works, will show you my faith."
And likewise, even if you have been blessed by a profound, life-transforming experience of the Holy which you simply know without a doubt was the work of God, you need to remember that just because it makes sense for you to talk about that experience in a certain way doesn't mean that those words are going to be meaningful to others. You need to learn how to differentiate between the wisdom, and the insight, and the knowledge that you gained from the experience itself, and the various ways that you might communicate that knowledge to others so that it will be meaningful to them as well. And this represents yet another different kind of knowledge altogether, which relies less on divine revelation than it does simple human connection, and the ability (as I mentioned last week) to find commonalities in even the most diverse human experiences.
Sunday, September 26, 2004
TO DWELL TOGETHER IN PEACE
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle MA
Neighborhood Sunday September 26, 2004
[extemperaneous introduction: in a year we’ve gone from strangers to familiar friends; when the honeymoon is finally over, the real work of living together in community begins]
Last weekend I was out in Seattle attending my 30th High School reunion. I had really mixed feelings about attending this event. On the one hand it really couldn’t have come at a much more inconvenient time of year -- which was reflected in the absence of a lot of my former classmates who, like me, also live at a distance, and whose lives basically follow an academic calendar. Plus, between the airfare, the rental car, the hotel room, the dogsitter, and all of the other incidental expenses, it turned out to be a pretty expensive trip -- (I’m a little embarrassed to say just how much). On the other hand, it is only once every decade, and I felt kinda obligated to go, since I was after all a student body officer, and had also served on the committee that initially organized our 10th. And then at the 20th I had the dubious distinction of being honored as one of the twenty most Distinguished Alumni of my graduating class of 540 (96% of whom are apparently even bigger slackers than I am) but which also happens to include the graphic artist who designed Microsoft’s “Clippy the Paper-Clip.” (He sometimes calls himself “the most annoying man in America). But the real reason I felt like I had to go is that I have a friend from High School whom none of us had seen or heard from in 28 years, despite having searched high and low for him prior to both of our previous two reunions. But last spring he Googled me, and got a hit on our FRS website; so to make a long story short I got him to agree that he would go if I would go, and so...I was going, whether it was convenient or not. And when I got back to Carlisle Tuesday morning (having flown overnight on the red-eye), there was an e-mail from Tom waiting for me, which I’d like to share with you now. It goes:
Tim: It was great to see you last night. It's really nice to be connecting with you again. It feels completely natural; it isn't like we're trying to escape into the past. The reunion in general felt like that to me, like I was reconnecting with people in the present, talking to them in terms of who they are now. It wasn't a nostalgia fest, which was nice. You mentioned that you had a nice talk with Dwight and Mary [I’ll say a little bit more about them in a minute}. I talked with them too, and had the same sense of being able to connect with them in a meaningful way. Mainly, I just want to thank you for helping me feel at ease. To me it felt like you were the host of the party, doing your best to make sure that I had a good time. Anyway, thanks,and stay in touch. And I don't believe a word of what you were saying about the presidential campaign, so there.
Dwight and Mary, by the way, were my High School’s poster-perfect Born-Again Christian couple. They’ve been together for as long as I’ve known them -- since before we were Freshmen, over 35 years now. And when we were in school together it was basically their mission in life to try to “save” me (and everyone else they met), while mine in turn (in my role as my High School’s chief gadfly, infidel and heretic) was to resist salvation at any cost, while at the same time challenging everything they believed. After graduation Dwight went to work as a contractor (a job he still does today), while Mary became a housewife and a stay-at-home mom...until the last of their children had at last fled the nest, at which point she decided that it was her turn to attend the University of Washington. She now works as an administrator for Habitat for Humanity, doing church relations, and in that capacity she and Dwight have traveled all over the world, doing their small part to help put an end to poverty housing. (And yes, they’ve both actually met Jimmy and Roslyn Carter).
Of course, the most interesting thing about our respective lives now is how closely our faith journeys have converged over the past three decades. I no longer feel so obsessed about always having to be right, or even trying to be the smartest guy in the room. I have a lot more respect and appreciation now for the “softer” side of spirituality -- I can sometimes actually even sing “Kum Ba Yah” without feeling ridiculously self-conscious. Mary, on the other hand, still feels nostalgic for the “feel-good” Christianity of her youth, but she’s also developed the capacity to look critically at her church, and to be displeased about some of the things she sees going on there. And she’s developed a lot more respect for Unitarian-Universalists too, now that she’s discovered that we’re not just all talk and hot air, but that some of us at least can also actually swing a hammer and use a saw.
My topic for today, if you haven’t figured out already, is Community -- what does it really mean to “dwell together in peace.” It’s the first of a series of four sermons I have planned for this Fall about the language of our covenant. And the reason I have gone on here at such great length about my High School reunion is that, for a lot of us I suspect, High School was the first truly complex community that we participated in. Prior to High School most people tend to live their lives on a lot smaller scale. Our world consists of our family and our immediate neighborhood, plus a teacher and maybe a couple of dozen kids we share a classroom with each day...perhaps only a few hundred souls at most, including our cousins and grandparents and the kids we met at summer camp.
But when we arrive at High School, at the age of thirteen or so, our whole world suddenly becomes a whole lot larger in a big hurry. There were over two thousand students, for example, at my High School, plus several hundred more teachers and administrators (and in my case every one of them was a stranger to me, since my family had just moved during the summer back to Seattle from California). But even for kids who have lived in the same neighborhood their entire lives, the first big challenge that confronts us all in High School -- bigger even than finding our way to our classes, or remembering our locker combinations, or determining whether it’s really safe to go into that particular restroom -- is figuring out where we fit in. Am I smart enough to be one of the Honor Society kids? Am I a good enough athlete to hang out with the Jocks? Am I going to try to be popular, and wear all the right clothes and go to the parties and make lots of friends; or am I going to pretty much try to keep to myself, maybe just hanging out with the handful of friends I’ve known since kindergarten? And what will I do if they decide to do something different than I do?
Discovering our affinities -- where we fit in -- is a key element in the process of exploring and discovering who we are as individuals. And yet there’s a second, even bigger challenge that confronts us for the first time in High School, and that’s figuring out how we’re going to get along with the folks with whom we DON’T fit in. How are we going to relate to people (and more pointedly, to groups of people) who are different from us, who are not part of our group, our “in” crowd, our little clique? Are we going to focus on the differences, the things that keep us separate? Or are we going to look for things that we have in common, that potentially bring us together? And let’s be honest -- there’s a power dynamic at work here also. Because if you are part of that supposedly “popular” group, it can sometimes seem to your advantage to keep others out, or to put them down in order to bolster your own status and sense of superiority; while if you’re NOT a member of that group, you have to decide at some point whether you are even going to play that game, or instead going to make up new and different rules of your own. But either way, it still comes down to a question of Empathy or Antipathy. Do we concentrate on our commonalities, the qualities we share? Or do we emphasize the distinctions, real or imagined, which we hope will distinguish us one from the other?
And then we all graduated (or at least most of us did) and went our separate ways. Some of us went to college, some of us went to work, or into the military, some of us even went to prison (at least in my graduating class they did). And at some subsequent point in time (probably a lot sooner than most of us realized) all of the little distinctions that meant so much in High School gradually became meaningless, because the subsequent distinctions had become so much greater. And yet no matter how great those differences may become, you will always have two things in common with the people you went to High School with. First, no matter how old you get, you will always be the same age. Your age. And the second, of course, is the accident of shared history -- that because you all happened to be the same age, and your parents all happened to live in the same community, you spent four critically formative years of your life (more or less) with this basically random group of people. And there’s nothing you can do to change that, no matter how hard you try. The best you can do is to choose to ignore it, to try to put it all behind you.
But if you have properly learned your lessons of empathy and affinity, you can also choose to embrace that community in a new way. And you can likewise use those same lessons to embrace new communities -- to discover new affinities that you might not have otherwise explored, and to grow as an individual in the process. I don’t remember anything about High School Algebra (in fact, I sometimes have trouble doing simple elementary school fractions)...but I do remember this: if you listen carefully enough, you can eventually find something you have in common with just about everyone you may happen to meet. It may be something so simple as neither one of you has ever met anyone else so different from yourself in your life, but it’s a start. That common denominator is enough to begin a dialog, a relationship, and from that interaction other commonalities (and differences) will begin to emerge. But so long as neither party desires to harm or exploit or dominate the other, the differences don’t really matter. While the commonalities potentially form the basis of a larger and more inclusive community.
I’m pretty sure that everyone here has heard of the Golden Rule: “do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” And there’s also a more apologetic variation of this rule, which basically says “do NOT do unto others that which you find hateful to yourself.” And then there’s the so-called “strong” version of the rule, which says “do unto others as THEY would have you do unto them” -- in other words, empathetically substituting the other person’s personal or cultural sensibilities for one’s own. But the point is, we don’t necessarily have to have a LOT in common with another human being in order to empathize with them, or to treat them fairly. We can learn how to “dwell together in peace,” without having to see eye to eye on every little thing.
Of course, there is also a cynical version of the rule, which goes something like: “Do unto others BEFORE they get a chance to do it unto you, because at the end of the day, it’s a dog eat dog world out there, and whoever has the most Gold makes the rules....” It’s clever, and maybe even a little funny (and to my mind disgustingly “American”); but it’s also dead wrong, even though at times it may not always seem like it. At the end of the day, there’s not enough gold in all the world to keep in place rules that are fundamentally mean or unfair; every dog has its day, truth is stronger than falsehood, and our common humanity is far more powerful than the differences and disagreements that divide us.
It’s true that often times we end up defining who we are by differenciating ourselves from who and what we are not. All Communities have boundaries of some sort. But healthy, loving, dymanic communities define themselves positively rather than negatively -- by lifting up who they are and what they stand for, in both words and deeds. And they are not so much things that we discover and join as they are entities that we help to create through our presence and participation in them. And likewise, “dwelling together in peace” is not generally something that we can do through domination: by imposing our will on others. Rather, lasting peace comes from learning to listen to one another, and then building on our commonalities in order to create a larger and more inclusive community.
Communities built on love -- or at the very least mutual respect and tolerance and perhaps even some grudging admiration -- are communities that endure. Communities built on hate are eventually consumed by their own hatred, no matter how righteous or justified it may seem. “To Dwell Together in Peace” is not just goal, it is also a discipline, a process which creates its own success. And it begins with a decision to listen, and to discover some common ground on which to build a home that we can share.
Reading: Martin Luther King Jr., “Loving Your Enemies.” A Sermon preached at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomary, Alabama on November 17, 1957.
There’s another reason why you should love your enemies, and that is because hate distorts the personality of the hater. We usually think of what hate does for the individual hated or the individuals hated or the groups hated. But it is even more tragic, it is even more ruinous and injurious to the individual who hates. You just begin hating somebody, and you will begin to do irrational things. You can’t see straight when you hate. You can’t walk straight when you hate. You can’t stand upright. Your vision is distorted. There is nothing more tragic than to see an individual whose heart is filled with hate. He comes to the point that he becomes a pathological case. For the person who hates, you can stand up and see a person and that person can be beautiful, and you will call them ugly. For the person who hates, the beautiful becomes ugly and the ugly becomes beautiful. For the person who hates, the good becomes bad and the bad becomes good. For the person who hates, the true becomes false and the false becomes true. That’s what hate does. You can’t see right. The symbol of objectivity is lost. Hate destroys the very structure of the personality of the hater.
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle MA
Neighborhood Sunday September 26, 2004
[extemperaneous introduction: in a year we’ve gone from strangers to familiar friends; when the honeymoon is finally over, the real work of living together in community begins]
Last weekend I was out in Seattle attending my 30th High School reunion. I had really mixed feelings about attending this event. On the one hand it really couldn’t have come at a much more inconvenient time of year -- which was reflected in the absence of a lot of my former classmates who, like me, also live at a distance, and whose lives basically follow an academic calendar. Plus, between the airfare, the rental car, the hotel room, the dogsitter, and all of the other incidental expenses, it turned out to be a pretty expensive trip -- (I’m a little embarrassed to say just how much). On the other hand, it is only once every decade, and I felt kinda obligated to go, since I was after all a student body officer, and had also served on the committee that initially organized our 10th. And then at the 20th I had the dubious distinction of being honored as one of the twenty most Distinguished Alumni of my graduating class of 540 (96% of whom are apparently even bigger slackers than I am) but which also happens to include the graphic artist who designed Microsoft’s “Clippy the Paper-Clip.” (He sometimes calls himself “the most annoying man in America). But the real reason I felt like I had to go is that I have a friend from High School whom none of us had seen or heard from in 28 years, despite having searched high and low for him prior to both of our previous two reunions. But last spring he Googled me, and got a hit on our FRS website; so to make a long story short I got him to agree that he would go if I would go, and so...I was going, whether it was convenient or not. And when I got back to Carlisle Tuesday morning (having flown overnight on the red-eye), there was an e-mail from Tom waiting for me, which I’d like to share with you now. It goes:
Tim: It was great to see you last night. It's really nice to be connecting with you again. It feels completely natural; it isn't like we're trying to escape into the past. The reunion in general felt like that to me, like I was reconnecting with people in the present, talking to them in terms of who they are now. It wasn't a nostalgia fest, which was nice. You mentioned that you had a nice talk with Dwight and Mary [I’ll say a little bit more about them in a minute}. I talked with them too, and had the same sense of being able to connect with them in a meaningful way. Mainly, I just want to thank you for helping me feel at ease. To me it felt like you were the host of the party, doing your best to make sure that I had a good time. Anyway, thanks,and stay in touch. And I don't believe a word of what you were saying about the presidential campaign, so there.
Dwight and Mary, by the way, were my High School’s poster-perfect Born-Again Christian couple. They’ve been together for as long as I’ve known them -- since before we were Freshmen, over 35 years now. And when we were in school together it was basically their mission in life to try to “save” me (and everyone else they met), while mine in turn (in my role as my High School’s chief gadfly, infidel and heretic) was to resist salvation at any cost, while at the same time challenging everything they believed. After graduation Dwight went to work as a contractor (a job he still does today), while Mary became a housewife and a stay-at-home mom...until the last of their children had at last fled the nest, at which point she decided that it was her turn to attend the University of Washington. She now works as an administrator for Habitat for Humanity, doing church relations, and in that capacity she and Dwight have traveled all over the world, doing their small part to help put an end to poverty housing. (And yes, they’ve both actually met Jimmy and Roslyn Carter).
Of course, the most interesting thing about our respective lives now is how closely our faith journeys have converged over the past three decades. I no longer feel so obsessed about always having to be right, or even trying to be the smartest guy in the room. I have a lot more respect and appreciation now for the “softer” side of spirituality -- I can sometimes actually even sing “Kum Ba Yah” without feeling ridiculously self-conscious. Mary, on the other hand, still feels nostalgic for the “feel-good” Christianity of her youth, but she’s also developed the capacity to look critically at her church, and to be displeased about some of the things she sees going on there. And she’s developed a lot more respect for Unitarian-Universalists too, now that she’s discovered that we’re not just all talk and hot air, but that some of us at least can also actually swing a hammer and use a saw.
My topic for today, if you haven’t figured out already, is Community -- what does it really mean to “dwell together in peace.” It’s the first of a series of four sermons I have planned for this Fall about the language of our covenant. And the reason I have gone on here at such great length about my High School reunion is that, for a lot of us I suspect, High School was the first truly complex community that we participated in. Prior to High School most people tend to live their lives on a lot smaller scale. Our world consists of our family and our immediate neighborhood, plus a teacher and maybe a couple of dozen kids we share a classroom with each day...perhaps only a few hundred souls at most, including our cousins and grandparents and the kids we met at summer camp.
But when we arrive at High School, at the age of thirteen or so, our whole world suddenly becomes a whole lot larger in a big hurry. There were over two thousand students, for example, at my High School, plus several hundred more teachers and administrators (and in my case every one of them was a stranger to me, since my family had just moved during the summer back to Seattle from California). But even for kids who have lived in the same neighborhood their entire lives, the first big challenge that confronts us all in High School -- bigger even than finding our way to our classes, or remembering our locker combinations, or determining whether it’s really safe to go into that particular restroom -- is figuring out where we fit in. Am I smart enough to be one of the Honor Society kids? Am I a good enough athlete to hang out with the Jocks? Am I going to try to be popular, and wear all the right clothes and go to the parties and make lots of friends; or am I going to pretty much try to keep to myself, maybe just hanging out with the handful of friends I’ve known since kindergarten? And what will I do if they decide to do something different than I do?
Discovering our affinities -- where we fit in -- is a key element in the process of exploring and discovering who we are as individuals. And yet there’s a second, even bigger challenge that confronts us for the first time in High School, and that’s figuring out how we’re going to get along with the folks with whom we DON’T fit in. How are we going to relate to people (and more pointedly, to groups of people) who are different from us, who are not part of our group, our “in” crowd, our little clique? Are we going to focus on the differences, the things that keep us separate? Or are we going to look for things that we have in common, that potentially bring us together? And let’s be honest -- there’s a power dynamic at work here also. Because if you are part of that supposedly “popular” group, it can sometimes seem to your advantage to keep others out, or to put them down in order to bolster your own status and sense of superiority; while if you’re NOT a member of that group, you have to decide at some point whether you are even going to play that game, or instead going to make up new and different rules of your own. But either way, it still comes down to a question of Empathy or Antipathy. Do we concentrate on our commonalities, the qualities we share? Or do we emphasize the distinctions, real or imagined, which we hope will distinguish us one from the other?
And then we all graduated (or at least most of us did) and went our separate ways. Some of us went to college, some of us went to work, or into the military, some of us even went to prison (at least in my graduating class they did). And at some subsequent point in time (probably a lot sooner than most of us realized) all of the little distinctions that meant so much in High School gradually became meaningless, because the subsequent distinctions had become so much greater. And yet no matter how great those differences may become, you will always have two things in common with the people you went to High School with. First, no matter how old you get, you will always be the same age. Your age. And the second, of course, is the accident of shared history -- that because you all happened to be the same age, and your parents all happened to live in the same community, you spent four critically formative years of your life (more or less) with this basically random group of people. And there’s nothing you can do to change that, no matter how hard you try. The best you can do is to choose to ignore it, to try to put it all behind you.
But if you have properly learned your lessons of empathy and affinity, you can also choose to embrace that community in a new way. And you can likewise use those same lessons to embrace new communities -- to discover new affinities that you might not have otherwise explored, and to grow as an individual in the process. I don’t remember anything about High School Algebra (in fact, I sometimes have trouble doing simple elementary school fractions)...but I do remember this: if you listen carefully enough, you can eventually find something you have in common with just about everyone you may happen to meet. It may be something so simple as neither one of you has ever met anyone else so different from yourself in your life, but it’s a start. That common denominator is enough to begin a dialog, a relationship, and from that interaction other commonalities (and differences) will begin to emerge. But so long as neither party desires to harm or exploit or dominate the other, the differences don’t really matter. While the commonalities potentially form the basis of a larger and more inclusive community.
I’m pretty sure that everyone here has heard of the Golden Rule: “do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” And there’s also a more apologetic variation of this rule, which basically says “do NOT do unto others that which you find hateful to yourself.” And then there’s the so-called “strong” version of the rule, which says “do unto others as THEY would have you do unto them” -- in other words, empathetically substituting the other person’s personal or cultural sensibilities for one’s own. But the point is, we don’t necessarily have to have a LOT in common with another human being in order to empathize with them, or to treat them fairly. We can learn how to “dwell together in peace,” without having to see eye to eye on every little thing.
Of course, there is also a cynical version of the rule, which goes something like: “Do unto others BEFORE they get a chance to do it unto you, because at the end of the day, it’s a dog eat dog world out there, and whoever has the most Gold makes the rules....” It’s clever, and maybe even a little funny (and to my mind disgustingly “American”); but it’s also dead wrong, even though at times it may not always seem like it. At the end of the day, there’s not enough gold in all the world to keep in place rules that are fundamentally mean or unfair; every dog has its day, truth is stronger than falsehood, and our common humanity is far more powerful than the differences and disagreements that divide us.
It’s true that often times we end up defining who we are by differenciating ourselves from who and what we are not. All Communities have boundaries of some sort. But healthy, loving, dymanic communities define themselves positively rather than negatively -- by lifting up who they are and what they stand for, in both words and deeds. And they are not so much things that we discover and join as they are entities that we help to create through our presence and participation in them. And likewise, “dwelling together in peace” is not generally something that we can do through domination: by imposing our will on others. Rather, lasting peace comes from learning to listen to one another, and then building on our commonalities in order to create a larger and more inclusive community.
Communities built on love -- or at the very least mutual respect and tolerance and perhaps even some grudging admiration -- are communities that endure. Communities built on hate are eventually consumed by their own hatred, no matter how righteous or justified it may seem. “To Dwell Together in Peace” is not just goal, it is also a discipline, a process which creates its own success. And it begins with a decision to listen, and to discover some common ground on which to build a home that we can share.
Reading: Martin Luther King Jr., “Loving Your Enemies.” A Sermon preached at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomary, Alabama on November 17, 1957.
There’s another reason why you should love your enemies, and that is because hate distorts the personality of the hater. We usually think of what hate does for the individual hated or the individuals hated or the groups hated. But it is even more tragic, it is even more ruinous and injurious to the individual who hates. You just begin hating somebody, and you will begin to do irrational things. You can’t see straight when you hate. You can’t walk straight when you hate. You can’t stand upright. Your vision is distorted. There is nothing more tragic than to see an individual whose heart is filled with hate. He comes to the point that he becomes a pathological case. For the person who hates, you can stand up and see a person and that person can be beautiful, and you will call them ugly. For the person who hates, the beautiful becomes ugly and the ugly becomes beautiful. For the person who hates, the good becomes bad and the bad becomes good. For the person who hates, the true becomes false and the false becomes true. That’s what hate does. You can’t see right. The symbol of objectivity is lost. Hate destroys the very structure of the personality of the hater.
Sunday, September 12, 2004
IF THE WORLD WERE PERFECT, IT WOULDN’T BE
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle MA
Sunday September 12th, 2004
READING: Matthew 5: 43-48
I thought I’d start out this morning by telling you all about the one time in my life I actually met Yogi Berra. I remember it almost perfectly. It was the summer of 1980, and I was taking a break from my job at the Massachusetts Historical Society, sitting out on the front steps drinking a cup of coffee and eating a Bavarian Creme doughnut, when who should come strolling along up Boylston Street toward Fenway Park but the manager of the hated New York Yankees. I recognized him right away, and instantly became star-struck, until finally he was right in front of me, at which point I blurted out “So, are you gonna beat us tonight?” to which he replied, without skipping a beat or breaking his step, “Gonna try,” and continued on his way to the ballpark.
OK, so maybe it’s not that great of a story. There I was, face to face with the legendary, undisputed champion of the unforgettable malaprop, my one big chance to say and perhaps even elicit something immortally clever, and Yogi Berra turns out to be more articulate than I am. Way more articulate. And I suppose the point of this story (if indeed it has one) is that if anyone ever tells you that there’s no such thing as a stupid question, tell them that they’re wrong. Stupid questions are abundant in this world. But it’s the stupid answers we remember, and sometimes have to live with a lot longer than we’d like to.
Just so you all know, today’s sermon topic was purchased by Margaret Darling at last Spring’s service auction. Auctioning off the topic of a sermon is an almost perfect fundraising gimmick. It works like this: the high bidder gets to select an issue or theme of their own choice, maybe even suggest a title, or some readings...we have a little conversation so that I can learn more about their ideas, and then I go right ahead and preach about whatever I want to anyway, just like I do every Sunday.... OK, maybe I feel just a LITTLE more conscientious than I normally do anyway about trying to give those of you who generously support this church (and who show up here faithfully Sunday after Sunday, I hope at least in part, to hear what I have to say) your money’s worth. But the bottom line is that I’m always interested in hearing your ideas about possible sermons, whether you pay extra or not; yet the “Free Pulpit” itslef is never REALLY for sale. Preaching is a sacred duty, which you have generously entrusted to me, and which I humbly attempt to fulfill, to the best of my ability every time I climb these stairs. Am I perfect? No. But I’m gonna try....
In any event, this particular topic is an especially good one (almost perfect, really) for a sermon like this, since it can be taken so effortlessly in so many different directions. What does it mean to be “perfect” anyway, and how do we know it when we see it? What is the relationship between perfection and change -- is perfection something that, by definition, never changes; and can anything incapable of changing ever really be considered “perfect?” And finally, how does our desire for perfection effect the quality of our lives in other ways? Are our lives truly made better by the attempt to do everything “perfectly,” or is perfectionism in fact something that undermines the quality of our lives, making life less satisfactory than is was to begin with?
If we were to start out simply by looking in the dictionary, we would discover that to be Perfect is to be “complete in all respects; without defect or omission; sound; flawless.” And if that were the end of it, we would likewise recognize immediately that the world isn’t perfect, and that it never has been perfect, and that it’s never going to be perfect either. Life is nothing if not dynamic, and the world right along with it, with all its flaws and defects and imperfections. The only thing we can ever really count on is change, and we can’t always even count on that. And yet, if we’re lucky, there are moments in our lives when the world FEELS perfect; when we obtain a fleeting glimpse of that elusive quality we call “perfection,” only to see it slip away again. Perfection’s very elusiveness is what makes it appear so desirable. And so we imagine that at some mythical time in the distant past, some Golden Age, the “good old days,” the world was always that way, always perfect, and perhaps that it will be that way again if only we work hard enough to make it so. Our vision of perfection (imperfect as it may be) thus helps to shape our understanding of the meaning of change; every change, either great or small, becomes either an act of progress or an act of declension, depending upon whether it seems to move us closer to, or further away from, what we imagine to be “perfect.”
This insight is especially important, because yesterday was the third anniversary of “the day the World changed.” And this past week as I’ve been listening to and reading the public reflections on the significance of that day, I’ve found myself wondering “what really changed on September 11th, 2001?” Was it actually the world itself that changed, or was it just our understanding of the world that we imagined ourselves to be living in -- our “normal” world which seemed so comfortable, so “perfect.” And if in fact it was princpally the latter, did our perspective change for the better, or for the worse?
Three years ago on the Sunday immediately following the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, I asked the congregation I was serving on Nantucket to reflect upon “the difference between a catastrophe and a tragedy.”
...A catastrophe is a calamity, a disaster, an event which inflicts widespread destruction and suffering. But tragedy contains an additional element: the fact that the cause of that calamity originates in the arrogant pride or hubris of an otherwise heroic figure, which blinds him or her to a fatal flaw within their character, which in turn becomes the source of their undoing. The same quality which makes the hero great also makes them vulnerable, and their destruction becomes tragic because it might have so easily been avoided, had the hero simply exercised a little more humility.
Think for a moment about the tragedies of Oedipus, or Othello. A calamity becomes tragic because a hero’s greatness, their capacity for bold, courageous, decisive action, unleashes a chain of events beyond their control, which eventually overtakes them and robs them of their own freedom to decide their destiny. Their fate becomes sealed, because their pride has in some way outraged and offended the Gods, who are ultimately responsible for preserving justice, and order, and equity in the Universe.
The events of [September 11th] were without question calamitous. But they will become tragic only if we allow ourselves, in our arrogant pride, to set out blindly upon a course of action that will eventually transform us into something we can not abide. Don’t misunderstand me on this point. It is essential that we commit the resources of this nation to bringing the perpetrators of this crime to justice. But, in doing so, it is equally essential that we do not allow ourselves to become criminals in our own right. I really can’t say it any more plainly than that. There is too much blood on our hands already; we are not always the heroic defenders of freedom and justice that we like to see ourselves as being. So long as we persist in remaining blind to our own faults, we risk unleashing a tragic calamity of truly catastrophic proportion.
Simply because we have been wronged does not make us right. Simply because we are powerful enough to hurt those whom we perceive to be our enemies does not in any sense justify our doing so. If our actions are to be regarded as just and proper, we must seek out the cooperation of the international community, behave consistently with standards of due process, and truly become the champions of freedom, justice, and human rights that we so often claim to be.
And above all...we must [continue to] believe and trust the words of America’s first (and in my mind still the best) Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, and remember that we most truly succeed in destroying our enemies when we are able to make them our friends.
If anything these insights are even more poignent today than they were three years ago. And at the heart of our nation’s tragic inability to see and recognize that we just might possibly be less than perfect is a second erroneous belief: the mistaken assumption that if we could just somehow succeed in exterminating all of the terrorists, and all the potential terrorists, and all their supporters and sympathizers, life would go back to being “normal,” and the world would be perfect again. But a world that is driven by violence and ideological zealotry and the passion for revenge will never be perfect, and should never be considered “normal.” Perfection lies in an altogether different direction.
It’s natural, I think, for people to assume that what seems “normal” to them should be normal for everyone else, and that if everyone would just act “normally” the world would be, if not perfect, at least a better place for everyone to live in. But this “tyranny of the normal” has an ugly side as well, which we often just choose to ignore. “Normal” and “Perfect” are not exactly synonymns. Normal refers to a statistical mean: an average, a “norm.” Perfection on the other hand represents an ideal, which is essentially unattainable for most of us, except perhaps in brief glimpses. And yet so often it seems as if the goal of life is to be “normal” instead of “exceptional,” to be “ordinary” rather than “extraordinary.” And so we struggle to be perfect because we fear that maybe there is something abnormal about us if we are less than perfect, while the reality is that none of us is perfect, and our efforts to become so often times are simply making us (and everyone around us) miserable. And maybe even a little crazy too. We look around, we compare ourselves to others, and even if we do eventually get to the point where we are aware of our own limitations and shortcomings and are able to accept them, God help the person who offers to help point them out for us.
But when Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount “Therefore be perfect, as your heavenly father is perfect” he’s not saying “be normal, so that none might find fault with you.” The actual word in Greek is teleios, and what it means is “complete” or “fulfilled” -- to be “fully realized.” It’s a Commandment to go beyond the ordinary, or what is generally considered normal -- and instead to love our enemies, and to return good for evil....because this is what God would do. And this is what we should be trying to do as well, if we wish to be part of God’s family. It’s not a demand that we become “perfectly” Perfect -- dictionary perfect -- or that we try to impose that vision of perfection on the rest of the world. That would be hypocrisy -- the sin of judging others by a higher standard than we are capable of meeting ourselves. Rather, it asks us to realize who we really are, and then to attempt to make THAT reality “real.” Is this going to be easy? No. Are we ever going to do it “perfectly?” Probably not. But we’re gonna try. Because that’s really the only answer that works “perfectly,” every time, to life’s most challenging questions...
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle MA
Sunday September 12th, 2004
READING: Matthew 5: 43-48
I thought I’d start out this morning by telling you all about the one time in my life I actually met Yogi Berra. I remember it almost perfectly. It was the summer of 1980, and I was taking a break from my job at the Massachusetts Historical Society, sitting out on the front steps drinking a cup of coffee and eating a Bavarian Creme doughnut, when who should come strolling along up Boylston Street toward Fenway Park but the manager of the hated New York Yankees. I recognized him right away, and instantly became star-struck, until finally he was right in front of me, at which point I blurted out “So, are you gonna beat us tonight?” to which he replied, without skipping a beat or breaking his step, “Gonna try,” and continued on his way to the ballpark.
OK, so maybe it’s not that great of a story. There I was, face to face with the legendary, undisputed champion of the unforgettable malaprop, my one big chance to say and perhaps even elicit something immortally clever, and Yogi Berra turns out to be more articulate than I am. Way more articulate. And I suppose the point of this story (if indeed it has one) is that if anyone ever tells you that there’s no such thing as a stupid question, tell them that they’re wrong. Stupid questions are abundant in this world. But it’s the stupid answers we remember, and sometimes have to live with a lot longer than we’d like to.
Just so you all know, today’s sermon topic was purchased by Margaret Darling at last Spring’s service auction. Auctioning off the topic of a sermon is an almost perfect fundraising gimmick. It works like this: the high bidder gets to select an issue or theme of their own choice, maybe even suggest a title, or some readings...we have a little conversation so that I can learn more about their ideas, and then I go right ahead and preach about whatever I want to anyway, just like I do every Sunday.... OK, maybe I feel just a LITTLE more conscientious than I normally do anyway about trying to give those of you who generously support this church (and who show up here faithfully Sunday after Sunday, I hope at least in part, to hear what I have to say) your money’s worth. But the bottom line is that I’m always interested in hearing your ideas about possible sermons, whether you pay extra or not; yet the “Free Pulpit” itslef is never REALLY for sale. Preaching is a sacred duty, which you have generously entrusted to me, and which I humbly attempt to fulfill, to the best of my ability every time I climb these stairs. Am I perfect? No. But I’m gonna try....
In any event, this particular topic is an especially good one (almost perfect, really) for a sermon like this, since it can be taken so effortlessly in so many different directions. What does it mean to be “perfect” anyway, and how do we know it when we see it? What is the relationship between perfection and change -- is perfection something that, by definition, never changes; and can anything incapable of changing ever really be considered “perfect?” And finally, how does our desire for perfection effect the quality of our lives in other ways? Are our lives truly made better by the attempt to do everything “perfectly,” or is perfectionism in fact something that undermines the quality of our lives, making life less satisfactory than is was to begin with?
If we were to start out simply by looking in the dictionary, we would discover that to be Perfect is to be “complete in all respects; without defect or omission; sound; flawless.” And if that were the end of it, we would likewise recognize immediately that the world isn’t perfect, and that it never has been perfect, and that it’s never going to be perfect either. Life is nothing if not dynamic, and the world right along with it, with all its flaws and defects and imperfections. The only thing we can ever really count on is change, and we can’t always even count on that. And yet, if we’re lucky, there are moments in our lives when the world FEELS perfect; when we obtain a fleeting glimpse of that elusive quality we call “perfection,” only to see it slip away again. Perfection’s very elusiveness is what makes it appear so desirable. And so we imagine that at some mythical time in the distant past, some Golden Age, the “good old days,” the world was always that way, always perfect, and perhaps that it will be that way again if only we work hard enough to make it so. Our vision of perfection (imperfect as it may be) thus helps to shape our understanding of the meaning of change; every change, either great or small, becomes either an act of progress or an act of declension, depending upon whether it seems to move us closer to, or further away from, what we imagine to be “perfect.”
This insight is especially important, because yesterday was the third anniversary of “the day the World changed.” And this past week as I’ve been listening to and reading the public reflections on the significance of that day, I’ve found myself wondering “what really changed on September 11th, 2001?” Was it actually the world itself that changed, or was it just our understanding of the world that we imagined ourselves to be living in -- our “normal” world which seemed so comfortable, so “perfect.” And if in fact it was princpally the latter, did our perspective change for the better, or for the worse?
Three years ago on the Sunday immediately following the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, I asked the congregation I was serving on Nantucket to reflect upon “the difference between a catastrophe and a tragedy.”
...A catastrophe is a calamity, a disaster, an event which inflicts widespread destruction and suffering. But tragedy contains an additional element: the fact that the cause of that calamity originates in the arrogant pride or hubris of an otherwise heroic figure, which blinds him or her to a fatal flaw within their character, which in turn becomes the source of their undoing. The same quality which makes the hero great also makes them vulnerable, and their destruction becomes tragic because it might have so easily been avoided, had the hero simply exercised a little more humility.
Think for a moment about the tragedies of Oedipus, or Othello. A calamity becomes tragic because a hero’s greatness, their capacity for bold, courageous, decisive action, unleashes a chain of events beyond their control, which eventually overtakes them and robs them of their own freedom to decide their destiny. Their fate becomes sealed, because their pride has in some way outraged and offended the Gods, who are ultimately responsible for preserving justice, and order, and equity in the Universe.
The events of [September 11th] were without question calamitous. But they will become tragic only if we allow ourselves, in our arrogant pride, to set out blindly upon a course of action that will eventually transform us into something we can not abide. Don’t misunderstand me on this point. It is essential that we commit the resources of this nation to bringing the perpetrators of this crime to justice. But, in doing so, it is equally essential that we do not allow ourselves to become criminals in our own right. I really can’t say it any more plainly than that. There is too much blood on our hands already; we are not always the heroic defenders of freedom and justice that we like to see ourselves as being. So long as we persist in remaining blind to our own faults, we risk unleashing a tragic calamity of truly catastrophic proportion.
Simply because we have been wronged does not make us right. Simply because we are powerful enough to hurt those whom we perceive to be our enemies does not in any sense justify our doing so. If our actions are to be regarded as just and proper, we must seek out the cooperation of the international community, behave consistently with standards of due process, and truly become the champions of freedom, justice, and human rights that we so often claim to be.
And above all...we must [continue to] believe and trust the words of America’s first (and in my mind still the best) Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, and remember that we most truly succeed in destroying our enemies when we are able to make them our friends.
If anything these insights are even more poignent today than they were three years ago. And at the heart of our nation’s tragic inability to see and recognize that we just might possibly be less than perfect is a second erroneous belief: the mistaken assumption that if we could just somehow succeed in exterminating all of the terrorists, and all the potential terrorists, and all their supporters and sympathizers, life would go back to being “normal,” and the world would be perfect again. But a world that is driven by violence and ideological zealotry and the passion for revenge will never be perfect, and should never be considered “normal.” Perfection lies in an altogether different direction.
It’s natural, I think, for people to assume that what seems “normal” to them should be normal for everyone else, and that if everyone would just act “normally” the world would be, if not perfect, at least a better place for everyone to live in. But this “tyranny of the normal” has an ugly side as well, which we often just choose to ignore. “Normal” and “Perfect” are not exactly synonymns. Normal refers to a statistical mean: an average, a “norm.” Perfection on the other hand represents an ideal, which is essentially unattainable for most of us, except perhaps in brief glimpses. And yet so often it seems as if the goal of life is to be “normal” instead of “exceptional,” to be “ordinary” rather than “extraordinary.” And so we struggle to be perfect because we fear that maybe there is something abnormal about us if we are less than perfect, while the reality is that none of us is perfect, and our efforts to become so often times are simply making us (and everyone around us) miserable. And maybe even a little crazy too. We look around, we compare ourselves to others, and even if we do eventually get to the point where we are aware of our own limitations and shortcomings and are able to accept them, God help the person who offers to help point them out for us.
But when Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount “Therefore be perfect, as your heavenly father is perfect” he’s not saying “be normal, so that none might find fault with you.” The actual word in Greek is teleios, and what it means is “complete” or “fulfilled” -- to be “fully realized.” It’s a Commandment to go beyond the ordinary, or what is generally considered normal -- and instead to love our enemies, and to return good for evil....because this is what God would do. And this is what we should be trying to do as well, if we wish to be part of God’s family. It’s not a demand that we become “perfectly” Perfect -- dictionary perfect -- or that we try to impose that vision of perfection on the rest of the world. That would be hypocrisy -- the sin of judging others by a higher standard than we are capable of meeting ourselves. Rather, it asks us to realize who we really are, and then to attempt to make THAT reality “real.” Is this going to be easy? No. Are we ever going to do it “perfectly?” Probably not. But we’re gonna try. Because that’s really the only answer that works “perfectly,” every time, to life’s most challenging questions...
Sunday, May 16, 2004
THE STATE OF THE CHURCH (2004)
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle MA
Sunday May 16, 2004
Early in my career as a Parish Minister, I got into the habit of preaching once a year, on the date of the Annual Meeting, on the subject of “The State of the Church.” The logic of this seemed obvious at the time, and hasn’t really changed that much. To my mind the only thing more tedious and deadly dull than listening to a traditional annual report is writing and presenting one. But making this subject the topic of a sermon, moving the issue of “the state of the church” from the nuts and bolts context of a business meeting to the inspirational forum of public worship, effectively shifts the focus from one of dry reporting to a dynamic exploration of questions of meaning and value. Rather than looking backwards, it becomes an invitation to look to the future, to examine the purpose and effectiveness of our religious society in the light of a shared and articulate vision of our mission and future goals. Or at least that’s the theory. It could also turn out to be just another one of those tedious and deadly dull sermons that every preacher seems to preach once in awhile, no matter how hard they try to avoid it....
But having said all that, let me just begin by saying that from where I stand, the state of the church looks good. It could be better, of course -- it can always be better -- but it could certainly be a lot worse as well. It seems to me that there’s been a lot of positive energy in the congregation this year, lots of optimism and enthusiasm, lots of good feelings. And of course, for all I know, it’s always like this around here; because, after all , I am still a relative newcomer to Carlisle and the First Religious Society, so there is certainly plenty left for me to learn about this place, and all of you. I was talking with a colleague about this the other day, and she told me that it really wasn’t until after the start of her third year, when she knew that she was really a “settled” minister, and not just serving as another interim. And the literature suggests that it’s typically not until the sixth or seventh year of a ministry that clergy truly “come into their own” as the “leader” of a congregation -- a phenomenon which seems to coincide with the moment that the number of people who have joined the church since the minister’s arrival begins to approach the number of people who have been there all along.
For my own part, I already feel very much at home here. But I’m also kind of hoping that the novelty NEVER really wears off -- that amidst our growing sense of comfort and mutual familiarity there will always be something new to learn, something different to try, some undiscovered territory to explore. And the thing that makes this possible is often simply the recognition that nothing in life is ever truly “settled” once and for all, and while at times this can feel unsettling, it’s also what makes life interesting, what keeps us lively and on our toes. Of course, this insight can sometimes be taken to the opposite extreme as well. There also always seem to be some people who like to shake things up simply for the thrill of the adrenaline rush, because they crave excitement of change for its own sake. But between these two extremes there’s a pretty broad path that we can follow, which allows us to be both creative and innovative while still enjoying the things we have always enjoyed, without getting stuck in a rut.
There’s one other thing I’ve noticed about my experience settling in here, which is that in ever other congregation I’ve served, without exception, I’ve been brought in to serve as a troubleshooter -- there was some specific problem or set of problems that needed to be fixed (or at least addressed), and it was my job to see to it that it happened. This wasn’t really the career I’d planned for myself; things just sort of worked out that way. But one of the big attractions of this congregation was that I liked the things that you were doing here, and simply wanted to be a part of it all -- maybe help you learn to do things a little better, or even just bring my own talents to the party, in the expectation that my contributions would add to the overall quality of the experience. So I’ve been trying to break my old habit of always looking around for problems to be fixed, and to learn instead how to look for new opportunities to be embraced, along with ways that I might best fit in and contribute to what you are already doing well together.
At our leadership retreat last fall, facilitated by our District Executive Lynn Thomas, we tried as a group to identify priorities for my first year of ministry here in Carlisle. And obviously, near the very top of the list was what we are doing right now: our Sunday morning worship service. Any time you add a new member to a team, any kind of team, regardless of how skilled or talented they may be, it takes a little time for the team to really “gel” again-- for the various teammates to get to know one another’s skills and abilities and how they all fit together in a supportive, synerystic and harmonious way. Preaching is obviously a very important part of what I do as a minister: it is certainly the most visible part of my job, and also probably the most time consuming...and although a lot of this work, the writing and the reading, I have to do alone that still doesn’t mean that I can do it all myself or that it happens in a vacuum.
A sermon is just one part of a larger experience of public worship which has a structure and a dynamic all its own. My job as a preacher is “to instruct, to delight, and to inspire” -- to take what I have learned through my education and experience, about our shared Unitarian Universalist faith, and to examine what is happening in the world in the light of what I know, in such a way that others might find it enlightening as well, not just spiritually or intellectually or in the abstract, but in the place where people actually live their lives. And the context of this activity is a time that we set aside each week to gather together apart from the distractions of the rest of the world, and to reconnect to one another as a religious community, to center ourselves and explore our lives more deeply, share our joys and our sorrows, sing out loudly in celebration of the things that we hold sacred, and then to return to the world inspired and encouraged to put our values and our principles into practice in our daily lives.
This worship, this “liturgy,” literally is “the work of the people” -- something that we do together. And all my ideas -- every one -- ultimately originate from listening carefully to you. If it’s on your mind, eventually I want to get around to talking about it from the pulpit -- not because I want to tell you what to believe, but because “the unexamined life is not worth living,” and our tradition of the Free Pulpit is grounded in presenting to thinking people thoughtful opinions slightly different from their own.
This brings me to what has been a second priority for this first year, which is simply trying to get to know all of you as well as I can. Obviously, this remains an on-going process, complicated by the fact that I don’t always see all of you as often as I would like. My head-counters tell me that the average attendance has been good this past year, although it has dropped off a little here in the spring; I fully expect that next September it will be a little lighter than it was last September (now that the novelty of seeing the new minister has worn off), and that basically by a year from now we will have a pretty good idea of what the new baseline is. And then we will begin to grow the church from there.
Growth in average attendance is the product of two things: an increase in the absolute number of people who attend church, and an increase in the number (or frequency) of times that each individual attends. Population times Frequency: how many, how often. And it is the single most important statistical indicator of the health and vitality of a congregation: more important than formal membership, more important even than the budget. All good things in church begin by people showing up, not just on Sunday morning, but at the various other activities of the church as well. And churches grow when people invite their friends. It’s really just that simple. One of the unanticipated benefits of the activities we have organized this past year to help me meet people is that they seem to have helped many of you to get to know one another a little better as well. I fully expect that we will try to continue to organize these kinds of events far into the foreseeable future.
There are a lot of other things I would like to talk about here this morning, such as our recent pledge campaign, and the efforts we have made together to build upon the work this congregation did with Michael Durrell during Diane’s interim ministry, as well as some of the plans to begin to create a more systematic program of Adult Religious Education here at FRS, together with the development of what are sometimes called “Chalice Circles” -- small, lay-led “covenant group” ministries of six to ten souls who meet together on a regular basis simply to share with one another, in an open yet structured way, their insights and experiences as spiritual seekers. But time is short, and I don’t want to leave here this morning without saying a few words, at least, about the Welcoming Congregation Program.
I have to admit that becoming a Welcoming Congregation wasn’t really something that was very high on my priority list when I was called here. It was (if I can borrow some language from Richard Clarke) something I thought was important, but not very urgent...and I knew that it had been somewhat controversial here, and thus needlessly divisive, and so I was perfectly willing to let it simmer on the back burner for awhile until there was some compelling reason to bring it up again. But we don’t always get to decide the timing of these things for ourselves; sometimes someone else decides to turn up the heat, so that things start to boil over and demand our attention.
Tonight at midnight same-sex couples will at long last have the right to become legally married here in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and while many (though not all) religious conservatives tend to view this development as either the work of the devil or the product of a sinister conspiracy of activist judges and secular humanists, I suspect that the response of most religious liberals (including Unitarian Universalists) ranges somewhere between benign ambivalence and outright joy. But regardless of how people may feel personally, the principle of “the inherent worth and dignity of every person” is now once more, for better or worse, front and center on the battlefield of the Culture Wars, in the midst of what is perhaps the most acrimonious and polarized political campaign of our generation.
There are a lot of misconceptions, right here in this church, about what it means to become a Welcoming Congregation, and while it would obviously be impossible to clear them all up right this second, the most egregious goes something like this: becoming a Welcoming Congregation means taking a vote to change the by-laws to declare that you are a “Gay Church” -- then you fly a Rainbow Flag above the front door, and suddenly anyone who ISN’T Gay is no longer welcome here. I know it sounds silly, but don’t laugh...because I’ve heard it described in almost just so many words on more than one occasion right here in this building, sometimes even by people who were basically in favor of the program.
What the Welcoming Congregation is REALLY all about, is essentiallly a systematic and on-going comprehensive process of Adult Religious Education designed to help churches learn how better to create the kind of safe space where ANYONE can come, along with their families and their loved ones, and talk openly about mundane things like where they went on their summer vacation, and NOT have to worry about about being shunned or ridiculed, or beaten up, or fired from their jobs, or thrown out of their homes, simply because God made them a certain way, and they are tired of always trying to hide who they are from their neighbors and fellow creatures.
The Welcoming Congregation Program is about building mutual respect and trust, along with a tolerance for diversity which is grounded in a better understanding of the value of pluralism, and of the wide range of human experiences that make up the human race. And the reason that it focuses so specifically on the LBGT community is that so much of the so-called “traditional religious values” crowd is so overtly hostile toward them. Thus we are called by our faith tradition to answer that hostility with hospitality, just like it says in the Bible....just like Lot took the two strangers into his home, in order to prevent the male citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah from abusing them, and thereby entertained angels unawares.
I think that it is only natural for human beings, or any kind of animal really, to be suspicious (and maybe even a little fearful) of the unfamiliar. This cautiousness concerning things that we don’t really understand is probably hard-wired into our brains -- a kind of “safety mechanism” which typically errs on the side of caution by keeping us out of harm’s way even when we’re not really sure what the harm might potentially be, or even whether there is any real danger at all. Homophobia is basically just another form of Xenophobia: a fear of the foreign, a fear of strangers. Like all prejudices, it is generally rooted in ignorance and misunderstanding, and tends to disappear rapidly in the presence of improved knowledge and increased familiarity. But we all come to this issue at different places on the learning curve, each of us with our own backgrounds and experiences. And as we learn together about one another from one another, our shared experiences eventually drive out the stereotypes and the misconceptions, and replace them with healthy relationships that affirm our similarities as well as our differences, always within a larger context of mutual respect and understanding.
And this is why I’m so confident that once we begin this process in earnest, it’s all going to go a lot more smoothly than you might suspect. Because after a year here, I feel like I am starting to get to know you -- and I know that you are all basically good, decent people: intelligent, curious, open-minded...who care about one another and the world around you, and who want nothing more than to do the right thing. You’re Unitarian Universalists, for crissakes! -- you really do possess the one true faith, but you don’t want to say anything about it because you don’t want those other folks to feel badly about theirs. But let’s not let that keep us from practicing what we preach. Because practice is what keeps a faith like ours alive. And it is through our good example that we begin to change the world, one good deed at at time.
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle MA
Sunday May 16, 2004
Early in my career as a Parish Minister, I got into the habit of preaching once a year, on the date of the Annual Meeting, on the subject of “The State of the Church.” The logic of this seemed obvious at the time, and hasn’t really changed that much. To my mind the only thing more tedious and deadly dull than listening to a traditional annual report is writing and presenting one. But making this subject the topic of a sermon, moving the issue of “the state of the church” from the nuts and bolts context of a business meeting to the inspirational forum of public worship, effectively shifts the focus from one of dry reporting to a dynamic exploration of questions of meaning and value. Rather than looking backwards, it becomes an invitation to look to the future, to examine the purpose and effectiveness of our religious society in the light of a shared and articulate vision of our mission and future goals. Or at least that’s the theory. It could also turn out to be just another one of those tedious and deadly dull sermons that every preacher seems to preach once in awhile, no matter how hard they try to avoid it....
But having said all that, let me just begin by saying that from where I stand, the state of the church looks good. It could be better, of course -- it can always be better -- but it could certainly be a lot worse as well. It seems to me that there’s been a lot of positive energy in the congregation this year, lots of optimism and enthusiasm, lots of good feelings. And of course, for all I know, it’s always like this around here; because, after all , I am still a relative newcomer to Carlisle and the First Religious Society, so there is certainly plenty left for me to learn about this place, and all of you. I was talking with a colleague about this the other day, and she told me that it really wasn’t until after the start of her third year, when she knew that she was really a “settled” minister, and not just serving as another interim. And the literature suggests that it’s typically not until the sixth or seventh year of a ministry that clergy truly “come into their own” as the “leader” of a congregation -- a phenomenon which seems to coincide with the moment that the number of people who have joined the church since the minister’s arrival begins to approach the number of people who have been there all along.
For my own part, I already feel very much at home here. But I’m also kind of hoping that the novelty NEVER really wears off -- that amidst our growing sense of comfort and mutual familiarity there will always be something new to learn, something different to try, some undiscovered territory to explore. And the thing that makes this possible is often simply the recognition that nothing in life is ever truly “settled” once and for all, and while at times this can feel unsettling, it’s also what makes life interesting, what keeps us lively and on our toes. Of course, this insight can sometimes be taken to the opposite extreme as well. There also always seem to be some people who like to shake things up simply for the thrill of the adrenaline rush, because they crave excitement of change for its own sake. But between these two extremes there’s a pretty broad path that we can follow, which allows us to be both creative and innovative while still enjoying the things we have always enjoyed, without getting stuck in a rut.
There’s one other thing I’ve noticed about my experience settling in here, which is that in ever other congregation I’ve served, without exception, I’ve been brought in to serve as a troubleshooter -- there was some specific problem or set of problems that needed to be fixed (or at least addressed), and it was my job to see to it that it happened. This wasn’t really the career I’d planned for myself; things just sort of worked out that way. But one of the big attractions of this congregation was that I liked the things that you were doing here, and simply wanted to be a part of it all -- maybe help you learn to do things a little better, or even just bring my own talents to the party, in the expectation that my contributions would add to the overall quality of the experience. So I’ve been trying to break my old habit of always looking around for problems to be fixed, and to learn instead how to look for new opportunities to be embraced, along with ways that I might best fit in and contribute to what you are already doing well together.
At our leadership retreat last fall, facilitated by our District Executive Lynn Thomas, we tried as a group to identify priorities for my first year of ministry here in Carlisle. And obviously, near the very top of the list was what we are doing right now: our Sunday morning worship service. Any time you add a new member to a team, any kind of team, regardless of how skilled or talented they may be, it takes a little time for the team to really “gel” again-- for the various teammates to get to know one another’s skills and abilities and how they all fit together in a supportive, synerystic and harmonious way. Preaching is obviously a very important part of what I do as a minister: it is certainly the most visible part of my job, and also probably the most time consuming...and although a lot of this work, the writing and the reading, I have to do alone that still doesn’t mean that I can do it all myself or that it happens in a vacuum.
A sermon is just one part of a larger experience of public worship which has a structure and a dynamic all its own. My job as a preacher is “to instruct, to delight, and to inspire” -- to take what I have learned through my education and experience, about our shared Unitarian Universalist faith, and to examine what is happening in the world in the light of what I know, in such a way that others might find it enlightening as well, not just spiritually or intellectually or in the abstract, but in the place where people actually live their lives. And the context of this activity is a time that we set aside each week to gather together apart from the distractions of the rest of the world, and to reconnect to one another as a religious community, to center ourselves and explore our lives more deeply, share our joys and our sorrows, sing out loudly in celebration of the things that we hold sacred, and then to return to the world inspired and encouraged to put our values and our principles into practice in our daily lives.
This worship, this “liturgy,” literally is “the work of the people” -- something that we do together. And all my ideas -- every one -- ultimately originate from listening carefully to you. If it’s on your mind, eventually I want to get around to talking about it from the pulpit -- not because I want to tell you what to believe, but because “the unexamined life is not worth living,” and our tradition of the Free Pulpit is grounded in presenting to thinking people thoughtful opinions slightly different from their own.
This brings me to what has been a second priority for this first year, which is simply trying to get to know all of you as well as I can. Obviously, this remains an on-going process, complicated by the fact that I don’t always see all of you as often as I would like. My head-counters tell me that the average attendance has been good this past year, although it has dropped off a little here in the spring; I fully expect that next September it will be a little lighter than it was last September (now that the novelty of seeing the new minister has worn off), and that basically by a year from now we will have a pretty good idea of what the new baseline is. And then we will begin to grow the church from there.
Growth in average attendance is the product of two things: an increase in the absolute number of people who attend church, and an increase in the number (or frequency) of times that each individual attends. Population times Frequency: how many, how often. And it is the single most important statistical indicator of the health and vitality of a congregation: more important than formal membership, more important even than the budget. All good things in church begin by people showing up, not just on Sunday morning, but at the various other activities of the church as well. And churches grow when people invite their friends. It’s really just that simple. One of the unanticipated benefits of the activities we have organized this past year to help me meet people is that they seem to have helped many of you to get to know one another a little better as well. I fully expect that we will try to continue to organize these kinds of events far into the foreseeable future.
There are a lot of other things I would like to talk about here this morning, such as our recent pledge campaign, and the efforts we have made together to build upon the work this congregation did with Michael Durrell during Diane’s interim ministry, as well as some of the plans to begin to create a more systematic program of Adult Religious Education here at FRS, together with the development of what are sometimes called “Chalice Circles” -- small, lay-led “covenant group” ministries of six to ten souls who meet together on a regular basis simply to share with one another, in an open yet structured way, their insights and experiences as spiritual seekers. But time is short, and I don’t want to leave here this morning without saying a few words, at least, about the Welcoming Congregation Program.
I have to admit that becoming a Welcoming Congregation wasn’t really something that was very high on my priority list when I was called here. It was (if I can borrow some language from Richard Clarke) something I thought was important, but not very urgent...and I knew that it had been somewhat controversial here, and thus needlessly divisive, and so I was perfectly willing to let it simmer on the back burner for awhile until there was some compelling reason to bring it up again. But we don’t always get to decide the timing of these things for ourselves; sometimes someone else decides to turn up the heat, so that things start to boil over and demand our attention.
Tonight at midnight same-sex couples will at long last have the right to become legally married here in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and while many (though not all) religious conservatives tend to view this development as either the work of the devil or the product of a sinister conspiracy of activist judges and secular humanists, I suspect that the response of most religious liberals (including Unitarian Universalists) ranges somewhere between benign ambivalence and outright joy. But regardless of how people may feel personally, the principle of “the inherent worth and dignity of every person” is now once more, for better or worse, front and center on the battlefield of the Culture Wars, in the midst of what is perhaps the most acrimonious and polarized political campaign of our generation.
There are a lot of misconceptions, right here in this church, about what it means to become a Welcoming Congregation, and while it would obviously be impossible to clear them all up right this second, the most egregious goes something like this: becoming a Welcoming Congregation means taking a vote to change the by-laws to declare that you are a “Gay Church” -- then you fly a Rainbow Flag above the front door, and suddenly anyone who ISN’T Gay is no longer welcome here. I know it sounds silly, but don’t laugh...because I’ve heard it described in almost just so many words on more than one occasion right here in this building, sometimes even by people who were basically in favor of the program.
What the Welcoming Congregation is REALLY all about, is essentiallly a systematic and on-going comprehensive process of Adult Religious Education designed to help churches learn how better to create the kind of safe space where ANYONE can come, along with their families and their loved ones, and talk openly about mundane things like where they went on their summer vacation, and NOT have to worry about about being shunned or ridiculed, or beaten up, or fired from their jobs, or thrown out of their homes, simply because God made them a certain way, and they are tired of always trying to hide who they are from their neighbors and fellow creatures.
The Welcoming Congregation Program is about building mutual respect and trust, along with a tolerance for diversity which is grounded in a better understanding of the value of pluralism, and of the wide range of human experiences that make up the human race. And the reason that it focuses so specifically on the LBGT community is that so much of the so-called “traditional religious values” crowd is so overtly hostile toward them. Thus we are called by our faith tradition to answer that hostility with hospitality, just like it says in the Bible....just like Lot took the two strangers into his home, in order to prevent the male citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah from abusing them, and thereby entertained angels unawares.
I think that it is only natural for human beings, or any kind of animal really, to be suspicious (and maybe even a little fearful) of the unfamiliar. This cautiousness concerning things that we don’t really understand is probably hard-wired into our brains -- a kind of “safety mechanism” which typically errs on the side of caution by keeping us out of harm’s way even when we’re not really sure what the harm might potentially be, or even whether there is any real danger at all. Homophobia is basically just another form of Xenophobia: a fear of the foreign, a fear of strangers. Like all prejudices, it is generally rooted in ignorance and misunderstanding, and tends to disappear rapidly in the presence of improved knowledge and increased familiarity. But we all come to this issue at different places on the learning curve, each of us with our own backgrounds and experiences. And as we learn together about one another from one another, our shared experiences eventually drive out the stereotypes and the misconceptions, and replace them with healthy relationships that affirm our similarities as well as our differences, always within a larger context of mutual respect and understanding.
And this is why I’m so confident that once we begin this process in earnest, it’s all going to go a lot more smoothly than you might suspect. Because after a year here, I feel like I am starting to get to know you -- and I know that you are all basically good, decent people: intelligent, curious, open-minded...who care about one another and the world around you, and who want nothing more than to do the right thing. You’re Unitarian Universalists, for crissakes! -- you really do possess the one true faith, but you don’t want to say anything about it because you don’t want those other folks to feel badly about theirs. But let’s not let that keep us from practicing what we preach. Because practice is what keeps a faith like ours alive. And it is through our good example that we begin to change the world, one good deed at at time.
Sunday, May 2, 2004
PASTOR AND COMMANDER: ANOTHER SIDE OF THE WORLD
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday May 2rd, 2004
I thought I’d start out this morning simply by taking a couple of minutes (more or less) to say a few nice things about President Bush. I know this may seem a little out of character for me, and that therefore some of what I have to say may sound like damning faint praise, or insincere, or even ironic, but I can’t really help that. This seemingly interminable electoral contest is steadily emerging as the most acrimonious in MY memory; and even though I know as an historian that elections often resemble open warfare (which is why they call them “campaigns”), and democracy itself many times seems like not much more than a rough and tumble, bare knuckled brawl, I still believe that at the end of the day a functional civilized society requires civil behavior, and that as a spiritual leader I ought to somehow try to model that. Not only is the ability to recognize (and even admire) the positive qualities of those with whom one disagrees an important step toward dialog, compromise, and eventual reconciliation, I also know that whenever people succumb to the temptation of “demonizing” their opposition, they run the serious risk of “misunderestimating” them as well. Even the most evil and odious political figure of the 20th century, Adolf Hitler, was a decorated war veteran wounded on the battlefield, as well as a committed and disciplined vegetarian who loathed both smoking and drinking, and loved both dogs and small children. Not much of a writer (although apparently he’s better in English than in his native German, because his translators have tended to clean up his grammar), but certainly a dynamic and inspiring public speaker, whose rabid patriotism was unquestionable. Simply to dismiss him as a madman -- a monster and an abomination -- actually minimizes the true magnitude of his evil-doing, because it ignores both its banality and its mass appeal.
But I digress. What I meant to say is that if I can find something complimentary to say about Adolf Hitler, even if it is essentially irrelevant in the greater scheme of things, I can certainly find something nice to say about George W. Bush. In fact, I can think of three things, right off the top of my head. And the first is that I know for a fact that the President is neither as dumb as he sounds, nor is he as sanctimonious and insincere as he sometimes seems to those of us who do not share his views. Let me take these one at a time. I first realized that the President is a lot smarter than he looks when I saw his SAT scores published in one of the national news magazines, and realized that they were virtually identical to mine. Not that the results of some stupid standardized test probably mean that much anyway. But personally, I’m not too sure that I’m really smart enough to be the President (and I can’t imagine any possible circumstance where I might actually have an chance to find out either -- thank God!), but I’m certainly no dummy; and I suppose that if I had the opportunity to watch my father do it first, I might feel a lot more confident that I was capable of doing the job myself as well. But my main point is that just because the President isn’t in the top one or two percent of the population intellectually doesn’t mean that he isn’t plenty smart enough to lead. If anything, the fact that he’s NOT a “wonk” is what makes him seem so personable and approachable. And if there are times when he appears a little smug and self-righteous, or even vindictive and mean spirited toward his antagonists...who isn’t? Those of us on the other side certainly haven’t been too kind to him either.
The second nice thing I wanted to say about the President is that he knows who he is and he knows his limits without surrendering to his limitations; he isn’t ashamed of being himself, and he isn’t afraid of surrounding himself with strong, smart, and outspokenly opinionated people. And this is actually relatively rare in a leader. Many leaders, I think, tend to assume that because they are in charge, their followers are all looking to THEM for direction and guidance, and sometimes they get a little swept away by this, and start to believe that they always have to be “the smartest guy in the room” -- that their leadership depends on providing the right answer in every situation every time, and that they can therefore never afford to be wrong or to appear foolish. And there are certainly times when the President appears to have fallen into this trap as well: when his need to present a strong, principled, and decisive image in public really just make him seem (at least to those of us who disagree with him) stubborn and ideologically obsessed (not to mention a little out of touch with reality). But it also seems to me that (in private at least) the President is quite adept at listening to the opinions of his advisors and other experts, as well as gauging the mood of the public (and especially his core constituencies), and then modifying his own views based on what he has learned. And this too is a positive quality in a leader: the ability to listen, to learn, and to lead your followers in the direction they want to go.
Finally, the one quality I truly admire in the President above all others is his singular ability to earn and inspire the loyalty of those who support him. On one level, there is nothing particularly mysterious about this quality: people are loyal to the President because they know he is loyal to them -- it is a reciprocal relationship of mutual obligation and responsibility. One hand washes the other. But there’s actually a lot more to it than that. I think the President inspires such strong feelings of loyalty among his core supporters because he articulates and defends a view of the world that is strongly held by people who feel that their opinions and beliefs have been profoundly marginalized in contemporary American society, and who see in him a leader who will restore that worldview and its moral values to the heart of our government’s foreign and domestic policy. They believe in him because he believes what they believe, and they all believe it with all their hearts.
I’ve been thinking a lot about leadership lately, and not just because there will be an election in six months which will once again determine the leadership of our nation for the next four years. This first Sunday in May is also the first anniversary of my election as the minister of this congregation, so I’ve also been thinking quite a bit about the differences between political and religious leadership, and likewise where they overlap, and where they ought to leave one another alone. Political leadership, at least in a democracy, is an expression of the will of the people through the principle of majority rule. Thus politics is all about the art of the possible: not merely an unvarnished manifestation of what is sometimes called “the tyranny of the majority,” but more typically a subtle combination of compromise and coalition building, together at times with a little judicious arm twisting, the ubiquitous quid pro quo, and no small amount of inflammatory pandering to the fears and prejudices of the electorate.
But religious leadership ought to be about helping people to discern the Will of God, together with a humble submission to divine authority (however you may choose to understand that concept of a “higher power”) -- not my will, but thine Oh Lord be done. Keeping these things clearly distinguished in one’s mind is not always the easiest thing to do. What’s wrong with twisting a few arms, or even knocking a few heads and kicking a few butts, when you know that God is on your side? The answer, of course, is this notion of humility -- the realization that no matter how powerful our convictions may be, we will never FULLY know and understand the mind of our Creator, and that to believe otherwise is arrogant idolatry. Faith is less about certainty of belief than it is the trusting confidence that we must act in good faith even in the midst of our uncertainty, not knowing for sure whether God is on our side, but hoping that we are on the side of God, a God who is both Just AND Merciful, Righteous AND Compassionate, and who loves All Souls with the same unconditional affection that a perfect mother might feel for her children. The experience of faith is something which should be freely shared, but never forcibly imposed; there is no place for coercion in the Kingdom of God. Or at least this is what Unitarians, Universalists, and other religious liberals have traditionally believed. Faith is a Gift of God. And we best discern God’s will for us when we are free to share our faith openly with one another, without duress or fear of reprisal.
Of course, religion and politics are not the only fields where quality of leadership significantly determines both the quality of the experience and the quality of the results. I strongly suspect, for example, if we were to do a quick survey of the number of books on the subject, most of them would deal with issues of Leadership in Business, where it is sometimes said that “managers do things right, but leaders do the right things.” And yet I wonder whether this dichotomy is really fair. Which is preferable: to do the wrong things well, or to do the right things poorly? (Actually, that statement pretty much describes the differences between our two political parties, doesn’t it?) Clearly, the best alternative is to do the right things well: in other words, to be attentive to both the process and the vision -- the quality of the relationship between the leader, the followers, and their task -- as well as the ultimate worthiness of the goal itself, and how that worthiness is best determined and communicated.
Business leaders often look to sports for metaphors that can help them understand and explain what it is they are trying to do when leading a “team” toward a “goal.” Sports are a lot simpler than life: the rules are reasonably clear and fixed, the goals are pre-determined by the rules, and both the size of the field and the duration of the game are relatively limited in scope when compared to “real life.” The job of a coach basically has three parts. The first part is to come up with a “game plan” -- a strategy that will allow the team to achieve a victory. The second part is to teach their players all the skills they will need to have in order to successfully carry out the plan. And the third part is to motivate the players to make their best possible effort, to play up to the level of their ability and maybe even a little beyond it -- to inspire and encourage, threaten and cajole, reward, punish, praise, prod, criticize, challenge, support...and so on and so on. No two coaches are exactly alike, and no two players respond to exactly the same set of motivators -- yet often a feeling of pride in the quality of one’s effort and achievements, together with fear of the shame of letting one’s teammates down, are at the heart of all these other motivations; and good coaches, good leaders in general, seem to know instinctively the exact combination of each that will work best for every player on the team. Or perhaps they know because they listen, and because they know their players as well as their players know themselves, and therefore know also what makes them tick, and how to communicate with them in a manner that that the players can easily understand.
Of course no discussion of leadership can really be complete without some exploration of the role of leadership in the military. Warfare is the attempt to impose one’s will on another through force; and the mission of the military is the management and effective application of lethal violence. Over the centuries, military organizations have turned the process of leadership development into a science, because professional soldiers know from experience that no matter how carefully you plan, no matter how rigorously you train, no matter how good your equipment is, there inevitably comes a time in combat when someone has to stand up in the face of danger and say to his comrades “follow me.” Planning, training, good equipment, unit discipline and morale, camaraderie and trust, obviously all play an important role in what happens next. But without leadership, nothing happens at all. The common assumption about moments like this is that these leaders must somehow be more courageous than the soldiers they lead, that they are so naturally brave that they simply aren’t afraid to risk their lives in the face of the enemy. But according to those who have had the experience, this isn’t the case at all. Courage under fire has nothing to do with not being afraid. True courage is about being afraid, and doing your duty anyway, because you know that the others are depending on you, and the example of your leadership, for their survival.
Here’s another interesting thing to ponder. A standard light infantry platoon in the US Army is comprised of 35 soldiers (or, as the Army would put it, “34 men and one officer” -- typically, a 2nd Lieutenant, who is probably still in his early twenties). Yet this young Lieutenant doesn’t lead this entire platoon all by himself: he is assisted by a Platoon Sergeant, three Squad Leaders, six Fire Team Leaders, and two Weapons Team Leaders...35 soldiers, and a full third of them are designated as “leaders” -- each of whom is prepared to assume the responsibilities of their superior should the latter be killed in battle. And, of course, the platoon is also supported by an entire “chain of command” which coordinates their movement with the movement of other units, resupplies them with food and ammunition, evacuates casualties and provides reinforcements, along with all of the countless other things (including chaplains) that are necessary in order for this particular platoon to be able to accomplish its assigned operational mission. It’s a pretty elaborate organization, all of which can be sent into action at the word of a single individual, the Commander in Chief, whose leadership “by precept and example” trickles down through the ranks. Yet ultimately the success or failure of our military in actual combat (and its aftermath) relies far less on the leadership of the individual at the top of the chain of command than it does on the morale, the training, and the leadership of the soldiers whose boots actually ARE on the ground, and who rely on one another in order to survive, safely, to the end of another day.
We’ve seen two vivid examples representing both the best and the worst of American soldiery just within these past few weeks. The positive example, of course, was Ranger Specialist Pat Tillman, 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, who was killed in action in Afghanistan during an ambush on April 22nd. Tillman, as you probably already know, had been the starting strong safety of the Arizona Cardinals, who left his lucrative professional football career to enlist, along with his brother Kevin, in the Rangers following September 11th. My big concern, both when I first heard about Tillman’s enlistment two years ago, and when I learned of his death last week, was that people would get the wrong message -- that they would look at his example and somehow equate being a soldier with being a professional athlete, and assume that combat was just another game. I don’t think Tillman ever felt that way, and I’m pretty sure he never intended to send that message...although you never know. Yet there aren’t that many people on this planet who are willing to walk away from a seven-figure income, and all that goes with it, in order to put themselves in harm’s way fighting for what they believe in the rugged mountains of Afghanistan. Pat Tillman was one. Osama bin Laden, interestingly enough, is another. I’m not really sure what to make of that, but there it is.
The shameful example involves the report, with explicit photographs, of the systematic abuse and humiliation of Iraqi prisoners by US Army Reserve military police at the Abu Ghraib prison. This is a complicated situation, and details are still emerging from the on-going investigation, so doubtlessly there will be much more to be learned in the weeks and months ahead. The President has said that he feels a “deep disgust” at the way these prisoners were treated (as he should), and that the behavior of these few guards does not represent the values of most American soldiers or the American people...which is certainly true. But I also believe that the President is wrong if he thinks that this is just an isolated anomaly that can be blamed on a handful of inadequately-trained and poorly-led reserve soldiers. The tone for this treatment was set much higher up the chain of command, and by decisions we have made as a nation about how we will treat the “enemy combatants” who come into our custody.
I’m not certain which profession is older -- that of the warrior, or that of the shaman -- and I’m not really sure that it matters that much either. I do know that in many ancient societies they were one and the same: the warrior king was also the chief priest, to whom the people looked for leadership at times of both military and spiritual crisis. Nowadays the two vocations don’t really appear to have much in common, although they intersect in intriguing ways. The trained, professional killer is also a dedicated professional peacemaker, whose strength deters conflict, and whose judicious use of force or the threat of force can sometimes prevent more widespread violence. Professional religious leaders, in every major religious tradition (including Islam), are typically taught that all men and women are brothers and sisters to one another in the eyes of their Creator, and that we should do unto others as we would have others do unto us; that the redeeming power of God’s love is more powerful than our own human desire for revenge, and that we most completely destroy our enemies when we make them our friends. But when righteous anger becomes wedded to religious zeal, bad things happen. Call it Jihad or call it a Crusade, when we dehumanize our enemies we dehumanize ourselves, rationalizing and justifying our evil behavior with the lame excuse that we are only doing God’s will.
Here “in the trenches” of religious life in America, in the day to day activities of local congregations like our’s, we don’t often talk about these “big issues” of leadership. Here the talk is all about “shared ministry” and the role of the “equipping pastor” -- a leader who gives to the people the tools, and training, and guidance they need to pursue effectively their own “call” to serve. A “coach.” Yet what we do here is not unconnected to what is happening in the wider world. Our faithful attempts to do the right things well, to inspire and encourage one another to excellence, and to lead by example as well as by precept, are not confined just to this building, or even to our little town. In some abstract, spiritual way, the light we bring to our endevours truly does shine beyond ourselves. So carry this flame of peace and love in your hearts, in everything you undertake. And may the light you bring to all you do become a shining example to all the world.
READING
[Ft Lewis] Installation Chaplain's Office
Unit Ministry Teams Mission
• Operate a state-of-the-art spiritual power projection platform for the warfighter by providing them a superior religious support program and infrastructure that ensures the well being of our soldiers, civilians, retirees and their families through free exercise of their beliefs and gives them the opportunities for the positive life changing lessons, power and stability that transform people of faith.
I Corps Unit Ministry Teams Mission
• To provide or perform religious support for all authorized personnel of I Corps and Fort Lewis during peacetime and across the full spectrum of war in order to support the command in the facilitation of the free exercise of religion.
• To advise the command in matters of religion, morals, morale, and ethical issues in order to support the unit mission.
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday May 2rd, 2004
I thought I’d start out this morning simply by taking a couple of minutes (more or less) to say a few nice things about President Bush. I know this may seem a little out of character for me, and that therefore some of what I have to say may sound like damning faint praise, or insincere, or even ironic, but I can’t really help that. This seemingly interminable electoral contest is steadily emerging as the most acrimonious in MY memory; and even though I know as an historian that elections often resemble open warfare (which is why they call them “campaigns”), and democracy itself many times seems like not much more than a rough and tumble, bare knuckled brawl, I still believe that at the end of the day a functional civilized society requires civil behavior, and that as a spiritual leader I ought to somehow try to model that. Not only is the ability to recognize (and even admire) the positive qualities of those with whom one disagrees an important step toward dialog, compromise, and eventual reconciliation, I also know that whenever people succumb to the temptation of “demonizing” their opposition, they run the serious risk of “misunderestimating” them as well. Even the most evil and odious political figure of the 20th century, Adolf Hitler, was a decorated war veteran wounded on the battlefield, as well as a committed and disciplined vegetarian who loathed both smoking and drinking, and loved both dogs and small children. Not much of a writer (although apparently he’s better in English than in his native German, because his translators have tended to clean up his grammar), but certainly a dynamic and inspiring public speaker, whose rabid patriotism was unquestionable. Simply to dismiss him as a madman -- a monster and an abomination -- actually minimizes the true magnitude of his evil-doing, because it ignores both its banality and its mass appeal.
But I digress. What I meant to say is that if I can find something complimentary to say about Adolf Hitler, even if it is essentially irrelevant in the greater scheme of things, I can certainly find something nice to say about George W. Bush. In fact, I can think of three things, right off the top of my head. And the first is that I know for a fact that the President is neither as dumb as he sounds, nor is he as sanctimonious and insincere as he sometimes seems to those of us who do not share his views. Let me take these one at a time. I first realized that the President is a lot smarter than he looks when I saw his SAT scores published in one of the national news magazines, and realized that they were virtually identical to mine. Not that the results of some stupid standardized test probably mean that much anyway. But personally, I’m not too sure that I’m really smart enough to be the President (and I can’t imagine any possible circumstance where I might actually have an chance to find out either -- thank God!), but I’m certainly no dummy; and I suppose that if I had the opportunity to watch my father do it first, I might feel a lot more confident that I was capable of doing the job myself as well. But my main point is that just because the President isn’t in the top one or two percent of the population intellectually doesn’t mean that he isn’t plenty smart enough to lead. If anything, the fact that he’s NOT a “wonk” is what makes him seem so personable and approachable. And if there are times when he appears a little smug and self-righteous, or even vindictive and mean spirited toward his antagonists...who isn’t? Those of us on the other side certainly haven’t been too kind to him either.
The second nice thing I wanted to say about the President is that he knows who he is and he knows his limits without surrendering to his limitations; he isn’t ashamed of being himself, and he isn’t afraid of surrounding himself with strong, smart, and outspokenly opinionated people. And this is actually relatively rare in a leader. Many leaders, I think, tend to assume that because they are in charge, their followers are all looking to THEM for direction and guidance, and sometimes they get a little swept away by this, and start to believe that they always have to be “the smartest guy in the room” -- that their leadership depends on providing the right answer in every situation every time, and that they can therefore never afford to be wrong or to appear foolish. And there are certainly times when the President appears to have fallen into this trap as well: when his need to present a strong, principled, and decisive image in public really just make him seem (at least to those of us who disagree with him) stubborn and ideologically obsessed (not to mention a little out of touch with reality). But it also seems to me that (in private at least) the President is quite adept at listening to the opinions of his advisors and other experts, as well as gauging the mood of the public (and especially his core constituencies), and then modifying his own views based on what he has learned. And this too is a positive quality in a leader: the ability to listen, to learn, and to lead your followers in the direction they want to go.
Finally, the one quality I truly admire in the President above all others is his singular ability to earn and inspire the loyalty of those who support him. On one level, there is nothing particularly mysterious about this quality: people are loyal to the President because they know he is loyal to them -- it is a reciprocal relationship of mutual obligation and responsibility. One hand washes the other. But there’s actually a lot more to it than that. I think the President inspires such strong feelings of loyalty among his core supporters because he articulates and defends a view of the world that is strongly held by people who feel that their opinions and beliefs have been profoundly marginalized in contemporary American society, and who see in him a leader who will restore that worldview and its moral values to the heart of our government’s foreign and domestic policy. They believe in him because he believes what they believe, and they all believe it with all their hearts.
I’ve been thinking a lot about leadership lately, and not just because there will be an election in six months which will once again determine the leadership of our nation for the next four years. This first Sunday in May is also the first anniversary of my election as the minister of this congregation, so I’ve also been thinking quite a bit about the differences between political and religious leadership, and likewise where they overlap, and where they ought to leave one another alone. Political leadership, at least in a democracy, is an expression of the will of the people through the principle of majority rule. Thus politics is all about the art of the possible: not merely an unvarnished manifestation of what is sometimes called “the tyranny of the majority,” but more typically a subtle combination of compromise and coalition building, together at times with a little judicious arm twisting, the ubiquitous quid pro quo, and no small amount of inflammatory pandering to the fears and prejudices of the electorate.
But religious leadership ought to be about helping people to discern the Will of God, together with a humble submission to divine authority (however you may choose to understand that concept of a “higher power”) -- not my will, but thine Oh Lord be done. Keeping these things clearly distinguished in one’s mind is not always the easiest thing to do. What’s wrong with twisting a few arms, or even knocking a few heads and kicking a few butts, when you know that God is on your side? The answer, of course, is this notion of humility -- the realization that no matter how powerful our convictions may be, we will never FULLY know and understand the mind of our Creator, and that to believe otherwise is arrogant idolatry. Faith is less about certainty of belief than it is the trusting confidence that we must act in good faith even in the midst of our uncertainty, not knowing for sure whether God is on our side, but hoping that we are on the side of God, a God who is both Just AND Merciful, Righteous AND Compassionate, and who loves All Souls with the same unconditional affection that a perfect mother might feel for her children. The experience of faith is something which should be freely shared, but never forcibly imposed; there is no place for coercion in the Kingdom of God. Or at least this is what Unitarians, Universalists, and other religious liberals have traditionally believed. Faith is a Gift of God. And we best discern God’s will for us when we are free to share our faith openly with one another, without duress or fear of reprisal.
Of course, religion and politics are not the only fields where quality of leadership significantly determines both the quality of the experience and the quality of the results. I strongly suspect, for example, if we were to do a quick survey of the number of books on the subject, most of them would deal with issues of Leadership in Business, where it is sometimes said that “managers do things right, but leaders do the right things.” And yet I wonder whether this dichotomy is really fair. Which is preferable: to do the wrong things well, or to do the right things poorly? (Actually, that statement pretty much describes the differences between our two political parties, doesn’t it?) Clearly, the best alternative is to do the right things well: in other words, to be attentive to both the process and the vision -- the quality of the relationship between the leader, the followers, and their task -- as well as the ultimate worthiness of the goal itself, and how that worthiness is best determined and communicated.
Business leaders often look to sports for metaphors that can help them understand and explain what it is they are trying to do when leading a “team” toward a “goal.” Sports are a lot simpler than life: the rules are reasonably clear and fixed, the goals are pre-determined by the rules, and both the size of the field and the duration of the game are relatively limited in scope when compared to “real life.” The job of a coach basically has three parts. The first part is to come up with a “game plan” -- a strategy that will allow the team to achieve a victory. The second part is to teach their players all the skills they will need to have in order to successfully carry out the plan. And the third part is to motivate the players to make their best possible effort, to play up to the level of their ability and maybe even a little beyond it -- to inspire and encourage, threaten and cajole, reward, punish, praise, prod, criticize, challenge, support...and so on and so on. No two coaches are exactly alike, and no two players respond to exactly the same set of motivators -- yet often a feeling of pride in the quality of one’s effort and achievements, together with fear of the shame of letting one’s teammates down, are at the heart of all these other motivations; and good coaches, good leaders in general, seem to know instinctively the exact combination of each that will work best for every player on the team. Or perhaps they know because they listen, and because they know their players as well as their players know themselves, and therefore know also what makes them tick, and how to communicate with them in a manner that that the players can easily understand.
Of course no discussion of leadership can really be complete without some exploration of the role of leadership in the military. Warfare is the attempt to impose one’s will on another through force; and the mission of the military is the management and effective application of lethal violence. Over the centuries, military organizations have turned the process of leadership development into a science, because professional soldiers know from experience that no matter how carefully you plan, no matter how rigorously you train, no matter how good your equipment is, there inevitably comes a time in combat when someone has to stand up in the face of danger and say to his comrades “follow me.” Planning, training, good equipment, unit discipline and morale, camaraderie and trust, obviously all play an important role in what happens next. But without leadership, nothing happens at all. The common assumption about moments like this is that these leaders must somehow be more courageous than the soldiers they lead, that they are so naturally brave that they simply aren’t afraid to risk their lives in the face of the enemy. But according to those who have had the experience, this isn’t the case at all. Courage under fire has nothing to do with not being afraid. True courage is about being afraid, and doing your duty anyway, because you know that the others are depending on you, and the example of your leadership, for their survival.
Here’s another interesting thing to ponder. A standard light infantry platoon in the US Army is comprised of 35 soldiers (or, as the Army would put it, “34 men and one officer” -- typically, a 2nd Lieutenant, who is probably still in his early twenties). Yet this young Lieutenant doesn’t lead this entire platoon all by himself: he is assisted by a Platoon Sergeant, three Squad Leaders, six Fire Team Leaders, and two Weapons Team Leaders...35 soldiers, and a full third of them are designated as “leaders” -- each of whom is prepared to assume the responsibilities of their superior should the latter be killed in battle. And, of course, the platoon is also supported by an entire “chain of command” which coordinates their movement with the movement of other units, resupplies them with food and ammunition, evacuates casualties and provides reinforcements, along with all of the countless other things (including chaplains) that are necessary in order for this particular platoon to be able to accomplish its assigned operational mission. It’s a pretty elaborate organization, all of which can be sent into action at the word of a single individual, the Commander in Chief, whose leadership “by precept and example” trickles down through the ranks. Yet ultimately the success or failure of our military in actual combat (and its aftermath) relies far less on the leadership of the individual at the top of the chain of command than it does on the morale, the training, and the leadership of the soldiers whose boots actually ARE on the ground, and who rely on one another in order to survive, safely, to the end of another day.
We’ve seen two vivid examples representing both the best and the worst of American soldiery just within these past few weeks. The positive example, of course, was Ranger Specialist Pat Tillman, 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, who was killed in action in Afghanistan during an ambush on April 22nd. Tillman, as you probably already know, had been the starting strong safety of the Arizona Cardinals, who left his lucrative professional football career to enlist, along with his brother Kevin, in the Rangers following September 11th. My big concern, both when I first heard about Tillman’s enlistment two years ago, and when I learned of his death last week, was that people would get the wrong message -- that they would look at his example and somehow equate being a soldier with being a professional athlete, and assume that combat was just another game. I don’t think Tillman ever felt that way, and I’m pretty sure he never intended to send that message...although you never know. Yet there aren’t that many people on this planet who are willing to walk away from a seven-figure income, and all that goes with it, in order to put themselves in harm’s way fighting for what they believe in the rugged mountains of Afghanistan. Pat Tillman was one. Osama bin Laden, interestingly enough, is another. I’m not really sure what to make of that, but there it is.
The shameful example involves the report, with explicit photographs, of the systematic abuse and humiliation of Iraqi prisoners by US Army Reserve military police at the Abu Ghraib prison. This is a complicated situation, and details are still emerging from the on-going investigation, so doubtlessly there will be much more to be learned in the weeks and months ahead. The President has said that he feels a “deep disgust” at the way these prisoners were treated (as he should), and that the behavior of these few guards does not represent the values of most American soldiers or the American people...which is certainly true. But I also believe that the President is wrong if he thinks that this is just an isolated anomaly that can be blamed on a handful of inadequately-trained and poorly-led reserve soldiers. The tone for this treatment was set much higher up the chain of command, and by decisions we have made as a nation about how we will treat the “enemy combatants” who come into our custody.
I’m not certain which profession is older -- that of the warrior, or that of the shaman -- and I’m not really sure that it matters that much either. I do know that in many ancient societies they were one and the same: the warrior king was also the chief priest, to whom the people looked for leadership at times of both military and spiritual crisis. Nowadays the two vocations don’t really appear to have much in common, although they intersect in intriguing ways. The trained, professional killer is also a dedicated professional peacemaker, whose strength deters conflict, and whose judicious use of force or the threat of force can sometimes prevent more widespread violence. Professional religious leaders, in every major religious tradition (including Islam), are typically taught that all men and women are brothers and sisters to one another in the eyes of their Creator, and that we should do unto others as we would have others do unto us; that the redeeming power of God’s love is more powerful than our own human desire for revenge, and that we most completely destroy our enemies when we make them our friends. But when righteous anger becomes wedded to religious zeal, bad things happen. Call it Jihad or call it a Crusade, when we dehumanize our enemies we dehumanize ourselves, rationalizing and justifying our evil behavior with the lame excuse that we are only doing God’s will.
Here “in the trenches” of religious life in America, in the day to day activities of local congregations like our’s, we don’t often talk about these “big issues” of leadership. Here the talk is all about “shared ministry” and the role of the “equipping pastor” -- a leader who gives to the people the tools, and training, and guidance they need to pursue effectively their own “call” to serve. A “coach.” Yet what we do here is not unconnected to what is happening in the wider world. Our faithful attempts to do the right things well, to inspire and encourage one another to excellence, and to lead by example as well as by precept, are not confined just to this building, or even to our little town. In some abstract, spiritual way, the light we bring to our endevours truly does shine beyond ourselves. So carry this flame of peace and love in your hearts, in everything you undertake. And may the light you bring to all you do become a shining example to all the world.
READING
[Ft Lewis] Installation Chaplain's Office
Unit Ministry Teams Mission
• Operate a state-of-the-art spiritual power projection platform for the warfighter by providing them a superior religious support program and infrastructure that ensures the well being of our soldiers, civilians, retirees and their families through free exercise of their beliefs and gives them the opportunities for the positive life changing lessons, power and stability that transform people of faith.
I Corps Unit Ministry Teams Mission
• To provide or perform religious support for all authorized personnel of I Corps and Fort Lewis during peacetime and across the full spectrum of war in order to support the command in the facilitation of the free exercise of religion.
• To advise the command in matters of religion, morals, morale, and ethical issues in order to support the unit mission.
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