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Twenty Five Years in the Ministry
Sermon Delivered at All Souls Community Church
Grand Rapids, Michigan November 2, 2008
Copyright © 2008
The Reverend Doctor Brent A. Smith
Whether a minister or layperson is speaking, it is always in some
way about the congregation because the congregation is the vehicle through which
we attempt to discern larger, transcendent meanings.
She was an ex-Catholic, he was an ex-Mormon, they were both
Scientologists and I was officiating at their wedding as a student minister in
Seattle. Her mother said to me, “I am glad they’re getting married in a church
even if it is yours.” I thought to myself that there must be a compliment
somewhere in that statement, and although I admitted to myself it was a
struggled to figure it out, I was determined to be up to the task!
The second wedding I ever performed involved a groom who, when we
met several times weeks before the service, repeatedly assured his bride and me
that he wasn’t nervous, and I didn’t know any better than to believe him. I know
better about men now and our willingness to mask our feelings. While repeating
his vows he fainted, and I caught him with my left arm. The bride looked at me
and asked, “What should we do?” I responded the only way I knew how as a
second-time officiant, “I guess we’ll wait for him to wake up,” and a few
awkward minutes later he did, finished the vows, and we finished the service.
I pulled out the ring for one wedding service performed on the deck
of a wooded lodge in the Colorado Rockies, and after blessing the ring, extended
it out for the groom, and when his hand bumped mine, the bride’s ring fell
through the floorboards of the deck. It delayed the wedding for a half an hour
as the bride’s little brother slithered under the deck to retrieve the prize.
But, we got through it and it was joyous.
I once preached in an elephant suit because that particular Sunday
fell on my wife’s birthday and she loves elephants and I love her. That wasn’t
wise as the suit was too heavy, you couldn’t hear a word through the trunk, and
one little boy kept pulling on my trunk. It was stupid but sweet to offer that
to my wife. I once wrote and preached a sermon made up of rhyming couplets. That
was just stupid, though lyrically stupid!
I have learned that with love and affection we human beings can
stumble through and survive anything, from birth to death and all the challenges
in-between. I have learned that without love and affection we will justify doing
just about anything as right, even to those with whom we share the deepest
things.
By my estimation I have preached over a thousand sermons, performed
over a thousand wedding services, a hundred gay and lesbian union services, 2 or
3 hundred Memorial services, and Christened and Dedicated at least that many
babies. I have preached to eight in a living room and over a thousand in several
sanctuaries, and had one minister tell me you’re not a minister until a
congregation chews you up and spits you out. I have been chewed up and spit out
by a congregation. I have watched men and women die, my own children born, and
had the privilege of being invited into people’s lives to share their most
intimate joys and bear with them their heaviest of burdens.
I have been blessed with a wife who understands the calling I
answer, and two children who grew up by enduring its burdens and joys, and
having people know more intimate details of their parents’ lives then others
should really know. It has all been a blessing and a grace, this life. Thank you
for this good life, and forgive me when I do not love it enough.
I have seen people at their worst and their best, behaving in ways
that baffle the mind, doing things that stir the heart, and treating one another
in ways that cause the head to shake in disbelief, for woe and weal both!
In twenty five years in the ministry I have learned that we human
beings are an odd lot, suspended as we are between the heavens and the
underworld. The same individual can love and respect himself deeply one moment,
and inexplicably come to loathe himself the next. A couple can tenderly care for
one another one day and say the most hurtful things to one another the next. A
congregation can lift up beliefs and ideals that inspire the noblest sacrifices
one day, and can be at each others’ throats the next. This, I have learned, that
we are an odd lot and sometimes the best thing and only thing is for someone to
tell a funny story and pass the food and drink! I remember the words given me by
a former congregant being treated for his mental illness, the wisest words of
them all: “Persevere!”
I have learned the most important question in religion is not,
“What do I believe?” because the answer to that changes over the years. I have
been a Buddhist, atheist, Christian, natural theist, just about every kind of
“ist” one can imagine in the twenty-five years of devotion to this life. I have
learned I am not an “ist,” but an individual. Beliefs do change, and when they
don’t one has stopped growing spiritually. The most important question is not,
“What do I believe?” but “What is really going on?” I think that’s the more
important question because whatever is really going on is shaping what each of
us believes at any moment in our lives.
The ancient was right in calling faith a matter of unseen things, a
matter of discerning what’s really going on. But, it is not a matter of magical
unseen things, like believing in the fantasy that creation occurred just a few
thousands years ago by a giant’s hand (a hand that didn’t exist for the Notre
Dame football team yesterday, I might add), or believing the death of one man,
Jesus, magically wiped away a human nature that is evil in its essence. Faith is
a matter of the unseen things we help generate or dissolve, things that uphold
life or undermine it: love and affection, or rancor, animosity, malice, and
hatred born of the hubris that we fallible human beings know certainty and
Truth. Generosity of the spirit is a practice that we cannot live out enough and
cannot live out in too much abundance. Sadly, stinginess of the spirit is an
unfortunate practice that too many take up, especially in religion. Faith is the
practice of trust in ourselves, trust towards one another, and trust in the
abundance in life itself throughout all the things that really are going on
around us, the tragic and the triumphant.
Today is a great example of this: What is really going on? Anytime
any one of our Unitarian Universalist churches recognizes a minister for
anything good or ill, the spiritual community is lifting up a deeper question in
order to live it out. In our faith tradition and unlike, say the Catholics or
Anglicans or Christian Reform, ministry is the province of us all and not just
designated “elites.” Our understanding of ministry emanates from the ancient
meaning of the word itself, from the Latin meaning servant. “You got to serve
somebody,” whined Bob Dylan, and though that is true in one sense, in a deeper
sense, through service and ceremony, this day is a time for each of us to
reflect upon the proper aim for human service. Other faith traditions may say
“the glory of God,” but ours is a more complex discernment as to how in serving
other human beings we can serve lofty and nobler aims. To what is our devotion
and service aimed?
Other faith traditions may say the proper aim for devotion and
service is right belief and treating others the way those beliefs suppose;
holding to correct doctrines founded in the idea that human beings are depraved
at birth and need saving. That is a spiritual path, just not our distinctive
way. We are founded in the ontological fact of human connectedness. “Know
thyself” becomes a way for us to know who we are distinctively as individuals,
and collectively as the human family.
And congregations rooted in relationships as we are, know that
human beings are first and foremost fallible. That’s one thing I have learned in
twenty-five years. Human nature is fallible, and I will tell you something I
have learned about myself in coming to know thyself. I am at the head of the
line when it comes to making mistakes and being fallible. The very first time I
entered a pulpit as a student minister in Seattle doing a reading and delivering
the Welcome in worship in Seattle in 1981, I misread the reading from Genesis,
and said, “Adam, by the seat of your brow you will eat your food until you
return to the ground from whence you came.” Forceful and with authority I read
that. And then, during the Welcome I invited the congregation to volunteer and
“man the coffee tables.” After worship a woman rushed up to me and gave me a
tongue lashing for using sexist language, instead of using the word “staffing”
the coffee tables.
A few days later the Senior Minister corrected me on the other
thing, telling me he waited a few days because he knew how nervous all of us are
who get up in front of others, especially for the first time. We expose who we
are every week, he said, and that is a vulnerability we are trying to
communicate to others is necessary for authentic love. But, it was not the “seat
of Adam’s brow,” but the “sweat of Adam’s brow” and advised me to proof read my
text before putting someone’s rear-end on their forehead! That was good advice.
Both were right. I had made mistakes. But I think what generates
trust is to presume all ministers, like all people, are going to make mistakes.
How one responds to human fallibility, their own and others, answers the
question, “What is really going on?” What’s really going on is our fallibility.
Other faith traditions may claim there are absolute right and wrong
ways to believe, unconditional right and wrong choices to make, supreme right
and wrong ways to behave, and that knowing what is right and wrong is the single
most important spiritual value. That is a spiritual path, just not our
distinctive way. You can know some things that are right and wrong, but rarely
if ever absolutely and unconditionally. Both the minister and the congregant
were right about different mistakes I had made. Both were right again in coming
to me directly to address them. But, in our faith tradition being right or wrong
is not the measure of the temporal or eternal value of a human being. What is
really going on in our congregations, as in all times in all of our lives, is
about trust. What do we say and how do we say it so that it generates trust?
What behaviors generate and thwart trust. Again, both were right and right in
coming directly to me. I was wrong, but being right in spiritual belief is not
enough, we declare, because there are so many times in our lives when we are not
right and ultimately we can never really know for sure. Only one response to my
mistake fixed AND generated trust. The other just corrected.
I have learned this is the discipline of our spiritual path. To
shape our lives towards holding and living what generates trust. To treat others
such that we become worthy of their trust, and to expand that circle. Knowing we
all are fallible and seeking to be honest and direct with one another in all we
do. It is the basis of bonds of love, of a respectful affection deeper than
whether I like someone or not. I can tell you there have been plenty of people
in the congregations I have served that didn’t like me, and I’ll let you in on a
secret about you. Everyone doesn’t like everyone else here either. We do not
congregate in a spiritual community because we are like-minded people, because
we like everyone here, unless we are no more than a fraternity or sorority or a
social club. To be a congregation in our faith tradition requires a discipline
of cultivating trust as the measure of walking together. To become worthy of
another’s respect, not to shrink down the number of people in our circle of
fellowship until it is composed only of those whom we like.
Our congregations aren’t successful because they have perfected the
right and correct beliefs about existence because our congregations aren’t
formed by like-mindedness, even if they are sometimes composed of individuals
who think everybody here agrees with them. I have learned that when it comes to
religion, the Unitarian Christian in the pew thinks I am an atheist, and the
atheist in the pew thinks I am an orthodox Christian. Neither is correct. I am
an individual. I have learned that the Democrats in the pew think I support
their candidate, and the Republicans in the pew think I have voted for theirs.
Neither is true. I am an individual.
Our congregations are successful embodiments of our generous and
broadminded ways because they are formed by like-hearted people. “We do not have
to believe alike to love alike,” is how one of our forebears put it. Deep in
their heart the people of our congregations are called to hold that the purpose
of having a church like ours is second only to their children as the most
important legacy they leave behind. Not to believe alike, but to seek a
connection deeper than our human differences and our all too human mistakes;
deeper than our likes and dislikes, because tastes and needs change. To become
worthy of another’s trust, to generate trust, and to create a community which
proclaims this as the highest aim of the human life, as a legacy second only in
importance to children.
So, what’s really going on? What is it that you individually are
serving, and what are you serving as a congregation together? Believe me, this
past week, I have asked myself over and over the question of what I serve, which
anniversaries like this occasion in us even if the question is well hidden other
days. I would invite you to use my personal anniversary for yourself and your
congregation, to ponder what it is you serve and how you measure your practice
of it. And I would encourage you to talk about that amongst yourselves, but not
with those whom you like, because you will be simply serving self-interest and
religion today is too much about worshipping personal opinion and belief and
like and need, as a god. Talk about that with those with whom you are aiming to
walk with. When we plant congregations or pecan trees, we do so as Howard
Thurman pointed out, not necessarily so that we reap the benefits of the fruit
we plant but because it is part of the practice of having faith in life.
Because, frankly, there is so much of modern life that argues
against having faith in life, whether through planting trees or congregations
devoted to freedom. There is anxiety all around us, and which one of us here
does not feel that. My job, your job, could vanish tomorrow as retirements and
homes values. I know that. I think you do, too. All in this life is fleeting all
the time, but it seems particularly apparent right now. I can tell you
personally I was reminded yesterday what is fleeting and what lasts when a
family member far away was diagnosed with cancer, as I was in the 1980’s in the
middle of serving the first Unitarian church where I was called as the minister.
And there is fear, always, but again more apparent now than other
times. This culture’s fear of tomorrow is just below the surface, and can be
easily agitated when you ask yourself if you think Obama and McCain are
frightened? You bet there are, each frightened that he will win, more than that
he would lose! That’s deep fear, when you fear what you are striving for.
But our spiritual life calls us to something larger than anxiety or
fear. Many religions cultivate fear and anxiety as a way to reveal Truth and
what it is that is correct to believe in. Many religions see fear and anxiety as
the path to faith. For us, I think, fear and anxiety are real, and not to be
ignored or denied. Yet, they are the opposite of faith because they will never
generate trust. Faith in life amid fear and anxiety. Trust in oneself and
others, even knowing we are fallible and make small and huge mistakes. Trust in
life amid fear and anxiety. All that I have learned from study and from others,
has not made me an expert in who I am or what we human beings are. I tried to
resist becoming an expert, and tried my best to cultivate the knowledge that we
cannot know all things absolutely, no Truth completely, and can never be right
and correct in all seasons. I have tried to resist seeing that as a spiritual
virtue, and instead sought to cultivate the liberation of the spirit and a trust
in life. Our knowledge serves to keep the mind free, the beginner’s mind, where
there are all possibilities, and especially, in all times and places and
persons, the possibility of love.
And in this you, as my other congregations have been, are my
greatest teachers. You remind me of this Divine aim every Sunday when one of you
stands up, lights the Chalice as a symbol of human devotion and sacrifice to the
free spirit, and recites for me and you to hear and ponder:
We light this Chalice to remember a truth,
Consecrated through the ages by the service and sacrifice
Of individuals and communities:
There abides a unity and freedom of the Spirit,
Expressed through a love for all souls.
AMEN.
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