What Do Fundamentalists Know About Religion That Unitarians Have Forgotten (and Need to Relearn)?

by Posted in Audio available, Gary Bennett, Guest Speakers, Sermons

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Gary Bennett

Member, First Unitarian Church of Austin

Sermon, delivered Sunday, July 25, 2010

The title of this sermon is a bit deceptive.  Today I wouldn’t use the term “fundamentalist” to mean evangelical, conservative or traditional, and these are the religious groups I really want to talk about.  Al Qaeda, the Taliban and the Saudi Arabian government are fundamentalist, as are Pat Robertson, various recent presidents of the Southern Baptist Convention and a host of others who have done such outrageous things as praise terrorist attacks on Americans, plot political takeovers in church services, foment the murder of abortion providers, spit on mourners at funerals for fallen soldiers and advocate revolutionary violence against the United States.  They are a recent phenomenon, a cancer on most major world religions, an attack on all modern thought and values; they are Fascists who masquerade using traditional religious language.  In contrast, the denomination I was raised in, Southern Baptists before 1979, was by basic principle apolitical; members tended to be politically conservative, but people like Jimmy Carter, Bill Moyers and my parents had no trouble fitting in.

Why should we be interested?  These are, after all, the traditions that many of us feel we outgrew; if anything, we think we have a bit to teach them.  Perhaps we do, but demographics have not been kind to us in recent decades.  We are grouped with liberal or “main line” Protestant groups, which also include the Episcopal, Methodist, Lutheran and Presbyterian churches.  We all share one problem today:  we can’t convince our own children that what we do is worth preserving.  UUs have mostly made up for these losses with adult conversion, which has so far kept us out of the other denominations’ apparent race to extinction; but we are still in trouble.  Politicians have taken notice, of course; and where in 1960 it was main line Protestant voices that they used for moral cover, today it is usually conservative Catholics, evangelical Protestants or Mormons, even outright Fundamentalists, that dominate the public forum.  It is not that  these groups are especially successful at proselytizing our children, who mostly become unchurched and thus invisible as far as the political culture goes; but the conservatives at least are keeping most of their own children.  For some groups, like the high birth rate Mormons, that alone would be enough for rapid growth.  If these changes in American culture and politics bother us, and I think they should, we have lots of serious ‘splainin’ to do.  We think that we have a better approach to religious experience, but it is they who do the better job of convincing the children that what they have is important.

From the beginning, human beings have been bonded into groups by all believing in the same “six impossible things before breakfast.”  Once these groups started stepping on one another’s toes by living together in cities or traveling to far places, religion began to be something distinct from the overall  culture; religion was where you met with your support group.  You would still prefer to shut up those fools who disagreed if you had the power to do so, but the religious group helped you to endure if you could not.  Christianity by the 4th century had its own share of crazy ideas and also the power of the Roman state to shut up everybody who disagreed.  Despite the fall of the Western Empire, this state of things persisted in Europe until a century of religious wars between Catholics and Protestants ended in the 17th century in a peace of exhaustion; neither group had been quite able to exterminate the other.  By the late 18th century in places like the English colonies in America, toleration came to be seen as a virtue in itself; the idea was that different religious groups could scream all that they liked, but had to leave the swords, battle-axes and torture chambers at home.

Today UUs profess not to feel threatened by all these competing ideas, believing that our ideas are strong enough to survive out in the marketplace.  Our advertising campaigns try to persuade the unchurched that they are very much like us; we are at one with the larger intellectual world, with science, human reason and American moral values.  But traditional religious groups feel more alienated from the overall world of ideas.  Their beliefs are quite distinct from those of the larger world and from those of each other.  Small doctrinal differences are assumed to be important.  For us Baptists, we asserted our lack of a creed, but at the same time accused other Christians of getting the rite of baptism all wrong.  We, like most traditional Christians, believed that salvation was by the grace of God, rather than by good deeds of human beings; but I and my Church of Christ cousins, little lawyers all of us, went round and round on whether Grace was enough or whether participation in the rite of Baptism by the One True Church — that was them — was also necessary.  What, said I, if you are saved by grace on Monday, but die before you are safely baptized in church the following Sunday?  I will spare you various other Great Ideas Seminars we conducted.  The point is,  if the UU view of matters is pretty much the same as that of most of the secular world, why bother with church at all?  Why not sleep in Sunday mornings, read a good book, go to a public lecture?  If you are blessed to move in an academic environment or live in a cosmopolitan city of great cultural offerings, why do you need a UU church at all?  But if you are an Evangelical,  you will not get much reinforcement of your “six impossible beliefs” except in your own church group.  You will need to spend a lot of time there, perhaps attending every time the church doors are open; and at other times, you might want to limit your socializing to other church members.

Then there is moral behavior.  For UUs, ethics is about helping others:  helping the poor, the sick, the elderly, children and other victims of social injustice; when we collect “pennies for peace” and try to build schools for girls in remote Asian villages, we are acting in the great ethical tradition.  We have support in the teachings of Jesus, of the Hebrew prophets, of Mohammed, of Confucius and of many other seminal religious teachers.  But for evangelical religions, most of these things are not so much morals but political issues on which good Christians can differ.  As a young Baptist, most of my time in church and Sunday School seemed to be spent in being warned against various “gateway” evils:  gambling was wrong because it led to playing cards, promiscuous sex was wrong because it led to dancing and smoking marijuana was wrong because it led to tobacco.  There were never any lessons on the evils of racial discrimination, poverty in the midst of wealth, unjust wars, the rape of the world’s resources or other environmental disasters. Religious morality was about individual perfection, about keeping the temple of your body pure for God.  UU moral positions tend to integrate us into the larger society in which we operate; evangelical Protestant positions tend to separate us into little self-absorbed clusters.  And these all become more reasons to structure your life around other church members,  people you can socialize with and not imperil your immortal soul.

Traditional religions require constant work on the part of their members.  Orthodox Judaism has seemingly an endless list of requirements of diet, clothing and other rituals.  Jewish friends have tried to explain to me how the laws of kosher are perfectly sensible; it seems the bans on eating pork, shellfish and mixing meat with dairy products were all put together by ancient nutritionists, protecting people from trichinosis, oysters out of season — do Hebrew months provide any rules comparable to r’s being safe?  —  and we all know the grim truth about eating fast food bacon cheeseburgers.  Stuff and nonsense:  the lawgivers wanted people to have to think about their religion every single day, in even the most trivial actions, just as my Baptist morality was designed to remind me of who I was, not to accomplish good.  For Jews the result was a tough faith that people preserved in even the most extreme circumstances, for thousands of years of living in isolated ghettos surrounded by hostile societies.  Few things have threatened Jewish identity more than living in religiously tolerant America over the last generation or so, where their declining numbers are similar to those of liberal Protestants.  A rabbi once told me he considered UUs the greatest threat to Jewish survival, as we gave shelter to couples in mixed Jewish/Christian marriages!   In an old fable, the sun and the north wind bet on which is the more powerful.  The north wind tries to blow a traveller’s cloak off, but he only wraps it ever more tightly about himself; then the sun comes out, warms the land, and the traveller  removes the cloak voluntarily.

Other religions have also found ways of making life tough for members.  Devout Moslems have to stop whatever they are doing five times a day to humble themselves before God; the fasting month of Ramadan and the required ultimate pilgrimage to Mecca are also hard.  Mormons require two full years’ missionary work from every young member as a rite of passage into adulthood.  I have seen firsthand how much more serious and religiously committed a person can become after that experience.  And then there are the Amish, who make their religious beliefs central to everything that they do in daily life.

And let us not forget the early radical Protestants.  Medieval Hell might have been a terrible fate waiting after death, filled with every juicy torture and humiliation a fevered imagination could come up with; but at least Catholics could feel safe as long as they remained obedient to and in good standing with the Church.  These Protestants took upon themselves the burden of finding the way to avoid Hell, without ever being sure they were right.  They became puritanical, self-denying, hard-working people who, by all work and no play and by avoiding idle hands, the Devil’s own workshop, might hope to escape damnation.  There was of course no room for compassion in this — if other people were mostly bound for eternal torture after death, any extra suffering they encountered in this life was trivial anyway — so it tended to generate a lot of excess wealth that came to be called capital by economists and ultimately to our rich modern society, all as a trivial side effect.  Children brought up in such hard faiths knew the seriousness and importance of what was going on, and usually continued to practice them in adulthood.

I haven’t talked as if the theological content mattered much in the success or failure of these religions.  Not entirely true:  some things obviously do matter a great deal.  The doctrine of Hell tends to grab one’s attention; for an imaginative child who has been exposed to it, anxieties can last a life time, even if he has rejected the idea of it in his head.  Heaven is more like an afterthought for most believers, whether it is supposed to be souls singing hymns for eternity — a prospect mercilessly satirized by Mark Twain — or if is supposed to be filled with the reward of 40 virgins — which can double as the place bad virgins go to be punished, some suggest.  Anyway, whatever goodies await, it is all kind of a bonus to go along with the biggie of avoiding Hell.

Above all, successful religions demand the belief that there is something that is greater than us, something before which we must humble ourselves.  Arrogance is the opposite of real religious sentiment, something to remember the next time you encounter a swaggering televangelist with an obvious financial or political agenda.  That we humble ourselves is more important than what we humble ourselves to.  Our own tradition is mixed.  Universalists supposedly thought God too good to condemn humanity to Hell, and Unitarians, that humans were too good to be condemned.  If I have to choose, given what I have seen of human behavior, I really, really hope the Universalists were right.

I started by asking what traditional religious groups know, and what we can learn from them.  Some lessons we will reject out of hand.  I cannot imagine UUs declaring war on science and reason.  Nor do we want to limit our concept of morality to keeping our bodies healthy while ignoring the world’s problems, and some of us even believe that “purity’s a noble yen, and very restful every now and then.”  But I think we do need to make the practice of Unitarian Universalism more difficult, if we want to survive.  We need an integrity about our lives, a sense that we are the same people, with the same values, on weekdays as Sundays.  We need to be in covenant with one another, so that our disagreements may be resolved without injury to any, and so that members always feel that being here or being with other UUs in any situation is a safe place.  We MUST give more; it’s hard to believe your faith is important to you when your giving is so embarrassingly poor compared with conservative churches, so low that they have severely crippled the mission of your church.  I know how hard my Baptist parents struggled to tithe — that means 10% of gross income, if any of you are in doubt — in what were often very grim circumstances.  Our own household falls far short of that standard.  But Jesus’ words are still relevant:  where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.  Contribute to the church’s mission AND to charities AND to just political causes that the church itself cannot involve itself in; contribute money AND time.  If Moslems can stop to pray five times a day and Orthodox Jews can expend the effort to keep kosher at every meal, can we UUs not require ourselves to do at least one thing every day that reminds us who we are?

And we must also make religion harder for our children. How we strive to keep them entertained; it would be unthinkable to require them to sit through a boring old church service, or so we believe.  Nonsense.  Most children will live up or down to consistent adult expectations.  Consider family discussions of moral issues; the “pennies for peace” project would seem a perfect opportunity to talk about what the problems are, and what Greg Mortenson is arguing in Three Cups of Tea are solutions.  The long term feedback will come in part by what happens in rural Asia, but also by what part of you your children decide in adulthood is worth carrying forward.  And that, above all,  is what UUs must learn once again about religion, or die.

Mission Possible

by Posted in Audio available, Guest Speakers, Sermons

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Nell Newton, Eric Stimmel, Chris Jimmerson

July 18, 2010

Leaders of First UU Austin present our new mission statement and introduce our new interim minister, Ed Brock.

“At First UU Church of Austin we gather in community to nourish souls, transform lives and do justice.”

Text of this service is not available. Click the play button to listen.

Tiger Woods and the Beer Cart Girl

by Posted in Audio available, Guest Speakers, Sermons

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Timothy B. Tutt

Pastor, United Christian Church

July 11, 2010

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Sermon

Some of you have looked at my sermon title in the bulletin and you think you know where I’m headed with this sermon, “Tiger Woods and the Beer Cart Girl.” Given the Sports news the past few months about Tiger and his off-the-course behavior, you assume you know what I might say this morning. After all, the bulletin also says I’m the pastor of a Christian Church and you know how those Christians are about sex. All I have to say is, “You dirty-minded Unitarians.” I’m not going to talk about sex at all.

But I do want to tell you a story about Tiger Woods and the beer cart girl. First, I may need to explain to you non-golfers – and I’m not much of golfer myself – about beer cart girls. Many golf courses hire young, attractive women to drive around the course selling beer from a golf cart. I know that’s sexist. And I know that’s exploiting women. I didn’t invent the practice; I’m just reporting it. I can also say I’ve never heard of a beer cart boy, but as I tell this story, if you would like to change the gender of my character you are welcome to do that. As I said, beer cart girls are mostly hired for their looks, their charm, and they’re ability to sell cold beverages to hot golfers. So, let’s take an imaginary trip to the links. Tiger Woods is the world’s greatest golfer. He’s won 95 professional tournaments, 4 Masters, 4 PGA Championships, 23 U.S. Opens. He’s the first golfer ever to hold all four professional major championship titles at the same time.

But recently, Tiger has slumped a bit. That happens, I suppose, when your spouse finds out you’re cheating and beats you with a golf club. And the tawdry affairs of your sex life are national news.

So, Tiger goes out to a course to brush up a bit. He needs to get his groove back. So, he goes to a course to practice. Something is just not right. His drives are short, his chips aren’t so chipper, his puts peter out. There he stands, the champion, defeated and frustrated, when up drives the beer cart girl. Now, as I said, beer cart girls aren’t hired for their golfing skills. They’re hired to sell beer with a smile and a laugh. But let’s say this beer cart girls drives up, hops off the cart and says, “Hey, Tiger, if you turn your front foot in just a bit, choke up a quarter-inch on your grip, and drop your back shoulder just a hair, your drive will be straighter. I’ve been thinking,” says the beer cart girl, “and maybe you should switch from a nine-iron to a seven-iron on the fairway.”

Imagine Tiger Woods, the youngest golfer ever to complete the Grand Slam … Tiger Woods, who was golfing on the Tonight Show when he was three … imagine Tiger Woods, the youngest Masters’ champion ever … getting golf advice from the beer cart girl.

Tiger Woods has won 111 Million dollars playing golf. Imagine him getting golfing advice from the beer cart girl, who works for tips. Imagine him saying to the ESPN reporters, “My game is picking up because I got some really great advice from the beer cart girl.” Some off you may remember back to the 1980 Presidential Debate when Jimmy Carter was asked a question about nuclear weapons, and he began his answer by saying, “I was talkin’ to mah daughta Amy the otha day…” Commentators just howled. Imagine the President of the United States getting advice on nuclear weapons from his ten year-old daughter.

That’s not how the world works, right?

Golf pros don’t get advice from beer cart girls. Presidents don’t get advice from fourth graders.

We have a sense of who is right and who is powerful and who is in charge and who is important. We listen to those people, right?

Let me tell you another story. This story is from the Hebrew scriptures. It’s from the Book of Kings, the portion that Christians call Second Kings.

(Parenthetically, let me say that I grew up a Southern Baptist in East Texas. And in the tradition of my growing up, this is where the preacher would pause to say, “Turn with me in your Bible to the Book of Second Kings.” My hunch is that the likelihood of Unitarian Universalist having a Bible at church is about as likely as Tiger Woods getting golf advice from the beer cart girl. Nonetheless, if you’d like to follow along on your Blackberry or IPhone, please log on to Second Kings, Chapter 5…)

In Second Kings Chapter 5, we meet a man named Naaman. Naaman was a general in the Aramean army. The Arameans were the vicious enemies of the Israelites. The Book of Second Kings says that Naaman was “a mighty warrior,” but he suffered from leprosy.

Now, along the way, the Arameans, on one of their raids, had captured a young girl captive from Israel. This girl was a salve to General Naaman’s wife And one day, this young slave girl said to Mrs. Naaman – the writer of Second Kings tells it in such poetic language – the young slave girl says, to Naaman’s wife: “If only my lord were with the prophet who is in Samaria! The prophet would cure him of his leprosy.”

To condense the story a bit. Naaman decides to take the slave girl’s advice. Naaman goes to Israel, takes a wagon-full of money with him from the king of the ArameansÑafter all, when you’re hoping to get a cure from your enemies, imagine what a little bribe can do.

So Naaman, the Aramean general with leprosy, goes to find the Jewish prophet Elisha.

There are a multitude of angles we could explore in this text: There’s the issue of bribery in military campaigns. Seems like some things never change. There’s the issue of suddenly discovering that your enemies may have the cure you need. Heck, we could even wander off into a discussion of leprosy in the ancient Middle EastÑbut we haven’t had lunch yet, so maybe we should save that.

The issue I would like for you to ponder for bit is this: Naaman – the great general, the mighty warrior, the conqueror of nations – following the advice of the slave girl, a prisoner, a child, a nobody. Naaman was the Aramean version of George Washington or Dwight Eisenhower or David Petraeus. He was a “somebody.” He was in the news, he had his name carved on stone tablets. The slave girl? We don’t even know her name. She was a nobody. And she was triply cursed – a female, young, and a slave – in a day and age that gave few rights to any of the three.

But the writer of the Book of Kings says that Naaman loaded up the caravan and headed off to find Elisha, following the advice of the slave girl.

What if the world were really like that?

What if we paid attention to the nobodies? Or even better, what if the nobodies were suddenly in charge?

I just returned from a week in Ecuador. A group of people from our congregation and from Wildflower UU, along with some folks from the UU Fellowship traveled to Ecuador together for a mission project, a service project.

We worked at a church in the village of Cachimuel, a community of Kichwa Indians, nestled on a steep slope of the Andean foothills. The people of Cachimuel, the Native Americans, are fairly poor people by our standards. Their village has only had running water for 12 years. I saw one tractor and two cars in the entire village. They use outhouses. Pigs and cows and donkeys and sheep wander around in the streets. I didn’t see a child with a single DSI or Xbox or Gameboy. Their clothes were often grimy.

But you know what? They invited us into their homes and served us coffee and tea. This weathered Kichwa woman welcomed us into a room where she was kneeling on the floor and beating reeds flat with a rock and making mats. And she gave me one, because she is a generous.

She was hammering reed mats with a rock, and she gave me one: Because she is generous. Me? I’m neither that hard-working nor that generous, I’m afraid. Another woman was squatting down on the front porch of the church on our first day at work. We were scraping and sanding off old paint. It wasn’t terribly work, but it was dusty and dirty and we were tired. This tiny Kichwa Indian woman, with several teeth missing, was sitting by this big, beat-up aluminum bowl. And as we walked out the door, she invited us to bend down, and she poured warm water to clean our hands. She had heated that water over a fire, carried that big pot to that porch, and was washing our hands.

We’re supposed to be the “somebodies,” right? After all, both Barack Obama and Sarah Palin say we’re the greatest nation on earth. We’re General Naaman from the Book of Kings. But maybe hubris is our leprosy.

Last week, I saw the slave girl, maybe no longer the captives, but still the “nobodies,” poor Indian dirt farmers, clinging to their back-mountain ways – showing me a hospitality and a generosity that I need to learn. Not so much giving me advice to follow, but offering examples to emulate.

Before my wife, Amy, and I moved back to Texas ten years ago, we lived in Washington, DC. There is a remarkable church in DC called Church of the Savior. It is a decentralized congregation, made up of about a dozen smaller churches. Each of the smaller churches has a particular focus. One church focuses on the arts, one focuses on issues of addiction and recovery. But one of the churches focuses on diversity. People must join that church in pairs. To join that church, you must join in tandem with someone who is different than you, someone who is “other.” If you are poor, you must join with someone who is rich. If you are white, you must join with someone who is black. General Naaman would join it with the slave girl. Tiger Woods might join with the beer cart girl. The purpose of that church is to create relationships that break down barriers, where people live with and learn from each other. Rich learning from poor, educated learning from uneducated, old learning from young, powerful learning from powerless.

I have many friends here at First Unitarian Universalist Church. Kathyrn Govier. Brent Baldwin. Donna and Derek Howard. Carol Ginn and several others were in class that I led at UT. It’s really a pleasure to be among so many friends this this morning. I have long been an admirer of this congregation. I am honored to be invited into this pulpit again this morning. With all of those pleasantries aside, let me say, Maybe, in some way, First Unitarian Universalist Church is like General Naaman. You’re smart, you’re well-educated, you’re important, you’re wealthy. You’re powerful in this city. You’re the “somebodies.”

But maybe you have a leprosy of sorts as well.

I know this congregation has gone through a long period of soul-searching, self-evaluation, internal examination. That is important. You are building bridges to the future and having vision-values-and-missions meeting. You’ve had consultants and committees and coffee conversations. Those things may be helpful. But make sure you aren’t just putting a Band-Aid over your leprosy. As you think about your future as a church, are you willing to listen to the nobodies? Are you willing to hear the powerless? Are you willing to load up a wagon-full of gold to follow the advice of the slave girl?

The first three principles of the Unitarian Universalist Association are impressive. The first three UU principles say that you affirm and promote: the inherent worth and dignity of every person; justice, equity and compassion in human relations; acceptance of one another…

Do you really? Do you really affirm the inherent worth of every person? Earlier, I mentioned Sarah Palin and Barack Obama. Do you really affirm the worth of both of them?

Or, what if this slave girl walked off the pages of Second Kings into First UU? What if she was a poor, immigrant who had suffered at the hands of a brutal government? What if she didn’t speak your language? What if she had never heard of yoga or philosophical inquiry or the yew grove moon ritual? I know you would give her canned goods, and you’d probably hire her to clean your home, but would you affirm her inherent worth as a member of this congregation?

Would you make her a Trustee if she’d never heard of Robert’s Rules of Order? Are you really compassionate in all your relations? The second principle says you are. Or do you try to out-vote each other, out-maneuver each other, out-talk each other? What if you gave up strategic planning and, instead, squatted out on the sidewalk with a big, banged-up aluminum pot of warm water and washed each other’s hands – or maybe even your feet – as a sign and symbol of compassion and caring?

You accept one another. Principle three says so. But, do you really? Would you accept the beer cart girl, as readily as you would accept a sociology professor? Would you accept a crack addict living under a bridge, as readily as you would accept that cute young couple that drives their new Prius past that bridge every day? Would you accept the day laborer named Raphael who doesn’t speak much English, as readily as you would accept the activist who has appointed herself to speak on Raphael’s behalf?

General Naaman, with his leprosy, loaded up a wagon of gold to go to find Elisha to see if the prophet can cure him of his disease. So, what happened? Was the slave girl right? Was Naaman cured? Did he find the prophet? What did he do with all that gold? Did the “nobody” become a “somebody”?

Well, you’ll have to log on to your Blackberries or your IPhones, or dust off the Bible that’s on your shelf, or run down to Book People and buy one and read for yourself the rest of the story. The ending is right there in the Book of Kings.

Which brings up another question: What about those kinds of people? People who read ancient faith stories like Second Kings, people who own a Bible or a Koran? Do you accept them? Do you affirm their faith journey? Do you promote their worth and dignity?

People who think stories of slave girls and generals might have meaning for you and your church on this day? Because you never know, the beer cart girl may just have good advice for Tiger Woods. And the slave girl just might cure your leprosy. And the voice of the nobodies may just have the word you need to hear.

A Government by the People

by Posted in Audio available, Guest Speakers, Mark Skrabacz, Sermons

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Rev. Mark Skrabacz

July 4, 2010

A Government by the People – Reflections on the responsibilities of our freedom

About patriotism George McGovern said, “The highest patriotism is not a blind acceptance of official policy, but a love of one’s country deep enough to call her to a higher plain.” Thomas Paine’s plea to move beyond the pale of a Sunshine Patriot in “The Crisis” is about as eloquent as it gets. He wrote: “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.”

What do we do with our freedom? Many of us question the influence of our liberty at any cost on the world stage. Who here has concerns about our covert and overt operations in our attempts to bring freedom and democracy to countries in areas where we stand to lose our access to natural resources and political clout?

Recent polls declaring our population’s dissatisfaction and distrust of our government are very interesting. I wonder how you feel about our present government and situations that have come to the fore in the last 18 months. How about the 8 years before? Did anyone poll you to ascertain your level of satisfaction and trust? Are you in agreement with these current polls? This distrust in government seems a bit odd given the evidence of people’s disinterest in and lack of knowledge about our system of government. A succession of opinion polls have revealed that a majority of Americans are unable to name a single branch of government – not legislative, not judicial, not executive. Nor can a majority describe the Bill of Rights, which helps explain why the Patriot Act was so easily swallowed by most Americans. More than two-thirds do not know the substance of that landmark Supreme Court case, Roe v. Wade – perhaps the most polarizing judicial decision of the last 40 years. Nearly half of all adult Americans do not know that states have two senators, and three quarters do not know the length of a senate term. More than 50 percent of Americans cannot name their representatives; 40 percent cannot name either of their senators.

American educator and author Mortimer Adler, wrote that citizenship is the highest office in our government. All other offices – president for instance, or chief justice of the Supreme Court – are the instruments by which we, the people, govern ourselves. The government of the United States resides in us, “we, the people.” What resides in Washington D.C. is merely the administration of the government. We recognize this fact when, after a presidential election, we say that we have changed one administration for another. When the administration changes, the government does not change. That’s because the principle rulers of our nation, the citizens, are the permanent rulers, whereas the administration of the government is only temporary.

This is the meaning of our freedom. That “we, the people” have become our own rulers, the power behind the administration of our government. I remember traveling in Europe in Autumn of 2004 at the time leading up to the Presidential election. My European friends continually questioned me as to why I and we Americans were keeping the federal administration in power. In answer to their queries as to how this could be, I could only retort with examples of our two party system gone awry and how politics and lobbying and money had their influences far beyond the pale of the single citizen and his or her one vote. I felt the frustration that perhaps some of you did, especially when November 2 rolled around and the administration was given another 4 years. That motivated me to work during the next few years, attending my precinct caucus in 2008 and personally contributing money and time to elect someone I felt more connected to and whose policies more closely reflected my own.

Regardless of our political preferences, it is sometimes difficult to remember that in our system of government the president is not a dictator, but actually works for the citizens and is limited by the Constitution. Today we must be reminded that we, the people are the ruling class! “Citizen” is the highest office under the U.S. Constitution. All other offices are secondary. Perhaps some of our citizenry are asleep at the wheel when it comes to accountability for what “our government” is doing.

This brings to mind the slogan, “My country right or wrong!” Remember seeing it on bumper stickers and hearing it shouted in the early 70s? This simple phrase was used to polarize a generation during the Vietnam Conflict. History reveals that it was probably first stated as a toast by Commodore Stephen Decatur, Jr., who was an American naval officer notable for his heroism in the Barbary Wars and in the War of 1812. He was the youngest man to reach the rank of captain in the history of the United States Navy, and the first American celebrated as a national military hero who had not played a role in the American Revolution. Decatur said, “Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations, may she always be in the right, but right or wrong, our country!” There’s another saying from Carl Schurz, who was a Union Army general and later served as U.S. Senator from Missouri, and then as Secretary of the Interior. Schurz said, “My country right or wrong: When right to be kept right. When wrong, to be put right!”

As citizen-patriots we love our country, and when the administration is leading the country in the wrong direction, we need the humility to admit it, and the courage to put it right again! As citizens we have the duty to do so.

Citizens come in all shapes and sizes, colors and preferences. One complains that our government officials are proceeding along the worst course of action, flies a flag on all national holidays and sports a “Support Our Troops” ribbon on his car. Another donates to her political party, never passes up an opportunity to vote and sports a “Dissent is the Highest Form of Patriotism” bumper sticker on her car. The relative patriotism of either is pretty much dependent upon your sympathy with their points of view. They have equal claims to patriotismÉ up to a point.

If we hope to gain more out of being an American than patriotic fervor, and seek to be more active Unitarian Universalists, than we must step outside of the “club mentality” and engage in an endeavor Emmanuel Kant emphasized with his students two and a half centuries ago. It was absolutely integral to the development of his philosophical views. Kant said, “Think for yourselves!” “Have the courage to make use of your own understanding.” This speaks to our motivation, that quality which most of us have little ability to understand in others, much less in ourselves.

Let’s look at our two patriots again. Many of us might assume the first gentleman is the worst sort of patriot. But let’s assume he questions the course of action of our government officials because he has been following developments closely from a variety of sources, reading up on specific history and spent a great deal of time agonizing over what the right course of action is, and only after such reflection, he complains.

The second patriot supports her chosen political party and always votes along party lines because that’s the way she’s always done things. It doesn’t matter who is on the ballot so long as she checks off the right box concerning party affiliation. Voting to her is a privilege without any correlating responsibilities.

I don’t want to judge others without some understanding of their motivation. I want to look more deeply and ask what makes them tick.

Beloved community, we may celebrate our freedom today, but there is much to do to fulfill the promise of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. For example, we still have not achieved justice for the First Nations of our land. And we are in the midst of a passionate, yet unofficial, Immigration debate about people who are sometimes referred to as “undocumented workers,” and by others as “illegal aliens.”

And we face another threat – the power of corporations that have all of the rights of “citizens” but apparently none of the limitations. With massive wealth, they are able to purchase “free speech” through the media to such an extent that they have far more power to influence the outcome of elections than real citizens have. Now the Supreme Court, with newly appointed members, has decided that purchased speech is “free speech” and cannot be limited.

The promises of the Declaration of Independence – that all men are created equal, and possess certain inalienable rights – are difficult promises to fulfill. Yet this is the promise of our America. Our government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed. We have, simply because we are human beings, the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. As citizens, we are the rulers of our nation. We believe today that these promises are not just for white male property owners, as they were at the time of the early American republic. These are promises for all women and men. It is our hope that in time such rights will be seen as the natural rights of all people the world over. In the meantime, we still have work to do to fulfill these promises right here in our own land.

One last thought. In the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson wrote that “the laws of nature and nature’s God” entitled people to these inalienable rights. Jefferson, Washington, Madison, Franklin, Adams all believed in God. The folks on the Religious Right are correct when they remind us of this fact. At the same time, they were not fundamentalist or even orthodox Christians. They were all deists, dissenters, or religious liberals of one sort or another, by the standards of most Americans of their time. A few, like Patrick Henry, were fairly orthodox; a few, like Thomas Paine, were so radical as to be anti-Christian. Jefferson, a deist, declared himself to be a Unitarian. John Adams was a member of a church that became Unitarian during his lifetime, and he is buried in that church, the First Parish Unitarian Universalist in Quincy, Massachusetts – as is his wife, First Lady Abigail Adams, and his son, President John Quincy Adams, and his wife, First Lady Louisa Catherine Adams. Two presidents and two first ladies all buried in a Unitarian Universalist Church – and no other church in the United States can say that. Likewise, Washington, Franklin and Madison also held deist views. They believed in God. But they often preferred terms like “providence,” or the term Jefferson used in the Declaration, “the laws of nature and nature’s God.” That is not a biblical phrase; it is a deist phrase.

Yet the Founders were not as secular as some on the left like to think, and they were not as orthodox as some on the right like to think. As a group its fair to say that they did believe that “the laws of nature and nature’s God” had endowed us with inalienable rights. They thought religious faith was important, that it gave us morals and ethics, and that these things were necessary for good government.

But they did not want a test of faith to be required to hold political office. The Constitution makes this clear. They did not want a national religion – the Bill of Rights makes that clear. And, as the Treaty of Tripoli clearly states – it was negotiated during the Washington administration, signed by President John Adams, and ratified without controversy by the Senate in 1797 – they did not intend the United States to be a Christian nation. Rather, they wanted our nation to be a land of religious liberty and tolerance.

And while they mentioned “the laws of nature and nature’s God” and the “Creator” in the Declaration of Independence, they left God out of the Constitution.

In one of the last letters of his life, Jefferson wrote of America’s hard-won freedom from kings who used church and state together to reign over others, acting as if only monarchs could draw strength from God. On June 24, 1826, 10 days before his death, he wrote, “All eyes are open, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”

For the Founding Fathers, God’s grace was universal, not limited to royal blood. We owe a great debt to our Founders. They were not gods. They were not perfect. They believed in liberty, but many kept slaves. They believed in virtue, but most lived very complex private lives. All believed in the general idea of religion as a force for stability, but most had unconventional faiths.

George Washington refused to kneel to pray, and was not known to take communion – in fact, when a clergyman admonished Washington for not taking communion, Washington responded by ceasing to attend church. Still, he explained the American victory in the Revolution as “the hand of Providence,” going on at great length about how God had defeated the British Empire.

These complex and self-contradictory people laid the groundwork for much good. We hold these truths to be self evident! We have many promises to live up to. May we have the wisdom to fulfill the promise of the Founders, to achieve the blessings of liberty, justice and peace; and may we have the strength to pass on these blessings to future generations.

Being an American can help us live our UU principles and being UU can help us achieve what James Bryce expresses so beautifully. “Our country is not the only thing to which we owe our allegiance. It is also owed to justice and to humanity. Patriotism consists not in waving the flag, but in striving that our country shall be righteous as well as strong.”

Environmentalism and a Culture of Caring – An Earth Day message

by Posted in Audio available, Guest Speakers, Mark Skrabacz, Sermons

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Mark Skrabacz

Pastor – UU Church of the Hill Country

April 18, 2010

One morning, long, long ago—in fact, 120 million years ago, something incredible happened here on Earth: The first flower ever to appear on the planet opened up to receive the rays of the sun. Prior to this momentous event, the planet had been covered in vegetation for millions of years but none had ever before flowered. I imagine that this first flower probably didn’t survive for long, since conditions were not quite yet favorable for a widespread flowering to occur. One day, however, such conditions came about.  A critical threshold was reached, and our planet became filled with an explosion of color and scent.  It was an evolutionary transformation in the life of plants and all life.

Much later, flowers would come to play an essential part in the evolution of consciousness of another species: us!  Think about it: over the years, flowers have provided inspiration and insight to countless artists, poets, teachers, and mystics.  In the New Testament, for example, Jesus, himself, tells us to contemplate the flowers and learn from them how to live. And the Buddha is said to have once given a “silent sermon” during which he held up a flower and simply gazed at it.  After a while, one monk began to smile. It is said that this monk was the only one who had understood the sermon. According to legend, that smile (which has been interpreted over the years as “awakening”), that smile was handed down by twenty-eight successive masters and became the origin of Zen.

So it is no accident that flowers are included in so much Buddhist art.  Seeing the beauty in a flower can awaken humans, however briefly, to the beauty that is an essential part of our own innermost being, as the Buddha called it, our original face — our true nature.

This is one of the reasons why many of us like to garden and work with plants. They are serene and their energy is infectious.

This is all described by Eckhart Tolle in his book, A New Earth.  Tolle raises the possibility that important religious teachers like the Buddha and Jesus were some of humanity’s “early flowers,” so to speak. That is to say, they were our precursors. They were rare and precious beings who were as revolutionary in their day as was that first flower 120 million years ago.  And when they appeared on Earth, conditions were not yet favorable for widespread comprehension of their messages.  This, argues Tolle, is because humanity wasn’t evolved enough, hadn’t yet reached a critical threshold of understanding to grasp the teachings.  Thus, these great teachers were largely misunderstood by their peers.

This raises the question:  are we more evolved now, some 2,000-2,500 years since the Buddha and Jesus were alive?  How many of us think that we are?  Although this evolutionary growth of consciousness has seemed to come in fits and spurts—and even seems to regress at times.

In these days of population growth and climate change, of industrialization and shrinking natural habitats, the question becomes whether or not are we evolving quickly enough to preserve life as we know it?

I want to be clear: this is not going to be a doomsday Earth Day sermon.  Rather, I want to share with you this morning why it is that I am feeling hopeful in spite of the many problems threatening the health and future of our Mother Earth.

Let me start with the assertion that we already possess the technical knowledge, the communication tools, the ability to educate our fellow humans about population control, and the material resources to grow enough food, ensure clean air and water, and meet the rational energy needs of all of us.  We have everything we need to survive and thrive for generations to come. Everything, that is, except for the required shift of consciousness that will inspire us to implement changes on a global scale.  Many of us are still plagued by the old habits and understandings that have caused the mess in which we now find ourselves.

“The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.” Thus began the famed astronomer Carl Sagan’s majestic 1980 television series, Cosmos. The epic grandeur of Sagan’s Cosmos—suffused with “billions upon billions” of planets, stars, and galaxies—captivated the imagination of viewers everywhere. But despite the almost sacred reverence for existence that permeated the series, some still took issue with its strictly scientific bias, finding little room for the numinous or the transcendent in Sagan’s naturalistic worldview.

Fifteen years later, the integral philosopher Ken Wilber issued an 800-page response to concerns such as these. Titled Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, Wilber’s grand tome argued for a more holistic conception of the universe—one that would honor the profound revelations of science and religion alike. He called the Universe “the Kosmos” (with a “K” from the Greek). So when some use the term “Kosmos,” with a “k”, it’s not only to affirm our appreciation for Sagan’s extraordinary universe but also to restore the spiritual depth and transcendent mysticism that the ancient Greek philosophers, who coined the word, duly acknowledged and revered.

Perhaps a more realistic synthesis of the two comes from renowned systems thinker Gregory Bateson,

“If you put God outside and set him vis-a-vis his creation, and if you have the idea that you are created in his image, you will logically and naturally see yourself as outside and against the things around you.  And as you arrogate all mind to yourself (Arrogate, from the latin arrogatus defined as claiming or seizing without justification.) Continuing with Bateson: as you arrogate all mind to yourself, you will see the world around you as mindless and therefore not entitled to moral or ethical consideration.  The environment will seem to be yours to exploit.  Your survival unit will be you and your folks or conspecifics against the environment of other social units, other races, and the brutes and vegetables.  If this is your estimate of your relation to nature and you have an advanced technology, your likelihood of survival will be that of a snowball in hell.  You will die either of the toxic by-products of your own hate, or simply of overpopulation and overgrazing.” Sounds daunting and all to familiar.

Here is the good news: although still relatively small, there is a rapidly growing percentage of humanity that is experiencing a shift in consciousness that many deem necessary if we are going to survive as a human species.  Some associate the shift to the theories and proofs of quantum physics.  Others attribute it to the emergence of the internet—which has brought connections and ideas into our homes from all over the world — our global village. Still others see it as a natural result of the end of imperialism or of the 2500 year epoch of the dark ages.  I personally think that all of these things are having their impact.  Just go to any bookstore and you’ll to find a number of books on the subject, some written by notable scholars such as Joanna Macy and David Korten.

These two writers differ greatly in their fields of expertise—Joanna Macy is a Buddhist scholar, and David Korten is an expert in business and economics.  But both are currently telling us the same thing: that we are now living in a defining moment in the course of our history. That the era of cheap oil is ending, climate change is undeniably real, and economies can no longer rest on the unsustainable foundation of financial and environmental debt.  Out of necessity, they tell us, we are collectively entering a new era.  We are moving away from the life-killing political economy birthed by the Industrial Revolution and we’re moving towards a sustainable, life-enhancing political economy that exists in harmony with the Earth.  They both refer to it by the same name.  They call it “The Great Turning.” Perhaps you’ve heard of it.

Simply put, this concept of The Great Turning encompasses all the actions currently being taken to honor, care for and preserve life on Earth these days—and there are lots of them.  But it is more than these, too.  It involves a new understanding of who we are and what we need to be happy.  In large numbers, people are learning the falsehood of the old paradigm that there is an isolated, competitive, solid self.   In its stead, we are beginning to embrace a new paradigm in which our selfish and solid separateness is seen for what it really is: an illusion.  We are discovering our inter-connectedness to everything, our mutual belonging in the web of life.  So despite centuries of mechanistic Newtonian conditioning, we are slowly learning to name, once again, this world—and everything in it—as sacred, as whole.

Whether these understandings come through Gaia theory, systems theory, chaos theory, or through liberation theology, shamanic practices, the evolutionary theology of UCC minister Michael Dowd, engaged Buddhism,or even Unitarian Universalism, such insights and experiences are now freeing growing numbers of us from the grip of the industrial-corporate-growth society. They are offering us nobler goals and deeper pleasures. They are redefining our wealth and our worth, thus liberating us—finally—from compulsions to consume and control everything in sight.

To me, I view this trend as a natural emergence of the Feminine (or Yin) Principle in a world that has been strongly skewed toward the Masculine (or Yang) Principle.  But however you view it, there is no denying the fact that something is sparking a transition around the world and it is giving me hope!

That’s because one of the best aspects of this shift is that there is less room for panic or self-pity.  No, with these new understandings of who we really are, it is gratitude that generally arises, not fear.  We become grateful to be alive at this moment, when—for all the darkness around us—blessings and awakenings abound. The Great Turning helps us stay mindful and steady, helping us join hands in community to find the ways the world self-heals — like our Sanctuary Garden and Hands on Housing.  The present chaos, then, doesn’t doom us but becomes a seedbed for a better, more sacredly connected, future.

This is a very exciting time to be alive: we have so much potential; we can make such a difference!  Of course that’s not to say that these coming years will be easy.  One can always expect resistance to change, especially when it affects profitability and patterns of dominance.   No, we are now encountering times of great suffering and uncertainty.  And at times our grief will seem overwhelming—like the type of grief so many of us are currently feeling about war, and genocide, and natural disasters, and over-population, of species extinction, and so many more disasters.

But like living cells in a larger body, it is natural that we feel the trauma of our world. So today — this Earth Day — we offer some balance to the paralysis of analysis and its intense anguish that we might be feeling these days.  These responses arise from the depth of our caring and the truth of our interconnectedness with all beings. After all, “to suffer with” is the literal meaning of compassion.  And this world could use a lot more compassion.

What if we were to understand our relation to nature and our environment in sacred terms or poetic terms or, with Emerson and Thoreau, in good old American transcendentalist terms, but there is no broadly shared language with which to do this. So we are forced to resort to what is, in fact, a lower common denominator: the languages of science and bureaucracy. These languages have broad legitimacy in our culture, a legitimacy they possess largely because of the thoroughness with which they discredited religious discourse in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But many babies went out with the bath water of religious dogma and superstition. One of these was morality. Even now, science can’t say why we ought not to harm the environment except to say that we shouldn’t be self-destructive. Another of these lost sacred children was our very relation as human beings to the mystery of existence, as such. As the philosopher G. W. Leibniz famously wondered, “Why is there something rather than nothing?”

For St. Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century, this was the fundamental religious question. In the place of a medieval and renaissance relation to the world that was founded on this mystery, we have a mechanical relation that is objective and data driven. We no longer have a forest; we have “board feet.” We no longer have a landscape, a world that is our own; we have “valuable natural resources.” Avowed Christians have been slow to recall this sacred relationship to the world. For example, only recently have American evangelicals begun thinking of the environment in terms of what they call “creation care.” We don’t have to be born again to agree with evangelicals that one of the most powerful arguments missing from the 21st century environmentalist’s case is reverence for what simply IS. One of the heroes of Goethe’s Faust was a character called Care (Sorge), who showed to Faust the unscrupulousness of his actions and led him to salvation. Environmentalism has made a Faustian pact with quantitative reasoning; science has given it power but it cannot provide deliverance. If environmentalism truly wishes, as it claims, to want to “save” something—the planet, a species, itself—it needs to rediscover a common language of Care.

Here’s a valuable learning: you cannot defeat something that you imagine to be an external threat to you when it is, in fact, internal to you, when its life is your life.  The truth is, these so-called external threats are actually a great convenience to us. It is convenient that we can imagine a power beyond us because that means we don’t have to spend much time examining our own lives. And it is very convenient that we can hand the hard work of our resistance to these so-called externals over to scientists, our designated national problem solvers.

Environmentalism should stop depending solely on its alliance with science for its sense of itself. It should look to create a common language of care (a reverence for and a commitment to the astonishing fact of flowers and plants and existence) through which it could begin to create alternative principles by which we might live. As Leo Tolstoy wrote in his famous essay “My Religion,” faith is not about obedience to church dogma, and it is not about “submission to established authority.” A people’s religion are “the principles by which they live.”

I’ll close with this: The establishment of these principles by which we might live would begin with three questions. First, what does it mean to be a human being? Second, what is my relation to other human beings? And third, what is my relation to existence as such, the ongoing “miracle” that there is something rather than nothing? If the answer to these questions is that the purpose of being human is “the pursuit ofhappiness” (understood as success, which is understood as the accumulation of money); and if our relation to others is a relation to mere things (with nothing to offer but what they can do for us); and if our relation to the world is only to “resources” (that we should exploit for profit); then we should be very comfortable with the world we have. If this world goes to perdition at least we can say that we acted in “good faith.” But if, on the other hand, we answer that there should be a greater sense of self-worth in being a human, more justice in our relation to others, and more reverence for existence as a sacred Whole, then we must either live in bad faith with market-driven capitalism and other systemic “givens,” or begin describing a future whose fundamental values and whose daily activities are radically different from what we currently endure. The risk I propose, as our choir sang, is for us to rise to the nobility of a star. We should refuse to be mere functions of a system that we cannot in good conscience defend. And we should insist on living a new story, one that re-cognizes the mystery, the miracle, and the dignity of things, from flowers to frogs to forests to our fellow humans, simply because they are.

Happy Earth Day!

Excellence in Ministry

by Posted in Audio available, Guest Speakers, Sermons

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Rev. Don Southworth

Executive Director

UU Ministers Association

March 28, 2010

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

READING

From Why I Am a Unitarian Universalist

by Jack Mendelsohn

Who is a Unitarian Universalist minister?

A person who is never completely satisfied or satisfiable, never completely adjusted or adjustable, who walks in two worlds-one of things as they are, the other of things as they ought to be-and loves them both.

A UU minister is a person with a pincushion soul and an elastic heart, who sits with the happy and the sad in a chaotic pattern of laugh, cry, laugh, cry-and who knows deep down that the first time the laughter is false, or the tears are make-believe, his or her days as a real minister are over. UU ministers have dreams they can never wholly share, partly because they have some doubts about those dreams themselves and partly because they are unable adequately to explain, describe, or define what it is they think they see and understand.

A UU minister continually runs out of time, out of wisdom, out of ability, out of courage, and out of money. A UU minister is hurtable, with great responsibility and little power, who must learn to accept people where they are and go on from there. UU ministers who are worth their salt know all this, and are still thankful every day for the privilege of being what they are.

The future of the liberal church is almost totally dependent on two factors: great congregations (whether large or small) and skilled, effective, dedicated ministers. The strangest feature of their relationship is that they create one another.

SERMON

It is a joy to be with you this morning! I want to thank Janet, your excellent interim minister, for inviting me to be with you today and for the assistance and support of our service leader Valerie Sterne. Valerie told me this was her first time but I think she was just saying that to make me feel good because this is my first time in this pulpit.

As Valerie mentioned I am the Acting Executive Director of the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association. I bring greetings and tidings of hope and anticipation to you from over 1600 active and retired Unitarian Universalist ministers from around North America. As I have read your newsletter the last few months I want to affirm something that Stefan Jonasson told you in January. Many of our UUMA members will be watching you in the next few months as you continue to do the work to lay the foundation for your new minister. I expect your search committee, when the time is right, will be hearing from quite a few of them.

The UUMA’s purpose is to support and nurture excellence in ministry through, mainly, continuing education and collegiality. I have the good fortune to serve, advocate for and occasionally lead those people who – in Jack Mendelsohn’s words – are “never completely satisfied or satisfiable, never completely adjusted or adjustable, who walk in two worlds-one of things as they are, the other of things as they ought to be-and loves them both.”

While I am not sure that all of us UU ministers, always love both of those worlds, I do know that Mendelsohn has one thing absolutely correct. “The future of the liberal church is almost totally dependent on two factors: great congregations (whether large or small) and skilled, effective, dedicated ministers. The strangest feature of their relationship is that they create one another.”

This morning I want to explore with you what happens when great congregations and great ministers create one another, or, to put it another way, what needs to be in place to enjoy excellence in ministry. Excellence in ministry – what might that be?

The Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association continues to develop and strengthen programs, training, expectations and standards of conduct to nurture excellent ministers but I hope you noticed that our purpose is not to support excellent ministers but excellent ministry. Because we know – what Jack Mendelsohn and I suspect most of you know – ministry is not something that is only done by ministers; excellent ministry takes ministers, of course, but it also takes all professional religious leaders and congregation members to make it a reality.

My late colleague Suzanne Meyer wrote, “A congregation is a cooperative institution; everyone is expected to participate in the creation of community and to share the load. The operative question is not what I can get out of this, but what of myself can I give? Faith communities exist not to serve us, but to teach us how to serve.”

Ours is a shared ministry. The word ministry, in its most ancient form, simply meant to serve. Gordon McKeeman, former president of Starr King School for Ministry, claims that ministry is a quality of relationship between and among human beings that beckons forth hidden possibilities and that it is inviting people into deeper, more constant, more reverent relationship with the world and one another. If we hold his words and the original definition of ministry to be true, ministry is to serve and bring forth the best in each other.

Defining ministry is easy; at least when we compare it with defining excellence. In December 2008 the UUA convened a summit on Excellence in Ministry. Ministers, educators, denominational and lay leaders were invited to reflect on the issues and challenges we face in achieving excellence in ministry. Daniel Aleshire, Executive Director of the Association of Theological Schools, told the group that excellence was a hot topic among religious denominations and seminaries representing every theological perspective. He said in his keynote address, titled The Tyranny of Excellence, “Being committed to excellence doesn’t make excellence into tyranny, of course. But if these many different schools, with their very different capacities, visions of the world, and strategies for theological education, can all use “excellence” as the descriptor of their identity, then it must have a very plastic definition. That is the tyranny. I have decided that “excellence” is one of those terms that everybody affirms because nobody knows what it means.”

We all know what mediocrity in ministry means. Hopefully we have not experienced it very often. But excellence, excellence is a little bit harder to define. Perhaps defining excellence is akin to what the Supreme Court declared when they were asked to define pornography decades ago. We known it when we see it. Or in the case of excellent ministry, we know it when we experience it. When we connect with something greater than ourselves, when we are transformed by serving others, when we find meaning and purpose and create a world with more compassion and love.

In the early 1980’s Tom Peter’s book, In Search of Excellence, was a rage in the corporate world. Six million people bought the book and I was one of them. Peters was recently asked to define excellence in a time when so many businesses in this country are falling apart, he responded, “The 1982 excellence was a static experience. But real excellence is always a moving target.”

Knowing that excellence always is a moving target, a target that we never really know we have reached and knowing that excellence in ministry is usually found in places which cannot be measured – our hearts, minds and souls; I offer you some lessons I have learned about co-creating excellence in ministry with the congregations I have served the last ten years. As you prepare for your new minister I hope you find them helpful.

The first lesson is that the mission and health of the congregation is the most important work and ministry that ministers and congregation members must be about. -. I am pleased to see that you are are doing the work of revisiting your mission and asking questions such as “what is our saving message?” Too often our congregations, ministers and religious professionals forget the mission of the congregation and focus too much on individuals and not enough on the health and well-being of the congregation’s mission. This is one of the reasons that we have not grown as a religious movement and is one of our greatest causes of conflict in our congregations. Ministers need the freedom and courage to challenge congregations into living the church’s mission and congregations need to expect their ministers and their members to pay attention to the mission of the congregation more than their own satisfaction.

My colleague Julie Ann Silberman-Bunn says this well. “A church is not a place where you are catered to and pampered. Our congregations are religious communities, sanctuaries for those in need, safe heavens, and respites from the chaos of the world. Churches neither expect nor guarantee satisfaction.” Excellence in ministry and mission aren’t about satisfaction they are about transformation – in ourselves, in our congregations, and in our communities.

Lesson #2 – A congregation must always remember they are both a sanctuary from the world and a sanctuary for the world. Every congregation is first a place for people to come to heal, to rest, to connect with something greater than themselves. The world is often a difficult place and we all need a place to come home to where we are known and loved for who we are and not what we do. But once we find a religious community like this we must not forget that we are not simply a sanctuary from the world but we are a sanctuary for the world as well. Congregations spend far too much time dealing with internal challenges and issues and far too little time reaching out to the world. A healthy congregation will not only have a care team for its members but will have a care team for the members of its community; a vibrant congregation will not only have a membership team to assist and integrate new people into the life of the congregation, they will also have a team and strategy for how to serve more people outside the doors of the congregation.

Reaching out to another is at the core of the religious life. Being in community with other congregations, other faith traditions does not only add new perspectives and learning to the congregation, it gives congregations the joy of serving and teaching someone else.

Lesson #3 – Remember that we are Universalists too. In 1961 two religious traditions came together as one. Our new name put the Unitarians in front of the Universalists and for most of our congregations Unitarianism is the primary theology and the main identity they carry. We call ourselves Unitarians far more than Universalists. In most of our congregations we seem to value the intellectual stimulation and rational debate of our Unitarian heritage far more than the heart centered passion and love of our Universalist faith. But excellence in ministry, especially in the multi-cultural world of the 21st century, must speak to the body, mind and spirit. Marlin Lavenhaur of All Souls in Tulsa Oklahoma, Senior Minister of one of the largest and most diverse congregations in the country, says he is not sure if Unitarian Universalism will survive the 21st century but he knows Universalism will. If we truly want to be more diverse and reach out to more people with the saving message of our faith Universalism will be far more attractive than Unitarianism. Embrace mystery, redefine God, language and worship that unites and moves the heart and the head.

Lesson #4 – Covenant is not optional. To build the beloved community and practice excellent ministry, we must make promises to each other about what we value and how we wish to be with each other. We are a covenantal and not a creedal faith. If we are to grow in our spiritual and emotional maturity we must agree on how we will be together. Every thing does not go. Being part of something larger than ourselves means that sometimes we must sacrifice something for the greater good. Covenants are not rules of behavior; they are promises about how we will be in relationship with another and how we wish to be challenged and comforted into being better selves and a better community.

Covenants – when done right – create and nurture trust; and trust, or rather lack of trust – is one of the shadow sides of Unitarian Universalism that too often quietly destroys the morale and connections of a congregation. We do not trust our leaders and our leaders do not trust us. Instead of assuming best intentions we fear and criticize those who are paid and volunteer to lead us. When we speak about the benefits of building and taking part in a religious community it is easy to get carried away with the ideals of what a community can be and forget the realities of how difficult building, and taking part, in a community truly is. But nobody said that congregational life – or excellence in ministry – would be easy. But it is worth it.

Lesson #5 – Be more religious and be more spiritual. To be religious – by definition – is to be bound together. It is to be aware of the sacred and to be willing to manifest the holy more fully in our lives. It means participating in a community and learning how to be guided and how to teach on the path of life. Spirituality is a commitment to embracing and enhancing spirit – literally, the breath of life. Religion without spirituality is community, rules and tradition that become meaningless and even lifeless. Spirituality without religion can become self-centered and bereft of connection and caring for the world around us. The words in your vision – “as an inclusive religious and spiritual community” – tell me you understand this. Of course, the challenge is to keep on living it.

Lesson #6 – Spiritual practice is foundational to Unitarian Universalism and congregational life. Spiritual practice is the regular act of doing something – hopefully every day – that connects us with the spirit, the sacredness, the joy, the depth that lives within and outside of us. Ministry – and especially excellent ministry – demands we have a deep well to draw from. Spiritual practice, drinking from the springs that quench our thirst, is essential. Two fundamental spiritual practices are gratitude and generosity. There are many ways to acknowledge and celebrate these two both in our lives and our congregations but I have seen that the congregations and individuals who are able to cultivate and create these spiritual practices live happier, more meaningful lives. Regular spiritual practice and sharing the fruits and techniques of that practice with others in your congregation should be an expectation of membership and if it happened would transform not only every life but every congregation as well.

Lesson #7 – Cultivate and develop leaders. To practice excellent ministry, to create the beloved community, the congregation that transforms lives, that makes a difference in the lives of those in the larger community demands strong, compassionate, competent leadership. Leadership development, training and support is not an optional practice it must be a fundamental priority of any congregation. To serve in leadership, to assist and support your leaders, paid and unpaid, to spend money to make sure people get the best training they can is what every member and every minister must to be committed to. It is not okay for nominating committees to have to ask 20 people to find one who will serve, it is not okay for congregations to elect members to serve on boards and not give them the skills and tools to be effective, it is not okay for religious professionals to not be held accountable to leadership and spiritual development plans and/or not being given the budget to do them right.

Lesson #8- Ministers are not your friends so treat them better than that. The congregant/minister relationship is a unique one. Intimate without being very close; formed in large part by past experiences and projections that have nothing much to do with who the minister really is. Whoever you call next year to be your new minister, they will have some of the stuff that delivers excellence in ministry and so will you. And you both will have stuff that gets in your way. The challenge will be what will you do with and for each other to bring out the best in both of you. Shower your minister with gratitude and generosity and most importantly the gift of telling him or her your truth. Don’t expect her to be your friend – do expect him to tell you the truth – as they see it – and not only the truth that will make you feel comforted all the time. Take a risk. Give cards and presents even when it is not a holiday or birthday. Be more generous and give more money so that your minister – and all your paid religious professionals – know you are as serious about this place as they are. And most importantly create a congregation that enables and supports excellent ministry in all its glorious forms.

Good luck in your work. May you know the peace, joy and transformation that ministry, especially excellent ministry, can bring into your life and the lives of others. May it be so. Amen.

Freedom with responsibility

by Posted in Audio available, Guest Speakers, Sermons

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Rev. Kathleen Ellis

Co-minister of Live Oak Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin

Ministerial Settlement Representative

March 14, 2010

Thanks so much for your warm hospitality! I’d like to express special appreciation to the Reverend Dr. Janet Newman and the Worship Committee for turning the pulpit over to me this morning. Together you have learned a great deal, you have been through tempest and storm, and you look ahead to further challenges in ministry. It’s an awesome task, but the rewards are great.

I am also grateful to the Rev. John Weston, Transitions Director, who has provided much of this information and excellent training for representatives like me. We are fortunate to have him as a guide for the search process. As for me, it is a real pleasure to be here, just across town from my home.

You have been through incredible transition and upheaval over the past year or so, yet here you are, poised on the threshold of still more change. The process for calling a settled minister has been honed through generations of experience for the benefit of congregations and ministers alike.

[Describe the difference between the search for a settled minister and the selection process for an interim. Clarify that I will be neither of them-just a guest preacher; just a consultant.]

The freedom we enjoy as Unitarian Universalists extends to multiple areas of congregational life. We are free to follow our spiritual paths where they may lead, free to decide whether and how to support the church with our resources of time and money, and free to call our own ministers. Other congregations and denominations revolve around holy scripture, sacred creeds, and lectionaries that recommend the readings and themes for worship. They seek a spiritual depth that comes when the ongoing study of familiar text sinks into one’s psyche over time and this is a great spiritual practice. Have you ever fallen in love with a poem and read it over and over until it seeped into your very bones? That’s the spiritual depth I’m talking about.

Traditional churches have doctrine to defend their beliefs and practices. They have bishops and hierarchies of authority to whom the minister is responsible for what he says, as well as how he conducts himself. Unitarian Universalist churches have very few of these controls. We have the freedom and the responsibility to govern our own affairs plus plenty of traditions of our own!

Some of you may wonder about Unitarian Universalist headquarters in Boston, our District Executive Susan Smith, your consultants Peter Steinke, Stefan Jonasson, Walter Pearson, or even me, your Ministerial Settlement Representative. Do we represent authority and control? Actually, we represent service to you, a member congregation of the Southwestern Conference and the Unitarian Universalist Association. You have autonomy and independence, but also the good sense to call in consultants as appropriate.

As for ministry, there is no external control over the content of sermons or the religious education that goes on here. Only the most out-of-bounds ethical behavior by a minister that is brought to the attention of the Ministry and Professional Leadership Staff Group, will warrant any attention.The Unitarian Universalist Association works for you, more like a trade association that forms a network for the benefit of its members. You the congregation have the power and the authority!

A great deal hangs on the choice of a minister. Your minister has enormous power in setting the tone and direction of worship, and even the tone and direction of the congregation. And you, the members of the congregation, have an opportunity to call a minister who best fits your mission and vision. The minister serves at your pleasure for as long as he or she remains in covenant with you. It is a sacred trust you hold for the people who are not even here yet. Ministers come and ministers go, but the congregation remains.

All of us are called in one way or another to serve the highest ideals we can achieve. Some of us are called to serve as professional ministers, with an intention to forge a bond with a congregation over the long term. You as a congregation will have a chance to call a minister presented by your search committee after hours of careful deliberation. I know that Austin in an attractive place to live and this is the largest UU congregation in town, so I am fairly confident that the search committee will consider a dozen or more ministerial prospects.

Settled ministers may have the good fortune to bless the children, then the grandchildren; celebrate their coming of age; officiate at their weddings; stand at the threshold of dying and death; partner with you in the ministry of the church. The letter of agreement between minister and congregation is open ended, to allow for the fullness of relationships to develop over time.

Jack Mendelsohn once said “The future of the liberal church is almost totally dependent on two factors: great congregations (whether large or small) and effective, dedicated ministers. The strangest feature of their relationship is that they create one another.”

Your Search Committee of 9 members will represent you as a congregation, selected with the greatest of care. Basically, you will want people who represent the congregation as a whole, not just special interests. In other words, you want Senators instead of lobbyists who advocate for one program like religious education for children or a particular social justice cause. You want people who are thoroughly steeped in Unitarian Universalism. You want people who have the time to spend.

Committee members can expect to work hard-about 400 hours over the course of a year-although someone told me recently that 400 hours is an understatement. But however daunting their task, a good Search Committee will reap spiritual benefits along the way. It’s an opportunity that comes along only rarely. If you are interested, find out from your Board about the application process.

Once the committee is in place, the rest of you will want to support its work by answering questions, filling out surveys, sharing your dreams for ministry, and preparing the way for new leadership. On rare occasions a committee decides not to make a recommendation according to their original timeline because they have not found the right match. However, the greatest risk is to call someone who is not a good match for who you are and where you hope to go.

A secondary risk follows when anxiety about the process gets the upper hand. Anxiety can generate risk-aversion and self-doubt to the point of paralysis. Look on this as an adventure! The committee will have wonderful ministers to consider and their challenge will be to narrow the field.

The Search Committee as a whole should get to know the congregation as thoroughly and intimately as possible so that they become a microcosm of the congregation. When they do the work of culling through ministerial records, when they conduct interviews of interested ministers, and when they meet ministerial pre-candidates in person, the gifts and qualities of Search Committee members will stand in for the congregation, as though all of you were in the room.

You as a congregation will benefit from this kind of representation. Your trust in the Search Committee will become a healing balm not just to the committee, but to each other and to the congregation as a body.

Freedom and liberation and the term “liberal” flow from the same stream. A liberal education gives us a broad appreciation for literature, history, public speaking, music, philosophy, and mathematics. Liberal arts and liberal religion have been closely related. Both of them aim to crack open our minds to new possibilities, new horizons, and escape from narrowness of vision, ignorance, and prejudice.

When I was a young woman, the best thing that could have happened to me was to participate in an international Girl Scout encampment in North Carolina, then to move from a southern upbringing in Shreveport to college in Missouri. My liberation from childhood had begun.

The late Rev. Forrest Church points out that the Church as an institution is conservative by nature. It forms boundaries, maintains traditions, and in association with other churches, provides a stabilizing force in society. On the other hand, it models and incorporates liberal values such as “hospitality, neighborliness, forgiveness, compassion, and tender loving care.” [from God and Other Famous Liberals, p. 122]

You would do well to select a minister who is generous in spirit and deeply immersed in the task of being and becoming a whole person. Technical expertise is not enough. To know how to preach a sermon or facilitate a group; to excel in scholarship or organizational development; all these are elements of ministry-pastor, prophet, rabbi, preacher, storyteller, midwife, juggler. But ministry is even more about the whole person, knowing what it is to be human and recognizing the humanness in others-that everyone is a juggler!

As you get to know your new settled minister, you will grow in the depth of your relationship. The minister may challenge your preconceptions and call you to account, and both of you will grow spiritually over time. With the right chemistry, your spiritual growth will be an inspiration to your minister, who will be the better for it. The congregation and the minister will shape each other.

Ministers are called to serve their Higher Power and to serve their congregations with their entire being. It doesn’t matter so much whether they are theists or atheists or any other theology; their task is to honor yours and to help you reach your fullest potential. To paraphrase Peter Lee Scott, ministry requires scholarship, yet it must be grounded in people’s lives. It is a social profession, yet often a lonely one. It involves finding meaning and making meaning; acknowledging human frailty while trying to rise above it; providing a shoulder to cry on, yet sometimes being the one who cries. Ministry is what you will do-together.

The ministerial search process has come about through years of experience in best practices, and in the past decade the process has also become much more open, thanks to technology. Both ministers and congregations prepare a record that is posted on the web. Every UU minister who reads your profile and is interested in checking you out further can indicate interest with a simple click on the keyboard. In the old days, the Transitions Director had to consider all the congregations and ministers looking for each other, play the role of matchmaker, and send a list of potential candidates to the congregations.

Now it’s more like “Match.com” or “EHarmony.com.” You are free to present yourselves as honestly as you can, and nothing stands in the way of a minister who likes your profile. Likewise, every Unitarian Universalist minister in search must answer a series of questions through the settlement web site such as why they are seeking a ministry and what kind; how they wish to work with staff and volunteers; and a mistake they have made and how they approached it.

Here’s a typical timetable: Once the search committee is formed, they will go on a retreat for team building, bonding, understanding each other’s personalities and skills, and deciding on a process for making difficult decisions. Then they will launch surveys and group meetings to find out what you want in a minister. Alas, no minister can walk on water or leap tall buildings, so you will need to set priorities. Remember the good qualities of your previous ministers as well as characteristics that seem important for the next decade or more.

The search committee will absorb all this information and post a congregational record on the web by Oct. 31. While they are waiting for interested ministers to indicate interest in serving you, they will put together a packet of information about you, various aspects of congregational and spiritual life, lots of photographs, and info about the City of Austin. This is typically ready by the end of November.

At that point, the process enters a phase of confidentiality. The committee will start reviewing the Ministerial Records of prospective candidates, exchange packets with the most promising ones, conduct phone interviews, and narrow the field to 3 or 4. Each of the pre-candidates will meet with the search committee for a weekend of interviews and a sermon at a neutral pulpit. The committee will sift through all available information, check references, and receive an interpretive summary from the Transitions Office that reflects everything in the minister’s file. In this way, any important information that is known to the UUA will be provided to the committee.

The committee then will decide on the one minister who is the best match for this congregation-someone with solid experience, a good track record, and a religious leader who can work with you toward your dreams. Ministers want a place where they themselves can learn and grow in spirit and where they can have a positive impact.

Be forewarned, however: No minister, however well qualified, can do this work alone. You need a mission and you need commitment. Unless you as a congregation, along with your minister, understand why you are here and what you are called to be, the best ideas and any amount of “busyness” will keep you static and uninviting. Then you need to own that mission, take responsibility for it, and carry it out into the world.

That’s what will get you excellence in ministry. The quality of worship, education, care and outreach will rise accordingly. Remember the idea of Jack Mendelsohn-that great congregations and great ministers shape each other. May you travel this transitional year with high spirits and a healthy sense of humor along the way.

Amen