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Rev. John Buehrens, Former UUA President
August 14, 2022
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
Former UUA President John Buehrens is serving us as Consulting Minister for Leadership Transitions. His sermon will be dedicated to the late Prof. Charles Harshorne, the distinguished process philosopher who was a member of our congregation.
Chalice Lighting
This is the flame we hold in our hearts as we strive for justice for everyone. This is the light we shine upon systems of oppression until they are no more. This is the warmth that we share with one another as our struggle becomes our salvation.
Call to Worship
Now let us worship together.
Now let us celebrate the sacred miracle of each other.
Now let us open our hearts, our souls, our lives to blessings both mysterious and transcendent.
Now, let us be thankful for the healing power of love, the gift of fellowship, the renewal of faith.
Not let us accept with gratitude the traditions handed down to us from those that came before and open ourselves to begin anew for those that will follow.
Now let us worship together.
Affirming Our Mission
Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.
Reading
– Rev. John Buehrens
Everything is in process. Even the seemingly solid bedrock of earth has gone through enormous changes since it was star-stuff, then magma. Nor is reality quite as the ancients saw it: changing combinations of earth, fire, water and air (or spirit). Nor is it made up chiefly of mass and space as in Newtonian physics. What seems to us to be “things” are just packets of energy, related for a time. They are events, actual occasions. So are we. Darwin, Einstein, and quantum mechanics all confirm this view of a universe in constantly process. The philosophy needed for our time is a process philosophy. If we dare to address or name Ultimate Reality, the theology we need is a process theology.
Second Reading
– Howard Zinn
Everything in history, once it has happened, looks as if it had to happen exactly that way. We can’t imagine any other. But I am convinced of the uncertainty of history, of the possibility of surprise, of the importance of human action in changing what looks unchangeable …
To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage and kindness.
What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives.
If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places — and there are so many — where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.
And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.
Sermon
ON TRUSTING THE PROCESS
A Sermon Delivered at
The First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin, Texas
Sunday, August 14, 2022
The Rev. Dr. John A. Buehrens, Past President of the UUA;
Consulting Minister on Leadership Transitions
It’s good to be here! I’ve known this congregation longer than many of you may realize. First when I was minister in Dallas in the 1980s. Then as UUA President. I remember preaching here some 25 years ago. In the front row sat your illustrious member Prof. Charles Hartshorne, then in his mid-90s. I felt honored by his presence. I knew him as America’s leading interpreter of process philosophy and theology. That afternoon, I called on him at his home. Charles had recently lost his dear wife, Dorothy. But when I raised the issue of grief, Hartshorne began to talk about being a hospital corpsman, during World War 1. About learning to accept what he could not change and trying to change what he could still effect. What a mensch! He died at 103.
He also spoke about what he had read while in Flanders, amid the carnage around him. Wordsworth. Shelley. English poets who anchored their hope in reverence for Nature and in that long arc of human history that we must try to bend toward justice. Hartshorne’s process thought, in books like Reality as Social Process, and Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes, influenced my own theology. Yet he was as much a scientist as a philosopher and felt that his very best book, was Born to Sing, grounded in scientific ornithology, and showing show that not all birdsong can be accounted for as simply establishing feeding territory or as mating behavior. Some of it, especially the dawn chorus greeting the new day, simply has to do with the joy of being alive. Which itself may help in survival. George Santayana – another philosopher with Unitarian ties – said as much in his book, Skepticism and Animal Faith.
Which reminds me of a story my friend and colleague Ken McLean tells. A congregant once asked him what he thought Unitarian Universalists had most in common. Ken answered, “Well, we’re inclined to be skeptical.” The man snapped, “I don’t believe that for a minute!”
So when I stand here, daring to preach to you “on trusting the process,” I don’t expect you to suspend all your skepticism. I think that the Creative Mystery and Process behind our shared existence deserves a certain awe, reverence and even trust. Yet not every process we human beings come up with is a creative process. Some, in fact, seem almost designed to stand in the way of progress. Just think of the many undemocratic processes built into our democracy. The privileging of small states over large in the Senate, the filibuster, gerrymandering, and laws aimed at voter suppression.
Every group or tribe, anthropologists tell us develops its own peculiar faith and fetishes.
For Americans, liberals especially, and therefore especially UUs, process becomes a bit of both. As UUA President, I sometimes impatiently quipped, as we voted to tweak our bylaws for the enth time, “Ah, how process threatens to become our most important product!” Amid debating resolutions about matters over which we had precious little real control, but on which we wanted to make our collective conscience heard.
One year, around the time I was last here in Austin – I think it was 1995, when our General Assembly was in Indianapolis, I even deliberately interrupt a deliberative process in the interest of really making a difference. The debate was over which three of many “resolutions of immediate witness” would come to floor of the Assembly. One was an issue on which I saw we were almost uniquely qualified to lead. It involved opening civil marriage to same-sex couples. For decades, we had been openly blessing such unions in our own communities. This involved advocating for a new civil right, out in the political world. It was not yet a popular cause.
“Madam Moderator,” I said to my dear colleague in leadership, the late Denny Davidoff, “May I rise to a point of personal privilege?” When she recognized me, I then invited everyone present involved in a same-sex union to join me on the platform, whether their partner was there or not. I was not among them. My wife Gwen and I have now been married for over fifty years. Yet I wanted others to see the faces of the one hundred plus UU delegates who then joined me, as their ally. That resolution then not only went on the agenda, but also passed overwhelmingly.
Predictably, some said that I had abused the process as set out in Robert’s Rules of Order. That was true. “Yet without a vision, the people perish,” as it also sayeth in scripture.
At a later General Assembly, I even said this: “I know, I know, some of you are unhappy that we aren’t growing faster. You think, like Thomas Jefferson, that every intelligent person in America should become a Uu. But think of it this way: in this age of the therapeutic, we have become the oldest, longest-lasting, most widely dispersed therapy program for people with authority hang-ups that America has ever seen!” The crowd laughed in self-recognition.
Once I even interrupted myself, during my President’s Report, to have delegates watch an ad from the Super Bowl that year. It showed a group of cowboys herding cats across a river, then gathered around an evening campfire. The leader then pulled out a lint roller, to get the cat hair off his clothes. “Yep,” he says, “it ain’t easy work, herding cats. But there ain’t no other work Ah’d rather do!” When the lights then came back up, I held up the lint roller, which I promised to hand to my successors, along with a tin cup, as symbols of the role of being UUA President. Bear that in mind. We elect a new one next year. May we and be merciful to him, her, or they.
While I’m here, I want some credit for encouraging your last senior minister, my friend Meg Barnhouse, to come here to Austin. As said to the voice of Radio Free Bubba, “Meg, honey, Austin! That place has your name on it!” She later said she had to choose between a bunch of New York banker types and a slightly drunk cowboy bunch. She chose you, friends! Be grateful! I hold her in my heart today, as I’m sure you do, wishing for her both good health and her self-deprecating good humor and creativity. God knows we all need them both.
Over the last two years, as the Covid pandemic has hit our congregations, and caused many of my colleagues to retire early, so that the “great resignation” has hit the ministry almost as hard as it has hit the restaurant industry. (With which we clergy have a great deal in common, BTW. Meg said as much in her famous piece about how working in a diner is a good preparation for ministry, saying, “Sorry: not my table, hon.”
It has made me recall what Darwin once said, “In evolution, it is not the strongest of species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but rather the ones most responsive to change.” Those who trust the process.
Tomorrow morning, or this coming week, some of you will trust the educational process enough send your children off to school. That’s a good thing! You have already trusted your Board of Trustees to bring together a team of ministers to serve – not only you, but also your transformative mission this city, this state, this nation, but in the world at large. Oddly, it all has to do with better democratic process! They are all committed to that mission. You are as well.
So this is the wisdom I would leave you with. During the year ahead, please, please do not try to micro-manage them. If you have concerns, voice them directly. I am their consultant on process of leadership transition. It is not one a rigid one, yet it does require trust, patience and direct address.
You will be working with a team of interim ministers, all dedicated to bringing out the best in your own souls and the best in the influence of this congregation and its core values on the surrounding culture, and on its regrettable and reactionary politics of oppression and exclusion.
You are free to question or even disrupt the process, if it too feels truly misguided, or missing some important point. I only ask that you have a VERY good reason for doing so. Recently I’ve been interacting with Nesan Lawrence, your President, your board, your staff. There is an openness there to hearing concerns that I hope you will trust. I know! Some of you may be saying, “Let’s just cut short all this interim process.
Believe me, the experience of the congregations throughout our larger family of faith suggests that you would be better served by taking the time to do some serious self-reflection. That’s what we don’t often do enough these days. We fire off an instant tweet, an email. Reactive, rather than thinking how best to influence the covenantal process we pledged to trust. Which is what we do when we covenant together in religious community.
At the end of this service, you will meet the three devoted UU ministers who will serve as your interim team in the months ahead. I have pledged to be their consultant on difficult issues, simply as a matter of collegial courtesy and concern. In an era when so many seem to have succumbed to the siren song of trust no one, don’t trust democracy, I ask you to give these, my reliable colleagues, at least the benefit of your skepticism. They have theirs as well, I’m sure!
Trust does have its limits. I think of many stores here in Texas that posted this warning: “In God we trust; all others pay cash.” Or Winston Churchill saying, “Democracy is the worst of all systems of government; except for all the others that have been tried.” Yet there is a greater, ever-changing Creative Process, of which we are the often critical, even whining, beneficiaries.
I say, let us give thanks that we ourselves are still in process. For if we are honest, we are not as yet the people we hope to be, nor have we yet contributed to the world around us what we might yet do. Supported by fallible, imperfect people just like ourselves – in the ongoing struggle, also imperfect, we now try to realize what Dr. King called “the Beloved Community.”
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