Has It Really Been Twenty Five Years?
Sermon by Stephen D. Edington, September 22, 1996
Reading
The Baby Boom generation is trying to come back to church. They are being led by their children--by the need to provide them with some kind of religious or moral basis for living . . .These are the ones who identified with the anti-war and civil rights movements, and who were greened by the greening of America...They were the counterculture, and in the nineties, with children of their own and careers in the establishment, are aware that the spiritual yearnings they turned eastward and inward to satisfy in the sixties are still there.
Being a good earner and consumer is suddenly not enough. The questions come with greater urgency as midlife approaches. Am I doing good as well as doing good? Am I being the example I need to be to my children? What will my life mean when I am no longer here on this planet? How can I love well? How can I heal my deep psychic wounds? How can I live my daily life with compassion, awareness, morality, and integrity? How can I reach out past my isolation and experience meaningful communion with others? These are profoundly spiritual questions, questions more of the heart than the head. Unlike the potential convert to Unitarian Universalism of past decades, these people tend not to be refugees from more orthodox religion. They do not need to rebel. They did their rebelling in the sixties. They are not looking for a refuge from Methodism, but from secularism, hedonism, and consumerism. . . .
I think that providing men, women, and children with a community of support for spiritual growth and healing is some of the most urgent and important work on the planet. It is countercultural as well in a society that devalues the unseen and is obsessed with the material and the tangible. In the sense that vast parts of the self are restored to the person who discovers the spiritual dimensions of life, it is no exaggeration to say that it is a matter of the saving of souls.
Arvid Straube (Minister of the Eno River UU Fellowship of Durhan, NC). "Spirituality of Church Growth" in Salted With Fire. Scott Alexander, editor. Skinner House Books..
Sermon
At our opening service two weeks ago I shared a little story about going back to the place where I began my career in the ministry 25 years ago this fall as a campus minister at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. To get there I'd driven over from Indianapolis on a very hot Indiana summer afternoon in June. On the morning of that same I day I'd taken part in the annual Ministry Days worship service, which is part of a two day gathering that we UU ministers have each year just before our Association's General Assembly begins. At this service there are recognitions given to ministers who are observing the 50th anniversary of their entry into the ministry, and to those who have been in it for 25 years. There are no surprises about it. If you're one of those in the 25 or 50 year class you are given a special invitation to attend months in advance. But it wasn't until I got in the room and sat down and saw my name in the program along with the other 25 year people--and then stood with those colleagues to be recognized at a certain point in the service--that the whole thing started getting real. Until then my response to the service had been along the lines of "Yeah, well, I guess I'd better show up." By the time it had ended I was more into thinking that twenty five years is a good chunk of time to invest in anything--half my life in this case: What has it been all about? Since little ol' Greencastle just happened to be a short distance away, I took the drive over so I could think about that for a bit.If you heard my story a couple of weeks ago you'll recall my return to Greencastle, Indiana proved to be reminiscent of Gertrude Stein's well known take on Oakland, California: "When you get there there's no there there." What wasn't there was any evidence that I'd ever been there. DePauw's campus ministry program had been re-named and moved to another part of the campus, and the young woman at the receptionist desk next to what had once been my office had never heard of the organization I'd once headed up. She didn't even look like she'd been born at the time I was there. Anybody I'd known in my DePauw days had either, like me, moved on--or was out of town on that particular day. So much for that.
But it was not a worthless trip. What was clear to me, as I drove back to Indianapolis, was that whatever meaning those 25 years have had is not going to be found in a stroll, or drive, down memory lane. The much more fruitful approach, I've decided, is to identify what it is I've taken from that stretch of time that can now be brought to the shared ministry in which we are each and all engaged as part of this congregation--and to which we invite those who wish to join with us and take part. I am in agreement with my UU colleague Arvid Straube when he says, "I think that providing men, women, and children with a community of support for spiritual growth and healing is some of the most urgent and important work on the planet." Such being the case, what I really want to focus on this morning is what there may be in those 25 years that does indeed have anything to do with this "urgent and important work" which beckons us all. So while I will be launching into a retrospective for the next several minutes, I hope to do it in a way that pulls the past into the present, and anticipates the future as well.
I was ordained into the ministry in the spring of 1971 in a liberal Baptist church (and that is not always an oxymoron) in Rochester, New York where I had attended seminary. Even by then I had logged a lot of miles on my religious journey--from the near fundamentalism and evangelism in which I'd been raised in southern West Virginia to the very academically liberal and socially conscious type of Protestant Christianity which characterized the theological school which I attended. Seminary was an exciting and tumultuous time. During my junior year the Black students there (the term Afro-American was still a few years off) actually shut the place down for three weeks by locking themselves into the one central building while they negotiated for certain structural changes at the administrative and faculty level that would make us truly racially inclusive at the institutional level, rather than simply at the level of the make-up of the student body. One of those students has now been a brother-in-law of mine for over 25 years, and the current President of that seminary is an Afro-American. Today those tactics from 1968 may seem questionable, but I learned something from that episode about the power of committed persons to push institutions in the direction of justice.
For those of us entering the ministry then our heroes and mentors were men like Martin Luther King, William Sloane Coffin, and Daniel Berrigan. Worthy mentors as these persons were, I'm afraid the ministry was still very much a masculine profession in those days. Be that as it may, the idea we took with us from seminary to ministry was that in addition to being a source of personal and communal nurture and transformation, religion should also be a transforming force in bringing about a more just and reconciled society; and that our most pressing social and political issues are, at base, issues of morality and spirituality.
This, I realize, is the cry that today's religious right has taken up--which is why I don't disagree with their premise that many of our social ills are reflective of a widespread moral and spiritual poverty. What I profoundly disagree with and continue to be disturbed by are the solutions and methods, largely driven by fear-mongering and manipulation, which such organizations like the Christian Coalition use in dealing with such ills; as well as with their understanding of what a moral order is--which is essentially a fundamentalist type of Christian republic. Having been educated, however, to appreciate the potentially positive interactions of religion and society ("religion and society", please note, is not the same thing as "church and state"), the last thing I want to see now is for religious liberals to abandon the arena of public policy; or be hesitant in bringing our voice to the larger debate and dialogue as to how we best achieve a just, sane, humane, and yes, moral social order.
To return to my personal odyssey, while the 1960's are generally recognized as the most tumultuous time of the post-war era, it was actually the decade of the 1970s that gave me a pretty wild and crazy ride. During those ten years, in more or less chronological order here, I: Got married; Graduated from seminary; Entered the ministry at DePauw; Left DePauw for a campus ministry post at the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point; Got Divorced; Dabbled around for a couple of summers in the humanistic psychology movement via some gestalt therapy training in the San Francisco Bay Area; Left the ministry briefly; Got re-married; Re-entered the ministry as a Unitarian Universalist; and capped the whole thing off in November of 1979 by taking on my first full-time parish ministry settlement as the minister of a small UU church halfway up the Maine coast, the First Universalist Church of Rockland, Maine.
The most important decision I made in the course of that ten year roller coaster ride was the one to come into the UU ministry. [Ahhh....better make that the second most important decision, after the choice to marry the woman who has been my wife for the past 18 years. Let's keep the priorities straight here!] Becoming a UU minister came after 2-3 years of some rather intensive soul-searching to which I've referred in other sermons, and so will offer only a brief sketch here.
The two summers I spent getting training in gestalt therapy also afforded me the opportunity to get a better focus on some of the life forces and experiences that had brought me into the ministry in the first place. By doing some honest theological inventory I realized that even the more liberalized understanding and affirmations of Protestant Christianity were no longer central to my own religious and spiritual consciousness. I was really enjoying the campus ministry; one of my roles on both of the campuses where I served was to be a liberal Christian alternative to some of the more fundamentalist groups like the Campus Crusade for Christ. But by the mid-to-late 70s I had an institutional problem in that the religious right was beginning to coalesce, and even the mainline Protestant bodies--like my own American Baptist denomination--were increasingly feeling the need to accommodate their right flanks. It seemed like it was time to go. I began preparing myself for a new career as a social worker and therapist, while also seriously considering becoming an English teacher. But the man and the woman who were the ministers at the First Unitarian Society of Madison, Wisconsin took me under their wings, listened to my attempts to sort out where I was going from there, and in time guided me into the UU ministry.
From Madison I went to Urbana, Illinois where I was on the staff of the UU Church there and ran their campus ministry program. While in Urbana I got the UU "seal of approval" for ministers and sometime thereafter was called to the ministry of the First Universalist Church of Rockland, Maine.
I was in Rockland for five years. It was largely a tranquil, settling-down time which I needed after the 70's. But I caught UUism just as it was on a cusp; just as it was taking a turn; just as it was beginning to stir itself up. Women were making inroads into our ministry in ways that were finally moving beyond tokenism.. We were just beginning to re-examine the implications of the excessive--make that near exclusive--masculine language and imagery by which we conveyed our largely humanistic principles. It didn't take me too long to see that it was an emerging feminist theology that would play an important role in taking this newfound religion of mine into its future.
While I had come into the UU ministry because I needed an alternative to orthodoxy, it didn't take me long to recognize that simply being an alternative to some of the more conventional forms of religion, does not, by itself, cut a whole lot of mustard when it comes to building a viable religious community. So while I reveled in the freedom of calling myself a "religious humanist" (a designation I still use) and in not having to tie all of my sermons to a Biblical anchor unless I deliberately chose to do so, I also came to see that, deep down, the newer people, particularly those around my age, were coming to this UU congregation with, as Arvid Straube put it "questions more of the heart than the head"-- regardless of how "heady" the language was they used in framing their questions.
As a movement--there in the early-to-mid 1980's--we UUs were coming to the realization that being an alternative to religion was not sufficient if we were going to be a truly vital and growing presence in our society. What was needed instead was a language with which we could meaningfully speak with one another with as well as ways of worshipping and being with one another, that would allow and enable us to be a genuinely religious and spiritual alternative. The conversation as to how we best do that--which is still going on--was just getting underway as I came into this movement, and I'm glad to have been a part of it.
After those five years in Maine which saw the birth of our son, Gordon, I took on an extension ministry on Long Island with the UU Fellowship of Stony Brook, New York. It was a denominational placement I undertook for four years as that society's first minister, after their being a lay-led society for 20 years. My goal was to help move them to a point where they could call and support a minister on their own, without the help they were getting from the UUA to have me there. I liked the congregation very much, and learned a good deal as well from the experience of ministry in a more urban (or ex-urban) setting than in Maine. But I missed New England and was ready to head back this way after those four years. Of my many experiences from those Stony Brook days, two come to mind now.
I officiated at my first same-sex "Service of Holy Union" ceremony for a lesbian couple while at Stony Brook. It was a small, private gathering; the couple wanted it that way. They wanted to avoid any kind of publicity. I must say that even as I was intellectually accepting of the idea of same-sex unions, I was surprised to discover some emotional resistance that I had to work through in order to be genuinely present for the couple involved. In the 11-12 years since then there I've probably conducted a couple dozen more such services and I've really come to feel blessed when two men or two women make what is often for them a rather daring choice to take me into their confidence and talk about their relationship and why they want to make a life of it together. I obviously cannot entirely know what it is like to be gay or lesbian--anymore than I can entirely know what it is like to be a woman or an African American. But I am grateful for the ways in which the gay and lesbian persons I've known over the years, especially those who have been members of the congregations I've served, have helped to expand my own awareness of the dynamics of their own lives as well as what it is that makes us all human. I'll expand upon this subject in a few weeks when my sermon title will be "Whose Marriage Is It That Needs Defending?" I don't think I need to tell you what recent piece of legislation that is in reference to.
The other Stony Brook experience I'll recount is about the time I got a call from the Chaplain at the SUNY/Stony Brook Medical Center: "We have a patient here who has specifically requested to see a Unitarian minister." The Medical Center was less than a mile from my office at the Fellowship building. I said I'd be over that afternoon. But when I asked for some information about this patient's condition the chaplain was evasive: "I'll tell you when you get here." When I stopped by his office prior to my visit, the chaplain, whom I knew and respected, confided to me in hushed tones that the man had AIDS. This was 1984 or `85. The fear was such then that the very word "AIDS" had to be spoken underbreath. And yes, again, I remember a twinge of apprehension as I put out my hand to shake the hand of the patient as we began our conversation. I had pretty good information about AIDS by then, but some of that societal fear was rubbing off nonetheless. It made a lasting impression on me that at a time when more mis-information that fact was proliferating about a particular disease, it was a Unitarian Universalist that this person, who was a stranger to me, had asked for. He was not a UU and actually knew very little about us, other that having heard maybe a UU wouldn't be as judgmental or fearful as others. And he decided to take a chance. Its a challenging and a sobering responsibility to represent a faith that certain persons, for any number of reasons--including and going beyond the one just cited here--are still willing to take a chance with. And that's a challenge that can come to any individual--minister or layperson--who calls him or herself Unitarian Universalist.
As I put this sermon together I realized that I have spent almost one third of my twenty five years in the ministry right here--in this building, in this community, from this pulpit, and with this growing and evolving congregation. After being a rolling stone for most of my life with 3-5 years in one locale or another, I now seem to be, well, gathering a little moss. (Or losing a little moss, as the case may be when it comes to the top of my head.). Since I consider my, and our, ministry here very much of a work in progress I don't feel I can offer the same perspective on it as I have on my other locales. Like most ministries it has had its times of joy and celebration--as well as its times of pain and testing. I've been quite heartened by the growth we've experienced, both in numbers and in the quality and depth of our congregational life, over the past 3-4 years. I've learned about some of the challenges that go with following a very long and successful ministry by a predecessor, and am thankful for the quiet personal support and encouragement my predecessor, Don Rowley, has given me over the years.
I came here after serving two congregations with memberships in the low-to-mid 100's and after running a couple of campus ministry programs. Here I've had to learn about getting past the "Lone Ranger" style of ministry that worked well enough in those other settings. I've had to learn that ministry in our type of setting here works best when it is shared and spread out among support staff and committed lay leaders. I've learned that ministry works best when you trust the human resources that are available in a congregation like this one.
I'm aware my language has changed over the years, particularly over the years I've been here, just as the language of Unitarian Universalism itself has changed during that time. I've noticed that words like "spirit", "grace", "nurture", "healing". "blessing" and the like are becoming basic staples of my vocabulary. And I hope I'm doing more than just making some semantic adjustments, for these words represent qualities and realities that I want to see become known, become real, become incarnated, in our congregational life. Recalling what I said earlier about the continuing vital need for a liberal religious voice in our societal conversations and debates on public policy, I continue to believe as strongly as ever that the UU ministry is largely about bringing to life the language of our first and second UU principles which affirm "the inherent worth and dignity of every person... (and) justice, equity, and compassion in human relations."
Another word I'm hearing more and more in UU circles, which I must admit I have some difficulty in latching onto, is "evangelism." I know, and I fully appreciate the fact, that when some of our UU "growth gurus" use that term they mean doing a better job of getting the word out about Unitarian Universalism to a larger swath of the population that we are now reaching--to people who would be very excited and happy to be a part of our movement if they just knew who we were and where to find us. Well, "Amen" to that! And you can do your bit for this UU brand of evangelism by inviting a friend or two or three to our "Open House " Sunday here in two weeks. But I guess I'm still dealing with a little bit of "left-over stuff", or some emotional resistance, from my evangelical Baptist days, because I am willing to be as evangelical a UU as anyone else--I just haven't yet gotten used to calling it that yet!
In looking now to the present and the future, I believe Arvid Straube is right on the mark in writing of the needs and desires that the post-World War II generation is bringing to our congregations: "The questions come with greater urgency as midlife approaches. Am I doing good as well as doing well? Am I being the example I need to be to my children?...How can I love well? How can I heal my deep psychic wounds? How can I live my daily life with compassion, awareness, morality, and integrity? How can I reach out past my isolation and experience meaningful communion with others? These are all profoundly spiritual questions, questions more of the heart than the head. Unlike the potential convert to Unitarian Universalism of past decades, (the people now asking these questions) tend not be fresh refugees from more orthodox religion. They do not need to rebel. They did their rebelling in the sixties. They are not looking for a refuge from Methodism but from secularism, hedonism, and consumerism."
The challenge of the liberal ministry that I see in the days ahead is to offer answers to the questions that Rev. Straube suggests. I don't mean generic one-size-fits-all answers, but rather a safe and nurturing setting where many answers can be discovered and celebrated. How we go about offering a core message of hope, healing, and renewal that also brings a diversity of human beings together is something I want to take up next Sunday with "Can A Big Tent Approach To Religion Really Work?" I think it can, but it depends upon who and what is in the tent itself. Catch me next week on this one.
A lot has happened in twenty-five years, as I came to realize the more I worked on this. But even so, its still been the shortest 25 years I've ever known, and I'm told it doesn't slow down any from here on out. In this year of the 25th anniversary of my seminary graduation I'm going to go back to seminary again when I take my sabbatical in a few months. The Sabbatical Committee and I will be devoting a Sunday service in November to give you an over all picture of the sabbatical time, but I just want to mention this much now.
I want to learn more about UU seminary education today, so I'll be devoting a significant portion of my sabbatical time to spending some time on several seminary campuses where women and men are preparing for the UU ministry. I want to attend classes, meet with some of the faculty, but mostly I want to talk with the students to find out how they understand their call to the liberal ministry today, how they plan to deal with some of the questions that Rev. Straube suggests, what their vision is for themselves and the congregations they will serve, or in the other types ministries in which they'll engage. I want to get some sense, some picture, of what the UU ministry is going to look like over the next 10-15 years--in the hope that I, and you and I together, can be engaged in a ministry which, in the words of one of our hymns, "reveres the past, but trusts the dawning future more."
To conclude, I don't know that I'll ever sit down and write my memoirs. I don't know that there would be much of an audience for them, and in any case I'm nowhere near ready to do that just yet. But on the chance that I ever do, I think I've got a title picked out--one that comes from another of our hymns. I'll call them "Here On the Common Human Way." The words are from a poem by a 19th century American poet named Edwin Markham. The gist of the poem is that all we need--all we really need--is already here, amongst us and within us: "Here on the paths of every day; Here on the common human way; Is all the stuff the gods would take, to build a heaven to mold and make New Edens. Ours the task sublime, to build eternity in time." I believe the liberal ministry is about awakening persons to the resources of the human spirit--to resources within themselves, to those found in the midst of human community, to those found in our relationship to the Earth and to Life Itself. The liberal ministry is about enabling persons to know eternal moments; to know meaning and fulfillment, in time--to build eternity in time. For it is the only time we have--this time we have with ourselves, with one another, and with the Larger Life in which we all share--and that time is sufficient, if we will make it so.
Copyright © 1996 by the Unitarian-Universalist Church of Nashua NH. All rights reserved.
