Over the last couple of years, in quite different contexts, I have heard the claim that the average length of a Unitarian Universalist ministry is now about seven years. I am not sure where this number comes from, but I have heard from search committee members, members of congregations that I am serving, academics, and UUA staff. My gut has told me that it is a meaningless number. That it might be true that the average length of a ministry is seven years across congregations of all sizes but that the claim would not hold up under a more fine-grained analysis. Comparing congregations of all sizes, I thought, is probably comparing apples to oranges rather than apples to apples. And so, I decided to dig into the data a bit to see what I could come up with. It turns at that the claim that the average length of ministry is seven years across all congregations is a good example of the old truism, “lies, damn lies, and statistics.” It is probably a true statement, but it doesn’t actually give us any useful information.

I am currently serving as the interim senior minister of the First Unitarian Universalist Church, Houston. It is a congregation of, as of today, 449 members. It is a multi-site congregation with 353 members at its largest campus, the Museum District, and 37 and 59 members at each of its smaller two campuses (Tapestry and Thoreau, respectively). So, I thought a good test of the claim that the average ministry lasts seven years could be done by looking at four different data sets. The first was of the ten congregations nearest in size to all of First Church. The second was of the ten congregations nearest in size to the Museum District campus. The third was of the ten congregations nearest in size to Thoreau (the larger of the two smaller campuses). And the last, an additional point of interest, was looking at the ten largest congregations within the Association. Here’s what I found*:

Data Set 1 (Ten Congregations Nearest in Size to First Church)

This data set begins with the First Unitarian Church of Providence and ends with the First Parish Unitarian Universalist of Arlington, MA. The average ministerial tenure for this set of congregations is at least 14 years. The longest tenure of a minister still serving is 35 years (Baton Rouge, LA). The shortest recent tenure of a completed ministry is 4 years (Burlington, VT). The median tenure for a ministry is at least 13 years.

Data Set 2 (Ten Congregations Nearest in Size to the Museum District Campus)

This data set begins with the Unitarian Universalist Congregation at Montclair and ends with the Unitarian Universalist Congregation, Santa Rosa. It should end with the Morristown Unitarian Fellowship. However, I wasn’t able to find information on the ministerial tenure of the last minister at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Buffalo and so I had to expand the data set by one. Three of these congregations are currently being served by developmental ministers. Several of them have also recently undergone ministerial transitions.

Among these congregations the average ministerial tenure is at least 11 years. The longest tenure of a minister of a minister still serving is 13 years (Morristown, NJ). The shortest recent tenure is 5 years (San Francisco and Greenville, SC). The median tenure is at least 11 years.

Data Set 3 (Ten Congregations Nearest in Size to the Thoreau Campus)

This data set begins with the Unitarian Universalist Church in Idaho Falls and ends with the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Norway (Maine). Three of these congregations are lay led. Of the remaining seven, the average ministerial tenure is 9 years and the median tenure is 7 years. Almost all of these congregations have gone through ministerial transitions recently and so the longest serving minister currently at one of them has only been there for six years. The recently retired minister of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Castine (Maine) left after 22 years.

Data Set 4 (Ten Largest Congregations in the Unitarian Universalist Association) 

This data set begins with All Souls, Tulsa and ends with the First Unitarian Church of Albuquerque. Several of these congregations are in the middle of long-term ministries. I decided not to go back and research all of their ministerial histories. When the tenure of the senior was less than ten years I used the tenure of the previous minister instead of the tenure of the current minister.

The average ministerial tenure is 21 years and the median tenure is 19 years. The longest ministry of someone currently serving one of these congregations is 19 years (University Unitarian (Seattle)) although the senior minister of First Madison just retired after 30 years. The shortest recent tenure I could find was 9 years. In addition, the average tenure of ministers in these congregations is almost certainly significantly longer than 21 years since the ministers of two the tenures I included (Tulsa  and Washington, DC) are both in their late forties or early fifties.

Conclusion 

The only congregations that I looked in which the median ministerial tenure is seven years are those with about 60 members. Congregations of larger sizes all had significantly longer ministerial tenures. This suggests to me that when I am in conversations with people about ministerial tenure I will be careful to suggest they think about the tenure of a ministry at a similarly sized congregation rather than making a more generalized statement. Congregational systems theory has long claimed that congregations of different sizes behavior differently. An examination of ministerial tenure of congregations of different sizes is further evidence for that claim.

*A note on my method

All of my data is derived from the UUA’s list of certified congregations for 2018 and its directory of religious professionals. The exception to this is the membership statistics for First Unitarian Universalist Church, Houston. The length of tenure is for most cases the tenure of either the current minister or, in the case where the congregation is in transition, the tenure of the most recently departed minister. The exception to this is where the current minister has been at the congregation for less than five years. In those instances, I have gone with the tenure of the prior ministry.

as preached at the First Unitarian Universalist Church, Houston, Museum District, September 23, 2018

This month our theme in worship is hospitality. For Unitarian Universalists hospitality, or radical inclusivity, is at the core of our theological vision. This congregation’s decision to desegregate in 1954 was a decision to be radically inclusive. You were the first historically white church in Houston to make such a decision. More recently, your decision to become a Welcoming Congregation was an act of radical inclusivity. You made an intentional choice to be a religious home for bisexual, gay, lesbian, and transgender people.

The decisions to desegregate and become a Welcoming Congregation were not political decisions. Instead, they came from the radical love found at the core of our universalist heritage. Universalism is a form of dissident Christianity that claims that God so loves the world that she cannot condemn any person to eternal suffering in Hell. Not one single person. Not you. Not me. Not anyone. Universalism teaches that God loves everyone, no exceptions.

There’s a fragment of a poem from the poet Edwin Markham that captures something of Universalism’s sentiment of radical inclusivity. It reads:

He drew a circle and shut us out.
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But love and I had the will to win,
we drew a circle and took him in.

The second circle is the wider circle. The wider circle is the circle of care and concern, the circle of love, that somehow, impossibly, is so wide that it takes in even the enemy. It takes in even the person who sought to cast the speaker out. The wider circle is a wonderful metaphor for the theology that inspired your commitments to desegregate and become a Welcoming Congregation. These were acts of radical inclusivity.

Radical inclusivity might sound like an intimidating phrase. It need not be. At its core it is a simple idea. It is creating a community to welcome the stranger. It is getting to know each other. It is recognizing the human in the other. It is like “The Rabbi’s Gift,” our story from earlier. Something profound happens when we realize that each person in the world, you, and me, and all the people outside of this sanctuary, is equally a child of universe. We all contain “the likeness to God,” as foundational Unitarian theologian William Ellery Channing told us. We all have something to teach each other about living amid the maddening rush of abrupt rain, piercing sunlight, and generative ground that form life’s tapestry.

Radical inclusivity is a recognition of this truth. It need not be hard. It can be something as simple as introducing yourself to someone else. There used to be a button floating around Unitarian Universalist communities that made this point. “The most radical thing we can do is introduce people to one another,” it read. Today, after the service, you can commit this radical act. You can walk up to someone you do not know and say, “Hello.” Who knows what marvels you might open up by meeting someone not already in your circle?

Meeting someone not already in your circle… Here is an odd thing about interim ministry: When a congregation calls a settled minister the congregation and the minister take time getting to know each other. The minister meets with the search committee for a full weekend. The search committee agrees upon a candidate. And then the candidate comes and spends an entire week with the congregation. At the end of the week, the congregation holds a vote to decide on whether or not they want to call the minister.

The process that led to my coming to Houston was more abbreviated. It was facilitated through the Unitarian Universalist Association’s interim matchmaking process. I was hired by the Board rather than called by the congregation. This is a drawn-out admission that you did not have much of an opportunity to get to know me before I appeared in your pulpit at the beginning of August. We should fix that. If I am going to suggest that you introduce yourselves to people you do not know then I should let you get to know me a bit better. I should say, “Hello.”

There is a meme floating around the internet that is popular in my circles. I thought it would serve as a nice introduction. It is on the front of your order of service. It is a Venn Diagram of the ways preachers, DJs, and bank robbers overlap. They each urge people to “put your hands up.” This Venn Diagram encapsulates some of the communities that have taught me about radical inclusivity: preachers, DJs, and bank robbers. I am a preacher. I came of age in the DJ culture of hip hop, house, and techno. And, well…. I have something to say about bank robbers.

Put your hands up.

We begin with DJ culture.

I love to dance. I mean I love to dance. I grew up in the Rust Belt in the 1990s sneaking out of the house late at night to hustle off to warehouse parties in Detroit or Chicago. Anyone know what I am talking about? The kind of parties where the DJs played too loud house music, techno, hip hop, soul… In desolate abandoned factories where everything was somehow rendered with impossible beauty I learned a passable New York liquid and a decent Detroit Jit. In those crumbling buildings the constant throb of the bass, the unsteady footwork of the crowd, and the sheer press of multitudinous human bodies all combined into a palpable beloved community. There’s a poem called “Ode to the Dancer” that captures a little of this:

Break-dancin’ thru the impossible to eat.
The fruits of labor never tasted so sweet.
We, had the Buddhist monks challenge the
Egyptians to B-Boy battles
and had Gandhi tagging up graffiti in the
bathroom walls of the club.
Where he left messages to
The dancers and the DJ’s
To tell the people that
“You may be black, you may be white,
you may be Jew, or Jenti, but it never
Made a difference in our house!”

Those early experiences dancing in clubs and at illegal rave parties across the desolate deindustrializing landscape have something to teach us about radical inclusivity. We live at a moment where the modes of religiosity are ever increasing. I have had religious experiences at all night warehouse parties where the music is interlaced with gospel vocals, appeals to the universal spirit, and reminders that “we are souls clapping for the souls;” at storefront yoga studios; at a meditation retreat. And, yes, I have had them on Sunday morning at church when the preacher offers the right combination of words, when the choir sings an unexpected anthem, when there is a pause between one breath and the next. What about you? Where have you had deep experiences of connection?

We might call those deep experiences of connection, in an intentional echo of Martin King, experiences of the beloved community. The beloved community can erupt anywhere. You might find it here, Sunday morning, in this beautiful sanctuary. It is that glimpse of the world as it should be. Rob Hardies, senior minister of All Souls, Unitarian, in Washington, DC, describes the beloved community this way. It is “the human family, reconciled and whole… where the divisions that separate us in our daily lives come tumbling down.” Retired Unitarian Universalist minister Marilyn Sewell casts its felt experience “as a moment outside time… no longer constrained by fears that keep us back, keep us small, keep our God small.”

These experiences of beloved community are experiences of radical inclusivity. They are experiences we can foster in church. We can foster them through the creation of worship that makes space for everyone, that proclaims that all are welcome, and all are loved. There are few other spaces in American society that have the potential for people to gather across the dividing lines of race and class.

Years ago, amid the shambling concrete of abandoned factories, I witnessed that music could bring people together in the country’s most divided cities. Black, white, gay, straight, suburbanite, loft dweller, drag queen in fabulous silver go go boots, baggy jeans wearing break dancing trickster, everyone united in “One Nation Under a Groove,” just as rgw original funkster George Clinton told us to. Our Universalist theology of radical inclusion challenges us to build religious communities that are capable of drawing such wide circles. Later, in some other sermon, we can talk about how difficult and challenging this work can be. But this morning I want to offer you a simple truth. Radical inclusivity begins with saying, “Hello,” to someone you do not know and inviting them into your circle.

Put your hands up.

The bank robber Willie Sutton was once supposedly asked, “Willie why do you rob banks?” “Because that is where the money is,” he’s alleged to have replied.

I first heard Sutton’s words when I was in my early twenties and living in San Francisco. While I was there I got to know the folk singer Bruce Phillips, whose stage name was Utah. By the time I met him, Utah Phillips had been a Unitarian Universalist for more than fifty years.

He had a weekly radio show on KPFA, KPFT’s sister station in Berkeley, and occasionally did concerts at Unitarian Universalist congregations in the Bay Area. Over the course of our conversations, listening to his radio show, and attending his concerts, I discovered that Utah had a particular affinity for bank robbers. “Working-class heroes,” he used to call them.

He often quoted Willie Sutton. And he liked to talk about Kid Pharaoh, a minor criminal from Chicago. In an interview, Kid Pharaoh had confessed that he had a political philosophy. He said, “I’m dedicated to one principle: taking money away from unqualified dilettantes who earn it through nepotism… Take it away from… [them]. Hook, crook, slingshot, canoe, we must shaft [these fellows]…”

In my conversations with Utah, I learned he praised bank robbers for three reasons. The first: his praise provided a radical critique of society. The second: it was an act of drawing the circle wider: reminding his audience that everyone, even the criminal element, has something to teach the rest of us. The third: he admired their clarity and honesty of purpose. They went to the place where the money was and took it.

Utah did not advocate robbing banks. But he did urge people to be clear about who they were and why they did what they did. That was the way he lived. He had been a critic of American society, the military, and our economic system ever since he returned to the United States after fighting in the Korea War. Part of his critique was that changing the world began by listening to the voices at society’s margin.

Parallels to his position can be found in the words of the President of the Unitarian Universalist Association, our friend Susan Frederick-Gray. She tells us, “the circle never gets drawn wider from the center. The circle grows wider because the people who live at the margins, at the edges, who see how exclusion is happening, are leading and organizing and working to break down those walls. So we all have to be standing in the margins, pushing for greater liberation for all people. That is the way we make the circle wide.”

In Susan’s vision, we Unitarian Universalists engage in radical inclusivity when we listen to the voices at the margins of our society, are clear about our theological vision, tell the truth in the public square, and invite the disenfranchished and disempowered into our circle. It is really not that different from Utah’s more controversial invocation of bank robbers. He told stories about them to be funny. But he also told stories about them to provoke his audiences to think about who in society we should be listening. By suggesting that even a criminal element has something to teach us he was being radically inclusive and drawing the circle wider.

Put your hands up.

You may have figured out by now that I am something of a Saturday evening juke joint Sunday morning choir kind of guy. I have learned an extraordinary amount about radical inclusivity from my participation in communities outside of the church. I have learned an equal amount from lifelong engagement with Unitarian Universalist communities. Otherwise, I would not be a preacher.

And now, we come to the part of the sermon where I make a confession. Everything I have learned in church and all of my sermons can really be distilled to a single message. It is found in the twentieth and twenty first verses of the seventeenth chapter of the Gospel of Luke. There we find Jesus in conversation with a group of Rabbis. The Rabbis asked him, “‘When will the kingdom of God come?’ He answered, ‘You cannot tell by observation when the kingdom of God comes. You cannot say, “Look, here it is,” or “There it is!” For the kingdom of God is among you!”

Other translations read, “the kingdom of God is within you!” Either way, the point is this, we Unitarian Universalists believe we can create the beloved community here on this good green Earth. Indeed, we understand that is the only the thing that has ever happened. It is not up to someone else. God is not going to do it for us. It is not going to happen somewhere or somewhen else. This luminous now is all we have been given.

That is a core message of our tradition. I know this because I spent my formative years in Unitarian Universalist religious education. I know this because I have studied and taught Unitarian Universalism in our seminaries. And I know this because it is what I constantly catch glimpses of as preacher and religious leader of Unitarian Universalist congregations.

Right now, our fourth through sixth grade youth are participating in Our Whole Lives. OWL, as it is called, is Unitarian Universalism’s sexual education program. That is correct, we teach sex education in church. And we do not teach it in the abstinence only fashion found in Texas public schools. Such an approach suggests that there is something wrong with the human body and our natural, embodied, need for physical connection. We Unitarian Universalists take a different view. We hold that we humans are embodied creatures and that being sexual is part of what it means to be embodied. We do not teach that abstinence until marriage is the only way to be responsible. Instead we teach that as creatures with bodies and hormones we need to learn to be responsible, respectful, and loving with our partners. We teach about consent. We teach about birth control. And we teach that there is nothing wrong with living in a world with a multiplicity of sexual orientations and gender expressions.

Note that this is not the explicit content of the fourth to sixth grade OWL program. That is much more focused on helping children understand their changing bodies and changing hormones as they go through puberty. But the messages I just shared are those we will eventually communicate to them when they reach high school OWL. And those messages are just a practical, embodied, recognition of the truth found in Luke 17:21, “the kingdom of God is within you.”

That is a truth that encourages us to practice radical inclusivity. It is the theological principle which inspired you to desegregate and become a Welcoming Congregation. It is why so many of you give money to support this congregation and the work of its three campuses. And it is a theological principle which can sometimes be realized with a simple introduction, a “Hello” that begins to draw the circle wider.

Are you with me? Put your hands up.

Would that I could end on that precise high note. But the phrase, “Put your hands up,” requires a closing coda. I need to acknowledge that it is a phrase sometimes used by the police. For some people, particularly some people of color, it invokes the specter of state violence rather than celebration, the voices on the margins, or church.

Committing ourselves to radical inclusivity means we are called to recognize that, despite our best intentions, our very words and actions can contain traces of the brutalizing violence which are endemic throughout society. Rather than flee from this truth it is better to confront it. Each of us sometimes turns away from the wider circle and seeks to push people out. But that is why we gather, Sunday morning after Sunday morning. We gather to recognize our own human frailty, the ways in which we have failed our higher vision, and encourage each other to continue to try to live into it. The spirit of such actions were found in the Jewish Days of Awe, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, which just passed. They were reflected in our story this morning, our responsive reading, and they are in the words from Markham’s poem which we return to as I close:

He drew a circle and shut us out.
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But love and I had the will to win,
we drew a circle and took him in.

Let the congregation say, “Amen.”

Water
Water

Each autumn we gather to mingle our waters and mark the start of our liturgical year. At each of our three campuses, we gather to share our dreams, to declare our values, to be present to each other, and all that is. Today, across the country, in congregations like this one, Unitarian Universalists are gathering for the same ritual and for the same purpose.

In services such as this, water is often described as the giver of life and bearer of memory. Our mingled waters are said to represent the communion that we aspire to in religious community. Sometimes, the waters take on a richness of meaning: reminding us of the drought of struggle, of the inevitability of change, of the tumult of life, and the hidden wells of awe and wonder that reside in each of us. Rarely, though, do services like this one recognize the sheer destructive power of water.

Water is the life giver. Two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen, that is what makes life possible. But water is also the life taker, the destroyer, the thing that can fill lungs and block out the two uncompounded atoms we must have to respire.

I have been thinking about water the life stealer since I learned I would be coming to Houston to serve as your interim senior minister. One friend told me to get an escape kit for my car: hammer to break glass and cutter to slice seat belt. Another advised me not to get a first story apartment. This advice came as, from afar, I read about the destruction of Harvey: the more than eighty dead, the lives broken, the houses ruined, the streets washed away, and the businesses destroyed.

Then I arrived in Houston. And I met one of you who had lost their home to the hurricane. And I met another of you whose car was destroyed. And another of you who no longer lives in their old neighborhood. And I learned of the city’s loss and sorrow. And so, I began to think about water as the stealer of life, water the despoiler.

I realized that we could not have a water ceremony that did not acknowledge the catastrophic power of water. For water has brought a great catastrophe to this city. One of the tasks of religious community is to aid us in the face of the catastrophes of our lives. These can be individual: cancer, death, the end of a marriage, the loss of a job… Or they can be collective: war, political corruption, systematic violence, the endurance of white supremacy, floods and hurricanes…

Some of the most ancient myths attempt to find meaning in waterborne catastrophes. Four thousand years ago the Epic of Gilgamesh was composed in the place we now call Mesopotamia. It tells of a great deluge that destroyed a primordial city.

For a day the gale [winds flattened the country,]
quickly they blew, and [then came] the [Deluge.]
Like a battle [the cataclysm] passed over the people.
One man could not discern another,
nor could people be recognized amid the destruction.

Genesis, the biblical text, recounts:

All the fountains of the great deep burst apart,
And the floodgates of the sky broke open.

The Greek poet Ovid, in his “Metamorphoses,” describes:

…The dolphins
Invade the woods and brush against the oak-trees;
The wolf swims with the lamb; lion and tiger
Are borne along together; the wild boar
Finds all his strength is useless, and the deer
Cannot outspeed that torrent…

These myths share a pattern. The deluge comes after the divine grows frustrated with human wickedness. The gods send the lethal waters to wash away sin and impurity. Cities are drown. The world becomes ocean. Only a handful of the righteous survive. And then the waters recede. The land returns. The world is purified. Humanity finds itself given a divine blessing, a divine healing. Noah is told: “Be fertile and increase, and fill the earth.”

This is not our theology. Our Unitarian Universalist theology is not one of divine destruction and divine healing. We do not believe that God punishes us because we are impure or wicked. Nor do we trust that God, unaided, will bring ultimate justice to the world.

Ours is a tradition of human agency and responsibility. Ours is a tradition which acknowledges that it is humans who have the power to create heaven or hell upon this muddy green Earth. Ours is a tradition that recognizes that so much that is wrong with this world, including the crisis of climate change, has been wrought by human hands. And ours is a tradition that understands that the good that exists in this world comes from love. It is a love, which Susan Frederick-Gray, the president of our association, describes as “a powerful, unconditional, overflowing goodwill for all people.”

It is this love which is the historic, theological, bedrock of Unitarian Universalist congregations. It is this love that our Universalist ancestors used to describe as “the sublime and heavenly doctrine of universal grace.” The idea that God so loved the world that all of creation would be eventually blessed with “holiness and happiness.” It is the legacy of our Universalist ancestors who believed that the unconditional love of the divine, in the words of Rebecca Parker, “directs us… toward actions of love and care for each other.” It is this love which teaches us that we have the human power and the human ability to heal each other and to heal this world.

This world, and this city, is in desperate need of healing. Today, more than ever, we are called to be healers. Over the last month as I have listened to your stories I have learned that this congregation has worked to heed this call. Many of you aided each other during and after the hurricane. Many of you have labored to rebuild the city, volunteering your time to recraft homes and assist the injured. Many of you are devoted to the ongoing work of healing. Even as we struggle to survive.

I will admit that I am new to your city and to this congregation. I only know of a fraction of the destruction that the waters brought. And I only know a fraction of the work that you have done. I am eager to learn your stories.

And I trust that as I learn about them I will discover in them, as I have discovered in every community I have served, the radical healing power of love. For it is radical love, powerful, unconditional, overflowing goodwill for all people, that teaches us that we can heal each other and the world. And it is radical love that I see now as I look at our mingled water. Water might be destructive but in our service, it can also be a symbol of our collective love for humanity and our planetary home. It can be a symbol of our ability to heal.

As I close I reminded of these words from Wayne Arnason, may we find the love they represent in our mingled water:

Take courage friends.
The way is often hard, the path is never clear,
and the stakes are very high.
Take courage.
For deep down, there is another truth:
you are not alone.

Amen and Blessed Be.

Dear Members and Friends of First Houston:

It is great to be with you and to be in the city of Houston. I am looking forward to my time with you as the congregation moves through its transitional period. I anticipate that our time together will be one of exploration, healing, and visioning. During the next several months we will be asking questions about the past, present, and, most importantly, the future of First Unitarian Universalist Church.

Of course, there may be changes. One question to be answered is when and how services should be structured. Until we reach a decision on the answer to that question, we plan to continue with one service at Museum District for the month of September. We will be examining how best to be together as a worshiping community dedicated to joy, the project of human liberation, personal growth, and building collective power to be a healing force in battered world.

So, I want to invite you to choose how you would like to commit or to recommit your time, energy, and skills and to be part of the Sunday Celebration, religious education, small groups, community service, and social justice actions that form the rich tapestry that is First Unitarian Universalist Church. And I want to invite you to reflect, give feedback and share your thoughts and needs as we go forward. It is going to be an exciting time!

This year our annual water communion will be held September 9th. All three campuses will offer similar services. These will include a ritual observation of the anniversary of Hurricane Harvey and a blessing of healing waters. I will be leading the Museum District service and two other services at Museum District for the month. The first, on September 23rd, Put Your Hands Up will include some autobiographical reflections on my own spiritual practices and the various communities I have found to be welcoming. The second, on September 30th, Habits of the Heart, will tend to ways Unitarian Universalist communities can be places of welcome and sanctuary during periods of crisis and transition. Each of these services will be made available via video to the Thoreau campus and by presenters to the Tapestry campus in the coming weeks.

In that spirit, the closing poem I offer you is presented in the spirit of being held during a time of transition. It comes from denise levertov. The theological language of her “Suspended” may not resonate with you. Even if it does not, I hope that her words at least echo the possibility contained within each religious community, and most especially within First Unitarian Universalist Church, that we can care for each other whatever we face.

“Suspended” by denise levertov

I had grasped God’s garment in the void
but my hand slipped
on the rich silk of it.
The ‘everlasting arms’ my sister loved to remember
must have upheld my leaden weight
from falling, even so,
for though I claw at empty air and feel
nothing, no embrace,
I have not plummeted.

love,

Colin

Dear Members and Friends of First Parish Church:

Today is my final day as your minister. I write to say goodbye and offer a few closing reflections on our time together and the congregation. I write with immense gratitude for my year with the First Parish Church of Ashby. We accomplished a lot during our brief period together. We celebrated the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the town and of the congregation. We organized meaningful social justice and service work, including a March for Our Lives event that was attended by over a hundred people and an Earth Day trash pick-up. We held services to deepen our religious life together and reflect on how best to respond, as Unitarian Universalists, to the crises that we face in this country and as a human species. We achieved Welcoming Congregation status with the Unitarian Universalist Association. We brought in new members. We saw an increase in congregational pledging. And most importantly, we sang together, worshipped together, talked together, shared food, were present to each other, and had fun! It is no wonder that I will miss you!

The Parish Committee asked me to offer some final reflections on the future work of the congregation. I have a few pieces of advice. First, remember that First Parish Church is one of the most important institutions in Ashby. It isn’t yours to maintain alone. In the next years, as you consider how best to preserve the historic building, I encourage you to reach out to the rest of the town. If you decide to undertake a capital campaign think about how you can invite people from beyond the congregation to participate. Everyone in Ashby benefits by having a beautiful church on the village green.

Second, recognize that you can accomplish a lot when you focus on what you want to do. One reason why I think we had such a good year was that we set a series of small achievable goals and then we stuck to them. Consider undertaking a similar process every year.

Third, don’t be afraid to think bigger. Sometime in the near future the congregation will be receiving an increase in rent on the cell tower. I know the temptation will be to use most of this money to maintain the building. What if the congregation were to spend it on ministry or programming instead? What could First Parish Church do with a half-time minister? What kind of programs could you provide to Ashby? What kind of difference could you make in the world?

So, that is my final, solicited, advice. It is up to you, as congregation, to decide what you wish to do with it. Whatever you choose, know that I will carry you in my heart always.

Before I go I must write something about the practice of ministerial leave taking. After I cease being your minister the guidelines of Unitarian Universalist Minister Association tell me that I must refrain from contact with members of First Parish Church for two years. This includes contact over social media. This is done so that you will develop a relationship with your next minister without my interference. I know it can feel harsh or unnecessary. It is difficult for me as well. However, long experience within our tradition has taught that it is best to respect this boundary. Doing so is one way to help congregations thrive.

And so, with those words, I leave you with much love and a final poem. It too is a piece of advice. It comes from one of my favorite poets, Joy Harjo.

“Remember”

Remember the sky that you were born under,
know each of the star’s stories.
Remember the moon, know who she is.
Remember the sun’s birth at dawn, that is the
strongest point of time. Remember sundown
and the giving away to night.
Remember your birth, how your mother struggled
to give you form and breath. You are evidence of
her life, and her mother’s, and hers.
Remember your father. He is your life, also.
Remember the earth whose skin you are:
red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth
brown earth, we are earth.
Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their
tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them,
listen to them. They are alive poems.
Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the
origin of this universe.
Remember you are all people and all people
are you.
Remember you are this universe and this
universe is you.
Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you.
Remember language comes from this.
Remember the dance language is, that life is.
Remember.

love,

Colin

as preached at the First Unitarian Universalist Church, Houston, Museum district campus, August 19, 2018

The course is set on hope.
The course is set on hope.

Our second reading comes from the Russian revolutionary Victor Serge. By turns an anarchist, a Bolshevik, and a dissident Communist–always a radical–he finished his life an impoverished exile in Mexico. He bore witness to many of the grand tragedies of the twentieth-century. He saw his dreams of a democratic socialist republic die in Russia. He watched his friends, his “constellation of dead brothers,” die under Stalin. He was there when Nazism smashed its way across Europe. And after all of that he could write, “the course is set on hope.”

The course is set on hope. Last week, I suggested that the way forward is with a broken heart. If we love the world, we will be wounded, I proposed. And I argued that one of the central tasks of this religious community was the work of healing: healing the wounds in our individual lives, healing the wounds of First Church, and healing the wounds of the world. This morning, I want to talk with you about the context in which this healing work must take place. I want to talk with you about the permanent emergency. And I want to talk with you about the role Unitarian Universalist congregations like this one might play in addressing it.

Rising populist nationalism in Europe; a President in the United States who echoes classic totalitarian language by calling the press “the enemy of the people;” hatred of migrants; bodies washed up on shores; heat drying out the great sequoias of the redwoods; the seemingly unstoppable horror of global warming; increasing inequality… We live in a time of profound economic, ecological, moral, and political crisis. I could turn every sermon into a litany of woes if I followed the injunction to preach with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.

What good would a constant litany of despair do you? Or me? Or any of us? We are in midst of a permanent emergency. The task is not to denounce the state of the world. It is find hope amongst all of the heart break. It is find some small honest joy while claiming a healing place in the great disorder of things. It is to say, yes, the world is full of tragedy, the world is in the midst of a permanent emergency, but maybe, just maybe, there is a way forward, there is hope to be found.

Doing so requires that we penetrate deep into the dynamics of the permanent emergency we face. By understanding it we might discover its true causes and stumble our way forward. In our effort to do so, you will forgive me, I hope, if I momentarily divert our sermon from the grave crises of the world to the more banal matter of my move to Houston.

Moving to a new place requires integration into the local governmental infrastructure. I have to get a new drivers license. I have to register my son for school. I have to register to vote. In my attempts to do so, I have come to the conclusion that Texans love their bureaucracy. Why else would you spend so much time with it? Monday, I attempted to get a Texas drivers license. I drove out to the Department of Public Safety on Dacoma. I discovered a line, a line that stretched all the way around the block in the humid, roasting, heat. Without the day to wait, I left, no Texas state id in hand.

Thursday, I took my son to register for Middle School. It took four hours. Four hours. Four hours in an uncomfortable auditorium where the air conditioning was turned so high the wooden chairs shivered. Four hours. Four hours with wiggling middle schoolers, bored, unhappy summer was ending, and anxious about a new school year.

You know, four hours is a long time. It turned my liturgical mind to thinking. “My son and I undergoing a bureaucratic rite of passage,” I thought. First, came the ritual of humiliation. We entered the ritual chamber, the auditorium, and divested ourselves of our individual identity. We became not people with names but numbers. Then we had to wait, and wait, and wait, as the clock ticked in the corner and number, after number, after number, not ours, was gradually called.

We were powerless to enter the community ourselves. We needed the help of a guide who finally summoned us to a folding table, “number 35, number 35.” And we were there, at the threshold, a folder thick of papers that had to be shuffled, stamped, photocopied, indexed, and stapled before our guide ended our ritual of humiliation and let us begin the process of entering the community of middle school.

Next, we endured the ritual of purification. We had to show the school nurse, a helpful, humorous, but harried woman, that my son had the correct vacations–that he had undergone the proper rites of purification–to be fully admitted into the middle school community. She marked this piece of paper. She marked that piece of paper. She deemed my son clean enough to be incorporated into the community. She sent us out of the auditorium into the attendance office. There we underwent one final ritual, the ritual of acceptance.

More pieces of paper were marked. More photocopies were made. My son was given a new name; a seven-digit number. It is how his new community, the Houston Independent School District, will refer to him in its internal documents. “Welcome to Middle School,” the kindly registrar said. We had completed the ritual of acceptance. He was now enrolled in middle school.

This is the permanent emergency. It is the process by which your humanity, and mine, is stripped away. It is the process by which we become not primarily people but numbers wending our way through databases and disheveled stacks of paper. It is the process by which we render our muddy blue ball of plant–the only Earth on which we have to survive–into tables of extractive resources and sums of profits and loss. It is the process by which we learn to treat the people, the animals, the world, around us as things we can use instead of entities with which we are in relation.

The permanent emergency is at the root of all of the emergencies that we, as country, as a human species, collectively face. Let us consider one example: racism. Like all of the ills that face us–the crisis of democracy, the ecological crisis, misogyny–it is a crisis with a history. It comes from somewhere.

Race is not a natural category. It is not something that exists independently in the world. It is something that we humans have created. If we ask any honest scientist, they will tell us that race has little genetic basis in reality. They will tell us that race is a social construction. It is even possible to pinpoint the precise moments when race as we think of it was created. And those moments have everything to do with treating other people as things, as numbers, as tools, rather than as people.

The idea that black people and white people are somehow different races begins on August 8, 1444. That was the day Prince Henry of Portugal arrived at the port of Lagos with a human cargo of 235 slaves. Until that moment human with black flesh had not been described by European thinkers as inherently different or inferior. The arrival of a large group of African slaves to the European continent marks the beginning of European ideas of racial difference. And it comes from the desire of wealthy Europeans to create a category of people whose lives can be reduced to the sums on balance sheets: profits, losses, income, and expenses. It is followed by other moments that we can identify. There is 1662, when Virginia passed a law that race was a legal category someone inherited from their mother. There is 1787, when the United States Constitution was adopted with its infamous three fifths clause. There is the 1857 Dred Scott case, when the United States Supreme Court decided no black person could be a citizen. Each of these instances was an effort to reduce a human life to something other than a human life: a number, a sum, an abstraction to be tracked across ledger sheets.

The permanent emergency… As Martin King told us, “We must rapidly begin the shift from a ‘thing-oriented’ society to a ‘person-oriented’ society.” The permanent emergency will continue until we collectively can effectuate the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented one. This shift is something Unitarian Universalist communities like this one are well poised to address. The first principle of our Association: “The inherent worth and dignity of every person.” The seventh principle of our Association: “Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.”

Unitarian Universalism was born amid the permanent emergency. Consider our friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of our tradition’s great theologians. He wrote his essays as attempts to find a way forward as a person in an increasingly thing-oriented society. Like us today, he lived in a period of profound social displacement, strife, and heart break. Like us today, he objected to much of it. He objected to the genocide of the indigenous peoples of North America writing, “Such a dereliction of all faith and virtue, such a denial of justice, and such deafness to screams for mercy, were never heard of in times of peace.” He objected to chattel slavery, telling his audiences, it was as “evil, as cholera or typhus.”

Emerson’s words from yesterday might well be applied to the crises of today. The crimes of the United States government at this state’s border could easily be described in the same terms he used to described equally awful crimes two hundred years ago. But Emerson was wise enough to recognize that the crises of the moment were but expressions of a deeper crisis, a profound crisis, the treatment of human beings as things rather than as people, the alienation of each human soul from the other, the permanent emergency.

Let us briefly turn to the essays he wrote in his attempt to find his way forward as a person in a thing-oriented society. In them he speaks of the sense of dislocation that it is so easy to feel, “Ghostlike we glide through nature, and should not know our place again.” And in them, he offers two solutions to the permanent emergency: to unleash our imaginations and to form real friendships. Calling imagination genius, he tells us, “In the thought of genius there is always a surprise; and the moral sentiment is well called ‘the newness,’ for it is never other.” He advises us on friendship, “When they are real… [friends] are the solidest thing we know.”

Unleashing the imagination, forming real friendships, these I suggest are what provides paths forward in the permanent emergency. What better to pursue in our Unitarian Universalist community? So many of us come to church seeking community and hope. What is hope but the imagination that life can be different than it is? What is community but a place in which to find abiding friendships?

Unleashing the imagination, all the crises that we face were imagined into being. Racism, I suggested earlier, is a product of the imagination. We can imagine alternatives. Indeed, we have imagined alternatives and we have struggled to bring those alternatives into being. The movement to abolish chattel slavery originated when abolitionists imagined society could exist without slavery. The feminist movement began when women imagined that they could live in a society where they were treated as people rather than as objects. Each movement for liberation has begun with a vision that the world can be different.

If you lived in a person-oriented society what would it look like? How would your home be different? How would your neighborhood be different? How would this church be different? How would Houston be different? How would this country be different? How would our world be different? These are questions we can pursue, together, in this religious community.

Forming real friendships, like the imagination, friendships are at the core of moving towards a person-oriented society. When we are friends with someone we focus our universal claim that we respect the inherent worth and dignity of every person on a particular individual. We encounter them not as a thing first but as a person first.

And here, I want to invite you to do something with me. I want to invite you to turn to your neighbor and tell them something. Now, I recognize this is something you might not have done before in your congregation. So, I apologize if it makes you uncomfortable. If you are uncomfortable you can always decline my invitation. I invite you to turn to your neighbor and say, “Neighbor, I recognize your inherent worth and dignity.” Try it, “Neighbor, I recognize your inherent worth and dignity.” Recognizing the inherent worth and dignity of particular people, that is where friendship starts. Recognizing the inherent worth dignity of particular people, that is one part of the way we move from thing-oriented society to a person-oriented one.

Imagination and friendship, I will have much to talk with you about both during our time together. But less you think that all of this talk of hope amid the permanent emergency is merely my preacherly penchant for abstraction let me close with a story and an observation.

The story is about Grace Lee Boggs. She was an activist and a philosopher who lived in Detroit for much of the twentieth-century and well into the early twenty-first century. Like Martin King, she understood that the crises we face are not primarily economic, political, or even social, they are moral.

Grace Lee witnessed the desolation of Detroit. She saw the city shrink from two million to less than seven hundred thousand. She lived among the abandoned factories and the burned out homes that stretched block upon block, mile upon mile. And she saw a new vision for the city, a greener vision, a vision in which her task was “planting the seeds of Hope.”

And plant she did. Working with others, she led a movement to regreen the city. She helped organize the creation of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of community gardens across Detroit. That ruined block became a vegetable garden. That one was turned over to flowers. Did her work completely transform the city? No, but it did create human connections amid isolation. It led to friendships across racial and economic lines. It generated new community organizations. It enabled thousands of impoverished people who would not otherwise have access to fresh fruit and vegetables to grow their own food. And it began with an act of imagination that vacant lots were not blight but “opportunities to develop urban agriculture and build a new society from the ground up.” It came from a recognition that there is an “inseparable interconnection between our minds, hearts, and bodies.” It originated with a vision that her city could be different than it was.

My closing observation is about Victor Serge. After all of the horrors of the first half the twentieth-century he was able to claim, “The course is set on hope.” Why? Because he experienced real, deep, friendship amid all of it. This gave him the knowledge that, however horrible humans can be to each other, we still retain the ability to recognize the inherent worth and dignity that resides in each of us. And through it all, he remained ever aware of the possibility of the imagination to uncover a better world. The last word of his last poem, found upon him after he died: “dazzling.” Dazzling, the last word of someone who had seen all of the crises of his age. Dazzling, the last word of someone who refused to let his imagination be stifled or forget power of friendship to save our world. Dazzling… the course is set on hope.

So that we may unleash our imaginations, build real friendships, and, together, as a religious community, confront the permanent emergency, I invite the congregation to say, Amen.

as preached at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston, Museum District campus, August 12, 2018

It is good to be with you this morning. And it is good to be in Houston. The opening words of our sermon come from the Australian pop singer Natalie Imbruglia’s wrenching break-up song “Torn.”

I’m all out of faith.
This is how I feel, I’m cold and I am shamed
Lying naked on the floor.

Perhaps these words sound familiar. Perhaps you have been there yourself. All out of faith, heart sick, dreams ruptured, the once neatly woven fabric of your life torn into jagged pieces that cannot neatly be stitched back together.

Maybe you were there just this morning. And maybe today, somehow, someway, you got up off the floor. You put on your bright yellow summer dress, your favorite black t-shirt and jeans, or your linen coat and tie, and you made it here. I do not your story. But I know this: if we love the world we will be wounded. And if we want to continue to love the world then we must do the work of healing. It is like the words from one of our earlier songs, “every scar I see / A place where love is trying to break in.” Or as the writer Alice Walker put it, “healing begins where the wound was made.”

The title of our sermon is “The Way Forward is with a Broken Heart.” It is inspired by Alice Walker. She wrote a book with the same title. I chose the title to acknowledge that I begin my interim ministry with you following the resignation of your previous senior minister. Some of you might be upset at him, at other members of the congregation, or about all that has passed in the last year within your religious community. I do not know. I am just beginning to learn your stories. But I know this: the health of your congregation depends in part at looking at the ways you have been wounded in the past, at the ways you might have wounded each other in the past, and then collectively engaging in the work of healing. Since healing begins where the wound was made this will require us to be honest with each other about how we have been hurt in the past. It is only by acknowledging the wounds that we experienced, and the pain we feel, that we can begin to find the way forward. And that way forward is with a broken heart.

But then world is heart breaking, is not? How often does your heart break? It seems I encounter something heart breaking almost every day. What about you? I am new to Houston. I arrived about a week ago. Already, I found that homelessness is an endemic problem where I live in Montrose. Just Friday I passed near someone whose story I am sure is heart breaking.

I am unpacking my apartment. And if you are anything like me, part of unpacking is the process of discovering all of things you do not need. Why are there two cuisinarts? Where did Biscuit, our cat, get twelve catnip mice from? Who packed them? How is it that I am still carrying around my tax records from 1999? And so, if you are anything like me, moving always involves trips to the Goodwill.

There I was. Standing in the Goodwill parking lot, convincing the manager that he should take all eight of my old folding bookcases, when a young man pulled up on a bicycle. He was shirtless. He was carrying a backpack. He opened it and took out a half case of beer. He sat down on the asphalt. The manager asked him to leave. He yelled back, “call the cops. I ain’t going anywhere.” Again, he was asked to leave. Again, he yelled, “call the cops.” I do not know how the story ended. The folks from Goodwill graciously accepted my collection of miscellaneous, and mysterious, kitchen implements. And I left with the certain knowledge that whatever happened next would be heart breaking. The police would come and forcibly remove the young man from Goodwill’s property. Or he would leave and spend the day’s heat somewhere else, drinking his way through twelve cans of beer.

Children in cages; endless cruelty to refugees in Europe; the violence of white supremacists in the United States; the rising, building, gathering crisis of climate change; endemic misogyny; the deaths of countless people of color at the hands of the police; uncivil discourse; gloating tyrants; war, war, and war… We only need to turn on the television, look online, or glance in a newspaper to discover things that can break our hearts. It is like Susan Sontag once wrote of the New York Times, “An ample reservoir of stoicism is needed to get through the great newspaper of record each morning, given the likelihood of seeing photographs that could make you cry.”

And yet, amid all of this horror and heart break there is joy and beauty to be found. Maybe not for all us. Maybe not all the time. But it is there: a delicate blue weed flower cracking through the gaps in concrete. The joyous warmth of children. The spaces between dancing salsa beats. Ochre oil clotted on taut canvas. The common tenderness we might share with each other on Sunday morning once the service has ended. I find wisdom in one of the most popular readings in our grey hymnal, Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese:”

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the world goes on. I have said little of our private pains. There are the wounds of the world. There are whatever wounds exist in this congregation. And then there are the wounds that we have suffered in our lives. The loss of a parent. The loss of a spouse. The loss of a child. The end of a marriage. Struggles with addiction. Poverty. Bullies for bosses. All of the disappointments and disillusions that cast shadows upon our lives. “Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine,” writes the poet.

The way forward is with a broken heart, Alice Walker tells us. But is it? I have been cold, shamed, and on the floor. And when I have been it has seemed that there was no way forward at all–heart sick, wounded, whole, or otherwise. What about you? To believe that the way forward is with a broken heart is an act of faith. It is not a rationale claim. It is a statement, sometimes against much evidence, that there is hope yet to be found in the world. And sometimes it seems like we should be all out of faith. And yet… and yet… there is a way forward. The sun in early morn will crack across mountain tops and bring the morrow. Spanish moss will continue to hang from ancient oaks. “Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination,” advises Mary Oliver.

The way forward is with a broken heart. Walker wrote the book twenty years after the end of her marriage. It is a thinly fictionalized series of accounts about how she made her way forward after a divorce that left her bewildered, heart sick, and lonely. The world that she thought she was going to create, to build, was forever gone. She is someone now who her young self could never have imagined. In the opening paragraphs, she tells her readers, “You do not talk to me now, a fate I could not have imagined twenty years ago.”

“[A] fate I could not have imagined,” there are few better words that capture loss. Walker’s marriage did not begin with the imagination that it would end in bitter discord, “[y]ou do not talk to me now.” When it begins, few imagine a ministry ending in disappointment. And yet, marriages and ministries both sometimes finish in sorrow.

The way forward is with a broken heart. We continue after life’s disappointments. In Walker’s book she weaves the torn fabric of ruptured lives into healing quilts. In one story, the narrator finds joy in “the woman I love now.” In another, two sisters encounter comfort, peace, and a modicum of delight when they travel back to their family’s old home. In a third, a father and a daughter discover solace in each other after years of difficulty. “[T]he world cannot be healed in abstract,” Walker informs us.

I suspect that if you are like me, you have been wounded in particular ways. I imagine that if this religious community is like other religious communities, it has been wounded in particular ways. It is only by addressing our specific injuries that we can begin to heal from them. And that healing is not something we can do alone, as isolated individuals. It is something that can only be accomplished together. “Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine,” counsels Mary Oliver.

The way forward is with a broken heart. Learning how to make our way forward, yours and mine, with a broken heart is deeply religious work. It might even be the central task of the religious community. There are few other places in our lives where we can be honest about despair. Again, and again, I have learned this during my ministry. The newcomer who tells me he’s visiting the church because his parents have just died. The transgender woman who shares that after years of alienation she has finally found a religious tradition that will love her without exception. The refugee who speaks almost no English and needs a place where she does not feel alone on a Sunday morning. A religious community like this one must be a place of love and healing.

That is the message our Universalist religious ancestors gave us to give the world. They said we were the church of “God’s love unlimited.” God’s love unlimited. No matter who you are, no matter the depths of your despair, no matter who you love, as members of this faith community we are called to love each other, to love the world, to face despair, and to collectively find our way forward with broken hearts.

This is deeply religious work. It requires the faith that somehow, someway, love will find us when we are shamed and on the floor. And that faith is not always easy to find. Sometimes it seems we cannot find it at all. But it is there, in the midst of heart sickness. There is always the possibility that we can learn to love again, that we can be gentle enough with each other to commit to the loving work of healing. There is always the chance that we can find a way forward.

Early Christianity was organized around finding a way forward with a broken heart. It began as a religious movement of those who continued after the heart-breaking loss of their beloved rabbi Jesus. Our second reading, the Epistula Apostolorum, was offered to remind us of this. It is a heretical text from the early second century of the Common Era. In it, the members of the early Christian church try to move forward after almost unimaginable disappointment. They had experienced great love in the person of their teacher. They had hoped for divine justice in the face of cruel empire. And their love and hope had ended in their leader’s death.

They reminded each other that love remained. They urged the members of their community to follow their master’s teaching: “But look, a new commandment I give you, that you love one another and obey each other and (that) continual peace reign among you. Love your enemies, and what you do not want done to you, that do to no one else.” They believed that if they had faith, somehow, someway, they could learn to love again. And through their love, they knew, they could heal each other and the world.

Let us forget for today that their message somehow became confused by the theologically orthodox over the centuries. Instead, let us hear in the words of the Epistula Apostolorum the expression of the church of God’s love unlimited. The theistic language may not resonate with you. Even if you need to translate it, I hope you will feel the transformative, healing, vision of love captured in those ancient words. They plead with us to find a forward way with a broken heart.

All this morning, I have suggested that the way forward is with a broken heart. I have invoked Walker’s wisdom, “healing begins where the wound was made.” But I have said almost nothing of the work of healing. It is early yet. I do not know your stories. All I know is that whatever healing work must be done, in our lives, in this religious community, and in our beautiful, fractured, world, is work that we are called to do together.

I am here, during this interim time, to do that work with you as best I can. During this transitional moment in your congregation’s life I promise to be as tender with you as I can. I will as honest with you about the wounds in your congregation, and in the world, as I can. I will be as honest with you about my own struggles and wounds as is appropriate. Throughout this period, I pledge to love you as best I can. I only ask that you have the merest glimmer of faith that whatever wounds there are in your lives, in this congregation, and in our luminous world we can find a way forward with broken hearts.

That it may be so, I invite you to join me in that spirit that some call prayer and others call meditation:

Oh, great spirit of love,
that some of us name God,
and others call the goodness to be found
in human life,
or name not at all,
be with me,
be with this congregation,
its members and friends,
its children and elders,
and all the people of this religious community,
as we engage in the work of healing
together.

There is so much pain,
so much hurt,
to be found,
addiction, disappointment, war, loss,
greed, grief…

None of us need suffer alone when we remember
that love can heal.
Let us remember that each human
is born with a beating heart
and the capacity to love.

Let us learn to awaken
that love within
and reach out to each other
so that we might heal each other
and this glorious world.

So that we may do good work together,
let the congregation say Amen.

Dear Members of the First Houston Community:

I am excited to be joining you this month for our time of interim ministry! My first day in the office will be August 7th. August 12th will be my first Sunday in the pulpit. I will be preaching at the Museum District. I will be preaching there again on August 19th and at least once at each of the campuses during the autumn. The services for the month of August will help us set the tenor of our work together. They are designed to focus our attention on the religious tasks before us as First Houston moves through a period of unanticipated transition during a time of profound cultural, ecological, moral, and political crisis.

I promise it won’t be dispiriting! My work while I am with you will be to help guide you through the transition while remaining honest about and engaged with the broader crises we face as a human species in this moment of history. One of the most important religious practices we can cultivate is the ability to find beauty and joy while we confront the disappointments and horrors of the world. As Unitarian Universalist theologian Rebecca Parker writes, “The greatest challenge in our lives is the challenge presented to us by the beauty of life, by what beauty asks of us, and by what we must do to keep faith with the beauty that has nourished our lives.” Some Sunday you might find me wearing a clown nose or engaging in an act of lyrical foolishness just as a reminder that joy should be constantly invoked.

Over the next few months my columns will share information and stories about the interim process. But, before I close with a piece of poetry, I would like to just tell you how excited about I am accompanying your congregation through its period of transition. I hope it is a time of growth and deepening for all of us.

It is a time, however, which will necessarily come to an end, for that is the nature of all things and, more particularly, the nature of interim ministry. I will be with you as you move through your period of transition. And then we will go our separate ways. And so it seems appropriate to conclude this month’s column with a fragment from T. S. Eliot’s “East Coker:”

In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.

I pray that this time of transition is a time of blessing for all of us. See you soon!

love,

Colin

PS Let me share with you a bit of logistical information. My office hours will be Tuesday through Thursdays, 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., with other times available by appointment. Mondays will be my study day and Fridays will be reserved for sermon writing. Saturdays will be my day off. I will be available to the church two evenings a week, most likely Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

I have been asked to fill-in at the First Parish in Needham tomorrow. I will be preaching a sermon on friendship. Service starts at 10:30 a.m. It will be my last in the Boston area before I start at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Greater Houston. 

This is my last sermon with you. It is not my last time in Ashby as your minister. That will be the evening of July seventeenth when I come to enjoy a concert on the green. Nonetheless, this morning is the last time that the collective you, the members and friends of First Parish Church, will listen to me in my current capacity–as your minister. Which is too bad. There is still so much that I would like to say to you and share with you. I cannot say all of it. What I can do is continue our conversation from earlier in the month. It is in some sense the same conversation we have been having all year. It is an attempt to answer the question: What is the purpose of the church? Or, really, as I said before, it is an attempt to answer three interwoven questions: Why does the First Parish Church exist? What difference does it make in your lives? What difference does it make in the wider world?

In my last sermon I suggested that one way we might answer these questions is to claim that this congregation, like Unitarian Universalist congregations across the country, can be a place where we learn the skills necessary to live in a democratic society. When we learn these skills we can make a difference in our own lives and in the wider world.

Some might argue that this is an answer that comes from the Unitarian part of our tradition. It suggests a certain faith in human nature. It suggests that we can collectively improve our lot and our selves. The claim that we have the ability to improve our selves is one of the claims that was at the heart of the Unitarian controversy in the nineteenth century. That was the conflict between liberal and orthodox Christians that eventually led to the First Parish Church splitting in two. The liberals, who believed that humans have the capacity to improve our selves, became Unitarians and stayed in this building. The orthodox, who claimed that human nature was inherently wicked and could only be redeemed with divine intervention, built the church across the street.

This morning I want to suggest a different purpose for the church than one that comes from the Unitarian tradition. I want to propose a purpose rooted in the theology of our Universalist ancestors. The purpose of the church is to love the Hell out of the world. Yes, we gather to further democratic practice and to build a more democratic society. But we do this because we are called to love the Hell out the world.

You might remember that Universalism was founded on a simple theological proposition: God loves people too much to condemn anyone to an eternity of torment in Hell. My friend Mark Morrison-Reed quotes the late Gordon McKeeman to describe this doctrine. He writes about how he once heard McKeeman “say, ‘Universalism came to be called ‘The Gospel of God’s Success,’ the gospel of the larger hope. Picturesquely spoken, the image was that of the last, unrepentant sinner being dragged screaming and kicking into heaven, unable… to resist the power and love of the Almighty.’”

Mark continues, “What a graphic, prosaic picture—a divine kidnapping. The last sinner being dragged, by his collar I imagined, into heaven.” What kind of a God was this? … This was a religion of radical and overpowering love. Universal salvation insists that no matter what we do, God so loves us that she will not, and cannot, consign even a single human individual to eternal damnation. Universal salvation–the reality that we share a common destiny–is the inescapable consequence of Universal love.”

In New England, one of the earliest and most important advocates of this doctrine was Hosea Ballou. For several years he was a circuit rider who traveled throughout the region spreading the message of God’s universal, unconditional, love. Ballou is reputed to have had a quick wit. There are a number of stories that have been preserved about his encounters with orthodox Christians who rejected the idea that God loved everyone without exception. You might recall one I have shared with you before. It was collected by Linda Stowell.

It seems that once when Ballou was out circuit riding he stopped for the night at a New England farmhouse. I imagine it was of the type that many of you live in: a large creaky wooden amalgamation of home and barn with the livestock living not all that far from the people.

Over dinner Ballou learned that the family’s eldest son was something of a ne’er-do-well. He rarely helped out with chores or did work on the farm. He stole money from his parents. He spent it when he went out late at night partying and carousing at the local tavern. The family was afraid that their son was going to go to Hell.

“Alright,” Ballou told them, “I have a plan. We will find a spot on the road where your son walks home drunk at night. We will build a big bonfire. And when he passes by we will grab him and throw him into the fire.”

The young man’s parents were aghast. “That’s our son and we love him,” they said to Ballou. Ballou responded, “If you, human and imperfect parents, love your son so much that you wouldn’t throw him into the fire, then how can you possibly believe that God, the perfect parent, would do so!”

It is a pretty fun story. I have used in a couple of sermons. It exemplifies the logic of universalist theology. God loves everyone, no exceptions. So, we should love everyone no exceptions. But as I have been thinking about the story I have come to recognize that it is not without its flaws.

It presents Ballou as a sort of lone hero–traipsing through rural New England spreading the gospel of universalism. There is truth to this portrayal but it elides a larger truth. Ballou did not spread universalism alone. He was but one of many early preachers who discovered the doctrine, a doctrine that is found in the Christian New Testament and in the theological works of early Christian theologians.

Someone like Ballou read a verse such as “For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive,” to mean literally what it said. Ballou and others interpreted this verse from I Corinthians to hinge upon the word “all,” which appears twice. All were condemned to mortality by Adam’s disobedience to the divine in the Garden of Eden. All will be given immortality through Christ. Not some. Not only the believers. Not just the righteous. But all. Every last sinner dragged screaming and kicking into heaven.

Ballou was not the first one to discover universalism in verses like I Corinthians 15:22. Origen of Alexandria was a Christian theologian who lived in the second and third centuries of the common era. Almost eighteen hundred years ago he taught that all would eventually be united with God. Taking a slightly different position than Ballou, he wrote “and there is punishment, but not everlasting… For all wicked men, and for daemons, too, punishment has an end.”

Ballou and Origen lived almost two thousand years apart. Their similar theological perspectives suggest one reason why Ballou and other circuit riders like him were so successful in spreading the Gospel of God’s Success. Lots of people believe that God is love and that a loving God does not punish. However, since this belief is held to be heretical by orthodox Christianity many people think that they are alone in their belief. Encountering someone like Ballou in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century did not convince them of universalism. It gave them permission to profess universalism because it helped them to recognize that they were not isolated in their beliefs.

I suspect Ballou’s circuit riding was a bit like the contemporary phenomenon of discovering people who are Unitarian Universalist without knowing it. Have you had this experience? It is a somewhat common for Unitarian Universalist ministers. And I think it is a relatively common one for Unitarian Universalist lay folk as well. It runs something like this: You go out to coffee with a relatively new friend. You chat about your friends and your families. Maybe you tell them about the foibles of your cat. Perhaps they share with you gardening tips. At some point though, the conversation turns serious. You might not know how you got on the subject but suddenly you are discussing your core beliefs. You tell them you are a Unitarian Universalist. They say, “I have never heard of that.” You explain. You give them your elevator speech. You might quote Unitarian Universalist author Laila Ibrahim:

It’s a blessing you were born
It matters what you do with your life.
What you know about god is a piece of the truth.
You do not have to do it alone.

Or maybe you quote our own Liz Strong, who reflecting on her childhood in Universalist church, wrote: “the center of my religious faith was a powerful belief in the inherent goodness and worth of all life. I believed in a god who loved me and all of creation.”

Whatever the case, your friend says to you, “Hey! That’s what I believe. I guess I was a Unitarian Universalist without knowing it.”

But what comes next? I wonder that about in the story of Ballou and the farm family. Did the family start a universalist church? Did they gather their friends together and form a small community of people someplace in rural New England who proclaimed, “God loves everyone, no exceptions?”

We do not know. But what we do know is that belief is not enough. We are called not just to believe in the power of God’s love. We are called to love the Hell out of the world. There is a lot of Hell in the world. And we know by now, from long experience, from all the prophets, is that the only way we can get rid of that Hell is through the power of love. It’s like Kenneth Patchen says in his poem, “The Way Men Live is a Lie:” “There is only one power that can save the world– / And that is the power of our love for all men everywhere.”

There is a lot of Hell in the world right now. This week we learned that since April the United States government has separated 2,000 immigrant children from their parents. 2,000 children. Separated from their parents. That is about as close a definition to Hell as I can find. It comes from the opposite of love. It is built upon the opposite of compassion.

The people who migrate to the United States do so because they have no other choice. It is an unbelievably difficult decision to uproot yourself and your family and travel thousands of miles, not knowing what you will find on the other end, in the hopes of making a better life. It is a decision that people only make when all the other options seem worse. Those options are sometimes to stay home and watch your children starve to death; to stay home and be murdered by paramilitaries; to stay home and be butchered by gangs; to stay home and be killed by an abusive spouse…

Immigrants provide net economic benefits to this country. Ask any honest economist and they will tell you that the United States is a wealthier country because of immigration. Immigrants have brought a wonderful diversity of art, food, and culture to this country. Mark Rothko, David Hockney, and William de Kooning are all iconic American artists. Each one an immigrant. Pizza, a gift from immigrants! St. Patrick’s Day comes from immigrants!

Hate and fear close the borders and try to keep immigrants out. Loving the Hell out of the world demands that we open the borders and let the poor, the marginalized, the frightened, the hungry, and the huddled, in.

Love over hate. This is an actual choice we make. Hate comes from a belief that all of nature can be reduced to the red tooth and claw. There is only so much in the world. You have to compete to get what is yours and damn everyone else. This is a view that turns immigrants into criminals. It prioritizes law over justice. It separates children from their parents. It falsely believes that the United States is worse off with all of the richness that has come from immigrants.

This is kind of hate is a choice. It is a choice that is sometimes based on a misreading of the Unitarian Charles Darwin’s “The Origin of the Species.” It misunderstands observations such as “One general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.” It bolsters this wrong interpretation of Darwin with false readings of the Christian New Testament like the one offered by the Attorney General this week.

Competition is certainly a factor in nature but in sits in tension with cooperation. Social animals like humans and honeybees cooperate with each other. Social animals survive by working together. The building of roads, the creation of schools, the development of science, the construction of a church, the maintenance of a congregation… All are acts of cooperation. Each comes from an often unarticulated belief that we are better working together, striving together, than we are alone.

Love the Hell Out of the World; we are faced with a choice. We can turn to hate or we can turn to compassion. That is why we Unitarian Universalists gather for community, we encourage each other to turn towards compassion. Competition or cooperation, hate or love, it comes down to a wager. We can choose to believe, like orthodox Christians, God will punish all sinners with eternal fire. The fire is coming for us like it was coming for the ne’er-do-well farmer’s son. The country cannot absorb more immigrants. Or we can bet upon love. That God, the perfect parent, will not condemn us to the inferno. That today, in the richest country in the history of the world, there is enough for all of the frightened, the starving, the poor, who come to our borders seeking sanctuary.

It is a bet on what is at the core of our humanity: love or hate, cooperation or competition. To love the Hell out of the world means to choose cooperation over competition. It means to suggest as, did Kenneth Patchen,

There is only one truth in the world:
Until we learn to love our neighbor,
There will be no life for anyone.

What have you chosen? As individuals? As a congregation? To love the Hell out of the world? That peace is more redemptive than violence? That we need to march, not fight, for our lives? That love is more powerful than hate?

I leave you with those rhetorical questions. They suggest answers to our three interlaced questions from the beginning of the sermon: Why does the First Parish Church exist? What difference does it make in your lives? What difference does it make in the wider world?

Those are your questions. You will have to wrestle with them as long as this congregation remains. But now, I have to go. And before I do, let me say this:

I hope that you will continue to love the Hell out of the world.
I love you.
I will carry you in my heart as long as my pulse continues to beat.
And I am deeply grateful for our year together.
Thank you for everything.

Let us give the final word, again, to the poet, who wrote in his non-gender neutral language:

Force cannot be overthrown by force;
To hate any man is to despair of every man;
Evil breeds evil–the rest is a lie!

There is only one power that can save the world–
And that is the power of our love for all men everywhere.

Let the congregation say Amen.