This sermon was preached by Dan Harper at the Unitarian Universalist Society of Geneva, Illinois, on Saturday, September 18, and Sunday, September 19, 2004. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Sermon copyright (c) 2004 Daniel Harper.
IMPORTANT NOTE: This sermon was preached many years ago, when I was an interim associate minister. The congregation who heard this sermon is now a completely different congregation. I post this here, because it’s an example of one kind of sermon that interim ministers used to preach.
Readings
The first reading is from the Christian scriptures, from the first letter Paul of Tarsus wrote to the early Christian community at Corinth:
“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.” [1 Cor. 13.4-5 (NIV)]
Second reading from The Almost Church by Michael Durall
Sermon
During the young people’s story, you heard me say that I am an interim minister, and you heard me say a little bit about what it means to be an interim minister. I’d like to be a little more explicit as to what it is I do as an interim minister. What I start out doing as an interim minister is help you address problems that may have accumulated; where it really gets fun is when I get to help you dream about the kind of church you’d really like to be…. but let me start from the beginning:
Obviously, a central part of what I do will be to carry out the normal duties of ministry in this congregation. I am here to preach among you, to be a pastor with you, to speak upon occasion with prophetic voice, and — because I am a teaching minister — above I am here to teach. It is perhaps worth mentioning that my ministry is with all ages: babies, children, youth, young adults, middle-aged people, and elders.
But an interim minister does more than simply carry out the normal duties of ordained ministry. Among the possible tasks of interim ministry, two stand out for me right now: to help this congregation — you folks sitting here — understand and honor your past and present; and to help this congregation, to help you, prepare for a new permanent minister and to anticipate the future with zest. And I’d like to take this time with you to lay out some of the issues in these two areas, as I see them.
Right now, I’d say the most important thing we must do together, you and I, is to understand and honor this congregation’s past. We should start by going all the way back to Caleb Buckingham, who started a Unitarian Sunday school in Geneva when it was a rather wild frontier town, and before there were any churches at all here. Caleb Buckingham paved the way for Augustus Conant, who came to Geneva, helped to build this church building with his own hands, and became the first minister here. I note with pleasure that the very first ministry of this church was, in fact, a teaching ministry — a heritage of which we can be proud. I also note that Augustus Conant’s ghost is said still to remain with this building, keeping a watchful eye on us, the inheritors of his good work.
I’ll skip through most of the rest of the 19th century, pausing only long enough to recognize Celia Parker Wooley, one of those pioneer women ministers the Unitarians and Universalists can be so proud of. She was here from 1893-1896, and lived in what we now call Pioneer House. (Parenthetically, I am personally convinced that her ghost still inhabits Pioneer House, the house in which she lived while she was minister here. While I am no believer in ghosts, I had an interesting experience with doors opening and closing in Pioneer House this summer, and it did seem to be more of a feminine presence than masculine. Perhaps she and Augustus Conant are both keeping a watchful eye on us.)
But it is the more recent past that I feel we need to attend to, so I will skip most of the twentieth century — skip over the amazing ministry of Dr. Charles Lyttle, who reawakened this church in the mid-20th C. — skip over Don and Betty King — pass over the coming of Lindsay Bates in 1978 — and move up to the 1990’s.
Some eight or nine years ago, this congregation hired —————— to be Director of Religious Education. She began as a religious education assistant, and moved into the job as Director of Religious Education when her predecessor left. She stayed here as Director of Religious Education for around eight years. Her tenure here was distinguished by the growth of the church school from perhaps fifty or sixty children and youth, to something over 150 enrolled children and youth. Beyond her work with children and youth, her adult programs are said to have been truly excellent, and indeed attracted some adults to become a part of this congregation.
Then —————— left this congregation rather suddenly in January, 2004. As is true whenever a long-term staff member leaves a congregation, there are those people who still mourn her departure, and there are those people who feel her departure has opened up new possibilities. From what I gather in listening to you, there are those who still don’t understand why she left. For now, that is all I have to say about —————— because it will be up to you to tell the whole story; it will be up to you to understand, and to come to terms with, her departure. As an interim minister, I am only here to help you tell this story yourselves.
As if the departure of a long-term staff member wasn’t enough change, the Unitarian Universalist Society of Geneva faces even more change. Last year, a third worship service was added; this room simply cannot accommodate all the people who want to come and worship here. It’s exciting when a congregation starts to grow, there’s an excitement of being a part of something that lots of other people also want to be a part of — you start to think, hey, maybe we’re doing something right here! — but growth creates stresses and strains as well, and adding a third worship service is a stress and a strain.
On top of all that, the church’s leadership has decided to experiment with adding a second minister to the staff. This, my friends, is a major change. Lindsay Bates has been here a long time, on the order of 26 years, and now you have another minister. Not only that, but the other minister you have right now is me, and boy am I different from Lindsay — I’m really tall, and I’m a minister of religious education (whatever that means), and instead of standing nicely at the pulpit I roam up and down the church as I preach.
Change is usually uncomfortable, my friends, and this old church is facing an awful lot of change right now. If I were a long-term member, I’d be feeling uncomfortable right now — excited, but uncomfortable too!
But wait, there’s more; yes, we have gotten to the most uncomfortable topic of all; the topic we talk about in hushed tones, preferably behind closed doors, and never when the children are around. No, I’m not talking about sex, I’m talking about money. (Compared to talking about money, sex is easy to talk about!)
Ah, yes — money. We don’t like to talk about it.
We’re a growing church, so we need more of it (but we don’t like to talk about how we need more of it, which means we fall behind in collecting money so we need still more of it). And generally speaking, Unitarian Universalists give less money — er, less of it — to their churches than any other denomination except Roman Catholics (which means we always need more of it, so we’re always having to talk about it, which makes us more uncomforatble because we hate talking about it).
Well. Enough about money for now [fan self]. I’m exhausted.
Finally, on top of everything else, we find an unrecognized but really big problem looming over all Unitarian Universalist congregations. We heard about that problem in the second reading today, to wit: the cultural and religious landscape around us is changing rapidly; while we continue to cling to ways of doing church that evolved during the 1950’s for an entirely different religious and cultural climate. Every other problem we face: ——————’s departure, the growth of the congregation, the addition of a second minister, (ahem) money — every other problem we face is deeply affected by the changes in the society around us.
You’ll remember that I said there’s a second task we must do together this year, and that is to prepare for a new permanent minister and to anticipate the future with zest. I believe the best way to begin working on this task together is to dream; simply because you need to figure out what kind of permanent minister you need. So we dream together of the future, you dream of the church you would like to become….
In my short time among you, I have heard you express two kinds of dreams for this church. Well, really I’ve heard as many kinds of dreams as I’ve heard people talking about their dreams, for we all add our little individual twists when we dream about our hopes for this church. But I feel I can group the dreams I have heard into two general categories.
For want of a better name, I call the first category of dreams the “clubhouse dreams.” By “clubhouse,” of course, I mean the very best kind of clubhouse, a clubhouse of integrity and honor. In these dreams, we want our churches to be beautiful safe refuges where we can escape from the vicissitudes of an unpleasant world and spend time with people who are pretty much like us. In these dreams, we’ll convince each other to give just a little more money so we can make our buildings beautiful, and hire just enough staff to care for us. In these dreams, we get volunteers only for those committees we need to keep the church functioning (although if we had any energy to spare, which we don’t, we’d try to do a little more outreach into the community). In these dreams, we create safe little refuges for liberal religion in a world increasingly dominated by fundamentalism.
But I keep hearing another kind of dream from people in this church. I hear vague dreams of a church where we equip our members and friends to go out into the world and… well, go out into the world not to do the usual kind of evangelism, but to do a truer kind of evangelism which we heard about in the call-and-response reading “Hey Ain’t We Got Good News”: more like preaching practiced, than practiced preaching. We dream of a church where “peace and justice are not just words we form with our lips, but realities we shape with our lives.” We dream of a church like the churches we hear of, with people so generous with money that we can give away a quarter or even a third of our church budget to make the world a better place — and still have plenty of money to equip ourselves to go out into the world. Yes, and dreams of a church where we ourselves are transformed — transformed to the point that our lives center on growing hearts that love, minds that seek, hands that serve.
I believe our first reading this morning, from Paul of Tarsus’s letter to the Christian community at Corinth, is about this kind of church. While I consider Paul of Tarsus to be anti-woman, homophobic, and in need of therapy, he was an organizational genius. He wrote that passage to a congregation that was in a time of major change, a time of turmoil; he asked them to hold on to love as force that drove their behavior.
Like the Universalists of old, we dream of a church whose central tenet is love. We dream of a church where we know we’ll be all right some day, where it may take a while to find our ways home but we will get there, and when we get there someone will wipe the tears away from our eyes — which I suspect will mean learning to wipe the tears away from each other’s eyes.– And this is a our second dream: we dream of a church of love.
I have heard these two kinds of dreams from you. I am not here to tell you which dream to follow. Maybe you heard in my voice that I kind of prefer the second dream, the dream of a church of love that transforms us and the world. But I can find nothing wrong with having a church that’s a clubhouse — though, mind you, I’m going to push you to make it the best clubhouse ever.
So now you know a little bit more about what an interim minister does, or rather what an interim minister can do if we work together. We will work together as I carry out the normal duties of ministry. I will be with you as you remember the past, and we will claim and honor the past, we will try to heal any old wounds. We will dream together, as you get ready to search for a new, permanent second minister. And then I will leave.
As you know, the sermon in a Unitarian Universalist worship service is never the final word on any subject. It is always an effort to open a conversation, an invitation to dialogue, to discussion, to correction and completion. I would like us to continue this conversation — but not here and now. I will be here at church this Wednesday evening, at 7:00 p.m., to host an open discussion forum with any of you who wish to come and talk with me. There will be child care available — although I welcome older children and teens to participate in this discussion with you adults. I will have a little opening presentation to frame our discussion together, and then we’ll talk.
This will not be the only time you have to talk with me. I will host these open discussion forums (fora?) on the fourth Wednesday of each month; and of course I am available at other times by appointment.
But let’s be sure to talk with one another. Let us claim and honor the past of this congregation, let us begin to heal old wounds, let us dream together, to the end that you may anticipate the future with zest.
So may we come together as a religious community. Amen.