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.

This sermon was preached by Dan Harper at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, in Kensington, California. 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.

Do you remember the story of Prometheus? Prometheus was one of the Titans in ancient Greek mythology. When Zeus came along to lead a rebellion against Cronus, Prometheus was one of only two Titans who helped overthrow the old regime. For his support, the Titan Prometheus was accorded something of a special status by Zeus, the new ruler of the gods. Beyond that, according to the ancient Greek religion Prometheus was the one who created humankind. And Athene, the goddess of wisdom, taught Prometheus about architecture, astronomy, mathematics, navigation, medicine, and metallurgy, among other useful arts. Prometheus in turn taught these arts to us human beings. Unfortunately, Zeus was not pleased by these increasing powers of humanity, and threatened to get rid of the whole race. It was only because Prometheus intervened that we were spared.

Prometheus also angered Zeus by taking humanity’s part in a dispute over which portion of a sacrificial bull should be offered to the gods, and which portion might be retained for use by humans. Prometheus made two piles of meat. One pile had all the best parts hidden under sinews and bones. The other pile had all the scraps and inedible parts hidden under a layer of snow-white fat. Naturally, Zeus choose what looked like the better pile. When he realized Prometheus’s deception, he angrily proclaimed that the upstart humans would not be allowed to have fire.

In an act of self-sacrificial rebellion, Prometheus slipped up the back route to Mount Olympos, on top of which Zeus and the other chief gods and goddesses lived, and there he stole a bit of fire. He concealed the glowing coal in a hollow fennel stalk, and brought it back down to share with humankind.

Zeus was outraged. Not only had Prometheus taught humanity how to cheat the gods, but he had stolen fire from Mount Olympos. In punishment, Zeus had Prometheus bound by unbreakable irons to the top of a mountain; and one a day, an eagle swooped down out of the sky and ate Prometheus’s liver. Since he was an immortal, his liver regrew each night, but then the eagle came back the next day. It sounds very painful!

You probably know the ending to the story. The mighty Hercules (or Herakles), half human and half immortal, finally freed Prometheus. But far more importantly, the self-sacrifice of Prometheus allowed humankind to learn how to make use of fire.

The Unitarian Universalist humanist theologian William R. Jones points to the myth of Prometheus as an example of how rebellion can be a saving act. Many of us were brought up with a different myth about rebellion, the myth of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. In traditional interpretations of the myth of Adam and Eve, they rebelled by eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and for that rebellion humankind will suffer to the end of time. Jones says he prefers the myth of Prometheus, where rebellion results in great good for all humanity — and where rebellion may be punished, but the punishment does not last forever.

I suspect most Unitarian Universalists prefer the myth of Prometheus to the myth of Adam and Eve. Like Prometheus, we believe in saving the human race, saving the world. Not only that, but most of us believe that it is acceptable to annoy the powers that be in order to save the world. We follow the precepts of Henry David Thoreau, who said that breaking laws through civil disobedience is fine, if you are working for the betterment of the world.

On the rare occasions when we use the words “saved” or “salvation,” we are most likely to mean saving the whole world. That’s one of the distinctive features of Unitarian Universalists — for us, salvation means saving the world. And when we go out to save the world, we tend to have pretty big goals. I don’t just want to give a dollar to the homeless man who sits outside the market where I go to buy my vegetables — I want to go much further than that, and create social systems that will put an end to homelessness everywhere. This is one of the things I like best about being a Unitarian Universalist: we think big, we want everyone in the whole world to lead a fully human life.

There is a bit of a problem that comes with thinking big in the way we do. Saving the whole world takes a lot out of you. It’s a big job, and even though we work together to try to make it happen, sometimes I start to feel a little burned out. I sometimes wonder if I’m feeling a little like Prometheus must have felt when he was chained up and having his liver torn out by that eagle. Saving the whole world sometimes feels like it requires a fair amount of self-sacrifice on the part of you & me.

One lesson I have absorbed over my lifetime as a Unitarian Universalist is thatsaving the world isn’t enough. I also have to save myself, as it were — I also need to have a personal spiritual practice. Meditation, prayer, yoga, a weekly session with a therapist, ritual eating of chocolate — we have a myriad of personal spiritual practices that we choose in order to ground us, to renew our minds and hearts and spirits, to keep us from feeling burned out.

I sometimes think that we Unitarian Universalists are a little like Prometheus, except that we have daily spiritual practices. We go out into the world to save humanity, and we do great things out there in the world. But, like Prometheus, we pay a price for saving the world. We stand up for feminism and anti-racism and gay rights at work, even when those views are unpopular, and we endure the consequences of our just actions. We stand up for our children, demanding adequate public schools, fighting to keep good schools open and to improve bad schools, and we do this in spite of being exhausted. This year, many of us will devote long hours of our precious spare time to registering voters, to serving with the Leagues of Women Voters, to getting out the vote. Many of us are devoted to helping organizations which promote non-violence or economic justice or other actions that will save the world.

In ways large and small, we strive to make the world a better place, and like Prometheus, we pay the price. So we go home to recover — to meditate, or to pray, or to sing Bach cantatas, or to cook, or whatever it is you do for your daily spiritual practice — and to wonder if there’s a Hercules who will come along and save us.

Two years ago, I wound up reading the Book of Revelation from the Christian scriptures. The book of Revelation is not a book that we Unitarian Universalists tend to spend much time with. If we read the Bible at all, we might read Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and then maybe read Genesis and Exodus as books of liberation. The book of Revelation is just a little too weird for most of us religious liberals.

My friend Ellen Spero, the minister at the Unitarian Universalist congregation in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, convinced me to read Revelation. She interprets Revelation as a book of liberation and of radical inclusivity. Forget what the religious right says about Revelation, says Ellen, it’s not a book about the apocalypse, about the end times. It’s a book about the here-and-now, how justice and righteousness will happen for you and me and for everyone now — in this world.

So following Ellen’s promptings, I read Revelation. And when I could read it as a book of liberation, I actually liked it. And I’ve been haunted by this one passage from it for some months now. The New Revised Standard Version — that’s the translation religious liberals tend to prefer, because it uses gender inclusive language whenever the ancient languages permit it — translates my passage as a short poem:

See, the home of God is among mortals
He will dwell with them;
they will be his peoples,
and God himself will be with them;
he will wipe away every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more.

This passage really struck a chord with me, and I think it has a lot to say to us religious liberals. Nor do I think it matters if you are humanist or theist, because I think this passage is less concerned about whether we believe in God, than in whether we believe in liberation of all beings. It tells us of a liberation where people will still die, they always have, but Death will no longer be worshipped as a god, and we will know death as a natural part of life — a liberation where people will still suffer, and we will mourn and cry and weep, but we will do so in the knowledge that justice will be done, that liberation is for everyone — a liberation where someone is going to wipe away the tears from my eyes, and I will wipe away the tears from your eyes, and justice will happen, here and now.

You may think this little poem is overly optimistic. Liberation usually seems a distant dream — knowing as we do that domestic violence continues, that war continues, that people continue to be sold into slavery around the world, that homophobia continues to be such an active force that the United States Senate is even now considering a bill to make same sex marriage unconstitutional. This little poem may be overly optimistic, but as a Universalist I pretty optimistic myself. I cannot accept a universe where we have to wait for an apocalypse before things get better. Nor can I wait for gradual progress onwards and upwards forever, until some day in the distant future justice and righteousness will come down like waters. Like that great Universalist Hosea Ballou, I know that glory is just around the corner — although unlike Ballou I admit that I’m not quite so sure what glory is….

In that poem from the book of Revelation, the line from the poem that sticks with me is that line about God wiping every tear away from our eyes. we’ve all been through some hard times — some of you have been through some very hard times. I would love to have someone wipe every tear away from my eyes. And I don’t know about you, but I can’t really imagine a humaniform God, a God with arms and hands that can wipe away those tears, and I guess a divine handkerchief with which to do the wiping. My imagination doesn’t work quite that way. But it doesn’t matter. I can imagine some person I know and love wiping tears away from my eyes. I can imagine my life partner wiping tears from my eyes — for indeed in the fourteen years we have been together, she has wiped tears from my eyes. I can imagine people in my church wiping tears away from my eyes, for while that hasn’t happened in a literal sense, there have been times when I went to church to keep from crying, or when I went to church so I would have a place to shed tears.

When Herakles broke the chains the bound Prometheus, I don’t think that was enough. What I want for Prometheus is someone to wipe tears away from his eyes. Or maybe he didn’t cry. After all, Prometheus was a Titan, one of those immortal demi-gods of ancient Greece. Maybe Titans don’t shed tears — I don’t know. The problem is, when we human beings start acting like Prometheus — the way we religious liberals sometimes do — we forget that we are not Titans. We are not immortal. We cannot re-grow damaged parts of ourselves overnight, in time to be hurt again tomorrow by the vicissitudes of our work for liberation.

We Unitarian Universalists are willing to go out and save the world by the dint of our own superhuman efforts. We Unitarian Universalists are willing to save ourselves from burnout by the dint of our own individual efforts at spiritual practices. We do a lot already. I don’t want to ask us to do one more thing. But I would like us to consider one little thing….

When you consider the work of liberation, in which you are already engaged, I ask you to consider this: if you are able to wipe the tears away from one person’s eyes — if you are able to allow someone else to wipe the tears away from your eyes — you have furthered the work of liberation, and that day you have made your contribution towards saving the world, and towards saving yourself as well. You don’t even have to actually physically touch someone, which is good news for me, coming as I do from a fairly traditional New England upbringing where shaking someone’s hand is plenty of physical contact, thank you very much. But if I walk down the street and the homeless man who stands on Telegraph Ave. near Ashby asks me for some change and I give him a little change, and if I also look him in the eye and smile, and for that instant I treat him as a human being (as scared as I may be, and he is a pretty scary guy some days), in that instant the world undergoes an infinitesimal moment of complete liberation; and maybe in some way he does wipe all the tears away from my eyes and death and mourning and pain are no more.

Of course these little bits of complete liberation do not solve the problems of hunger and economic injustice and the lack of treatment for persons with chronic mental illness, and — guess what — we still have to do all that hard work. And I still have to get up in the morning and do my daily practice of yoga, which I’m really bad at but I do it anyway. Being good religious liberals, we will continues to work hard and pull ourselves up by our very bootstraps.

While we are hanging on to our bootstraps, at least we can know liberation is all around us. It could happen to you today. You could look into someone’s eyes, and it could happen. It won’t last long, perhaps, but it could happen. In that moment, and just for that moment, you and the world could be saved.

What could be better than that? Next time it happens to me, I’m going to see if I can just accept it — to know that love will overcome all obstacles.