What Is Our Sermon?

Rev. Mark Stringer

First Unitarian Church of Des Moines

8/27/06

“I would rather see a sermon than hear one any day.”
—Edgar Albert Guest, newspaper man and poet (1881-1959)

 

Call to Gather  Adapted words of Ed Harris

We have come together from many different places
this morning…we have come together to our church.

This church is not a place of right convictions, a fortress of truth

  or even a bastion of philosophy.

This church is a community of those who have suffered loss,

  lived through it, and learned true compassion.

Our church is where we hear music and sing it ourselves,

  where we serve one another, and where the strands of our beliefs,

  our lives and hopes are in a cable strong enough

    to bear us across the valleys of pain, despair, grief, doubt and disillusionment.

Each of us here this morning has experienced these, or will.

We learn from each other, and for these reasons this is a special place

  infused with our hope.

So to each of you, whether it is your first time with us, or just another return to a place you know as home,

I bid you welcome.

It is good to be together.

 

Meditation  “Alive Together” by Lisel Mueller

 

Speaking of marvels, I am alive
together with you, when I might have been
alive with anyone under the sun,
when I might have been Abelard’s woman
or the whore of a Renaissance pope
or the peasant wife with not enough food
and not enough love, with my children
dead of the plague.  I might have slept
in an alcove next to the man
with the golden nose, who poked it
into the business of stars,
or sewn a starry flag
for a general with wooden teeth.

I might have been the exemplary Pocahontas
or a woman without a name
weeping in Master’s bed
for my husband, exchanged for a mule,
my daughter, lost in a drunken bet.
I might have been stretched on a totem pole
to appease a vindictive god
or left, a useless girl-child,
to die on a cliff.  I like to think
I might have been Mary Shelley
in love with a wrongheaded angel,
or Mary’s friend.  I might have been you.

This poem is endless, the odds against us are endless,
our chances of being alive together
statistically nonexistent;
still we have made it, alive in a time
when rationalists in square hats
and hatless Jehovah’s Witnesses
agree it is almost over,
alive with our lively children
who—but for endless ifs—
might have missed out on being alive
together with marvels and follies
and longings and lies and wishes
and error and humor and mercy
and journeys and voices and faces
and colors and summers and mornings
and knowledge and tears and chance.[1]

 

 

Reading

“Walking Toward Morning” by Victoria Safford

 

You know, we do it every day.  Every morning we go out blinking into the glare of our freedom, into the wilderness of work and the world, making maps as we go, looking for signs that we’re on the right path.  And on some good days we walk right out of our oppressions, those things that press us down from the outside or (as often) from the inside; we shake off the shackles of fear, prejudice, timidity, closed-mindedness, selfishness, self-righteousness, and claim our freedom outright, terrifying as it is—our freedom to be human, and humane.

 

Every morning, every day, we leave our houses, not knowing if it will be for the last time, and we decide what we’ll take with us, what we’ll carry: how much integrity, how much truth telling, how much compassion (in case somebody along the way may need some), how much arrogance, how much anger, how much humor, how much willingness to change and to be changed, to grow and to be grown.  How much faith and hope, how much love and gratitude—you pack these with your lunch and medications, your date book and your papers.  Every day, we gather what we think we’ll need, pick up what we love and all that we so far believe, put on our history, shoulder our experience and memory, take inventory of our blessings, and we start walking toward morning.[2]

 

Sermon

 

This first Sunday back in the pulpit after my summer leave has always seemed like a good opportunity to share a story from the time I have been away from you.  In the past, I have spoken about things I experienced on vacation trips or encounters I had with places or people around town.  In previous years, I have spoken about getting a speeding ticket, or visiting the Jordan Creek “Town Center” for the first time, or the spiritual benefits of spending summer evenings dancing with my preschool daughter to her still-favorite rock band, The Wiggles.   I’m pleased to say that I had a rich summer…a summer with its share of stories, some of which I will share in services later this fall. Like the trip Susan and I took to New York City earlier this month that brought us to the World Trade Center site for the first time in ten years and the surprising thoughts and feelings that arose for me there. Or the not one…not two…but three times my family was visited in July by an earnest young Jehovah’s Witness practitioner who must have figured that sparring with a UU minister over the civil rights of same-sex couples was good training for his faith development. However, some of you will be pleased to know that I will not be writing a sermon about getting another speeding ticket this summer…even though I did.

 

The story from this summer that I have chosen to share with you today is not something I directly experienced myself.  Rather, it is a story that comes from a colleague of mine here in town, the Rev. Tim Diebel, a friend I have gotten to know through my work with AMOS.  Tim told me he was at a ministry conference recently where Eugene Peterson, a Presbyterian minister with many years of experience, was relating tales of his life as a pastor.  At this conference, Peterson told a story about his adult son, an aspiring writer, who had once told him, “You know Dad, you only have one sermon…a sermon that you just preach over and over in various ways...kind of like novelists who essentially keep writing the same book through their careers.”

 

Now most of us who speak from church pulpits on a regular basis are well aware that we end on similar themes from week to week.  But to be told by your own son that you really only have one sermon…well, I can see how that would be more than a little disappointing.  It certainly was to Peterson who did what I imagine most of us in the preaching profession might have done.  He took his son’s comment as an indictment.  After all, he must have wondered, I have at least three or four I cycle through…but just one? 

 

A few years later, the same son, now living in another town, began expressing some displeasure with the church he was attending and mentioned to his father that he planned to “shop around.”   Again, a chunk of time passed and Peterson said he hadn’t been hearing much about the church shopping, so, one day, he asked his son if he had found a new church home.  "No," the son replied, "I visited several, but, you know Dad, they haven't found their sermon yet." 

 

They haven’t found their sermon yet.

 

As I continue to think about this story, I keep returning to two compelling questions. The first of these questions is not, “Do I have just one sermon?”  for that is far too easy a question.  Of course I have just one sermon…at least that I preach on Sunday mornings anyway. I’m sure some of you who have been around for more than a few months have your ideas about what that sermon is. I’ll admit to what I think my one sermon is a little later.  But before I do that I want to share my two questions.

 

The first question is What is your sermon?

 

What is your sermon? Obviously you get to preach it from a pulpit the way I get to.  Still, I contend, you do have a sermon. It’s the sermon you preach by the way you choose to live … the sermon described so well, I think, by Victoria Safford in our reading this morning, the sermon that is expressed every day as each of us goes  “out blinking into the glare of our freedom, into the wilderness of work and the world” and determines what our commitments will be…how much love we will bring with us…how much arrogance…how much forgiveness, hope, love and gratitude we will carry as we return, each glorious and pain-filled time, to our walk towards morning.  So, what is your sermon? 

 

Now you could most certainly argue with me (and some of you have) about how much choice each of us really has on this walk we call life.  So much is out of our control, we say…from our genetic makeup and predispositions, to the era in which we have been born and the cultural norms we have found there…from the way we were raised, to the mostly random things that happen around and to us that clearly have little to do with anything that we have chosen.  And yet, I still maintain, most of us do have choices in how we interpret our lives at least, and certainly in how we face each day, despite all that is out of our control.  And these choices are the primary content of the sermons we offer the world. Sermons that impact far more than we may realize…sermons that can have ripple effects that can actually improve or further trouble our world. So what might your sermon be?  What is your sermon?  I think it is a provocative question.  A poignant question even.  A question worth asking every day.

 

But my purpose this morning is not just to have us focus on ourselves as individuals, as important, if not essential, as that can sometimes be. I’ve got bigger things on my mind.  You see, this past Friday, the board and staff of our church spent a whole day in retreat thinking about the future, setting goals for what we may bring to this institution in the coming year as we continue to pursue our mission, which I like to simplify into “we strive to transform ourselves and our larger community.”  And all this thoughtful conversation reminded me again of the second question I ask you this morning: 

 

“Have we, the First Unitarian Church of Des Moines, found our sermon?”  If so, what is it?  What is our sermon?

 

Historically speaking, the question is not difficult to answer.  Beyond a doubt, our church, this church that formed 129 years ago this month, has always had at least one sermon.  It has been a sermon not only preached from the pulpit by its ministers…but more importantly…and oftentimes more poignantly…a sermon lived by many of its members.  From its inception, this church has served as a needed alternative to more conservative and discriminatory forms of faith (or secular practice) that would claim, sometimes in defiance of their own scriptures, that there is a hierarchy of worth and dignity…that some people have more worth or value by virtue of their theology, or their race, or their gender, or their sexual orientation…than do others.  The sermon of this church, then, has been that we need to care for, respect, and protect the rights of our sisters and brothers as we would ourselves. 

 

From the earliest days of our church in the late 19^th century, members and ministers were active in the women’s suffrage movement. In the first two decades of the 20^th century, the development of the American Religious Humanism movement had some of its earliest expression in the sermons of a former minister Curtis Reese, who preached that emphasis on divine intervention should take a back seat to the role of people as instruments of change.  We have had members and ministers active not only in organized labor movements, but, former minister Aaron Gilmartin, was a cofounder of the Iowa Civil Liberties Union.  In 1948, seven years before Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus in Birmingham, Alabama, Edna Griffin, a member of our church preached her own sermon, you might say, by filing suit against a Des Moines lunch counter for refusing her service because of the color of her skin.  Several of her First Unitarian friends effectively preached along with her by picketing the lunch counter for six weeks.  They eventually won the case and the integration of Iowa’s public accommodations was on its way.  The list goes on, from the generous post-war relief efforts of our Unity Circle group to members protesting the Vietnam war.  From members housing refugees to helping to secure affordable housing.  From our church being one of the first UU churches in the country to receive the “Welcoming Congregation” designation from the UUA, which means that we were far ahead of the curve in being intentionally welcoming to our LGBT sisters and brothers, to our now thriving Interweave chapter and ever-increasing participation at the Des Moines Pride Parade each year, this church continues to preach a sermon of equal rights for all.

 

And then there is our vibrant presence in AMOS, our continued backing of the work of The Interfaith Alliance of Iowa, and our increasing commitment to  and support of the Des Moines Area Religious Council…among other connections made with other important initiatives in town through members living their personal UU sermons in powerful ways.

 

And yet, with all the good work being done and the important connections being made, I still sometimes wonder if our church has truly found its sermon yet.  For example, I wonder if we would be willing, as an institution, to take a stand in accordance with our stated values, even if the decision could upset a minority of members?  Do we have to all agree in order to act?  This is a key question for us, because I think if we are afraid to ruffle a few feathers from time to time, we may be afraid to fully engage with our mission and we may miss the opportunity to work through some of the tension that could lead to the transformation we claim to seek…both the transformation of our larger community…and ourselves.

 

Which brings me back to my one sermon.  The one sermon that I think is at the foundation of all others.  The sermon that I believe is the key to how we define our sermon as a church.

 

I know what some of you are probably thinking.  Two words.  Say it with me now: “Creative Interchange.”

 

I think you’re only partially right.

 

Of course, those two words, Creative Interchange, symbolize for me something more than just a way to view the importance of being open to relationship…open to the possibilities that arise we can engage with one another with the expectation that we may be transformed by the encounter.  Creative Interchange to me is, just as the person who coined the term, liberal theologian Henry Nelson Wieman, believed it to be, the source of human good.  Creative Interchange is, or could be, or dare I say, should be our ultimate human commitment...the creative force that promises the possibility of something more reliable than love if we would only give ourselves fully to it.  It promises the possibility of redemption.

 

I believe that only when we choose to engage with one another with the expectation that transformation is possible will we leave ourselves open enough to be challenged…to be surprised…to be saved from ourselves and our sometimes misguided belief that we already know all we need to know.  That’s why I think a church like ours can be so important.  If we are doing it right, we should be offering a haven for creative interchange…a practice laboratory where each of us can hone skills we can then take out into the world…a world filled with tough situations…tough situations that demand creative interchange because they demand that we give ourselves in service to something other than our own predispositions.  Rather we must give ourselves to the possibility that we often can discover a greater good as a result of seeing the world through the lens of someone else’s experiences.  We don’t have to always agree…which is good, because we won’t.  Creative Interchange asks that we merely try to understand…and that we do so with respect for the other person’s humanity…and for our own.

 

However, the idea of Creative Interchange is nothing but an esoteric notion unless we actually give ourselves to it, living it out in our interactions, and creating an environment where it can flourish.

 

That’s why I think my one sermon is actually very closely related to the sermon that I think has been expressed throughout the history of this church…the same sermon that I think can be our foundation for years to come.

 

It is up to us. 

 

It is up to us to create and maintain lives of meaning and substance for ourselves and for our sisters and brothers the best that we can.  It is up to us to help build a church where we cannot help but be transformed, where we can’t wait to get here each week because we know we might be transformed, because we are open to and curious about difference, and enthusiastic to participate in the pursuit of transformation of ourselves and our larger community.  It is up to us to provide a religious home for our children and youth who are just as desperate as we are for connection and for meaning in a world where our souls are being drowned in endless advertising and what amounts to nihilistic propaganda dressed up as religion, government, and/or capitalism. It is up to us to us to help create the kind of world where people are cared for, where the planet is seen as a partner with us rather than simply a resource, and where religion is the means to a solution to our problems rather than the cause of them.

 

It is up to us…

Each of us…

and the sermons we live. 

It always has been. 

It always will be.

 

 

Closing Words (Goethe, adapted by Bruce Southworth)
Whatever we can do, or dream we can do, let us begin it this day.  Boldness has genius and power and magic in it. And may we be bold in our living and in our loving, in our giving and our forgiving so that the world awaited becomes more nearly the world attained.