Call to worship:
Congregation & Leader: We come together in the spirit of shared worship and prayer, seeking to open our hearts to life with all people in a spirit of tolerance and respect.
Minister: We come, recognising the innate worth and dignity of all people; we come, seeking to promote freedom to believe as consciences dictate;
Cong: We come, believing that the truth is best served where the mind and conscience are free;
Min: We are people of faith, seeking to promote free and inquiring religion;
Cong: We come to worship God and to celebrate the gift of life;
Min: We come, seeking ways to serve humanity ñ our whole human family;
Cong: We bring our respect for all creation; it is a gift and is our home;
Min: We remember Jesus, his life, love and example; and in following his teachings we honour the liberal Christian tradition;
Cong: We pray for strength and courage, that we in turn may encourage and unite in fellowship all causes which support the religious liberty of their members;
Min: We shall remain unconstrained by the imposition of creeds . . .
Cong: . . . for ours is a liberal religious heritage.
Min: We come seeking to learn from and contribute to the spiritual, cultural and intellectual insights of all humanity.
Cong: We come with pride in our rich heritage of sacrifice and service,
Min: and we seek to be faithful successors to the spirit of this witness.
Original (Invocation) by Rev John Midgley based on GA Object (2001), adapted and extended for congregational worship by Rev John Clifford
Lighting of chalice As we light our candle this morning we call to mind the suffering of those whose lives have been affected by the terrorist attacks of 11 September. We are aware of the fears and worries of so many but in the midst of worry and fear we proclaim the importance of the light of Truth, the warmth of Love, and the fragility of Beauty.
Reading from Thoughts and Meditations by Khalil Gibran: "Vision"
'Life without Love is like a tree without blossom and fruit. And love without Beauty is like flowers without scent and fruits without seeds....Life, Love, and Beauty are three persons in one, who cannot be separated or changed. ....
'Life without Rebellion is like seasons without Spring. And Rebellion without Right [Justice] is like Spring in an arid desert..... Life, Rebellion, and Right [Justice] are three-in-one who cannot be changed or separated. .....
'Life without Freedom is like a body without a soul, and Freedom without Thought is like a confused spirit......Life, Freedom, and Thought are three-in-one, and are everlasting and never pass away. .....
'That which Love begets,
That which Rebellion creates,
That which Freedom rears,
Are three manifestations of God.
And God is the expression of the intelligent Universe.'
Sermon: The Object of Our Desires
Introduction:
One of the disadvantages of preparing a sermon ahead of time is that sometimes national or international events occur which religious communities then need to pray about and think about. In the case of the terrorist attacks in the US, one of the objects of the terrorists is to disrupt ordinary life as much as possible. Now I'm one who believes that one task of religion is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted and there's no denying that most of us in the industrialised West have been far too comfortably dismissive of the problems of Palestinians, Iraqis, Bangladeshis, Lybians, Nigerians, Sudanese, Ethiopians, Moroccans, Yemenis, Indonesians, Timorese, Angolans, Zimbabwians ... the list is almost endless, but it is significant that the large majority of the populations of most of these very poor nations are Muslims. But while it is important to pause to share grief, to reflect on global issues, to try to learn something from the utterly devastating events of 11 September, it is also important to carry on with our lives and not allow terrorists to set our whole agenda. So this morning's service is responding to both our need to pause and our need to continue and the address on the Object of Our Desires will now proceed essentially as planned.
1. Start at Essex Hall and Objects Process
I started at Essex Hall in January 1989, having spent 4 years in Germany with the International Association for Religious Freedom. During that period the family and I had made several visits "back home" but my involvement in denominational affairs was limited to attendance at 2 out of 4 Annual Meetings and some services of worship, mostly in Glasgow or Padiham. But as Information Officer for the GA I was plunged right into the thick of the consultation and review process that had already been going for a couple years. In my role of Information Officer, I was a member of the Objects Commission attempting to get the pulse of the movement, to get the sense of what we really felt was central to our religious identity and to build a form of words which would express that sense in a way acceptable to 90% of our religious community. At the end of the day, the hard work of the Objects Commission and the hopes of so many who desired a modern, up to date constitutional statement of where we were and where we felt we were headed, foundered on the 90% rock. It easily passed the Annual Meeting stage but only achieved 79% in a postal poll of all congregations.
2. Passage of Resolution on Aims & Purposes
Two years later a motion was passed at the Annual Meetings which took the text agreed by the 79% and made it a statement of our Aims and Purposes. Upon a complaint from some Unitarians that this was confusing and unconstitutional, the Charity Commission declared the resolution ultra vires, i.e. of no effect because it was beyond our powers and confusing to have Aims and Purposes that potentially conflict with Constitutional Objects. In England and Wales it is a very difficult thing to change the constitutional objects of a charity, because people have donated money, sometimes over several generations, with a certain set of goals in mind and any change in direction must take this into proper account.
3. Passage of Resolution 10 years later. A couple years ago the FOY society and our then GA President, Rev Keith Gilley, decided to resurrect the agreed text as a normal Constitutional Amendment. Of course in 10 years a lot of documentation can disappear and a lot of community memory disappear through forgetfulness and death. But the process was re-started.
4. Negotiations with Charity Commissioners
Negotiations with the Charity Commission started but meantime there had been substantial changes to Charity Law in England and Wales. Registration procedures and financial accountability laws had changed something fundamental in the framework of what was and what was not acceptable. The effects of this change can be easily seen and they are on-going.
5. Complications over definition of 'religion' & Scientologists
While some Charity Commission lawyers were in very helpful discussions with the GA, other Charity Commission lawyers were in discussions with the Scientologists about their status as a religious charity. There are three tests in English law for a religious charity: A belief in a Supreme Being; the use of devotional practices in connection with such a Supreme Being; and Promotion of the religion being to the Public Benefit. In these other discussions the Scientologists, defending their concept of Supreme Being, made reference to the Unitarians and our lack of a creed. Since the Commission is required to operate within the Convention on Human Rights and treat religious bodies equally, this challenge led to a review of the GA's religious charity status. After a couple anxious months, we got confirmation that the GA was validly registered as a religious charity.
6. Charity Commission lawyers in our discussions with them provided us with a good text which included all our desired phrases in a legal form.
Some of our desired expressions had to go into a preamble and our former round of negotiations had established that "civil and religious liberty the world over" was too political to be in our Objects although a reasonable level of such activities was permissible. Interestingly, I have seen it argued in a charity legal journal that with the implementation of the Human Rights Act, it may well now be permissible as an object of a charity. But to return to the ChCmn lawyers: they advised us that it was better to have One Object with various qualifying phrases than many Objects, and this is now the form used in the GA constitution.
7. There were many exciting and good things from our Annual Meetings in Chester earlier this year, (especially the involvement and visibility of youth) but the most long-term accomplishment is to have achieved the Object of our Desires after a 16 year process. We have much cause for celebration, even those of us who have some reservations about particular phrases or emphases. The Object is not a creed, every word of which is to be slavishly followed, it it a statement of where most of us are at this time, recognising that in another 20 years we will need to rethink how to restate our collective purposes in coming together. The King is dead! Long live the King!
8. Closing Thoughts
We now have a modern statement of our shared, collective purposes that focuses on the worship of God and our freedom from creeds. Freedom from a collective statement of belief does not mean that we should avoid personal beliefs -- quite the contrary, we are free from collective imposition precisely because it is important to develop our personal theologies. This is a lifelong task and a reflection of our developing religious maturity. Our community exists to encourage, foster, and enable personal commitment, not to alleviate us from this responsibility in some group-collective-borg-like mindfulness of sensibility. Many of us hope that our new Object will give strength and direction in this process and I hope that members of this congregation will find it helpful.
John Clifford
Benediction: As we leave the peace and fellowship of this gathering to go into a world full of diversity, fear, and hate, may the Spirit of Love inflame our hearts, may the Spirit of Truth inform our thinking, and may the Spirit of Beauty open our eyes, our ears, and our feelings.
Anniversary Sermon
I delivered the following sermon at the General Assembly Anniversary Service in April 2003, held in St Mark's Unitarian Church, Edinburgh. This sermon is also on the website of the British Unitarians .
A Universalist Sense of Ministry
A key unifying factor in our variously named member congregations is that we do not require any formal statement of belief for ministry or membership. We take pride in being a creedless religious community, but we do this because we value individual religious expression and commitment too highly to allow coercion by others. Our aversion to creeds, however, should not be allowed to become an aversion to content. Each of us should have a developing religious perspective whose content we can share with others. Our promotion of the richness of diversity will appear very shallow to outsiders if all we offer is a content-free process. A content-free process is abstract to the point of coldness and while experts can get into a heated argument about how cold the dark side of Pluto is, that heat doesn't make Pluto any warmer.
I have identified with the Universalist side of our liberal religious community ever since I joined 42 years ago in the USA, having had previous contact with the Universalist Church in the village of Oak Park where I was born. Classical Universalism held that the Love of God leads ultimately to the salvation of every individual soul. This was a Bible-based faith that first appeared in Britain and America in "organised" congregations towards the end of the 18th century, slightly earlier than when various radical dissenting congregations were coalescing around the "Unitarian" label. In Britain, the leaders of the Universalist cause joined the Unitarian cause in that time, providing heart and vigour.
My personal creed, essentially Universalism of the old school with modern vocabulary and philosophical foundations, is as follows: God is Love and we are creatures of Love. We are created, nurtured, and fulfilled by creative love working within us, through us, and amongst us creating Truth and Beauty, Healing and Wholeness. Value arises from the activity of God's creative, dynamic Spirit, and value- oriented communities are central to developing individual potential and enabling just communities. Religion is more a matter of spiritual awareness and practical commitment than it is of rational theology.
There is a more recent use of "universalist" to mean universal heritage, unbounded by any particular faith vocabulary. At first sight these two uses of the word seem disjointed, but a closer look reveals that (in the old vocabulary I am no longer completely comfortable with) a loving God intending every soul to be saved provides everyone with insights sufficient for their progressive development. That is, God's care is not limited to those who accept a particular revelation centred on the life and death of Jesus. God's care has resulted in sufficient religious revelation/ guidance that those who have never heard of Jesus will also be saved with minimum need for corrective punishment. The complexity and depth of Reality have to be seen from various perspectives for a fuller understanding. We, from our limited cultural background, have much to learn by serious encounter with other cultures. I believe that it is NOT true that all religions are saying the same thing and it is NOT true that all insights are equally valid. But all religions are struggling with the same mysterious, complex reality and have learnt something unique to share with others. This, at least, is part of the perspective of the Universalist.
Contexts for tonight's service include the war in Iraq; the GA Theme of Removing Barriers; our GA financial difficulties with our concurrent discussion on organisational structure and goals; and even the survey of attitudes towards ministerial roles initiated by Resolution at the 2002 Meetings. I will not be addressing any of these contexts directly, although some of my perspectives may be apposite to some of these issues.
While the first reading was chosen with one eye on our new GA theme, it also reflects my personal approach to practical ministry. The second reading on the glory of God's work in evolution reminds us of the majesty of the process that helped us to get where we are; it also points to a broader degree of sympathetic reflection on Darwinian ideas than we usually credit. The Rev Henry Drummond was a professor of natural science to a religious community that we would normally judge to be illiberal, yet his attempt to harmonise his theological and scientific understandings is a marvellous example of liberalism. We typically distinguish between reasoning and feeling, head and heart. This can be helpful, but it can also take us too far from the real world in which our emotional and rational faculties are more or less integrated into our personalities. One word I have found useful is "sense", used for an awareness with both cognitive and emotional dimensions. My use of "sense" in the sermon title, therefore, points to both an attempt at dispassionate analysis and an expression of passionate commitment.
I'd like you all to do something for me for a few seconds. Look around at the people nearest you - to the left, to the right, in front, and behind. It wouldn't hurt to smile and acknowledge their existence. ......... What did you see? Someone you know well enough to know that they regularly and currently suffer from piles? Or their spouse is babysitting an autistic child so they can be here? Or their cousin/ daughter/ grandson has just been diagnosed as having cancer? Or that they are cheating on their partner and dreading exposure? (This does happen in Unitarian circles.) Or that they are facing the economics of redundancy? Perhaps you looked into the eyes of a stranger. Perhaps you smiled at someone who has a close family member in the armed forces serving in Iraq. Or someone with a physical or emotional impairment that makes "routine" tasks a daily struggle.
Virtually everyone in this building will have private sufferings -- physical, emotional, psychological, or spiritual, that are not readily visible to others. We usually appear OK even when we are screaming inside for comfort or release. Universalist theology starts with a God of Love, but it very quickly moves to an awareness of the reality and universality of suffering and builds its sense of ministry to the world on these twin foundations.
Universalist ministry is the ministry of the whole church to the whole world. Of course there are limitations, set by personality, resources, time, skills, but the goal is to remove barriers and build bridges to overcome what limitations we can. The same universalising process that led the Jews to shift their understanding of God from a tribal war champion to the Creator of the Universe now needs to be applied to our modern understandings of science and nature, whether we are talking cosmology or DNA. The dynamic, creative process shaping our richly diverse universe through billions of years has not chosen a small subsection of Earth's inhabitants for special favour and this is part of the universalist message, whether the context is sociological (confronting the various partialisms and phobias that permeate society) or theological (confronting the claims of special and particular salvation).
The right kind of leadership can enable our congregations to exercise ministry more effectively by providing example, encouragement, sensitive support, special skills and knowledge and training. This can be crucial in taking the ministry of the whole church to greater qualitative depths, where "ministry" means using our lives and resources to assist the creative process and "minister", means someone (including a Lay Pastor or Lay Leader) who is committing their working life (or a substantial part of it) to the special role of helping the congregation undertake its ministry. But members need to have the self-understanding that places them as key players on a team. Whether we are talking about prayer, pastoral care, social justice work in the community, publicity, interfaith contacts, or public worship, if "the minister" is doing it all, neither minister nor members are enabling the church to serve the world properly.
Our hopes, our commitments, our attitudes, and particularly our actions are the arena of our ministry. It's not good enough to say that God loves us, if this has no effect on how we relate to other people. Nor is it good enough to say that God loves the world if this has no effect on how we relate to our environment. Responsible and localised consumption; sustainable development; fair trade; tough curbs on pollution: too many issues for any one of us to focus on, but our faith that "God loves the world", means we will include some such issues in the patterning of our ministry.
Worship is frequently seen as the prerogative of "the minister". They have special training and hopefully special skills in helping congregations to worship but good worship is neither an academic exercise nor a matter of the group following the leader blindly; nor is it a matter of sitting passively and letting the leader "get on with it". Celebrating the spirit of life and love and beauty, focusing on the source of our values, increasing our devotion to a life of value, giving thanks for the bounty of life - all these require preparation and active focus in order to be effective. This ministry of worship is the responsibility of every member.
Carter Heyward has a passage in Cries of the Spirit about practical love where she says: "Loving involves commitment. We are not automatic lovers of self, others, world, or God. Love does not just happen. We are not love machines, puppets on the strings of a deity called "love". Love is a choice -- not simply, or necessarily, a rational choice, but rather a willingness to be present to others without pretence or guile. Love is a conversion to humanity -- a willingness to participate with others in the healing of a broken world and broken lives. Love is the choice to experience life as a member of the human family, a partner in the dance of life, rather than as an alien in the world or as a deity above the world, aloof and apart from human flesh."
We can start with a gloriously general principle like "God is Love". We can then move from the general to the particular: God loves us. We can ponder how, in a particular situation, we can respond to God's love. And when we respond in love and by being where that love is needed, we sense that God's love is present in our lives. We sense that our lives are bridges in the world between sin and salvation, between suffering and healing, between the general and the particular. As Kahlil Gibran put it, rather than seeing God in our hearts we see ourselves in the heart of God, at the centre of this awesome creative process at work in the world.
Personal commitment to a life shaped and guided by religious sensibilities is NOT a duty. It occurs as we reflect and respond to what we believe is valuable in and for our lives. Organising our personal resources to reflect what is valuable to us is an expression of commitment, not some imposed duty.
I now turn to a central practical implication of living out this view -- or not, as the case may be.
I believe that we desperately need a culture shift in our churches. In spite of possible political misunderstandings, we would do well to refer to ourselves as liberal religious communities rather than free religious communities. We say that revelation is not sealed but we often act as if our purses were. Forget the financial problems of the GA for a moment and look at where most of our congregations are - our congregations and our buildings that we say we love so much. How many of our ministers serve congregations where the live income funds a proper stipend for the minister? Simplifying somewhat, a congregation of 100 requires an average annual contribution of 1% gross income from each member to provide the minister with an income equal to the average of the congregation; a congregation of 40 needs an average contribution of 2.5%, and a congregation of 20 needs 5%. And this is just for the minister's stipend, not the cost of the whole ministry of the church.
If we see ministry as hiring someone to do ministry for us because we have some spiritual duty towards the world, this will be very different from seeing the called minister (or lay pastor or lay leader) as joining our religious community tohelp us to do our ministering. One reflection of this difference will be in our valuing of our support of our ministry.
For most of my adult life I have given a percentage of my gross income to charity in planned, regular giving -- the larger part of this going to various Unitarian causes. When I had small children and related responsibilities this percentage dropped to 1%, but is currently back above 5%. The value that each of you places on your local congregation and the situational stretching or squeezing that affects the actual amount you contribute is for each individual to judge, but I firmly believe that our congregations will never thrive until we support our own ministry. In words mostly of one syllable, one reason we are such poor givers is that too many of us see the ministry of our church as the job of someone we call a minister rather than as OUR, personal, ministry.
Fear of losing our congregations is strong, but the force of a positive commitment to share what we consider valuable is even stronger. Universalists proclaimed an end to fear as a primary motivation. We respond to God's love rather than God's wrath.
I close by illustrating what I mean by sharing the Parable of the Compassionate Jug by Idries Shah, a Sufi mystic who writes for "westerners".
In a hot, dusty, and dark hovel lies a man in agony, made worse by his inability to reach water to quench his thirst. A jug on a shelf on the other side of the room sees his plight and, moved by intense compassion, manages to shift itself to within arm's reach of the suffering man. In his thrashing about, the man discovers the jug and raises it to his lips, only to find that it is empty of water. In his frustration and anger he throws it against the wall and it breaks into pieces.
The progress of humanity depends on the productive functioning of value-oriented communities. As Erich Fromm stated in The Art of Loving, "Love is productive"! Our liberal religious approach has a unique gift to share, and we should be able and willing to share it, but to do this effectively, we each have to search our hearts for the lure, the sense of importance and direction that represents our patterning of our lives in response to a God of Love. This patterning includes action and resource priorities. If our churches do not adequately minister, they will be swept aside by some developing form of community valuing (perhaps even by theatre musicals as mentioned earlier in these Meetings) - and will deserve to be swept aside as shards of empty jugs. The answer is not to shift responsibility for our ministry even further onto a dedicated few. The answer is not to expect some other level of organisation to do our ministry for us. The answer is not to crouch in fear of being swept away, rather to commit our individual selves to shared ministry and commit our resources in line with our truly-felt value of our congregations, which we claim to love. Think on it: We are aware of being part of a dynamic creative force whose beauty and complexity stretch from the majesty of the cosmos to the quantum workings of particles we can only see at third hand. And in our fear and partial understandings we pull back from the very commitment that would make us effective ministers to our suffering world and its inhabitants.
In a few moments we will thank ministers and a lay pastor who are retiring and welcome those starting their ministry with us. Our retiring ministers and lay pastor have together given us 139 years of service, in most cases decades of their lives, leading the ministry of our churches. These men and women have given themselves to help us exercise our ministry for our fellow men and women; for the care of our social values of justice and community; for the care of our congregations that nurture and promote those values; and for the love of our world and its protection from exploitation, pollution, and destruction. We have indeed been blessed by their commitment.
We have new ministers, lay pastors and lay leaders coming through training. Three of them are being welcomed tonight. May we be blessed in future years by their commitment and may they find collaborative and supportive communities in our churches.
Amen.
18 March 2010
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment