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

St Mark's Edinburgh, 3 June 2007

Meditation and Readings:

(a) from Every Nation Kneeling, a collection of services edited by Rev Will Hayes of Chatham. This reading is by Ernest Crosby and has the title, "On, to the City of God!"

Our highest truths are but half-truths,
Think not to settle down for ever on any truth.
Make us of it as a tent in which to pass a summer night,
But build no house of it, or it will be your tomb.
When you find the old truth irksome and confining,
When you first have an inkling of its insufficiency,
When you begin to descry a dim counter-truth looming up beyond.
Then weep not, but give thanks.
It is the Lord's voice, whispering:
"Take up thy bed and walk."

(b) TS Elliott: “1. What we call a beginning is often the end and to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from. 2. We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

(c) Willard S. Krabill: “Those who are mentally and emotionally healthy are those who have learned when to say yes, when to say no, and when to say whoopee!”

Sermon:

Cycles of Life

Those who know me well enough to know of my life-long interest in cycling may have thought, when they saw the sermon title, that I would be speaking about all the bikes I have owned over the years. Cycling has, in fact, been one of the abiding patterns in my life, a life of many changes over the decades. This pattern, cycling, has stayed with me partly because of newly developing priorities along my path of life: (a) starting with the freedom to explore larger areas of my childhood and later university neighbourhoods, but then (b) the need to make every penny count, later followed by (c) ecological concerns and finally (d) concerns to keep the body in reasonable shape.

But, No, I'm not going to be talking about the joys of bicycling today -- but I can't resist sharing a pithy proverb with you that I heard many years ago and which seems to bear on my very busy life: It’s a sort of “what my Granny taught me” saying: Blessed are those who run around in circles, for they shall be called Big Wheels!

I start my address proper today observing that at many levels change is a watchword of our lives today: (a) as a denomination we are just over one year into a period of real change, with a new governance structure and since April a new Chief Executive; (b) likewise here in St Mark’s the ‘old’ (well, maybe not really all that old) minister and associate minister have demitted office, a guest minister arrives this week, and an interim minister has been chosen to start in September; (c) in Scottish politics the traditional Labour party hegonomy has been shaken to its core and a nationalist First Minister and administration are in place; (d) in British politics the outgoing Prime Minister continues on his lengthy, expensive farewell vanity tour and the incoming Prime Minister waits impatiently as he goes through a show trial as senseless as any devised by Moscow during the Cold War.

Some things, unfortunately, seem to be heading in a constant and consistent direction – you all know my attitude to our beleaguered Prime Minister’s decision to send our military forces into war in cooperation with the United States and a small number of other countries but in contravention of international law without specific UN authorisation for such a move. Whatever our feelings on the justice or wisdom of this action (or lack thereof),, and Unitarians are not quite of one mind on this,, we all recognize that the mistakes made by allied leadership have resulted in civilian and military casualties on a scale totally disproportionate to the declared aims of our attacks. I will not directly address this issue today although some of what I say may be relevant, particularly about learning from patterns of experience.

A bit more personally, my grandchildren are now speaking as well as haring about everywhere with an energy that is frightening and an inquisitiveness that is daunting. We all know about the natural tendency of parents and grandparents to spend a good year or so encouraging children to speak and then the next 18 years encouraging them to be quiet!

Theoretically retired now for two and a half years, I find myself as busy as ever – and truthfully would not have it otherwise even when I complain occasionally of overload. Barbara and I are now giving very serious thought to what is in our long-term best interests regarding housing and our future health prospects. This might mean us returning to Scotland or it might mean staying in Wales – a big decision for us but also for our families.

So, recognizing that all these changes and many others are a continuing part of life, both recent and pending, my thoughts have turned to change, entry to and exit from situations, holding on and letting go, what to throw out (both from my bookcases and from my active interests), attachment and detachment, in short, the cycles of change and patterns in life that are paradoxically always with us.

I digress briefly to recall that when I was minister with the Glasgow Unitarians some 20 years ago, there was a fascinating item in the news that must have given thousands of ministers a useful sermon illustration for several weeks. It was about an accident involving a cruise liner. In this incident, the ship was far out to sea when a woman (I don't recall her real name but let's call her Mrs MacSmith) fell overboard one night without being noticed. In fact it was several hours later that she was missed and a bit longer before it was realised that she had probably fallen overboard. What to do? The captain ordered the ship to retrace its course and sure enough, after several hours they found her! The amazing thing, for me, was not that they found Mrs MacSmith, but that when they found her she was swimming steadily in the direction of the ship's path.

Now that was a brave woman! In the middle of nowhere with no special equipment and she swims after the ship lights that were receding steadily until they were well out of sight. And she kept on swimming even when they disappeared. Mrs MacSmith was also a lucky woman -- no sharks in the neighbourhood, tolerable water temperature and weather, a captain brave enough to turn the ship around, .......

One of the dividing points that anthropologists and sociologists use to describe societies is the division between those that believe in linear time and those that believe in cyclical time, roughly speaking between those who see life as oriented to a specific goal (e.g. to get to heaven) and those who see life as a series of unending repetitions with the hope of some day, some how, exiting from the cycles. Generally speaking, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam base their life-views on linear time, while Hinduism and Buddhism base their views on cyclical time. This difference can also be expressed in astronomical terms between those who think that the force of gravity holding our expanding universe together is too weak and the universe will continue to expand under the influence of mysterious dark force until the energy runs out, and those who think that gravity is strong enough to stop the expansion of the bubble formed at the Big Bang and everything will collapse back to the "Centre", perhaps to restart with slightly different characteristics in the next Bang.

The Buddhist laws of inevitable change and suffering through attachment have meant a lot in my personal theological development -- much more than any personal drive to achieve an exalted status at death -- but I've also found a "goal-less" ethic doesn't suit me. Without trying to deny others the rights to their own choices about destiny, I am convinced that it is possible to specify (clearly enough to be useful guides) the blockages to developing personal freedom and group support; and then to act to remove these barriers, whether we are talking about literacy, poverty, illness, natural disasters, or more cultural specific subjects like economic and political justice. We do this, I hope, with some trepidation, for others who are affected by this cannot always give us feedback and enter into equal dialogue about their situations, but to be faithful to our own searchings, we have to come to some answers, tentative though they be, to move on to the next step.

And this brings me back to cycles, for without cycles of some sort, we couldn't see patterns, we couldn't abstract points of comparative similarity from different events. We couldn't extend our personal sympathies outward to include others in "similar" situations if every situation were unique in virtually all its aspects. Perhaps it would help to drag up an image from one of my previous existences, when I was a maths teacher. It is also the image that scientists tell us is at the heart of life: the helix -- a three-dimensional figure like wire wrapped on the outside of a cylinder. Because, like some short story by Herman Hesse, we go through various adventures in life and wind up back where we started.

But,, not quite where we started, for we have changed on the way -- we have increased in understanding or sensitivity, or maybe even in prejudice, but we have changed and therefore the total situation which includes us is different. Even our perceptions, having been shaped by our incremental experiences, will mean that we exist in a new reality.

If we as human beings, ever get to a stage where perceptions cannot change/develop, if we ever come to feel that we have so much of the Truth that others' contributions couldn't make a ha'penth of difference, if we ever stop trying to develop sensitivity to the patterns of events that we experience and observe, it will be time to leave this existence. Life requires change and openness to change -- not in everything, at least not everything at the same time, but essential openness to change. When one life reaches it's end, new life has to join the dance so new steps can be created and learnt. And this is the secret of human progress: we have BOTH our obligations to the future, to provide the wisdom we have accumulated and ALSO to provide the freedom for the next cycle to sense new patterns. James Luther Adams, a Unitarian and one of the great American philosophers of religion, wrote about the prophethood of all believers -- not in the sense of foretelling specific events but in the sense of being sensitive to the emerging patterns of the future era as we move towards it.

My grandchildren's world will be vastly different from the one of my upbringing. Of course, transmitting the patterns that I have found meaningful and that their mother and father have found meaningful, is part of sensitising them to see the cycles themselves. What sort of patterns do we emphasise as we shape the potentials and leave in place the barriers they will come across? Whatever the decisions of the political and economically powerful, we have the power to help shape the perceptions that can change the world. We can provide both patterns and inspiration to compensate for the mistakes we have made so that those patterns, pollution, greed, war, do not need to be blindly copied.

For us, our basic tools are not answers (necessary as these are), but guiding principles or processes. But we should have the courage to say to our children and grandchildren what our tentative answers are and this is where our principles come in.

When we are asked what we believe, the questioner usually wants an answer with specific content, while we Unitarians want to provide an answer in more general terms. Discovering and testing, however, can be draining activities and a real serious moral struggle every morning as to whether or not to brush our teeth would be ridiculous, so I, for instance, would say that I think it's a good thing to brush my teeth after breakfast even when I’m too rushed or forget; But we Unitarians are good at speculation and rationality and can easily make a long song and dance about water fluouridation, dentistry as a business rather than public service, the ethics of the sugar industry, .... you name it, we can find some way to drag it into consideration, especially if it helps us to avoid giving a clear answer. But recognising patterns in our lives means seeing the answers we come to as well as asking questions.

To have the courage of one's convictions is part of our ideal of the integrity we seek between ideal and real -- the matching of what we think is best to what we actually do. And this is not unique to Unitarians. The only claim we have to a relatively unique approach is to say that even as we dedicate ourselves to living out our highest ideals, AT THE SAME TIME we dedicate ourselves to the possibility that our highest ideals can be improved and this means the change (destruction?) of what we consider the best we have, in order to get The Better.

So let us return to lucky, courageous Mrs MacSmith and give thanks for her that to the list of items that enabled her courage to be effective, we can add that someone cared for her enough when she was younger to teach her, not how to hold on to a life-preserver, but how to swim.

John Clifford
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