Vision: The Revolutionary Purpose of the Church, revisited
Obijuan January 28th, 2010
a sermon delivered to the Unitarian Church of Los Alamos, 1/24/2010
Vision: The Once & Future Church
Obijuan January 28th, 2010
a sermon delivered to the Unitarian Church of Los Alamos, 1/17/2010
Vision: The Care & Feeding of Your Community
Obijuan January 28th, 2010
a sermon delivered to the Unitarian Church of Los Alamos, 1/10/2010
Part One of a series leading to UCLA’s “Searching for the Future” weekend.
The Innkeeper’s Tale
Obijuan December 24th, 2009
(an expanded version of an improvised tale, told to the Unitarian Church of Los Alamos, 20 December 2009)
We have all heard the story of the miraculous birth, and of the man that the child would eventually become. Much of it seems hard to believe, too fantastic. To be sure, most of the tales were written by hands that had been nowhere near the stable. Whether or not they are true is unimportant to this tale. All we need to know is that long before there were shepherds or angels, long before there were mysterious men with luxurious gifts, there was a baby, and before that a weary couple, a mother in labor, looking for a place to rest.
That place was not easily found.
The innkeepers of Bethlehem were a miserable lot – sour, sad, and miserable. Odd, then, that they were in the business of hospitality, but these were the days when one’s career was handed down from generation to generation. Most, if you could ask them, would have preferred a more glamourous lifestyle. Who wouldn’t? But, no, it was innkeeping, or perhaps begging. There wasn’t much choice in the matter. If your free will had been so abridged, you’d probably be sour and sad, as well. And so they were, the innkeepers of Bethlehem, sour and sad, miserable to a man. And the sourest and saddest of them all was Samuel.
It hadn’t always been so for Samuel. As a young man, he’d taken quite happily and naturally to his father’s work. He had loved the little inn that would one day be his. He had loved meeting new and exotic travelers and listening to their tall tales from the road. He had loved the smells that blew in from his mother’s kitchen, and even the smell of the stable as he helped his father clean it.
Samuel had loved the inn just the same when it passed into his hands, had watched with pride his own family take to the work of innkeeping, just as he had. There were his children, cleaning and fetching, learning their way so that they might inherit. There was Miriam, pretty, clever Miriam, performing daily miracles in the cramped kitchen, finding ways to make the little money that rolled in last. Miriam, the wife he still did not believe he’d ever deserved.
When Miriam had died, everything began to change. He’d knelt by her side as her heart beat its last, and in that moment felt a piece of his own heart close off to the rest of the world. His business partner, his soulmate, gone. The work would be harder without her. His life, too, would have less joy.
“At least,” he thought to himself, “I still have the children to count on.”
But, children being children, they grew into adulthood, started families of their own, moved away. One by one, Samuel watched as his children married and wandered away, starting lives of their own. And with each receding footstep he felt more and more of his heart close off to the rest of the world. With each day that passed, the work gave him less and less joy. Sour and sad, now, he took in what guests he needed to scrape by, and retreated from the world as much as he could. Continue Reading »
Hey! Mr. & Mrs. “Real” America, Pardon My Indelicate and Unprofessional Language, But Fuck You and Your “Death Panels” (an impolite sermon for impolite times)
Obijuan August 17th, 2009
Hey, America. It’s been a while since you and I have talked. I can tell by the glazed look in your eye that you probably think I look familiar, and it’s even more likely that you don’t care, anyway. Look, I know it’s prime time, and you don’t really want to hear anything I or anyone else has to say, but . . . well, quite frankly I’m really pissed off at you right now, and I need you to just sit there and listen up.
Who the hell amI? Has it been that long? Let me refresh your memory.
I’m a pastor. Usually, I give counsel, I listen deeply, and I sit quietly with people as they pass through those life events that make us most human. I am with people in their best and worst moments.
Many in my vocation train for these sorts of moments working as hospital chaplains, standing in the cross-currents of love and death on a daily basis until our souls have been shattered into a billion little pieces and we’re left to construct something called a “pastor” out of the shards that we’re able to recover. I’ve seen bodies mangled and brains withered. I’ve stood at the sides of grieving families as they identified the bodies of lost loved ones. I’ve been in the room with people as they’ve drawn their last, rattling breath. This is all, of course, just a long and fancy way of saying that I and my colleagues know a little something about death, or at the very least living amongst the dying. Continue Reading »
The 2008 Berry Street Response
Obijuan July 20th, 2009
Last year, I had the honor of being asked to give the response to the annual Berry Street Essay at the UUMA’s Ministry Days conference in Ft. Lauderdale.
The Rev. Christine Robinson’s wonderful and thought provoking essay, “Imagineering Soul,” has already made the rounds in various forms, including an excerpt in a recent issue of the UU World.
What is keeping us from evoking the holy, from embracing our congregations’ purpose as imagineers of soul? I think it’s that we’re shamed, scorned, and scared.
Whatever our theologies, we have a collective fear of the spiritual that makes it hard for us, lay and ordained, to take the risk of spirituality. Our collective fear of the spiritual has deep roots in shame and in the scorn we use to mask our shame. Together they keep us from meeting our own needs and the needs of those who come to us thirsty for depth and heart without traditional dogma.
If you haven’t already read it, I encourage you to do so.
My response begins simply:
There is little I can add to what has already been said, other than to stress that, besides those experiences of spiritual shame and fear of the Holy that you list as impediments to the role of minister as Imagineer of the soul, I would add that we are often impeded by the fact that the expectations of this profession have shifted — and not necessarily for the better. A long-time friend of mine, a Catholic priest who for years was the director of vocations for a diocese in Massachusetts, once told me that he felt the major reason for the crisis in vocations that the Catholic church was experiencing was that the nature of the job had changed so radically in the past several decades. The priestly role had been diminished and been overshadowed by the role of administrator, the balance between the two had been lost, and “who in their right minds,” he asked me, “would willingly profess vows of chastity and poverty so that they could take up a career in middle management?”
Over the years, more and more Unitarian Universalist ministers have taken up vows of poverty as well, loaded at the front end of formation and cunningly disguised as Stafford Loans. Many of us do this willingly, and yet the shift in demands are no different for us.
The scribe of the Berry Street Committee had asked for a copy of the text to my response last fall. Foibles of time and technology have delayed its posting. It is, at last, available for all. You can read it here.
Ten Commandments for Rabbis (and others)
Obijuan July 7th, 2009
Margaret Marcuson points us to this piece by Rabbi Jack Bloom. It’s written as advice to Rabbis, but it certainly applies to other clergy. Take note. Take heart.
I
You are unique
Each congregant is unique. Your congregation is unique. True and certain
this is. Each and All of you operate from distinct maps of reality, none of
which is real. Know for sure that you have been redeemed from the serfdom
of old certainties and brought to the possibilities of a land flowing with milk
and honey.
I’ll be adding it to my daily reading practice.
(NB: Margaret serves on the faculty of the “Leadership in Ministry” workshops I’ve been participating in over the last few years. She’s a wise one with the family systems, and I highly recommend her new book, Leaders Who Last.)
The Big Questions: Why Do Bad Things Happen?
Obijuan April 17th, 2009
delivered to the Unitarian Church of Los Alamos
7 December 2008
Time begins, as we know it, with violence, a great explosion – a massive hydrogen bomb for all intents and purposes – tossing burning elements out into the cosmos at tremendous speed. Eventually the elements cool, and the universe begins to coalesce. Stars begin to form, then galaxies. One star in particular seems conducive to the support of life under the right conditions. Roughly 40 million years ago, our planet began to take shape as we know it. This planet hurtles through space at a blinding speed of roughly 67 thousand miles per hour. It orbits the sun at a distance of roughly 91 million miles. If it orbited any slower, the distance would close and the planet would roast. Any faster, and the distance would increase and the planet would freeze. The surface of the planet itself is covered by mostly water, and the parts that are not water are made up of relatively loosely connected land masses, floating at a snails pace, casual crashing into and careening off of each other over a span of deep time. The land shakes and tears itself apart as it moves. The massive amounts of water threaten to swallow the land from time to time. And the core of the planet, a molten fire, threatens to rise up through the cracks as well.
Somehow, amidst all of this speed and danger and fragility, the planet brings forth life. Over millions of years life evolves – first single-cell organisms, then more and more complex, until at last the planet brings forth the human race, a most unique species. Humans develop creativity, imagination, and, most importantly, free will. Where other animals live off instinct, the human animal is able to make choices, and being free, the species doesn’t always make the right choices. Often, we hurt others, we mistake ourselves for the be all and end all of existence, we act in ways that reflect the violence in which the universe is given birth.
Eventually, all of this will end. The same elements that were thrown out to cosmos will begin to collapse once more. Life as we know it will disappear, and everything that is will crush itself into a dense singularity until, as the theory goes, it explodes out into the cosmos once more.
In the mean time, here we are, free creatures capable of the most extraordinary acts of love and compassion, and the most horrendous acts of violence and hatred, living on a slowly shifting planet whose natural processes drown us or swallow us whole without warning, the whole thing hurtling through the vacuum of space at mind-numbing, deadly speed, and all the while needing to maintain a constant distance of orbit, lest the sun that gives life takes it instead.
It’s a wonder, sometimes, that we have survived this long amidst what amounts to chaos.
These being our givens, the question before us this morning is, “Why do bad things happen?”
The Big Questions: What Happens When We Die?
Obijuan February 13th, 2009
delivered to the Unitarian Church of Los Alamos
9 November 2008
As training for the ministry, seminary students are expected to spend an early portion of their formation time in what is known as Clinical Pastoral Education – acting as chaplain in a hospital or prison setting, getting used to being around humanity at its most human, and getting used to it now before one got to far into the process. The message was clear – “If you cannot deal with human suffering face to face, you might want to consider another line of work.” And so, I spent the better part of 2004 interning as a hospital chaplain, an urban level one trauma center, to be precise. For nine months, I bounced back and forth between the chaos of the trauma center and the quieter and often more private tragedies of the hospital’s inpatient wards. Mostly, I worked amidst the chaos.
The chaplains job in this environment was to help families navigate the chaos. More often than not in the trauma ward, the families were dealing with the sudden and violent death of a loved one. The chaplain was there to answer the question, “Now what?” This is less of an existential question than you’d imagine.
So often, the answers I had to provide were practical ones – guiding spouses and children through the myriad forms required by the hospital and the state, helping deal with the coroner’s office, and always, always translating doctor and hospital speak into plain and simple English.
In the trauma center, one gets used to the idea of death. The chaplain is the tour guide for the living, those left behind. Each on-call day, I was less the spiritual guide than I was the sane and calm hands, eyes, and ears of the family – a temporary member – handling the practical nitty gritty so that loved ones could begin to grieve as they should. The existential follows fast on the heels of the practical.
The big question before us this morning is, “What happens when we die?” The me of 2004, surrounded by death and the chaos of the practical on all sides might have wearily and with some edge of gallows humor answered that question: “Paperwork.” Continue Reading »
The Big Questions: What is the Meaning of Life?
Obijuan February 6th, 2009
delivered to the Unitarian Church of Los Alamos
5 October 2008
In a cave on a high plateau on the slopes of Mt. Parnassus in the town of Delphi in Greece, there was once a sanctuary dedicated to god Apollo. The sanctuary was home to the Pythia, the famous oracle at Delphi, who was renowned for her gifts of prophecy, spurred on by the gasses that seeped out of the earth from crack in the cave’s floor that led her into altered states.
The Pythia was an astonishingly accurate seer, although her proclamations were cryptic. One coming to see the oracle needed to know the key to deciphering her predictions. The key was inscribed over the mouth of the cave, for any who cared to take the time to read it and take it to heart.
Gnothi Seauton.
Know thyself.
