PeaceBang

PeaceBang, Unplugged!!

Friends, I share with you my first sermon done completely without notes. All I took down the stairs with me was my ordination program so that I could read the ordination vows.

A few observations:

1. Wow, what a motormouth! Without the discipline of the ms in front of me, I am breathless, tending to start the next phrase before one is even out of my mouth.

2. Near the end of the service, my volume and articulation drop a bit. You have to listen closely.

3. The sound quality is lesser than usual since we had to put our digital recorder on the piano. I was walking around a lot, so I’m glad the recorder did as well as it did.

4. The sermon ended where you hear it end — with the words Yossi said to me at the Chabad House that night. What happened next, after about 15 seconds of silence, was that our Student Minister gave this prayer immediately before he and I distributed the flowers for our Flower Communion.

I wrote the prayer, and here it is:

God, Holy One beyond naming,
who calls us all into the rich tapestry of life lived in caring community,
Here we are. Send us.
Send us into our days with open hearts and good graces,
make of us emissaries of peace and affection,
each of us as lovely and unique a gift as these flowers which we now distribute,
representing all the ways we bestow our presence upon each other,
all the ways we simply show up in love.
As we pass the flowers, take one that is different than the one you brought.
Receive it as a gift, as we sing together our closing hymn, #298, “Wake Now, My Senses.”

**Thanks and kisses and hugs to Scott Wells for making it possible for me to link the sermon.

The Annual Prayer of Kvetching

There is always that worship service at Ministry Days at GA that contains a prayer that goes something like this,

Holy One,
we come together at the end of a long, difficult year.

And etc.
You get the idea.

I’m exaggerating, of course, but not that much. And while this prayer is going on, I’m sneaking looks around at the several hundred clergy people there and thinking, “CRIPES, is ministry as bad as all that? Is it disloyal to say that not all of us come wounded and disappointed to this gathering? Would I get dragged out into the parking lot and kicked in the teeth if I led a prayer and said, ‘Dear God, my job is awesome and I have a really delightful and inspiring congregation and my staff is 100% fantastic and we had another good year with just the usual number of terribly sad or difficult things, and thanks?’”

As I’m thinking this, I imagine the lay people over at UU University having their own worship service and having a prayer that kvetches about their disappointments and contains veiled references to the way we fail to respect and support them .

Of course I remember years when I came hurting and thoroughly burned out to Ministry Days, and those prayers reflected my current reality. I understand the pastoral need to name how difficult and painful ministry can be. I just think that our collegial gatherings tend to emphasize the negative far too much, and also focus far too much on the grand chasm that some of us seem to think lies between the ordained clergy and the laity. It was so refreshing to hear none of this at the Festival of Homiletics. I mean NONE. Not in casual conversations, not in formal presentations.

What’s that about?

Preaching Without A Net

For the first time in my ten year parish ministry, I preached without notes today. I went down the stairs from the pulpit and picked up a microphone and gave a sermon called “Showing Up In Love.”
I structured the sermon around three stories and in response to Isaiah 6:8.

Some thoughts:

• It took just as long to prepare as any of my written sermons, but of course the preparation was much different.
• It felt incredibly intimate and more emotionally engaged to me than most of my sermons.
  I realized halfway into it that it was a very evangelical presentation, embodied, as I walked around with the mic and — freed from a manuscript text– could just bring myself unvarnished and unfootnoted.

It occurred to me that part of the reason I am so devoted to written manuscripts is that I’ve been afraid to be to say too emphatically what I really feel! Better to be a bit more temperate, you know, well-researched, carefully crafted. So this was really scary and exhilarating.

I felt extremely exposed. I am glad I waited to do this until I felt experienced enough to do it, and that I risked this with a congregation who knows and loves and accepts me. I knew that if I bombed and needed to go back up to the pulpit to look at my notes, they would have been patient and supportive.

I am really, really proud of myself for taking this risk. I started the sermon by saying, “If you don’t do things that scare you, you can’t grow. I’m doing something today that scares me.”

We recorded it for podcast, and I can’t wait to hear it. The congregational feedback in the receiving line was overwhelmingly extremely positive and appreciative, so even if I think it wasn’t great, I will take the risk again.

Psalm 90 And the Power of Speed-Reading

I did a funeral yesterday for a man who was born Russian Orthodox and who became a Roman Catholic in his adult years (mostly because there was no Russian Orthodox church around), and who worshiped faithfully at a local Catholic parish.

At the end of his life, his priest refused to visit him. I know the priest, and he’s a cold, hard man. I do not doubt the man’s wife when she says the priest ignored her phone calls. She, the wife, is a child of our parish (hasn’t been to church in a couple of decades but still a child of our congregation) and she phoned me as her husband was in his last days to say, “Would you go do a blessing for him? He liked you.”

It seems that he had seen me officiate at the funerals and memorials of some of his friends and thought I was “his kind of minister.”

Of course I went to the hospital to bless him. You get that for free just for the asking, is my opinion. You don’t have to like me. Heck, you can even give me a Bronx cheer on your way to Heaven. When someone asks for a blessing at the time of death, we’re not talking about mutual admiration societies or even good relations between church and individual. We’re talking about preparing the soul for the ultimate transition. How could his own priest not be there? For one of his own faithful members? It galls me, it really does.

So anyway, we did the funeral yesterday morning and I wanted to include some of the traditional prayers and Scripture from this man’s tradition. We read from Thessalonians and the Gospel of John, lots of resurrection stuff that has nothing much to do with our tradition but has everything to do with Russian Orthodox faith. It was one of those funerals that takes place in our church but isn’t for a UU; leaving the minister with lots of liturgical and theological choices and hard decisions. I did the best I could. I read the things that I thought would have comforted and held him, had he been there. Actually he was there, in a lovely mahagony casket.

I thought I’d do something unusual and start with Sentences from the Universalist Book of Prayer. Then, reading along the night before, I found that I just loved the sentences from Psalm 90 in particular, so I thought I’d start the service in a strong, invocational way with it. You know, very triumphant and faithful and all that, before doing the welcome and pastoral piece (”we celebrate life in the midst of mortality,” and etc.).

HOUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM.

Not having taken the Universalist Book of Prayer into the pulpit with me, silly me thought a Bible would suffice. And opening my Bible to Psalm 90 and beginning with diaphragmatic breathing and confident tones, I proceeded to lay it on the faithful. Here’s what happened, with my thoughts in parentheses:

Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. (oh yes, this is great)
Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God. (what beautiful stuff!)

You turn us back to dust, and say, “Turn back, you mortals.” (oh, this is deep, but it’s a funeral, we can take it)
For a thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it is past, or like a watch in the night.
You sweep them away; they are like a dream, like grass that is renewed in the morning;
in the morning it flourishes and is renewed; in the evening it fades and withers. (wow, is this gorgeous !)

For we are consumed by your anger; by your wrath we are overwhelmed. (Holy crap. What? This wasn’t in the Universalist Book of Prayer !)
You have set our iniquities before you, our secret sins in the light of your countenance. (Panic! panic mode! Lord, this is a SITUATION! Help me out here!)

At which point I took a huge pause because there was NO WAY IN HELL I was reading the following phrases:

For all our days pass away under your wrath; our years come to an end like a sigh.

The days of our life are seventy years, or perhaps eighty, if we are strong; even then their span is only toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away.

Who considers the power of your anger? Your wrath is as great as the fear that is due you.
So teach us to count our days that we may gain a wise heart. (now THAT’S in the Universalist Book of Prayer, and I love it, and I’m so sorry I skipped it by accident. But you can see why. It’s nestled between some seriously Calvinistic stuff that to my mind, has no place in a service of the celebration of life.)

After a huge pause, which I tried to make meaningful by looking as though I was just absorbing the power of the text, I continued here:

Turn, O Lord! How long? Have compassion on your servants!
Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, so that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.
(I skipped this) Make us glad as many days as you have afflicted us, and as many years as we have seen evil.
(and continued on here)
Let your work be manifest to your servants, and your glorious power to their children.
Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us, and prosper for us the work of our hands— O prosper the work of our hands!

So, friends and pastors, the power of speed-reading, and the importance of marking up your Bible before you get into the pulpit. I’m not a fan of cutting and pasting our way through Scripture just to pick the bits we like (thank you, Thomas Jefferson) or that undergird our own personal view of God, but hell’s bells. You can’t minister to a group of 200 people grieving the loss of their beloved pal by giving them that kind of word. You just can’t. Southern Baptists can write in and slap me up if they want, but it’s moments like those when I think maybe I would rather be burned at the stake than tell a group of mourners that God is angry at them all their lives and that those lives end “like a sigh.” I mean, not without being able to add some words of explanation and interpretation.

Friends, the pulpit is a dangerous place. Ascend it with care.

A Sermon Series: Soft, Small Animals

I preached a sermon series on the Ten Commandments this year and whew!– we got into some pretty heavy stuff. I mean, unless you’re going to treat it in a namby-pamby way, the Decalogue is going to take you into some serious moralizing, something quite foreign to most Unitarian Universalists.

I joked from the pulpit today that I was going to try not to make eye contact with anyone in the congregation because I had heard that when I did so, that person got all nervous and thought I was maybe focusing on them because they broke the Sabbath, or were an adulterer or someone who took the name of the LORD in vain. I said, “I just like to look at you! Don’t take it personally!”

But anyway, my sermon was on the ninth and tenth commandment and connected the ways that oppressors who covet the land and resources of others will almost always demonize them first — or “bear false witness against them” — in order to convince themselves, and others, that what they’re doing is justified. I referenced African slavery, the Chinese occupation of Tibet, Iraq, Darfur, the Holocaust, the witch hunts of the medieval era, and a local conflict in a nearby town. Near the end of the sermon I said,

As citizens of the most powerful nation on the planet, I think we should reflect with particular gravity and intention on the ninth and tenth commandments. All empires – not just the American empire – are built on egregious violations of these commandments. As the human story presses forward on an increasingly stressed and depleted planet, it falls to the most powerful to decide whether this pattern of greed leading to lies and manipulation and domination is sustainable, and to find new alternatives if they conclude it is not. I conclude for myself that it is not. — “Lying and Stuff” 5/20/07

As has happened with this sermon series in the past, what I wrote at home in a fairly calm vein became more serious and impassioned in the delivery of it. I was talking to SisterBang about it and she said, “What did you do to them?” because she’s very protective of my congregation. She loves them a lot and wants to make sure that I’m not, in her words, “mean.” Whenever I tell her that a Sunday service was intense she says, “It’s time to do a kitten and bunnies sermon.” And she’s right. You’ve got to mix up the joy and praise and the confrontation of hard truths.

So SisterBang has a recommendation for a sermon series next year: “Soft, Small Animals.” We figure we can do one on fieldmice, one on baby bunnies, one on newborn chicks and a special one on prairie dogs (my favorites!). I think this is a great idea. I am also considering Adult Religious Education offerings on the theme of “Candy & Toys.”

A New Body

Someone I simply loved died last weekend of cancer.

I say I “simply” loved her because it was simple. I loved her the first moment I saw her come to church on her husband’s arm. I had an immediate reaction in my heart, kind of a shy recognition of real beauty, the way you feel as a little girl when you see a woman who strikes awe in your heart because she’s just so pretty, she is the most beautiful lady you have ever seen, and you want to be just like her when you grow up.

But this was more than prettiness.
It was purity of spirit clothed in kindness and bright, humorous presence– the kind of loveliness that you just don’t see very often.

(One of my colleagues has this kind of loveliness. Her initials are PP. I feel the same way when I see her)

This lovely woman died last week, and she was in agonizing pain for much of her final days. Her hospital room was full of people who wrung their hands with grief and helplessness as the medical team tried to find some combination of drugs that would give her some relief. We wanted so badly to help her.

Her sister said yesterday at her memorial service that her suffering assaulted our faith.
I shuddered at the words, so there must have been great truth in them for me.

Last week I was reminded — we are were — that all the love in the world, even surrounding you in the tiny boat of your dying bed, even pouring in as God’s holy spirit — cannot endure the sufferings of your body for you, and cannot make the journey of the soul for you. We struggle alone no matter how held we are in care; no matter how surrounded we are by compassion. God abides with us, God does not live our lives for us.

But yesterday at the memorial service, as people queued up for Communion, I understood something for the first time. By becoming the body of Christ (or the Beloved Community), we can make whole what is torn asunder by violence, pain, the natural limitations of the body, human sin and fear.
I looked at the long line of patient people standing in line to receive the bread and the cup (and many who were there who chose not to partake, but were no less part of the Body) and I thought, “Sweetheart, here’s your new body. Here’s your new body.”

And now the tears finally come.

Grace Note: A Liturgical Moment Of Salvation

On Sunday I gave an unexpectedly intense sermon on the commandment “thou shalt not kill,” and chose a truly unsingable hymn for the closing hymn. Big mistake; bigger than usual. Because of a very sad loss we had announced earlier in Joys and Concerns, and because the sermon itself mentioned the loss and went on to be emotionally rougher in the delivery than it had sounded inside my head, there was a lack of flow between the end of the sermon and the closing hymn. I allowed for a pretty long moment of silence as the congregation and I shared the heaviness and thought, well, preacher lady, nothing’s coming to you, so let’s have at the closing hymn.

I had chosen #289 in the grey hymnal, “Creative Love, Our Thanks We Give” which has fantastic words but a truly awful tune. I can sight-read pretty darn well and even into the second and third verse was totally failing to pick it up. What a helpless feeling, standing up there with this beloved community gamely plowing through this complicated tune.

Then I noticed something wonderful. The song ends on an F, which is the same note on which our earlier hymn, “There is More Love Somewhere,” begins.

We all know “There Is More Love Somewhere,” and we sing it without the hymnal now. We had just sung it with great feeling earlier in the service.

So after we concluded our death march through “Creative Love, Our Thanks We Give,” I just continued to sing… but the first verse of “There is More Love Somewhere.” Everyone picked it up right away — what a relief to be able to sing freely together after such a hard topic!! — and I saw some of the choir members in the back of the meetinghouse join hands.

I’m ten years into this liturgical business, and man, you cannot let down your guard for a moment.

The Fullness Of Who You Are: Stewardship Sunday

Today was Stewardship Sunday at church, and it was joyous and energetic. Great music. Happy people who deeply care about one another. God didn’t give me a husband but God got me together with this church, and they are my great love. Five years into this relationship I find myself more and more deeply drawn into amazement atthe simple profundity of what we are trying to do and be together.

We told the story today of the rich man who falls asleep in the synagogue and hears the rabbi preach on Leviticus , which instructs him tobake 12 loaves of challah bread and to leave them behind the tabernacle. It gets confused in the man’s mind, so he winds up thinking that he has heard the voice of God telling him directly to bake the bread. He figures, I’d better do it, so he bakes 12 loaves of challah and leaves them back where the Torah is kept.

The rich man leaves the synagogue, and meanwhile, the poorest man in town who is also the custodian of the synagogue, comes in. He is praying: Please, God, help me. My family is hungry, we have nothing, something has to happen for us or we’ll starve.

He goes behind the ark and he sees the loaves. He is jubilant, praising God and saying Wow, I knew You were a generous God, but I didn’t know You worked so fast!

The rich man comes back later and sees that the challah is gone. He, too, is jubilant. My offerings have been received by God!!

This relationship continues for weeks: the rich man bakes the leaves the challah, the poor man takes and is fed by it. They both believe this is a miracle directly from God.

One day the rabbi just happens to be in the sanctuary and he sees this whole little drama unfolding. And he calls the two men to him and explains what has been going on. The man are so disappointed!! So it wasn’t God after all, it was only them. But the rabbi says, you are the hands of God. You are the hands of God when you give, and you are the hands of God when you receive.

So I said to the congregation, this is the great story of how church life works. We don’t want it to be a secret here. Because here’s what you need to know — get this! — not only do we pay to support this community, we also get to do all of the work!!

There is no disappointment in this, no

Applause And the Ministry

Reading the Christian Century today, I found myself caught and held by the words of Fred Craddock. Here is the item from their Centurymarks column:

MORALITY TALE

When asked to reflect on why pastors like Ted Haggard fall morally, preaching guru Fred Craddock said that it stems from the fact that many pastors never learn to deal with favorable attention. ‘Never at home or in seminary did anyone teach me how to handle applause,’ Craddock said. ‘You don’t think about it when you’re coming along because you never imagine yourself getting applause for anything. Then when it happens, you say, Hey, I can get used to this. Pretty soon, you’ve got to have it. So your surround yourself with people who silently applaud you for one reason or another. And then your life is gone.’

***

When I was preparing for the ministry, I often sternly asked myself whether or not this was a real vocation or another dramatic role I was taking on as a way to distract myself from other life issues. I was not offended, therefore, when a member of the MFC (Ministerial Fellowship Committee) asked me the same question during my interview/interrogation for fellowship.

I have been in the theatre since I was in elementary school, performing in dozens and dozens of productions and playing a long list of wonderful characters. I have long been aware that performance experience has been a great boon to public ministry, as I have a disciplined use of voice and body that stands me in good stead as a speaker and presider. I can ad lib when necessary. I am comfortable with the choreographed formality of ritual. I know how to breathe when attacked by nerves, and I’m not embarrassed to sing hymns full voice.

But reading Craddock’s comments today, I see that my experience as a performer also served me well in another regard: I learned young that applause is just applause — an ephemeral expression of appreciation that arises out of the exchange of energy and cathartic emotional experience. For the amateur performer, it is the only payment for weeks of serious effort and commitment. Yes, it is exciting and even glamorous. But it is not the foundation of a lasting relationship, and it is most certainly not an antidote to the essential loneliness of the human condition.

Many times I have come home to an empty house or apartment after having entertained hundreds of people on the stage that evening, only to think that by that hour, most every memory of my performance would be utterly gone from those who stood in an enthusiastic ovation at 10:30 p.m. I always savor the intimate moment of the curtain call because I know that within minutes, the theatre will be empty and dead of energy and that I will go home wrung out. Just as in church, they may love you when you’re there, but you’re going home alone. There is no bitterness in this fact; it is just a fact.
I have to seriously question the basic maturity of any pastor who isn’t honestly acquainted with the wide, beautiful and desolate prairie between people’s acclaim for a job well done and the true condition of his or her own soul before God. What is our prayer life for but a reflective walk across that prairie, guided by grace alone? If we’re not walking that prairie on a regular basis, what in the world do we have to say to our people in the first place that’s worth a fig?

Applause doesn’t come to a minister or an actor because one is so great. It comes because one is brave and stupid enough to use their talents on behalf of the gods of comedy and tragedy, to enter into the spirit possession that is theatre and ministry, and to conform one’s body, mind, soul and spirit to the dictates of their calling. To me, cries of “Brava” often translate as “Thank you for being willing to do this, so that I don’t have to!” To which I say, “Thank you for running a company/driving a truck/raising a family/serving in the military/selling insurance/working in a hospital/teaching children so that I don’t have to!” Cripes, ministry is among the rare professions that get recognition at all in our culture!

I am stymied by Fred Craddock’s disingenuous claim that ministers are never prepared to receive favorable attention. Nonsense! From the moment we announce our intention to pursue the ordained ministry, we receive all kinds of attention, and most of it positive. Oh my, we must be so spiritual. We must be special. We’re so exotic. We are warmly congratulated for our first terrible outings in the pulpit. We are paid honoraria and the appreciation of families for muddled eulogies, rambling, incoherent wedding homilies, and botched pastoral counseling sessions. No matter how poor our writing, we get front page of our church newsletters every week. People ask us to pray for them, assuming that our heart is in the right place, that the words of our mouth and the meditations of our hearts are acceptable in the divine sight. How can Fred Craddock say that we’re not prepared for adulation? Any seminarian who is even slightly paying attention will notice that he or she is fairly barraged with unearned praise from the moment we enroll in our M.Div.program. No matter how much we flail about with extended attacks of self-doubt and extravagant insecurites while preparing for ministry, we must know — musn’t we? — that religious communities mostly want to provoked to deeply admire and esteem their pastor.

So, Fred Craddock, you may be right– maybe ministers too easily become sad addicts of adulation and attention — but not because we haven’t been led to expect it. Because we’ve failed to tell the truth about how much applause we get that we don’t deserve, and because we’re too enamored of martyrdom models of ministry to honestly confront that fact.

I think it’s too simplistic to say that Ted Haggard fell from grace because he surrounded himself with starry-eyed fans. Do we actually think he would have made different choices if he had had regular criticism from friends and parishioners? What form of criticism, exactly? And is this to say that it is somehow a congregation or a religious community’s responsibility to maintain a pastor’s integrity by the magically right combination of praise and critique? How, if that pastor can’t or won’t hear it?

Applause is a wonderful thing. Everyone craves recognition, praise and thanks. In the ministry, however, we should remember that applause is not so much evidence of our greatness as it is evidence of a good peoples’ desire to have a praiseworthy pastor. The only response to applause is to try to live into it, and in doing so, a good dose of fear and trembling is always in order.

Children and Adults Making Music

There are many things about the holiday services at my church that touch my heart, but one thing in particular really got to me this year: intergenerational musical moments.

During our Children’s Holiday Service (where each Sunday School class shares — in a thematic holiday-oriented way — what they’ve been studying), we had an anthem with a small children’s choir. Pretty standard stuff, but what wasn’t standard was the four adult choir members standing behind the children, singing a soft counterpoint to their melody. They learned the piece together, they rehearsed it together. Therefore, we were spared that whole “LOOK AT THE KIDDIES AREN’T THEY CUTE” situation that so often occurs when children perform music in a worship setting. I thought it was breathtakingly tender and beautiful. Just kids and grownups sharing their music with an appreciative congregation.

At Christmas Eve, we had two very young men (one in college and one right out) provide our prelude and postlude music on piano and saxaphone. These are both children of our church who have done this for both of our services for two years now, and they’ve also given a concert together at our Center for the Arts. They’re terrific. We love them, and they love being there. It didn’t occur to me until two nights ago, watching them, that their jazzy take on the Christmas classics adds a bit of contemporary pizzazz to our extremely historic New England traditional Christmas Eve service. I was like, hey, we’re kinda cool, man!
And boy, I wish you could have all heard “Ave Maria” played on the alto sax in our quiet, candlelit church as people walked out into the night. You’d think it was kind of sacreligious, but it was like a lullaby right from God for all Her babies.

At the end of our 5 pm service, we had four kindergarten and toddler boys playing the handbells to accompany “Silent Night.” I hadn’t known that this was planned, and watching their expressions of rapt attention as they played will be forever branded in my memory. The tykes were able to hit every bell perfectly on cue because standing behind each of them was their mother or grandmother, gently tapping them on the shoulder when their time came. Again, adults and children making music. No exploitation of cuteness for the benefit of cooing elders, as makes me so uncomfortable when I’ve seen it done in churches. Just people who love music making music together. They were conducted by our Music Director’s 17 year old son.

I’m not saying that the cuteness factor wasn’t extremely high, but the thing is, EVERYONE was cute. The mothers and grandmothers and the teenaged conductor were cute, not just the children. It made you realize that all God’s children are just really cute when they’re making music together. And that on Christmas Eve, we’re all children.