The Post Modern Preacher

We sit in a place of history. On this land, in these halls walked legends of our faith. Those superstars of yester year who shined so bright that they are like the Bono, Madonna, or Cher of today. Ralph Waldo, Henry David, William Ellery, I do not have to say their last name for you to know who they are. Superstars like E. E. Cummings graced these same halls, as did Theodore Parker, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Samuel Joseph May, and Henry Ware. This is the who’s who of men in the Unitarian tradition. Some famous names, these superstars from our past. Sadly this historical list lacks anyone who was not a white man. Still, something tells me that Abigail Adams, Mary White Ovington, and Susan B. Anthony might have had a home here if our current cultural values were present through the nineteenth century. Those values arrived at by the work of some of our predecessors I just named.

Imagine with me, if you will the work of our predecessors. On whose back are we standing? Tell me what the values of these people were? I do not foresee a future where I will keep a sword and loaded pistol in my desk as I write my sermons in case the powers of this world try to remove those in the church who are made free in sanctuary. What would it be like to speak for complete equality in a society were only the rich receive education while the poor children are sold into the working force at a young age if they have any hope of feeding themselves. The predecessors, what were they thinking when they spoke for freedom in a society which held humans in life long bondage. The predecessors, what did they have going through their mind when they spoke of equality when women were property to their fathers or husbands without even property rights. These giants, these superstars who flew in the face of culture, of propriety, the social pariahs of their worlds where they lacked the privilege of General Assemblies, of UUMA chapter meetings, of clergy fellowships since orthodox protestant clergy labeled them heretics fought on and on for what was moral and what was just with crumbs of sustenance in the days before email and ubiquitous cell phones when friends are an instant message away. Yet still, our culture shines because of their presence. Those before you let their light shine.

Whose chalice fire really burned bright and enlightened our world? I would like to focus on the story of a few of our superstars. Many of you know what September 11th, 2006 marked, the five-year anniversary of a great tragedy. How many of you also know it was the hundredth anniversary of Gandhi launching his first campaign of nonviolence. A century of nonviolence prompted by his reading of Henry David Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience. For some of us living in Walden Pond, maybe we should remember that spending some of that time out in the woods of Emerson’s back yard prompted our boy Henry David to sit in jail instead of paying war taxes. For some of us still living in our quiet contemplation and our righteous indignation against the current administration maybe we should get out of Walden Pond and take that liberal enlightenment to the real world where people are still dying in wars while we hide in our suburban churches. If a society jails a just person unjustly, the only place for the just is in prison. Something tells me this star of our history whose work inspired Gandhi and through Gandhi empowered Martin Luther King would challenge us to burn just as bright.

Another shining star of our past from this very region, the couple whose work inspired the flaming chalice as our denominational symbol does not receive a whole lot of credit. Reverend Waitstill and Martha Sharp, two thirds of America’s presence amongst the Yad Vashem, the righteous of nations are superstars of our past. Their story is often unsung, since Waitstill was the seventeenth minister asked to go to Prague by the Unitarian Service Committee. They shepherded Unitarian and Jewish people, primarily children out of Nazi occupied Eastern Europe, and escaped from Prague the day before their arrest would have happened at the hands of the Gestapo. Their rest was short lived since they soon went to Portugal to continue the work of rescuing those under Nazi rule. This couple worked the black market of Vichy France to provide milk to the children in occupation and forged documents to ferry people to safety. The seventeenth minister asked did this. The work of the Unitarian Service Committee inspired Hans Deutsch to design the first chalice artwork as a logo for the USC. This logo, adopted by the Unitarian Universalist Association and the great majority of our congregations shines with the light of our predecessors.

Still in the early half of the twentieth century, we had another predecessor who shined brightly. I know many of you have seen our churches perform the flower communion. Have we told the story where this ritual comes from? Like many, I love our New England history, but this comes from the original home of Unitarianism in Eastern Europe. Norbert Capek was born in 1870, and spent his first forty years in southern Bohemia. A Baptist originally, but after fleeing to America due to oppression he experienced from voicing his concern about the impending World War he learned of Unitarianism and by 1920 converted to be part of the Unitarian ministry. As a native of the Czech Republic, he returned to Prague after World War I to form a liberal ministry. While in Prague, he saw the problem of a closed communion, or even a communion of bread and wine which would exclude some attendees, but recognized the need we have for ritual and community so he asked congregants to bring a flower each week to fill the church, and return home with a different flower as a sign of the transformative beauty of faith. When the Nazi regime entered and occupied Prague, he preached on the importance of freedom and justice. Despite being offered the opportunity to return to America, he pastored and preached on freedom and justice. This brought the ire of the Gestapo who deported him to Dachau in 1941, and his death at Nazi hands a year and a half later. In the face of brutal oppression, his light shined ever on.

Here we stand, in the halls of academia which were graced by some of our past superstars which demand a legacy. So how do we stand up to that legacy. The world has a need for our light, since last I checked our nation still occupies countries unjustly, but we have a chalice. While the poor of this country eat diets of under nourishing food, we have a light. While the inner city school districts have money stripped from them, condemning another generation to ignorance, illiteracy, and further separating the power of the haves from the have nots we have some oil left to burn to kindle our own chalice light. It is not just the work of our predecessors which makes this tradition so vibrant, so powerful and meaningful. James Reeb and Violla Liuzzo didn’t think Thoreau had cornered the market on social justice when they were killed shining their Unitarian Universalist flame. From 2005’s General Assembly in Fort Worth where we were challenged to burn down Walden Pond and get out of our liberal complacency to live into the legacy of Civil Disobedience we let our chalice burn bright. At 2006’s General Assembly in St. Louis we were encouraged with the words of Sweet Honey in the Rock’s Ella’s Song that those of us who believe in freedom cannot rest until the killing of every black mother’s son means just as much as the killing of a white mother’s son. “Not needing to clutch for power, not needing the light just to shine on me 
I need to be one in the number as we stand against tyranny.” Our tradition chose to shine the light of the recently departed in the 2007 General Assembly where the late Reverend Marjorie Bowens Wheatley, whose prophetic work on race relations being a matter of faith was lifted up as a brilliant flame coming from the chalice of Unitarian Universalism. These inspired stories are only a few of the examples where our light can change the world if only we live into our message. We can enact a new world, one where through our diligence people see the light of compassion instead of only our icy glare of intellectual elitism. We can transform people’s lives if we offer them the sacred message f Unitarian Universalism instead of hiding in our timidity and woundedness. Our light can rise up like a star on the horizon, leading the way to change.

How can we live into this legacy and current challenge to shine? My hope, my prayer is that it lives in all of you. We, the future of Unitarian Universalist ministry are the ones who will be casting the sparks that will light new chalices for the generations to come. We are called on to be the light. Our actions, our charge is to be as bright as we can, to shine wherever we go. Our light can no longer be hid; our message can no longer be whispered apologetically. As a denomination we have anemic growth from bickering in our pews about how we don’t want to change, we don’t want to grow, we don’t like this or that theological term all because we as religious professionals have not inspired our congregants to live the Unitarian Universalist message. Ours is a faith of transformation, of heresy, of protestation where we choose instead of blindly accepting the way things have always been done. Here in New England that is even more necessary since we are the church on the green, we are the church that people see in every city, town, and village center where we can both be the beacon to the community or drown in the weight of our history. Our light might go out if we fail to shine it so brightly that even those with their eyes held shut by the strength of rigidity and dogmatic humanism will have no choice but to be awed by the possibility it offers and warmed by the heat our chalices can produce if we but stoke the flame. What does our faith offer when it loses that heat, that light, that transformative quality? Will it be just another footnote of well-intentioned people who did well but now are trampled underfoot, or will we be the beacons that shine the way for liberal religion into the twenty first century. I choose to let my light shine.

I enjoy playing poker, but as a grad student my income doesn't support gambling with any considerable stakes. A minister friend introduced me to some of his congregants who host a low stakes tournament every few months and this past Saturday I played. The event struck me as a bit odd because it is one of the many times where I treated as different for being a religious professional.

I was introduced as the minister at school to several of the people at the event and had to let them know it was ok to use foul language around me, and that I was no holy man who might be offended by their comments. I started off well in the tourney, then went on tilt and was out by the third blind change. A good sized chunk of the players present were active laity at this specific congregation, and it was interesting to see them act with their proverbial hair down around their minister and this "minister at school." There was still some reservation, but they were very friendly. Even in their warmth, it seemed as though I was a bit apart. Perhaps even on the poker table I do not lose the ministerial presence in their eyes. It hits like a weight of responsibility to see the separation made real.

A coworker asked me today to help him design a wedding service. His friend is getting married now that she and her significant other have their second child on the way. He's doing the internet ordination so he can sign their certificate on the cheap. I was amused when he asked me what he had to say to make the thing official and he was confused when I didn't give a simple answer. When I told him I had readings and we could sit down with the couple to design a service he was confused since he thought I meant bible readings. More and more such things happen where people around me use me as a ministerial resource or think me a minister when I'm not that far along in the process. Three semesters of seminary does not a minister make, nor does the four months of field ed I've done for the district. Often I look at the respect and responsibility folks place on my identity as a religious professional in awe. Who am I to be this? It is a question I wrestle with. Who am I to lead, when I am just as much a wanderer in this quest to find a little meaning? Who am I to lead, when I'm being just as deceitful as the next when bluffing a hand at poker? Perhaps that is why we should all ask who are we not to lead.

The semester has come to a close, with the relief of completion. I attended the HUUMS holiday party on Saturday, and realized the difference of the culture between Harvard Div folk and those of us at BU. Me in my jeans felt a bit out of place with the folks in suits and dresses. I've seen the class analysis speaking of problems in discussing power and authority because UUs are middle to upper class, but it rejects the tradition of the working class Universalists. Especially outside of New England, there are many who come from privilege, but are not upper class and experience working class values. Maybe that is something we forget when we point to the demographics of education, but for those of us who are only the second generation of college goers in our families, we hold more to Garth Brooks' Friends in Low Places than to the Brandenburg Concerto. Not all of our congregations have Tiffany stained glass or are Kings Chapel. I wonder how much of our claiming privilege and wealth insults the congregations in places like Roxbury or Flint?

Last weekend was the New England regional fall conference of the UUA. Functionally, no one from Maine was there and only a handful of NH/VT folks. Several items had me thinking, and wondering if my conception of ministry is the same as others.

Is worship the most important thing our congregations do? I would say no at this point. Maybe that view will some day change, but the importance of congregations is bringing people together in relationship. Worship can be a mechanism of that function, and it is a fundamental element to the community. The greek terms for church life seem applicable, church is about leitourgia (worship), but also diakonia(service), koinonia(community), kerygma(proclamation), and didache(teaching). All of them are fundamental and none supercede the others.

Secondly, where does one draw the line between prophetic voice and pastoral presence? While it is important to speak the truth to power, how does it get said with rebuke in one hand and consolation in the other?

From Elie Wiesel, the comment being about the torment and anguish Abraham had when God demanded he sacrifice Isaac.

It wasn't that he suffered; we Jews know that God gives you no special place because you suffered. What matters is what you do based on that suffering.

This week for Theology II, we have been asked to summarize our notion of God in one page. Hardly fair, since one page is so limited and it only gives the briefest sketch of what our understanding is. However, it is something I want to chew on, so I've placed my statement below:

Many people have written tomes on the nature of God. Before attending BU, my favorite notion of God was Whiteheadian Process. Creativity bounded by conception as a persuasive force pulling the past into the future where possibility could be played out was much cleaner for me then notions of a three in one, imminent and transcendent at once nonsuffering, unchanging, omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient God.


I am Unitarian. The oneness of God prevents God existing as a discernable three. This ends up touching on many doctrines. To the best of my understanding, the trinity is doctrine because the death on the cross has to atone for the sins of humanity. Something about the atonement seems so false to me. How can my sins be paid with the blood of another? How can any sins be atoned for? No amount of remorse undoes the damage done by wrong doing. Our best is healing the wounds instead of pretending they don’t exist. Again, we come upon another doctrine, that of Christology. If I view Jesus as a healer and a prophet, his work to heal the wounds of those around him makes much more sense than serving as a paschal scape goat for the wrongdoings of humanity. He was killed not to show revelation that humanity killed God and God suffered, he was killed because he spoke truth to power and revealed a better way of living and a new faith for all.


Since I have touched on atonement and Christology, to complete this view of God I need to reflect on pneumatology and theodicy. When folks deify the holy spirit, I wonder why they forgot about the Hebrew Scriptures. God moves through the lives of people with the Ruach Elohim. This breath/spirit was not a separate person but an agency of the one divine. Why have they exalted the agency of God up to Godhood itself? I do not know the answer to that question. For the justice of God, I return to process. When I think of metaphors to use for God I end up with a blues guitarist. Improving on the guitar knows some boundaries, but not hard and fast rules. Sometimes a wrong note gets played or a note is bent in a way that sounds off. Ultimately the music controls itself as much as the musician. In many ways, that is how I see God. The metaphor of a divine musician playing along at creation, drawing it into a tight composition that is a real expression of the outpouring of the joy and love of creation sounds more tangible to me than the consequent and primordial natures of divine reality but both speak to the same meaning. God, the fellow sufferer who understands, God, the musician who feels the pain of the wrong notes but moves on with the composition anyway because ultimately the blues will out.

With the big news of the national ad campaign in Time, the splash campaign in the SF Bay, and thoughts of what I will be doing with the MBD, I am often struck by how inarticulate we UUs are about our message. The ad for the Bay Area begins with descriptions of what UUs are not and doesn't bring in the positivity until halfway into the commercial. Do people really go to church for what they won't be recieving? I don't go to an Indian restaurant because I don't want McDonald's, I go because I want tikka masala and samosas.

Why is it that there is an ethos of shame around our message? Why do we time and time again begin with taglines like you don't have to believe in God to come to our churches. As clever as it sounds, "You have questions, so do we" doesn't really say much about us either. Some alternate wordings could make the statement stronger. Something like, "Unitarian Universalism, where we have the courage to live in the questions." This statement boldly claims that we don't just have questions (who doesn't) but that we live in them. The statement says we don't have cheap grace. What about claiming that everyone is welcome to come to our table. Our congregations might not be so friendly to the more conservative minded but they are welcome to our table even if our faith will challenge their belief. We could even crib Anselm's tagline of "faith seeking understanding" as our message since we do not divorce our thinking heads from our feeling hearts.

Maybe we want to feel some level of shame since there is no profession of our sins so we cannot with clear conscience move past our guilt. Are we so hurt by our pasts that we have to preface who we are with who we are not? Why do we parade our woundedness as a red badge of courage? Today, I heard a comment from a fellow UU seminarian that the title of religion is problematic for UUism and we are perhaps better labelled a movement. Do you go to a building on Sunday mornings to sing songs, hear wisdom, and listen to the exegesis of texts and moral encouragement from a movement? Do you go to a movement to wed or to have a memorial of your life? Do you go to a movement for counselling when life is hard? Why are we afraid to say religion? There are many atheistic religions. Well, by many I mean sects of Buddhism, Confucianism, with the door open to other traditions of which I am ignorant. There are Buddhist churches. Yet, our churches shouldn't be called churches, they should be called meeting houses...

I hope one day we can get over ourselves. I hope we can find our way in our spiritual journey without prefaces of what we don't believe or do. I hope one day we can see any spiritual journeyor who is authentic in their path and call them friend, even if their spiritual guide isn't the Roshi or Lama of the week and is instead perhaps Julian of Norwich. Maybe one day we will let people learn from Marian traditions as much as we allow folk to learn from Kuan Yin. Maybe someday we can talk of Mohammed instead of Rumi.

From Annie Dillard

Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.

This whole summer I've felt a frustration while leading worship. Who am I, this stumbling, trembling, young man to lead the worship and spiritual practice of those whose paths I will never walk? Who am I to play about with games I cannot comprehend invoking the name of God when my own understanding of divinity is so fleeting? The best I can do is understand the relationship I have with my fellow spiritual travellers and I've been chartered to somehow relate their needs to the greater than essence which we all glimpse at some point but never hold onto because of the terrible power of enormity that such divinity holds.

I wonder if this is why the Norse forced Odin to lose an eye to gain the knowledge of runes, or if the Greeks made Prometheus live in perpetual agony on his rock for giving humanity fire. Jacob was injured wrestling the angel, and Jesus was hung up on the cruel tree to give some form of revelation. With this cost, this suffering, why do we dare wake the sleeping God? Partly because when you feel that explosion of TNT, you can only have the same rush by creating larger explosions. Maybe we need, maybe I need this drastic transformation as the ends of my faith. Maybe it is because as I am, I am not now enough and in the worship and the community I am turned more to an awareness of the waking God through the relationship we have in our communities. God is there in the laughter at the mistakes, God is in there at the lukewarm singing of hymns and the barely mumbled prayers as much as God is there when the liturgics make me tremble.

I don't know where this path is leading me, what changes this community enacts within me. I know my hand is being held by those who have come before and it holds onto those who will come after me.

The morning was spent with Terasa at the District Office going over plans for my field ed this year. The end goal is the creation of a marketing task force for the MBD after identifying stake holders and developing congregational buy-in over the course of the coming year. There is the potential that Boston would be the site for the 07-08 big blitz UUA marketting campaign much like what the Bay Area is experiencing this year but the groundwork needs to be established sooner rather than later.

Part of the groundwork is educating our congregations on radical hospitality. What does it mean to be genuinely welcoming? How do you great the new comer and how do you develop the spiritual gift of making space for the stranger? The number one demographic response to churches that do not grow is the feeling that the congregation is one big happy family. Mid size churches and large churches grow, in jargon program sized churches and corporate sized churches grow. Small churches-pastoral sized churches just don't have the capacity to grow.

I wonder how I'm going to couch this in theological language for my University? We are proclaiming a welcome which rings of evangelism but also nurturing faith communities toward healthy welcoming behavior which is almost discipleship. At times I feel a difficulty translating UU parlance to mainline protestent parlance, almost as if they are seperate languages.

It is a bittersweet thing, the summer ending and the fall encroaching. Boston cools from the summer heat and today I wore a hoodie as I biked to and from work. Summer has never been my favorate season. I don't sleep well in the oppression of heat and humidty. They weigh upon me in almost spiritual ways, with clawing discomfort and unshakeable perturbation. Fall brings about renewal. Fall gives hope. Fall means more work, with the district, with class, with my job, and perhaps with ASC.

Tonight I had dinner with my classmate who is the most catholic Catholic I know. He's preaching at Cambridge Unitarian Universalist the week from Sunday on Interfaith Worker Justice. I was able to show him some of the nuances to our particular style of worship, and through some of my sermons illustrate what we do, and the problems of worship sans a single truth. In his first life, he was an editor with an education from Cornell. Perhaps I put too much stock in names, but having him read and approve of my sermons reassured me. I struggle and doubt a lot that I am playing at things far greater than I will ever understand when I lead congregations in worship. The word in the sermon is our form of communion where each has the chance to be invited to a sacred place or turned away with boredom as the preacher prattles on.

I've been jamming again of late. Since much of my summer took creative juices to keep up with the sermon writing while keeping full time hours at BU, I had my guitar collect dust for the better part of July and August. With writing put aside for a time, I am able to play again. The calluses on my left hand had died down so I get the hot sharp pain after an hour strumming but it feels good as accomplishment. Belting out some Johnny Cash or some Richard Shindell or some Gary Jules feels cathartic. It touches that special place inside where I find calm and solace. Music with song and strum becomes prayer, more reverent than the kneeling with my prayer beads and for a moment I am become Elohim, creator of worlds.