The Unitarian Fellowship of Peterborough

Music by The Occasional Singers

In the words of our annual theme...What Are We? Where Are We Going?
On this World Religions Day, we’ll once again take stock of this, our ‘religion.’

Religious Exploration:  Spirit Play 'Love You Forever'  Seekers 'Special Project

Opening Words

To this house we come bringing our boldest dreams -- seeking here the inspiration and strength to make them be!

To this house we come hoping to bury broken dreams, to be sustained through their pain and to discover new ones amidst their tears.

We come here lonely, isolated from meaningful human contact, searching for warmth and closeness and care. Needing to grow beyond plateaus of the commonplace, we seek here challenges and commitments productive of greater wholeness and deeper meanings.

We come intense and constructed, hoping for encouragement to shed our pretenses and to be ourselves. Filled with despair and self-doubt, we seek affirmations prodding us to say "yes" to ourselves and to life.

Somehow, always putting happiness ahead of ourselves, we enter this place trusting that what happens here will enable us to make and to accept a little bit of it now -- today!

Strange place, this house -- here we cry, sing, laugh, hurt, dance, touch, survive, celebrate, grow, search, doubt, hope, rejoice, pray, trust, care, learn, think, wonder, be, become! Yes, this morning, to this house we come.

Welcome to this house of hope, challenge and far-dreaming. 

STORY FOR ALL AGES

Pooh Plays Doctor              - Kathleen W. Zoehfeld

READING

Gordon McKeeman

Ministry is:

A quality of relationship between and among human beings that beckons forth hidden possibilities.

Ministry is:

Inviting people into deeper, more constant, more reverent relationship with the world and with one another.

Ministry is:

celebrating the triumphs of the human spirit, the miracles of birth and life, the wonders of devotion and sacrifice.

Ministry is:

witnessing to the life-enhancing values, speaking truth to power, standing for human dignity and equity, for compassion and aspiration.

Ministry is:

all these and much, much more than all of them, present in the wordless, the unspoken, the ineffable.

Ministry is:

speaking and living the highest we know and living with the knowledge that it is never as deep, or as wide or as high as we wish.

Whenever there is a meeting that summons us to our better selves, whenever our lostness is found, our fragments are united or our wounds begin healing, our spines stiffen and our muscles grow strong for the task.

There is ministry.

MESSAGE

This doctor/patient analogy thing is almost completely wrong.   I am not the doctor and you are not the patient.  Rather, we are in this dance together and we each have the power and the responsibility to ensure the health and vitality of the Unitarian Fellowship of Peterborough.   In truth, our patient, what we are attending to, all of us, is the ministry of this congregation.

Yet, there is also something right about the doctor/patient analogy...at least in so far as you have called me to be your minister...and one part of that call is, when appropriate, to speak with a prophetic voice.  This particular service, our annual ‘state of the fellowship’, is a time when I am called to name, or diagnose, our condition.   But then there’s always the chance I could be wrong.   Remember that.  You also have the power and responsibility to evaluate the state of the Fellowship.  You, the people, are called to pay attention to the health of this congregation, to note where there is illness or brokenness, to name it, and to work to heal it, together.  This is our work and our joy. 

Analysts sometimes speak of ‘getting a balcony view’.  Those of you who regularly choose a balcony seat understand this...from up there you get a different perspective than from the front row.  When we are up close, or participants in a dance, we cannot see the patterns or how the individual steps and dancers work together.  So we need to step back, and look at it as from a balcony.  I invite you into this place today...if you want to literally move up to the balcony, please do so.

Last week I spoke about the developmental stages one might pass through on a journey of faith.  When I was working on that sermon, I realized that it was connected to today’s message, and decided that this should be Part 2 of that conversation about opening and deepening....a conversation that connects a journey of faith with the current state of our beloved Fellowship.   Not surprisingly, it is also intimately linked with our annual theme...”Where do we come from?  Where are we going?”

A quick reprise of last week’s message...

First we tried to find a definition for faith that can resonate with us, one that goes beyond a traditional religious definition.  I used faith as James Fowler does[1]...for him, faith is our most fundamental orientation to the world – our basic images and core assumptions about how the world works and our place in it.   We have faith in that which we trust on a most basic level, and this trust provides a backdrop of value and meaning in our lives. 

James Fowler is the guy who proposed a theory of faith development that is widely used.  He suggested that there are six different stages of faith that humans seem to move through in a progressive manner.  Fowler’s research showed that the majority of adults are in stage three, and that Unitarian Universalist churches are primarily in stage four.  Stage five is important to understand because it provides a glimpse of what we could possibly move toward.   Briefly, stage three is a place of conformity, stage four is a place of individuation, stage five is a place of starting to remove boundaries and to embrace paradox.  

I suspect that few of us use the word ‘faith’ in our internal dialogue, let alone our daily parlance.  And yet, if faith is about trust and values and meaning, then it most certainly is integral to the work of this community.  We are here together on a journey of faith, one that we hope grows out of the depths of our beings, even as it breaks us open and deepens our understanding of the world in all of its glorious diversity.

Last week I also mentioned a critique of Fowler’s work, one which I appreciate, that calls into question the whole paradigm of progressive stages, as if our lives should be guided by or even judged by a comparative system.   This critique reminds us that these stages are better viewed as descriptive.  Each stage has the potential, as Fowler says, “for wholeness, grace and integrity and for the strength sufficient for either life’s blows or its blessings.”  Your stage is okay, my stage is okay, our stage is okay.  And yet, the reason I thought last week’s message is linked to today’s is that I found myself wondering how this theory could help us to describe the current stage, or state, or health, of this faith  community.  Doing so could help us to claim and live into where we are, or it could help us to evolve and grow, although certainly those options are not mutually exclusive.

To continue, I’d like to let go of the language of stages, and instead to look at where we might have stuck places and growing edges.   This examination, through the lens of faith development, is new to me, and I admit that my examination and interpretation is nascent, at best.   Bear with me.

As I understand it, in adolescence, even for a congregation, there is a growing awareness of complexity and diversity, and it exists mainly to synthesize all of that new information and to form an identity...a coherent orientation to the world.  The congregation is concerned with how it is like, or unlike others, but hasn’t formed a strong enough identity to maintain that identity without relying on comparisons.  It also has an ideology, but doesn’t really examine it and may even be rather unaware of it. 

The gift of adolescence is that it is a time to form a myth of identity and faith, one which both incorporates the past and anticipates the future. 

Based on that understanding, and trying to consider it from our balcony, I would say that we are growing up, and may even be post-adolescent.  Still, we often slip into our teens...when we describe ourselves in terms of that which we are not, as in saying Unitarianism is an alternative religion.  Or, when we have difficulty communicating exactly who we are to others; sometimes people leave here scratching their heads.  Or, when we say we come here to be with ‘like minded people’ (which is rather like having a teen gang).  In addition, few in this community have a long history in our tradition, and in that is an ongoing challenge to examine and understand our collective ideology. 

As we move into adulthood (if we move into adulthood,) we begin to take more seriously the responsibility for our own commitments and beliefs.   This often brings us into tension with the tug between individual and group identity; between our deeply felt feelings and the need to reflect upon them; between self-actualization and service to others.   Identity moves from being formed from a composite of our groups and roles, to an identity based in a frame of meaning that we understand as our unique ‘worldview.’  

The strength implicit in adulthood is a capacity for critical reflection on one’s self and one’s outlook, yet there exists the danger of narcissism in assuming that our created reality is all-inclusive. 

I think this mostly describes us.  We take responsibility for ourselves and our beliefs, though I do believe we could take this more seriously and in a more integrated way.  And, I often feel the adult-like tensions within our congregation.  Do we claim a group identity or one that is a collection of individuals?  Do we trust in the ‘rightness’ of our principles, or are we willing to reflect on them and question them?  We seem to vacillate between spending our resources within our walls or using them to serve the larger community.  These are the tensions of an adult faith, and we are immersed in them. 

As perhaps you’ve surmised, adolescence is synonymous with stage 3, and adulthood with stage 4.  Join me on the balcony and take a look at this.  What does it mean that for a majority of you, a big factor in your presence here is ‘community’...the ability to come and be with friends?  What does it say about us that we have a hard time expressing who we are and what we stand for?  What can we learn when we hear that, at least for some, it can be difficult to ‘break into’ this community?  How do we make sense of always seeming to be a few people short of enough volunteers or dollars to achieve our goals?

Lots of things can be seen from the balcony.  One thing you might see is the dance created by our current structure.  We are a community that, by many measures, is too small for a full-time minister.  But your dreams, and the financial support offered from your investments, make that possible.  A full-time minister offers you consistency, and a certain confidence, and a foundation for growth.  Yet it also means that financial resources are focused on a minister, and that the minister needs become the administrator and the sexton as well. 

When I look out from the balcony, I see ‘the minister’...be it me or someone else...connected to too many things...so that this position plays the part of the know-it-all, the hub.   That’s not healthy, or at the very least, it is disempowering to the system.   I know it doesn’t really make sense from a structural point of view, but wouldn’t it be great if we could remove the minister from the center and put something else there... a mature faith... a passion for social justice...a commitment to our values of equality and diversity... an openness to the unpredictable life that springs from a faithful dedication to religious freedom...an engaged and empowered community.

There’s an exercise that is sometimes done at our Canadian Unitarian Council’s leadership school, in which one person is assigned to draw a map of the conversation.  The drawing begins with points representing each person, and you watch and track the conversational ball, which is passed then to another person, who passes it on, and then another person intercepts it, and then another person grabs it, and then there is silence for a moment, and then the ball is passed, or taken, by someone else...and so on.  You end up with something that looks like those old gyroscope drawings...and in the finished picture, you can see, by the overlap and density of lines, where the ball most frequently lands...who talks most...where the power lies.

Let’s take that model and expand it into our personal lives and the community.  Let’s say we each are a ball of energy that we carry to whatever we do, or focus on, or even think about.  What does this gyroscope-produced image look like?  Where is our energy spent?  I suspect that another thing that you might see from the balcony is the obvious pattern of a whole lot of balls and resources converging here on Sunday morning, and just a few dribbles during the week.  That’s to be expected.  But, let’s take a critical look at that.  Might seeing it in this way change how we spend our time or spread our resources?  Do we accept that this is ‘the way society is’ today...with religious community taking a back seat to other things?  If these two hours on Sunday morning are to remain our time of mass convergence, as I suspect they are, how shall we best spend them?  Do they become more precious if we see how limited this time is?   I’m trying not to imply any preferred answers to these questions, but rather to just look how we function.  Being able and willing to do this reflection is part of being a stage 4 adult.

Let me go one step further.  It’s interesting to me that in the description of a more mature adulthood, there is evidence of many things to which we aspire...the ability to have porous boundaries, a readiness for closeness to things and people that are different, and a commitment to justice that goes beyond the confines of tribe, class, nation, or religious community.  Stage 5 faith is marked by a willingness to spend and be spent for the benefit of others and for future generations.  

I can’t say for certain that a person or a community must move through stages consecutively.  But if that is true, and if we dream of building a community based in a mature faith perspective (as in stage 5), we better attend to the work of stage four, which is to be more reflective and willing to critique who we are.  We had better improve our ability to name who we are.  And to do these things will require, rather than a random gyroscope of energy, a picture created out of more concerted choices and focused resources. 

The great management consultant Peter Drucker wrote that the core product of all social-sector organizations is “a changed human being.”  A congregation’s [ministry] is its unique answer to the question, “Whose lives do we intend to change and in what way?”[2]  What we do here only matters if we see positive transformation in the lives of the people touched by the congregation’s work.   Hopefully that’s a greater sample of people than just you who are here today, but it is also you.  Is the work of this congregation a transformative force in your life?  If not, then we’ve got some “‘splaining to do,” as Ricky Ricardo used to say.

What is the state of the Fellowship?  Today we’ve looked at our ‘state’ in terms of our ‘stage’.  I believe we are a congregation who has moved into a stage 4 faith, but who still dabbles, sometimes, in adolescence.  I believe we are a congregation who sees stage 5 ahead, and would like to go there, but has work to do in stage 4.  We are all of these things, and we are also all of the things that you see from your balcony view.  We can name and examine what we see from this perspective, and then we can get back on the dance floor and enjoy the dance.  

You know the old joke...the patient asks the doctor if chi will be able to dance after the operation.  The doctor says, “sure!”  The patient responds,” that’s good, because I never could before!”  Well, that joke doesn’t apply any better than the doctor/patient analogy.   You could dance before, you can dance still, you will continue to dance, maybe even with some new and life-giving moves.

Let it be a dance we do.
Amen. 

CLOSING WORDS

Richard Gilbert:                

As we leave this community of the spirit,

May we remember the difficult lesson

That each day offers more things than we can do.

May we do what needs to be done,

Postpone what does not,

And be at peace with what we can be and do.

Therefore, may we learn to separate

That which matters most

And that which matters least of all.