Rev. Anthony David
June 23, 2007
Last year, the Rev. Laurel Hallman (from First Unitarian Church in Dallas) was in this pulpit, and she talked about what it meant for a congregation to call a minister, as you have called me. She said, “When you call a minister to your church, you invisibly hand him stewardship of the Unitarian Universalist tradition in this place, in this church, in this time. He will have to call you to take a longer view, to consider the yet unborn children who will come after you, to be ready for those who need our saving word, to lift them from loneliness and alienation…. When you call a minister, you give him that responsibility—to call you into the future with grace and love.” That’s what the Rev. Hallman had to say—to call a minister into service is to invite being called into a longer view and a higher purpose. And in my four years serving as your minister, I have aspired to do just that, as best as I could. You called me, and I have called you, and it has been nothing less than a call to the extraordinary. Together, we have given birth to a wonderful new church, and its mission to change lives is so vital that, when adversity struck only one year after its public launch, we could not dare to let it die, too much was at stake. And since then, Pathways has only become stronger and clearer. Healthy dialogue. Hospitality. People of all ages growing through study and service. Financial generosity. Outreach offerings. A growing ministry of pastoral care. A growing social justice witness around progressive family values, which affirm loving gay and lesbian relationships as holy and as right as any other.
Pathways is becoming stronger and clearer, and part of this has been our worship service every Sunday. And I have got to tell you what a privilege it has been to preach from this pulpit! During my time here, I’ve preached around 100 sermons, and through them—with varying results, I’m sure—I’ve tried to call you into a longer view and a higher purpose. Various sermon series titles come to mind: The Power of Myth; Science and the Spirit; Living Our Values; Hitchhiker’s Guide to Faith; Creativity and the Art of Living; Terror in the Name of Religion; When Difficult Relatives Happen to Good People; Befriending Difficult Emotions; and on and on. Through all of them, I’ve tried to call you into the future with grace and love, and to be ready to serve.
And now I am preaching my last sermon as your called minister—and the message is the same as it has always been. Grace and Love. To be ready to serve. And in all of it, to be not just average, not just ordinary, but extraordinary.
To this end, there are three things I would call you to. The first is this: To remember that, in your personal lives and in the life of this community, you are stronger than you know. I’m talking about one of the core convictions here at Pathways Church, that each and every person has amazing inner resources to draw upon in healing their own suffering, as well as the suffering of others. The sacred is inherently present in nature and in human life, and when you and I tap into it, when we mindfully connect with it, we find that we are changed: our relationships are strengthened, our creativity is unleashed, our possibilities are expanded. The way is opened up to larger realities in life, of reverence, of gratitude, of forgiveness, of service. People hunger to experience this! People yearn for this! And it means that your fundamental purpose as a spiritual community is to invite as many people as possible into experiences like this, and then follow up by channeling the resulting passion and compassion into works of love and justice.
This is the insight and the knowing I am calling you to, and it is nothing less than a call to the extraordinary. You are stronger than you know. Again, I go back to September of 2005, when this congregation learned that its external funding would be pulled six months sooner than planned, and that it would need to radically adapt or die. Pathways had begun as an experimental rapid-start large church, and the dream in the early days had been bold. Lots of money and a big professional staff would spur instant numerical growth—in six months, we would have an average of 600 people in worship every week. The dream had been brash. And it was clear that, one year after launching Sunday morning services, it wasn’t going to come true. The dream was dead.
Months after this, after Pathways had had to downsize its multiple staff and let go its Worship Pastor, its Family Life Pastor, its Executive Director, its Office Manager, and two Music Coordinators—after their leavetaking (which was so sad and hard), and after this congregation’s surge to step forward into leadership and fill the gaps (which was so joyful and brilliant), I was still feeling cranky about the Unitarian Universalist Association’s decision to pull the plug prematurely on the experiment. One day I was at a local bookstore, and my wandering eye stopped on a particular title: Never Call Them Jerks. Hmm….. I was intrigued. I opened it up at random, and here is the passage my eye fell upon. The author, Arthur Boers, is coming out of the Christian tradition, so his words resonate especially well with the Judeo-Christian source of our Unitarian Universalist faith. He writes, “In [a book called] Life Together, theologian Dietrich Bonheoffer warns against forming churches on ‘wish dreams.’ He calls it ‘God’s grace’ when idealistic dreams are shattered. The problem comes … when we become more attracted to our ideals and dreams than to reality. […] Dreamers may become proud, judging, pretentious, self-righteous crusaders. We become demanding of God, others, and ourselves.” That’s the passage my eye fell upon, when I opened the book up at random. And I said to myself—whoa! Universe calling! Universe calling! Know what I mean?
Wanting more, I turned to another place in the book, and this is what I read: “James Dittes, a professor of pastoral theology and psychology, says that our greatest progress as ministers happens not when our dreams and visions are fulfilled … but when they are denied, demeaned, or disregarded. Then we have the opportunity of hearing God’s ‘call in the disruption’—a marvelous phrase. Once my primary question was asking how God wanted me to bring change to the church. Now I trust that God is at work among them already. […] Now I ponder such questions as this: ‘What is God doing and saying here already, and how can I assist?’” That’s what I read, and I came away transformed. The experimental rapid-start large church dream was dead, and all that that meant was that the baggage of idealistic, unrealistic expectations had been cleared away, and that there was a new opportunity before me to hear, in the midst of all the disruption, the call of Life leading us forward, leading me forward: the call of the Spirit, the call of Creative Yearning, God’s call. In the midst of the disruption, what I needed to remember was that strength and health was still in our midst, amazing inner resources were still ours for the asking, we were stronger than we knew. All I needed to do and all we needed to do was ask, What is the Spirit of Life working among us already, and how can we assist?
That’s the extraordinary future I am calling you to. Wish dreams will come and go. They will be shattered. But always there is trust that the Spirit of Life never stops working in our midst, a Spirit of grace, no matter what happens; and so we never stop asking the question, How can we assist the health that is already ours? How can we focus more on that? The Spirit of Life never stops, so you never stop. Never stop. Find ways to feed what’s healthy and starve what’s not. Feed what’s healthy, starve what’s not. How easy it is to cling to fear and anxiety, to unrealistic demands and expectations! So choose to starve them instead, and feed the honest courage, feed the sense of humor, feed the forgiveness, feed all the best that flows out of the human spirit. Feed what’s strong.
Beyond this, there is a second thing I call you to: To kiss joy as it flies. That’s a line from a poem by William Blake, which, in its entirely, reads like this:
He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sunrise.
That’s the extraordinary thing I call you to. Kiss the joy as it flies, to live in eternity’s sunrise. But you must know that it means being radically open to loss and to pain. Joy and woe in this world are woven together finely, and so if you numb pain, you’ll numb the joy. It means living with grief as not some sort of short-term illness, like the flu, but as simply part of what it means to be human, and part and parcel of the joy of our days. Grief is a spiritual path that grows our souls and opens us up to the Sacred and the Divine.
I want you to kiss joy as it flies. It means that I am asking you to let me go. I ask this not because I do not love you, for I have loved you before you even had a name. I ask this for the sake of Pathways’ continued growth. How will you dance with your future minister if I never step back from the dance, and you don’t let me? How are you going to hear your future minister calling you into the future with grace and love if I don’t stop talking, and you don’t let me?
I want you to kiss joy as it flies. I want you to live in eternity’s sunrise. It means that with the people you love in your life, and with my ministry here, you do the three things that poet Mary Oliver talks about. She says, “You must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends upon it; and when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.”
I am asking you to let me go, even as it hurts so badly to ask it. My time here is at an end, and I and we must make room for what is next. Out of respect for the primacy of your future ministers, I must lay aside all ministerial duties and responsibilities here at Pathways. This includes preaching, teaching, and counseling; it means officiating at weddings, at child blessings, and at memorial services. It also means just talking about what’s going at Pathways by phone or email or in other ways, and offering comments and advice. I can’t be a part of that anymore, and it’s not because I don’t love you. It’s because I have to step back from the dance, so you might dance with your new minister. I have to stop talking to you, so you can hear your new minister’s call. I have to die to you, so that a new ministry might live.
Even so, even so: we shall live in eternity’s sunrise together. We will. I know that I will always be a part of this place, and that you will always be a part of me. I take with me from this place seeds for planting. I take with me a box full of blessings, and the box has one word on its lid: JOY. I take it with me. Even as I step back to make room for new leadership to emerge and arise in this place, I know that as we remember our time together, we will always carry something of who we are with each other. “Nothing is lost,” writes a poet—
the universe is honest.
Time, like the sea, gives all back in the end,
But only in its own way, on its own conditions:
Empires as grains of sand, forests as coal,
Mountains as pebbles. Be still, be still, I say;
You were never the water, only a wave…. “
I want you to kiss joy as it flies. That is the second thing I call you to, which will take you to the extraordinary.
And now the third and last thing. To introduce it, I want to offer up two quotes from the writer Henry Miller. Here’s the first: “All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous unpremeditated act without benefit of experience.” That’s the first quote, and here is the second: “Back of every creation, supporting it like an arch, is faith. Enthusiasm is nothing: it comes and goes. But if one believes, then miracles occur.”
Just listen to the language here, emerging out of Henry Miller’s creative heart. “Growth as a leap in the dark;” “if one believes, then miracles occur;” “back of every creation, supporting it like an arch, is faith.” That’s what I’m calling you to, the third and last thing: faith. I’m calling you to faith.
This past week, I was at the Unitarian Universalist Association’s annual gathering, called General Assembly, held in Portland, Oregon, and as always I had the pleasure of catching up with old colleagues. I was talking with one of them, and I can’t tell you what guided the brief conversation in this direction, but he started to tell me about a sermon that he likes to use when he guest preaches. The title comes from a book by business consultant Peter Block: The Answer to How is Yes. And once again, the universe was leading me into the path I need to go. It was sending me a message. I felt something click. My heart felt lighter about my own future and yours.
The answer to how is yes. What Peter Block is trying to get to here is this: when people are confronted by unknowns, they can ask how as a defense against living life fully and courageously. It's not that asking how is necessarily wrong—it’s just that overfocusing on questions like "How long will it take?", "How much will it cost?" and "How will we do It?" can foster a state of mind in which no change is possible. Overfocusing on how questions, if we indulge that, implies that we should start nothing and go nowhere unless we have all the answers in advance. And therefore we are paralyzed. Overwhelmed. Consciousness of obstacles dominates. Fear dominates. Anxiety takes over. Do you want to live out a small vision? Do you want to be a finger-in-your-navel, inward-oriented church? Then overfocus on how questions.
The way to the extraordinary requires something different. Again, how you will do this and how you will do that are good and important questions, but never forget that first and foremost, being extraordinary is about saying yes to your mission and YES your vision and then having faith that you will make up the how as you go along. Have faith. As I look towards a new ministry, I am repeating this to myself like a mantra, and I call you to do the same. The answer to how is yes.
And so come my last words in this pulpit. Be extraordinary. Feed what is strong. Kiss joy as it flies. Say YES, believe, so that the miracle you are will continue to unfold. I call you into your future with grace and love. I call you to be ready. The world needs you. AMEN.