1 "Balance, Momentum, Timing: The State of the Church 2013." Miller, First Religious Society, Carlisle MA May 19, 2013 Rev. Diane Today is Pentecost, an important religious holiday in the Christian liturgical year. Some of you are familiar with Pentecost, even though we haven t observed it here for some time. Pentecost marks the end of Easter. Easter is not a single day, but rather a season - Eastertide, as mentioned in the A. E. Houseman poem - which begins on Easter Sunday and lasts fifty days. So now Pentecost arrives. It is based, like Easter, on a miracle story. One of the listen up and take notice miracle stories. The followers of Jesus were gathered together, weeks after his crucifixion. Evidently they were a diverse group, for they spoke many languages. Light broke through from heaven and descended as tongues of fire. Suddenly they could all understand each other perfectly. The boundaries of different languages fell away, and they spoke to each other and communicated without barriers. This was understood later to be the Holy Spirit, the element of the divine that was not a person, but rather a force, a presence, a connecting blessing. And so the Church was founded. This is the origin story for the institutional structure of Christian faith. And I think it would be fair to say that we have never communicated perfectly since that day, no matter how hard we try! You might guess that Unitarians dropped Pentecost because it was Trinitarian. However, that was a later interpretation of the story. In the Hungarian and Romanian Unitarian congregations, Pentecost is one of the four Sundays when Communion is celebrated in all the churches. Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost. It is a time of honoring faith as it is lived in community, of acknowledging the importance of the institutional church. Today I honor Pentecost by wearing its color, red. It is the right timing for our Annual Meeting, and for a State of the Church sermon that reflects on where we are now, by looking backward at the church year. It involves some counting, to measure things that can be measured. It involves seeing where we are on the wheel of the year. A state of the church sermon asks how we are living our mission and vision. Our Mission and Vision declares: We are a welcoming inclusive community, striving to make the world a better place, now and for future generations. We are dedicated to service, education and social action. We care for each other and foster personal and spiritual growth." So today I have some thoughts on Timing, Balance, and Momentum. First, Timing.
2 Pentecost is an ideal time to consider the institutional form of our faith tradition. Our tradition is congregational, a form of church life that trusts and empowers the members to make decisions and shape the life of the church. Our tradition of ministry also entrusts its clergy with leadership and care of the tradition. It is now 37 since I graduated from Divinity School and began in our tradition of ministry. Seven of those years have been here with this congregation five as your called minister, and two before that as your interim minister. Timing is important in church life. We do not know when flames of the spirit will descend upon us and enable us to hear one another clearly, transcending all differences. We do not control the timing. But we can be ready, so when this happens, we don t miss it. Thus we aspire to be a welcoming, inclusive community. We prepare ourselves by learning how to know one another across differences. We strive not to fall into the pattern of group dynamics of being a friendship group, a club, or a closed system. That means spending time with newcomers and visitors, to find out what brought them to the church, what they seek, and who they are. It is common these days to speak about healthy congregations. I am not fond of the metaphor of health and illness for churches. I prefer the metaphor of being ready for the arrival of inspiration, transformation, Spirit of Life, Joy, or the Holy Spirit, by whatever name. This is not all in the ancient past. There are times now when spirit infuses a congregation, when people feel on fire with mission and purpose. Such times cannot be engineered, but we can be ready, and we can be willing to be changed. Are we able to hear one another, are we open to communication, are we united by common concerns? Balance. Our mission statement describes both compassionate actions and personal growth two aspects of spiritual and institutional life that need to be in balance. Balance is something we each must find in our own lives, and it is always a challenge in a church. For example, how do we find the right balance of serving the community and serving the members of the church? How do we balance the priorities and wishes of various committees and groups? What we call committees and groups could also be called our ministries and we have many of them all seeking to make the world a better place, perhaps working globally, perhaps working locally. A budget is a way we try to allocate resources, in ways that will best further our ministries. It has been said that a budget is a moral document it is a way we express our values and our mission. It calls for balance. You may know the New Testament story of Mary and Martha. Jesus is the
3 honored guest at their home. Mary sits at the feet of the great teacher, listening, taking up his teachings and wisdom and presence. We can picture her: serene, quiet, spiritual. Meanwhile, Martha is bustling about getting the food ready, and she is put out that Mary is doing nothing useful toward that task. Jesus, however, praises Mary. And so churches tend to rank quiet attention above activity and doing. But as we know, in order for there to be quiet times for teaching and learning, times for meditation and being present, someone has to be fixing lunch and getting the table set and making it possible. Mary needs Martha for her moment of sitting at the feet of the great teacher. It takes a lot of busy people behind the scenes to make it possible for us to have worship people making the coffee, providing nursery care, and so forth. That is spiritual work, too. Jesus praised Mary, and it was taken up as the idea that sitting quietly is the better type of spiritual practice. Chances are we are missing what was important in this story. Mary was transgressing the norms of her time to sit with the men. Jesus was probably encouraging that, breaking the norms of gender behavior. In fact Jesus said, in a verse that was lost early on, Peter, go help Martha in the kitchen. You are such a rock when it comes to getting things done, and Martha shouldn t be left to do everything. Church life needs balance of action and reflection, doing and being. Momentum. This is a vital, active, congregation. Our membership has been mostly holding steady in recent years. There is a great premium on growth in church life, and it is usually meant in terms of numbers. In an era of sharply falling church membership, holding steady can be seen as an accomplishment. Our Sunday attendance had been increasing, from 83 to 86 to 88 in the past few years, but it has dropped this year to an average of 75. That may be an aberration caused by a couple snowstorms, but I think it warrants notice. The single best way to draw people to Sunday services is for people to invite friends and neighbors, and tell them what you find here that matters to you. One family has been inviting their friends who have small children, but they are finding that there is a cultural shift going on. Many people feel that church does not have a place in their lives. People with no religious affiliation are the fastest growing demographic in our country. Surely you have had someone tell you that they are Spiritual but not religious. The institutional life of a church, for all its marvelous accomplishments, has been disappointing at times to most of us. Churches are made of human beings, and we can be difficult, imperfect, and time-consuming.
4 Every generation of church life faces challenges. One challenge for us now is the individualism of these times, captured in trend of people who declare that they are spiritual but not religious. Many parents believe they can do a better job teaching values to their children than can a church. Many adults are confident they can live good and ethical lives without a religious community. I hear people say that our very name, First Religious Society, and our denominational name, Unitarian Universalist, are off-putting and confuse people. I hear people say that church is too much work, conflicts with family time, with brunch, with sports and other activities scheduled on Sunday mornings. Well, I think we need to address these concerns not by refuting them, but by letting people know what, for you, is worthwhile at the core of being part of an institution that is religious. Everything worthwhile takes effort. Our challenge is to make sure that church indeed IS worth the time to be a priority in your life. How to address those challenges of our times? There is no shortage of ideas. Churches are always being told the ten things they must do to be a thriving church. If we pursued all the advice being urged upon us we would never get anything done. We must find directions from within our particular situation. Not everything important for us to do is going to be new and different. Some is in fact the same old, same old. A minister described a family new to church with several children. They had been what ministers call unchurched and the children had just one year of Sunday School under their belt. In the middle of what was his second Christmas pageant rehearsal ever, the little boy cried out in total exasperation, Do you mean to tell me that we are doing exactly the same story we did last year? 1 Momentum in church life is not always about a linear motion of increase. Momentum is about the cycle of the church year, about seeing new insights in the old stories, rituals, holidays, and people. So why are we here? You who participate, who create the life of this church? What is it that motivates us to gather together as a congregation, a covenanted body of people making up a church? In "The Sacred Journey", Frederich Buechner wrote this: To do for yourself the best that you have it in you to do -- to grit your teeth and clench your fists in order to survive the world at its harshest and worst -- is, by that very act, to be unable to let something be done for you and in you that is more wonderful still. The trouble with steeling yourself against the harshness of reality is that the same steel that secures your life against being destroyed secures your life also against being opened up and transformed by the holy 1 Lillian Daniel, When Spiritual But Not Religious Is Not Enough: Seeing God in Surprising Places, Even the Church New York: Jericho Books, p. 11
5 power that life itself comes from. You can survive on your own. You can grow strong on your own. You can even prevail on your own. But you cannot become human on your own. We are here to become human with each other. We are here to make this a better world. We are here to balance doing and being. This is our time, with its challenges. We do not simply belong to this church. We are the church. AMEN.