Lessons from the Interim Time

Unitarian Church of Sharon
4 N. Main St.
Sharon, MA 02067

781-784-3652
E-mail UCS

Sermon by Rev. Tricia Brennan

December 6, 2009

December is upon us; grey days, brown leaves, the first snowfall, less light as the song says. We burrow down into the winter.

How goes it with you these days?
Are you a person who finds these shorter colder days
to be a melancholy time?
Are you one for whom Christmas, Hannukah and New Years are harbingers of great joy- happy memories coupled with happy expectations?
How goes it with your soul?

I am your minister, I get to ask those kinds of questions- even as an interim minister I get to ask and listen to your responses that come in conversations, or email, or what you say in Joys and Concerns; sometimes you say it all in how you are with each other, or just the look on your face.

It is good to be real- to ask ourselves and others how we are doing, and listen to the answers that well up inside us or are shared by those with whom we live or work or worship. This day, this life lays claim to us, claiming our full attention, asking us to be awake to what we are feeling or thinking, what we fear and what we hope for, what questions occupy our hearts and minds.

Lessons from the Interim Time is the sermon title
in the order of service. Lessons from the Interim Time.
Interim- meaning the in-between time, the not-yet there time, the land of the unknown.

In one meeting of the TT member Ray Wallace gave us the word bardo, a Tibetan word that means between states, and signifying in the Buddhism the time between death and rebirth. It is an extended time, when much happens with the spirit of the departed. When the bardo period ends, the departed either becomes enlightened or is reborn.

We’ve haven’t held out the hope enlightenment when talking about our work together in this interim, in-between bardo time. Maybe we’ve set our sights too low.
Yet one of the key tasks of the interim period is discovering a new identity- and that is very much going on right now, and that, one could say, is a form of growth and enlightenment.

In the midst of all the intense work going into AIM project and in the soul-searching for a new minister, a new identity of this congregation is forming As the very walls that give shape and space to the church arise, the congregation’s sense of its own shape and size and potential is arising as well. As you discern what qualities you seek in a new minister, you do so with a deepening awareness of what makes this congregation tick, what is its unique DNA. This new identity is not entirely clear; it’s not neatly defined in one sentence. But the shift into something new is in motion. The imagination of the congregation is quickening by the enormous external and internal changes occurring. For folks who like a lot of excitement and change, this must be a thrilling ride. For those who prefer slow and steady change, this must be hell!

Now what we call identity is a quirky thing,
operating on an unpredictable timetable.

My friend Ginny is one of the best mothers I know.
Motherhood seems to be her calling
he gives herself wholeheartedly and with great intelligence
to the raising of her three children.
When her first child was born she was handed a form to fill out that would then be used to type up the birth certificate.
Along with the newborn’s name and date of birth,
she was asked to fill in the space
of mother’s name and date of birth.
Taking care to answer all questions correctly-
for she wanted her daughter’s birth certificate to be correct,
she dutifully wrote …..her mother’s name and birth date
in the space marked mother.
It was the date of birth, 1932 that gave it away…
For Ginny, the word mother, the identity of mother,
had always belonged in her mind to her mom.
It was yet to be her identity in the fullest sense.
We don’t become mothers or fathers the moment
we give birth or receive our children through adoption.
That identity comes in bits and pieces as we are stretched in love and exhaustion, until there comes a time,
for most of us who are parents, when that identity is inescapable, woven into the fabric of our being,

Sometimes we become suddenly aware of a part of our identity that we hadn’t realized was ours. “I guess….I am an alcoholic.” says the person whose life is falling apart due to her drinking.
The very first step of recovery in claiming the identity.

“I am not attracted to girls, but I am to boys” says the young man, “I think I am gay”. Naming it, claiming it, and forming a true life.

When did I become a minister?
I was ordained on October 14, 2001,
two weeks after the death of my father,
one month and three days after the twin towers crumbled
and whatever sense of certainty or security
we Americans might have had left us.
My ordination was meaningful.
It rang true for me and gladdened my heart.
But it was not until people started to expect me to be their minister, to demand of me the love and honesty that is essential to the work, that I started to became a minister.
It was not until I felt for the first time
“I don’t want to do this ministry any more, this is too hard’
which I felt in my car in the hospital parking lot
early one thanksgiving morning after spending the night
with a family whose son and brother had just died
from injuries sustained in a car accident.
You can only want to return something that you already possess. My identity as a minister derives as much from the times the work is hard and I want to quit, but don’t,
as it does from times of delight and success.

You know what I mean, I suspect.
We come to know who we are in the struggle,
in the mess of trying to do it right as best we can,
in the honest moments when we don’t try to make nice
or make light but speak the truth, above all, to ourselves.

Yes, we come to our identities overtime,
sometimes gradually and sometimes suddenly,
and often we fight the new.
On some level it is simply the way of the world to fight change.

Consider this curiosity: Did you know that the standard U.S. railroad gauge-, the distance between the rails, is 4 ft., 8.5 inches- an exceedingly odd measure for standardization?
If you knew that obscure fact,
then you probably know too why this is so.
Tracing back, we find the measurement was brought
to the United States by English expatriates,
who built the American railroads
the way they were built in England.
And tracing that history, we find that same standard was copied
by the English railroad people to match the pre-railroad tramways. That standard, in turn, conforms to the jigs and tools
for building wagons, which used the same wheel spacing.
And that spacing conformed to the old wheel ruts
on old long-distance roads,
because wheels and axle would be broken
if they did not ride smoothly in the well-established ruts.
And the ruts were developed through the use
of these long-distance roads,
constructed by imperial Rome for their legions and war chariots, which were build to standard specifications.
The conclusion is that the current U.S. standard railroad gauge
of 4 ft, 8 in is based on the original specifications
of the imperial Roman army war chariot. *
So there.

We resist change, in our measurements, in our habits,
in our sense of who we are.
We resistant, I think, because embracing a new way or a new identity means a little death, a little dying of what was.

Remember the Groundbreaking last spring-
that lovely day of speeches and music and ritual.
Remember that tasty cake that Jessica Armstrong
made in the shape of the old wing that was about to be demolished. We ate the cake, remember,
we symbolically consumed the old as we prepared for the new.
Letting go of old forms is usually not so sweet.

For all the power that comes
from naming a new identity,
for all the momentum arising when we move forward
in a new form better suited to the present reality,
we fear the loss and the little deaths that come with change.
Few of us are unafraid of death, wrote Forrest Church,
it is the ultimate mystery.
He was speaking of the big death, of course,
but all the smaller endings and good-byes,
the losses and letting gos, are minor versions of the big death. Perhaps if we could learn how to fear less our own deaths,
we might be more open to all the little deaths we face:
the old forms, the old identities, the old habits that no long serve. Perhaps.

This past Thanksgiving was the first
I did not spend with my family of origin.
For 52 years I spent Thanksgiving
with members of the Brennan family.
Even the year we were living in Mexico,
my sister, brother and mother came to visit.
Now in my 53rd year of turkey dinners, my husband, daughter and I spent the day with a family we’ve become friends with
in the past year, new friends, local friends, good people.
It was lovely, and it was different and it was a little death.

In the reading from Forrest Church’s book Love and Death,
we heard the oft-quoted phrase
that the opposite of love is not hate, but fear.
In a similar vein, Abraham Joshua Heschel,
the prophetic and mystical 20th century rabbi,
wrote that the opposite of good is not evil, it is indifference.

To quote Heschel further and I believe he said this in the 1960’s when our country was fighting the Vietnam war:

“I would say about individuals,
an individual dies when he ceases to be surprised.
I am surprised every morning that I see the sunshine again.
When I see an act of evil I’m not accommodated.
I don’t accommodate myself to the violence
that goes on everywhere; I’m still surprised.
That’s why I’m against it, why I can hope against it.
We must learn how to be surprised. Not to adjust ourselves.
I am the most maladjusted person in society.” **
Heschel and Martin Luther King were close,
and served as sources of mutual inspiration-
perhaps you can hear echoes of Kings words in Heschel’s just then.

The opposite of good is not evil, it is indifference,
and we fight indifference by learning how to be surprised.

Learning how to be surprised and being curious
are cousins of a sort. A holy curiosity questions
why things are the way they are,
especially when the status quo is harmful to some.
With being surprised and asking questions comes the courage
to imagine a new world, a new way and a new identity.
Our world is indeed in upheaval and is changing; our best imaginations are needed now to create something better and to find what it is that each one of us can do to make it so.

Let us bring it closer to home,
to ourselves as we shed old identities and embrace new identities, and to this church, soon rounding the bend in its 2nd year of interim time and deeply engaged in discovering a new identity-
we do well to keep a holy curiosity alive.
Just as the more we can love,
the less fear can hold us back,
so the more curious we are about who we can become,
the less resistance to change we may feel, or maybe a better way to put it is that we will be able to be curious
even about our resistance and whatever wisdom there is in the resistance can come forward.

So we ask each other- how goes it with you?
and the genuine curiosity that the one hears in the others voice allows for the freedom to tell it like it is.

So we wonder what is the particular calling of this church
in this community and this world at this time?
At this time when 1 in 4 American children use food stamps,
when our country is considering increasing its military commitment in Afghanistan, when foreclosures claim people’s homes with increasing frequency.
And hopefully the broad reach of the question
“what is your calling” sparks your imagination
and your answers to that question arise from a powerful connection to world outside the church walls.

So we are curious, in this interim time, and ask,
“does the church want to grow, and what would be lost and what would be gained if it grow, and what would it be like to have two services?”
And those good questions gets us to go
deeper into dialogue and discernment.

And then we get really curious and ask about the nitty gritty:
whose responsibility is it to change the wayside pulpit?
Where are the batteries for the walkie-talkies?
Just where did we store the Christmas wreaths?
And hopefully we laugh at ourselves
even as these good questions help form new ways of organizing.

A holy curiosity is a great enabler of growth
and good antidote to fear, indifference and inertia.
In the time of interim, this bardo time, this Advent time,
may curiosity be our companion and guide.

* this example is found in Leading Change in the Congregation, by Gilbert Rendle, page 11

** Speaking of Faith radio program "The Spiritual Audacity of Abraham Joshua Heschel” June 5, 2008

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