2018.1.14 There is No One But Us

2018.1.14        “There is No One But Us”    

Time for All Ages: Litany of the Generations

Reading from Holy the Firm by Annie Dillard

“There is no one but us. There is no one to send, not a clean hand or a pure heart on the face of the earth or in the earth—only us… unfit, not yet ready, having each of us chosen wrongly, made a false start, yielded to impulse and the tangled comfort of pleasures, and grown exhausted, unable to seek the thread, weak, and uninvolved. But there is no one but us. There has never been.”

Reading from Stride Toward Freedom by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

“Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable.  Even a superficial look at history reveals that no social advance rolls in on the wheels inevitability….Without persistent effort, time itself becomes an ally of the insurgent and primitive forces of … social destruction.  This is no time for apathy or complacency.  This is a time for vigorous and positive action.”

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Some of you know that last November I was unexpectedly able to take a brief trip with my partner to Europe.  I mostly was in Germany, but also took the train to Amsterdam for a couple of days, where I stayed with a dear old friend who has lived there now for 8 years or so.  So good to get historical perspective – we (and by that I really mean white folks in the US) tend to live with such a short vantage point on history.  As if everything is now, 50 years ago is the distant past, to say nothing of 150 years ago, or 17 generations ago, and nothing that happened that long ago could possibly have any bearing on our own moral life, or the state of our souls.

So, when I was in Amsterdam I spent one whole day alone, wandering around the old Jewish section of town.  I went to the Jewish historical museum, literally built on top of what used to be 4 different synagogues.  I then went to the Esnoga, the synagogue that was built between 1670 - 1675 by Portuguese Jews who had moved to more cosmopolitan Amsterdam, fleeing persecution during the Inquisition. 

It is an enormous, beautiful place of worship, still an active worshipping community and also serving as a museum.  It was built at the same time as the grandchildren of the first enslaved people in the United States were being born.  The rows of wooden benches in the synagogue have compartments under the seats—little cubbies—where men could store their items for worship.  Each had their own designated seat.  During WWII when more and more men were disappearing, the community kept their things locked up in their compartments, to remember them.  Some of those items are still on display, a reminder of the people who lived, not that long ago; and who did not survive. 

I was left with a sense of amazement that the synagogue itself was still standing, through the centuries, including and especially through WWII.  The past was present.

And then I went to the final stop of the day—the Dutch Resistance museum—which takes you through the years of WWII and explores the ways that Dutch people did – and did not—resist Nazism.  It was the very first section of the museum that continues to haunt me—

the section which covered the time period when Hitler first invaded and occupied Holland, and the year or two right after.  Through personal stories of regular people the exhibition focused on the dilemmas that people were confronted with during the occupation.  To what extent should one adapt to the new situation and did one dare to resist?  For those in positions of power, especially governmental power, should they stay in those positions and try to use that power to resist from the inside?  Or should they resign and work from outside the system?  Then there was the problem of the initial strategy that the occupying Germans pursued:  to be gentle on the Dutch at first; to try to win them over to their Aryan nationalism.  For a great many people, after the initial invasion and occupation, life went back to normal for a while.

That evening, back at my friend’s house, I was reviewing the day with her and her partner, who is Dutch.  I shared with them how powerful I thought the Resistance museum was, the examples of great bravery and sacrifice, the examples of complicated ethical calculations. 

And then her partner, interrupted me to say—“We did not resist.  The Dutch people hardly did anything.  We like to think we did, we have a whole museum dedicated to that story – but really, the vast majority of people did nothing. We were all complicit.”  There are many ways to tell the same story.

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Did you know that Dictionary.com named “complicit” as the 2017 word of the year?  I’m not sure exactly why they chose it, but here’s why I want to talk about it today:  I can imagine the thousands of people in this last year, especially people of racial or gender privilege asking themselves, “Am I part of the problem?  Have I been enabling/propping up/complicit with white supremacy, with toxic male supremacy, with fascism, with xenophobia, etc?”  Some of us are asking those questions for the very first time, and it’s good to be asking it.  Others of us ask it several times a day, and worry about it, as if we could somehow distance ourselves from what is happening in our country, as if we could ever give a definitive “no” to the answer “Am I complicit?”  Of course we are.

The root of the word is the same as the root of the word complicate.  Comes from the Latin complicare = to fold together.  One thing is connected to another is connected to another is connected to another.  Stories exist on top of stories, our lives are multi-dimensional, actual history cannot be told in one voice.  As Dr. King said, “In a real sense, all life is inter-related.  We are tied in a single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapably network of mutuality.  And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.”

I want you to imagine a kind of garment with me --- you know what smocking is? You most often see it on little girls’ handmade dresses.  It’s a method of embroidery that gathers up a huge amount of cloth, folds it up into tiny little creases so it becomes much smaller. There’s this nice orderly pattern embroidered on top of it, tightly holding and folding together so much of the fabric. So much is hidden underneath, in the complicated folds and creases.  You wouldn’t be able to tell just how much fabric is there unless you unraveled that embroidery, picked out the stitches and let the fabric open up.

This is my image today for history, how the powerful tell history, and how we can re-tell history towards our freedom and our opening up.

We, all of us, are born into structures and systems and a history that make us complicit, whether we choose to be or not.  We are born into certain dominant stories about history, practically written on us like the embroidery on a smocked dress.  Often neat and tidy stories, that appear beautiful on the surface, but hide so much underneath. 

As Dr. King said in one of his sermons collected in the book Strength to Love, “We are made by history.”  He went on to say in that same passage:  “Who doubts that today most [people] today are… shaped by the patterns of the majority? Or to change the figure, most people, and Christians in particular, are thermometers that record or register the temperature of majority opinion, not thermostats that transform and regulate the temperature of society.”

Dr. King, like the Hebrew prophets, like Jesus, like all great prophets and resistors of Empire, was someone who asked us to wake up to a wider, more inclusive history; to wake up to how we are shaped by that wider history in ways we often don’t realize, ways we don’t see. 

He asked us to tease apart the nice orderly story we were telling about the history of the United States, to open up the folds and creases and expose the hidden stories, so that we might be more honest about who we are.  But not just to re-tell history to somehow get it more correct—we do this to also shape history and to shape the future, so that we might be more just, so that we might be more loving, so that there might be more freedom in this land.

“Human progress is neither automatic or inevitable” he said.  It is up to us to take the history we have been born into, to tell the truth about it as much as we can, and shape it towards a different future.  This is how we resist simply being acted upon by the forces of the powerful who usually tell history, and so shape it to their own ends.

The poet W.H. Auden wrote in 1939, just a few weeks after the beginning of WWII “All I have is a voice to undo the folded lie.”

Last weekend the Blount County United Faith Committee sponsored a forum entitled “Jesus and Race” and focused on prompting reflection on what followers of Jesus are called to do and to be in response to on-going systemic racism in the US.

It began with a telling of history from two perspectives.  Two people using their voices to undo the folded lie.  A white woman, SM Atchley who was a student at MHS in 1963 when schools were desegregated here, and an African American man Ron Coffin who was one of the first 4 to enter MHS that year.

SM recalled the first day the new students entered the school building.  How they were surrounded by police, and by people, students watching as they walked towards the school.  How they entered the school and then disappeared, how they were not at the school assembly that morning.  How they were not allowed to be in the same classrooms together.  How they had to enter the classrooms after the bell rang and all the other students were seated.  How they were separated and alone.  And she remembered for us, emotionally, how when they walked up to that school building, there was no one walking with them. 

How she didn’t walk with them, didn’t speak with them. How ever since that day, when she was just 16 years old, she wonders, Could she have walked with them?  What else could she have done? Most importantly, what can she do now?

And Ron, in telling his own history of that time, reminded us of what a brutal year 1963 was.  When those 4 students walked into Maryville High School in September they were walking surrounded not just by police, but by a context of national movement and change, violence and assassinations.  The March on Washington had just happened.  And just a week later the 16^th Street church in Birmingham was bombed, killing 4 young girls.  Ron reminded us that as we remember and tell history, it’s important to be specific with our words, lest we tell another a folded lie – He said, it was desegregation that happened in 1963, not integration. Integration would have meant an inclusion not just of those four students, but some of the African American teachers and administrators from their school, and a recognition of their full humanity, and a recognition of their right to bring all of who they are into that school.

Right here there is a deeper, more complicated history to be unfolded. 

And when we do that, when we listen to that history, as we did during our Time for All Ages this morning, we are reminded of what Annie Dillard wrote--

“There is not a clean hand or a pure heart.”  There is not someone somewhere else with the moral innocence to save us or tell us what to do.

Through history we are all folded together, we each are always, already complicit, in each other’s complicated lives.  “There is no one but us.”

Perhaps the question to be asking, especially today, is not “Are we complicit?”  But how?  How did we get here? Whose stories am I listening to? And what will I do to shape this history towards something different, to bend the arc a little further towards justice in my time? 

The final words written on the walls of the Dutch Resistance museum, as you exit the exhibit are a quote from the Dutch writer Remco Campert, whose father died in a Nazi concentration camp: “Asking yourself a question, that’s how resistance begins.  And then ask that very question to someone else.”

To what extent do we adapt? How much are we willing to question? And how much are we willing to do to resist?

We are made by history, AND we are called to be questioners and shapers of history.  We are called not just by Dr. King but by the spirits of all the ancestors—those who walked with King, those who stood silently by; those who died in enslavement, those who did the enslaving; those who died in the concentration camps, those who resisted, those who went along to get along; those whose stories we tell and those whose stories we have forgotten.  May we listen to that call just as much, if not more than we listen to the loud voices in their places of power today.

May we keep asking our questions—

            Questions about our own lives, and how it is intertwined with the histories we learn, and the histories we don’t learn;

            Questions about our elected leaders, about the way things are today, and the way things could be.

We are the ones living in this time, in this history-in-the-making.

Let us continue to claim our power, and our responsibility

So that in the next generation, or 17 generations from now, a different history will be remembered.

May it be so.  Amen.

2018.1.7 How Shall Our Garden Grow?

2018.1.7 “How Shall Our Garden Grow?”    Rev. Laura Bogle        Foothills UU Fellowship

Readings:

Connections are Made Slowly by Marge Piercy (#568 in Singing the Living Tradition)

Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.

__You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.

More than half a tree is spread out in the soil

under your feet.

__Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.

Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.

__Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.

Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.

__Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.

Live a life you can endure: make love that is loving.

__Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in, a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.

Live as if you like yourself, and it may happen:

 __Reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.

This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,

__For every gardener knows that after the digging, after the planting, after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.

Mark 4:3-8

“Listen. What do you make of this? A farmer planted seed. As he scattered the seed, some of it fell on the road and birds ate it. Some fell in the gravel; it sprouted quickly but didn’t put down roots, so when the sun came up it withered just as quickly. Some fell in the weeds; as it came up, it was strangled among the weeds and nothing came of it. Some fell on good earth and came up with a flourish, producing a harvest exceeding his wildest dreams.

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Context for those who are new: the congregation voted last month to enter into call exploration process, to consider whether to call me as your settled minister.  This sermon is a response to that vote.

It was perhaps dangerous to agree to preach this sermon, on my vision of ministry with you all, during the month when our worship theme is “resistance!”  Hopefully you all are not here to resist what I have to say today.

While I’m not preaching directly on the theme of resistance today – here’s one connection I will make—I see the purpose of our congregational life in these times is to resist cultural and social pressures that separate us, that keep us lonely, that keep us hopeless and despairing, that keep us only talking to people in the same income bracket or the same educational status or the same race or the same age as ourselves, and to resist pressures that keep us disconnected from what is most important and precious in our hearts and souls.  We resist those cultural pressures is by practicing living a different way of Love and connection in this community.

As your part-time, consulting, minister the last 5 years I have been privileged to be with you as we seek to deepen and expand the ways we practice that kind of Love.  Back in October I preached a sermon that was really a Love Letter to all of you as this congregation enters its 10^th year as a chartered congregation of the UUA.  I reflected on where this congregation has been, and where we have been together. That sermon is posted on my blog if you want to go check it out.

One of the things that I’ve experienced in the last 5 years with you is a back-and-forth spiraling deepening of investment and trust.  As you have welcomed me and invested in me and trusted me, I have been able to deepen my own investment and trust; and vice versa.  I have learned from this process so far that the relationship between a minister and the congregation they serve is a dynamic one;  it is never only one thing for very long.  It is core to my theological perspective that I am only who I am because of the relationships I am embedded in.  And so in a very real way, I am not the same minister who joined you 5 years ago.  For one thing, I have more kids!  But I am the kind of minister I am today in large part because of you. 

And so, what I have to share with you today is out of the best that I have to offer, today, knowing that it is just part of an ongoing conversation among us. 

I want to thank and acknowledge the folks who have sent in specific questions for me.  It is interesting and notable to me that most of the questions submitted have in some way to do with organizational structure, authority, tradition, power, decision-making, and growth.  I will begin I hope to answer some of these questions today, though because I am a preacher it will be through metaphor.  And I want to note, that there’s much more that could and probably should be said – and I want to set aside additional time for those conversations.

We, together, are considering entering into a more permanent and longer-term relationship—one that is open-ended and based in a covenant with one another. 

Very often marriage is the metaphor used for this kind of relationship between minister and congregation.  You might have heard that if you were here for my colleague Jake Morrill’s sermon on called ministry last month. 

That’s a rich metaphor and there’s lots that is helpful there;  the spiritual practice of growing in love and intimacy through committed and equitable partnership, through the good times and the bad times.

But it’s not the first one I depend on—perhaps because as someone who for a long time didn’t have the right to marry the woman I love, the word marriage has been a bit fraught for me.

Another colleague of mine, who spent years as a labor and delivery nurse before becoming a minister, says the minister is like a midwife—doing hard work supporting and coaching the congregation to give birth, but not doing the actual labor of giving birth.  I like this metaphor, too, because it reminds us that the work of the congregation is not in the end the minister’s work; that indeed, the congregation does not belong to the minister.  In our tradition the congregation belongs to itself, and it is only the congregation that can decide to enter into special relationships with a minister.  It is the congregation which must decide where and how it will bring new life into this world.  The minister is there as guide, as supporter, as inspirer, as knowledge-bringer.

But, this metaphor is also not the first one I lean on.

The metaphor I want to open up today is that of ministry as organic gardening.  Perhaps this works for me because I grew up in a family with a big garden.  And, while I am no master gardener, I try to continue that practice of growing some food every year.

To be in ministry—whether ordained or lay ministry-- is to be cultivating earth, planting seeds, nurturing life, harvesting and feeding others, following the seasons, recognizing the fallow seasons as crucial for the next year’s crop.  It requires being attuned to the ecology of the whole.  It is about organic growing.

I often get asked “Is your church growing?”  By which people usually mean, do you have more members than you had last year?  And sometimes, I have asked you all, do you really want to grow, and how?  Congregational consultant Loren Meade, in his book More than Numbers: the Ways Churches Grow  outlines 3 other ways that church grow besides simply growing in the number of attendees or members. 

He talks about maturational growth, incarnational growth, and organic growth--All different kinds of growth that aren’t directly about how many people are on the membership roll.

To be only focused on numerical growth to the exclusion of these other kinds of growth would lead, I think, to seeds being planted in shallow or rocky soil; and an inability to take hold and really produce a harvest.

            Maturational growth—which is maturing in spirit and wisdom; becoming more of who you 

and we are meant to be; growing in faith across the lifespan spectrum from children through elders.

Using the metaphor of ministry as gardening, we might think about maturational growth as the practice of tilling and feeding the soil; preparing our souls to receive seed, so that when some are scattered they don’t sprout too quickly and die, they don’t get eaten by the birds, they don’t get strangled in the weeds—but we can receive them and allow them to take strong root.

            Incarnational growth—which is growing outward—putting our faith into practice in the world; embodying our values more effectively and living our mission. 

Using the metaphor of ministry as gardening, we might ask the question “Who does our crop feed?”  How are we using our plot of ground and our resources to feed others—not just ourselves?  That is, how are we sharing our harvest?

            Finally, he talks about organic growth—or, organizational growth,  and that’s what I want to spend a little bit more time on today.

Marge Piercy reminds us that ecological connections are made slowly – that we don’t always see what is happening underneath our feet, or see the effects of our actions in one season.  Healthy organizational development is a lot like this.  A few lessons I learn for our congregation, reflecting on organic gardening practices:

#1 Any organic gardener or farmer I know has to take a long view – thinking about the long-term health of the soil, for instance, so doing things like planting cover crops to replenish nutrients, and sometimes letting the ground lie fallow to rest. 

àIn congregational life and leadership, we could do the same.  Remembering that we each will have seasons of growth and activity, and seasons of rest and replenishment.  I want to see us build that into the organizational culture of our congregation, so that we are not burning out our volunteers or our leaders.  That means building strong functioning teams where the work can be shared among us. 

#2 Taking the long view also means not using toxic tools even it might get you a better harvest this season, because you know in the long run pesticides are going to wreak havoc on the larger ecosystem.

            àIn congregational life and ministry, for me this means that process and relationship matters just as much if not more than the product or harvest in one season.  It may take longer, but if I want to grow sustainably I have to take into account the long term effects of my actions.  For us, this highlights the importance of taking the time to have real conversation and build real connections.  To really listen to each other, even when we disagree.  This is where our congregational covenant is so important and guides our work with one another.  As your minister, I see one of my primary jobs is to help us hold that covenant together; to help us make that covenant real.  As a human being, just like you, I know that I myself don’t always live up to everything that covenant says.  In a longer term relationship with one another we are going to have lots of opportunity to call each other, with love, back into covenant and right relationship.  We do this for the health of the whole ecosystem, and our own spiritual integrity.

#3 Organic gardeners are not monoculture planters—only growing one thing.  In organic gardening there is a concept of complementary or companion planting. It’s the idea that one kind of plant next to another actually helps the other to grow.  Having a diversity of plants helps them all to thrive together.  Think about the old Native practice of planting squash, beans, and corn together—the Three Sisters.  The corn emerges first, and provides a stalk for the bean vine to reach up when it comes up next.  Later the wide leaves of the squash provides some shelter and shade at the roots, holding in moisture and keeping the weeds at bay.

àWe are also not a monoculture here, thank God.   How boring would that be?  We can all thrive better when we welcome the unique gifts we each have to bring.

Native American ecologist Robin Wall Kimmerer writes, “The way of the Three Sisters reminds me of one of the basic teachings of our people.  The most important thing each of us can know is our unique gift and how to use it in the world.  Individuality is cherished, and nurtured, because, in order for the whole to flourish, each of us has to be strong in who we are and carry our gifts with conviction, so they can be shared with others.  Being among the sisters provides a visible manifestation of what a community can become when its members understand and share their gifts.  …The gifts of each are more fully expressed when they are nurtured together than alone.  In ripe ears and swelling fruit, they counsel us that all gifts are multiplied in relationship.  This is how the world keeps going.”

è From an organizational structure perspective, this means we make room for each of us to give the gift we have to give, and to make that easier and more transparent.  This is a growing edge for any small congregation—to fully welcome and integrate newcomers and to communicate well how to get more deeply involved. This is something that we have to continue to work at, together. 

è The metaphor of companion planting in a garden also helps me think about roles and boundaries in a congregation in a non-hierarchical way.  The more clear we are about whose job is whose, the more beautiful our garden can be.  The more clear we are about whose job is whose, the more fruitful we can be, together.  As your called minister I will be invested by the congregation with a particular sphere of authority, to lead the spiritual and worship life of this congregation, and to lead us in ministry to one another and the world. In the same way the congregation invests the Board with the power to play a particular role of governance, to do a particular job in the garden.  Its not the same job as the minister, but we must be in collaborative complementary relationship in order to grow well.   

All of that authority is given by and is accountable ultimately to the power of the congregation.   The process of deciding whether to call me as your minister provides a good opportunity to get deeper clarity about our roles.

#5 Organic gardeners have to practice a certain kind of discernment.  This time of year I love looking through this beautiful seed catalog I get, and making big long lists of things I want to plant in the spring.  The dream is so beautiful!  And then I remember: oh yes, I only have these 4 little raised beds in the back yard, I’m going to have to make some choices here!  I have to ask, what might actually grow here?  What do I most want to grow this year?  Can I add another garden bed and adequately take care of it?  My hope in my ministry with you, is that we will grow in our ability to practice this kind of discernment, together, so that as a community we make good decisions and feel we are moving together in a mission-focused way. 

For instance, I get asked often these days whether I want us to have our own building.  I can tell you that I am excited that we feel full here on Sunday mornings and that I think we need to be thinking creatively about how we make more room for all of us and what we want to do.  I can tell you that I personally am excited about the visions that were cast at our leadership gathering back in September when so many people individually shared variations on a theme—the idea of a space in the future that we share with other good work and organizations in our community, consistent with our mission.  Again, I go back to the metaphor of organic growth, and thinking about long-term sustainability.  What do we really need, and when, and why?  How do our values guide us in the use of our resources?  As your minister I am here to both cast my own vision, but also to listen and to companion us all in a process together.  The two are not mutually exclusive.

Gardening or farming is a risky business.  You must invest a huge amount early in the season, not knowing whether the harvest will be good.  You never control all the variables – there might be a drought or a disease.  There might be seasons when the whole crop is lost.  Or you might end up with way more tomatoes than you know what to do with.  But does that mean not planting at all in the next season?  No.  We rely on each other and the Spirit of Life that is greater than anyone of us, to have the faith to keep planting.  Each attempt at sowing seed is an act of faith, and an opportunity to pay attention and to learn.

May we together, in the words of Marge Piercy,

“Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.

Live a life you can endure: make love that is loving.

…Reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.

This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,

For every gardener knows that after the digging, after the planting, after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.”

May we live our short lives on this Earth growing more Love, serving Justice, and creating Beauty.

May it be so, and Amen.