2018.9.30 Charge from the Ancestors

CHARGE FROM THE ANCESTORS

For the Installation of Rev. Laura Bogle at Foothills UU Fellowship on Sept. 30, 2018

A Collaboration between all four East TN UU congregations

ADAM: Our Unitarian and Universalist roots go back at least a couple thousand years, but it wasn’t until the 16th century that the first Unitarian congregations formed in Transylvania. Similarly, UU roots can be found from the beginning of early American history, but organized congregations did not emerge until the 1700s in the United States. 

CATHERINE: Our ancestors call us to remember our long history of the free and responsible search for truth and meaning. 

ELNORA: Likewise, there were surely UU beliefs in East Tennessee from the founding of the city of Knoxville in the late 1700s, but it wasn’t until 1868 that the first Unitarian congregation began meeting in Knoxville. Unfortunately, the congregation stopped meeting after only 8 months. 

A couple of decades later in 1891 a Universalist church was planted in Harriman. But the church was faltering within only a few years. 

FRED: In February 1895, when the Universalists held their national convention in Knoxville, they appointed Quillen Shinn as missionary to the South, a position he held for the rest of his life, riding on horseback over hill and through valleys.  

Soon the Unitarian Church of Knoxville was organized, but the group stopped holding meetings 18 months later because the community was not receptive to UU values. The Universalist Church of Knoxville also organized around this time and met sporadically. In 1917 the Unitarian Society of Knoxville formed, but it did not last very long either.

JEFF: Our ancestors call us to trust what rises up from the people, and to imagine and embrace a Unitarian Universalism that, like a hardy native plant, is indigenous to East Tennessee.

BETH: After World War II, the young adults who stayed to live in Oak Ridge began to create the city’s institutions, among them Fred and Louise Drosten. In the Fall of 1948, people from Oak Ridge and from Knoxville gathered to meet with Lon Ray Call from the American Unitarian Association, and by 1949, a single congregation--with two campuses, one in Knoxville and one in Oak Ridge--began to meet. Rev. Dick Henry would preach in Knoxville in Sunday mornings and Oak Ridge on Sunday afternoons. Within a year, both Knoxville and Oak Ridge had grown enough to stand on their own, and continued on, no longer as twins, but as neighbors. 

ADAM: Our ancestors call us to listen to young adults, to spread the good news of a Love that leaves nobody out everywhere it can go, to invest in that mission, and to know that our founding story is that we’re better together.

CATHERINE: TVUUC boldly accepted African American Jim Person as a member during a time when that put the church on the wrong side of the law. The school board met about the matter and called the Unitarians “Communists,” and the church was no longer allowed to meet in the school space. 

On the other side of town, the City of Oak Ridge had been established according to Jim Crow laws, and that built-in racism required and still requires work to untangle and dismantle. In the 1950s, Unitarians worked diligently toward integration of schools, businesses, housing, and even the local cemetery.  

ELNORA: In 1968, in the wake of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination, the Poor People’s Campaign came through Knoxville on its way to DC, and members of TVUUC fed 2000 people in their efforts to support the cause. 

FRED: However, following Dr. King’s assassination, there was a general disintegration of the coalition around civil rights, and some African American leaders didn’t feel that they could make a movement or a difference from their positions within UU churches. This schism had a deep impact, especially on the national level. 

JEFF: Our ancestors call us to perseverance, courage, and patience, as we work toward the Beloved Community.

BETH: The seeds of a new congregation began in conversations in 1984 between the Oak Ridge and Tennessee Valley UU churches. A couple of years later Westside UU Church in Farragut was formed. 

It would be another 24 years until the Foothills UU Fellowship was chartered, but seeds were being planted. In 1988 the Smoky Mountain Unitarian Group -- also known as SMUG -- was a small group that could fit around a table at a diner on 411. 

ADAM: Somewhere around the early 2000s Chris Buice, minister of TVUUC and a former member of the Smoky Mountain Unitarian Group, encouraged the creation of a Small Group Ministry in Blount County. The small group soon began to launch larger events and worship services. Once established, the seed of the small group ministry grew very rapidly. 

CATHERINE: In March 2006, the congregation now known as Foothills UU Fellowship, began meeting as a satellite ministry of TVUUC, first meeting at Maryville College, then in two other locations before moving to our current space at the Smith Life Event Center. In 2008, the congregation was chartered as a UUA congregation. 

ELNORA: Our ancestors call us to prioritize building relationship first, to remember the Fellowship is not a building, and to know that seeds planted may bear fruit many years later.  

JEFF: In July 2008 our congregations were deeply affected by a tragic shooting at TVUUC, motivated by hatred and resulting in the loss of two precious lives and injuries to several others. Out of this terrible tragedy came resilience and hope and the Side with Love movement that seeks to harness love’s power to stop oppression. 

BETH: Our ancestors call us to resilience, strength, and hope in the face of fear, hate, & oppression. 

ADAM: In January 2018, East TN UU ministers and congregations worked together to host the UUA annual Board meeting in Knoxville, where our UUA president Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray reminded us that “This is no time for a casual faith.” Importantly, she added, “This is no time to go it alone or to think that we are in this alone.” 

CATHERINE: Our ancestors call us to dream big and to work together in partnership with our sibling congregations and our denomination in order to fulfill our vision of radical love and justice for all people.

ELNORA: In the nearly 70 years since the formation of the Oak Ridge and Tennessee Valley congregations, our four congregations have been served by somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 ministers, each bringing their particular ministry and wisdom and together working to support East Tennessee UUs in living out our values in our congregations and in our communities. 

FRED: Our ancestors call us to celebrate the richness and strength of long relationships that take time to deepen and grow.

Deep Calls to Deep : our intentions for the next year together

At last Sunday’s joyful worship service we held a child dedication for the Copeland family and our annual Water Ceremony. Pictures may be seen in our private Facebook group. I asked the gathered congregation to consider sharing one or two words of intention: How will you let yourself be known in this coming year? How will you reach out to know others?

Here’s a bit of my reflection from the service for those of you who weren't able to be there--

The poet William Stafford wrote,

If you don't know the kind of person I am

and I don't know the kind of person you are

a pattern that others made may prevail in the world

and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

Have you ever felt like the people around you don’t fully know you? I mean, really know the fullness of you?

It’s a common experience – there are people we’ve known for years, at work, in our neighborhood, where we volunteer, perhaps even people here at the Fellowship.

And yet when it comes right down to it, we’re not sure how well we really know each other. I’m not talking about anyone intentionally misleading each other. I mean the more subtle ways we keep from knowing one another: We leave our interactions on the surface, perhaps as a kind of protection.

Maybe we just make nice to avoid topics on which we disagree. Perhaps we don’t know each other simply because we don’t stop, slow down, and share, and ask, and listen.

It is a deep human need, to feel as if we are known.

And a deep human fear, to think that we will never be fully known.

Or even worse, that if we let ourselves be fully known, we won’t be loved or accepted.

For many people, of many religious traditions, including historically in our own UU tradition, experiencing God has been an experience of being fully known and fully loved.  

Nan Merrill, in her translation of Psalm 42 of the Hebrew Bible, uses the word Beloved for God.

“My soul thirsts for the Beloved,

               for the Living Water.

When may I come and behold

                              your face?

…

Deep calls to deep

               At the thunder of your waterfalls;

All your waves and billows

               Have washed over me.

By day You lead me in steadfast Love;

At night your song is with me”

There is a depth in every one of us that calls out to meet the deep in others. A depth in us that wants to be met with Love.

Perhaps God is what happens when the depths of each other meet.

Jewish theologian Martin Buber said: “When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them.”

Maybe God isn’t the word or the framework you would use. What word do you use for that transformative experience of being deeply known and loved for who you are?

The Universalist in me simply affirms that there is a greater Love that is beyond my own small self, a Love that knows and holds all of us, and that can be known in authentic and intimate relationship with another human being.

If we miss knowing the depths of each other, we miss God, we miss the big Love that is possible.

And as the poet says, “a pattern that others made may prevail in the world, and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.”

Our world today is full of superficial sound bites, campaign slogans, easy categories, and frankly not a lot of depth, let alone honesty.

We are a community of faith that puts covenant above creed, that puts relationship above belief. And so, our spiritual work is to go to the depths with each other. We practice here so that we can do it other places.

One of the ways we practice is through our small groups called Circles of Trust, based on the work of Parker Palmer… these groups covenant to meet monthly and to deeply share from our lives and listen to each other. The format isn’t intellectual discussion and it’s not group therapy. It’s a different kind of meeting each other on holy ground where our deepest truths may come forth. We make several agreements about how we will be with one another—including my favorite: no saving, no fixing, no advising!

Parker Palmer says: “We believe that we will find shared truth by going up into big ideas, but it is only when we go down, drawing deep from the well of personal experience, that we tap into the living water that supplies all of our lives.” (A Hidden Wholeness, pp.123-124)

Our congregational covenant also calls us to practice this kind of depth – a few highlights of what we agree to in our covenant (you can read the full text here):

• to listen to each other
• to be a welcoming place
• to be authentic and support each other in our vulnerabilities
• to speak our truth in ways that honor other people’s truths,

The more we practice it here, the better we might be at it out there in the rest of the world. The rest of the world where, as Parker Palmer says, “Animosities are unraveling the fabric of our civic society, degrading democracy’s infrastructure. Anything we can do to help people form relational ‘habits of the heart’ will help.” (https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/443/if-only-we-would-listen )

I’m glad to be engaged in this practice with all of you and look forward to a great year together.

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.”

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

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.

…

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.

+++++++++++++++++++

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.

2017.12.3 The Gift Economy

2017.12.3        “The Gift Economy”   Rev. Laura Bogle

Time for All Ages Sophia’s Guest by Becky Brooks

Reading          by Alison Luterman

Consider the Generosity of the One-Year-Old

who has no words to exchange with you yet,

and instead offers up her favorite drooled-on blanket,

her green rhinoceros as big as she is,

her cloth doll with the long blonde pigtails,

her battered cardboard books, swung open on their soggy pages,

her limitless heart.

If you were outdoors she would hand you a dead beetle,

a fistful of grass, a pebble,

by way of introduction or just because.

And if, a moment later, she wants it back,

it would be for the joy of passing

these simple symbols back and forth,

freely offered, freely relinquished,

This is me.  Here is who I am.  Oh.

In the same way, sun

drapes a buttered scarf across your face,

rose opens herself to your glance,

and rain shares its divine melancholy.

The whole world keeps whispering or shouting to you,

nibbling your ear like a neglected lover,

while you worry over matters of finance,

of "relationship,"

important issues related to getting and spending,

having and hoarding,

though you were once that baby,

though you are still that world.  

                    

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a scientist, a professor of botany and ecology, and a person of Native American Heritage.  In her recent book, “Braiding Sweetgrass,” she tells of how the early summers of her childhood she would spend hours out picking wild strawberries.

“I’d lie on my stomach in my favorite patches, watching the berries grow sweeter and bigger under the leaves. …

Even now, after more than fifty Strawberry Moons, finding a patch of wild strawberries still touches me with a sensation of surprise, a feeling of unworthiness and gratitude for the generosity and kindness that comes with an unexpected gift all wrapped in red and green.  ‘Really? For me? Oh you shouldn’t have.’ After fifty years they still raise the question of how to respond to their generosity.”

One way, she says, to respond to generosity is to pass on the gift.  She and her siblings would always pick enough berries for their Father’s special shortcake on father’s day.  His favorite.  “it was a gift that could never be bought.”

She remembers an early lesson in economics when one summer she was hired to pick cultivated strawberries on a neighboring farm.  Earning a dime for every quart.  And the owner of the farm saying to her, “These berries belong to me, not to you.  I don’t want to see you eating my berries.” The cultivated berries had become an owned commodity, and if Robin wanted to bring any home, she had to spend most of what she had earned picking the berries, to buy the berries, which sold at 60 cents a quart. 

In contrast, the wild berries were there as a gift—they belonged to themselves, not to anyone else or to the marketplace.

She writes, “Gifts from the earth or from each other establish a particular relationship, an obligation of sorts to give, to receive, and to reciprocate.  The field gave to us, we gave to my dad, and we tried to give back to the strawberries.” (25)

You could say Robin’s whole book is a meditation on the moral disconnection that happens in the great so-called Free Marketplace, where we are removed from the relationships and reciprocity that occurs when we look on the world and each other as gift.

Think about a time you received a gift – what was your response?  One of gratitude?  Did it make you want to give something back in return?  How did it make you feel? 

Now think about the last time you bought something – put gas in your car, went to the grocery store, went to the department store, exchanged money or more likely, you didn’t even exchange money with a person, you simply put a card in a slot and mysteriously paid.  What were you thinking?  What was your response?  Very often, for me, anyway, it’s simply completing a task. There’s not a feeling of connection.  There’s an emptiness in the transaction.  Or perhaps a sense of despair--  Maybe we think… wow I just spent the equivalent of hours of labor to put gas in my car just so I can work more.  Or maybe… I have no idea where any of this food was grown or who grew it.  Or maybe… I wish I could buy that sweater I saw, that would just complete my life, but it’s too expensive.  Or maybe I buy it anyway and just put it on the credit card, only to find out that another sweater produced in Honduras, or wherever, does not in fact make my life better.

That feeling of emptiness and disconnection might be why, according to a Harvard study released last year, just over half of millennials aged 18-29 say they don’t support capitalism. They aren’t sure about what the alternative is, but they realize the current state of affairs isn’t serving them, or their future and the future of our planet.

As Martin Kirk and Jason Hickel write in a recent article for FastCompany, entitled, Are You Ready to Consider that Capitalism is the Real Problem?, “It’s because they realize—either consciously or at some gut level—that there’s something fundamentally flawed about a system that has a prime directive to churn nature and humans into capital, and do it more and more each year, regardless of the costs to human well-being and to the environment we depend on. …

As Robert Kennedy famously said, Gross Domestic Product “does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play . . . it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.””

One of our neighbors is kind of a crotchety old guy.  In a neighborhood that is gentrifying he holds out in his house, living on a very limited income, partly surviving on food pantries and scavenged items.  And yet, he occasionally will bring us things – most recently it was a bouquet of flowers he got at a local ministry, clearly donated by Trader Joe’s because they were a bit droopy and on the verge of their demise, and no longer could be sold.  “For the girls” he said, “make sure you let them put it in a vase!”  And so we did.  And they loved it, of course.

Now, I would never think to write a thank you note to Trader Joe’s after I spent money buying a bouquet of flowers there, but I feel gratitude to my neighbor, and I even feel some gratitude to Trader Joe’s for giving away some flowers.  Our neighbor received a gift and passed it on, and it made me more mindful—what gifts do I receive to pass on to him?

Charles Eisenstein writes in his article, “To Build Community, An Economy of Gifts,” :

“Community is woven from gifts. Unlike today's market system, whose built-in scarcity compels competition in which more for me is less for you, in a gift economy the opposite holds. Because people in gift culture pass on their surplus rather than accumulating it, your good fortune is my good fortune: more for you is more for me. Wealth circulates, gravitating toward the greatest need. In a gift community, people know that their gifts will eventually come back to them, albeit often in a new form. Such a community might be called a "circle of the gift."” 

There are increasingly all kinds of organized and informal ways people are trying to resist the commodification and upwards concentration of wealth in the marketplace and turn towards alternative gift economies, circles of the gift, structures that help meet people’s needs and build community at the same time.  “Think mutual aid, community organizing, self-help, and cooperatives of all kinds.”  http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/solidarity/capitalism-is-not-the-only-choice-20171114

In one model a small group of people meets on a regular basis, they each share one thing they need – say, help building a fence-- and they each share one thing they have to give—say, extra produce from the garden—and they figure out how to share and meet each other’s needs without buying anything or exchanging money.

There are lots of other examples too, including large cooperative, worker-owned businesses whose mission is not to make the most money but to meet a community need and sustain family-friendly, family-supporting jobs in the process.

These are not new and innovative ideas—in some ways it is simply returning to and expanding a well-known way of life. 

We ourselves as a congregation are our own gift economy.  We pool our resources—money, talents, food, care—we share them with each other and with those outside our walls with no expectation of equal exchange or “profit”.  When you give to this congregation, it is not a market transaction, but a gift of trust in community and reciprocity.  When you allow yourself to receive gifts through this congregation the circle is completed. 

Giving and receiving is both a reflection of the relationship that already exists, and a way to deepen that relationship. 

In the same way, when I give out of our Ministers Discretionary Fund, it is not a gift with strings attached, I do not ask for a detailed accounting of how the gift was used, nor a particular return on investment.  It is simply moving what has already been given as a gift along again, circulating the wealth towards the greatest need.

It is hard spiritual practice to be like the generous one-year-old in the poem that Autumn read—simply experiencing the joy of passing gifts back and forth, freely offered, freely relinquished, without grasping for self or security, without feeling owed to or in debt.

If only I could be so generous in my heart. 

If only we could be so generous in our nation.

We often hear talk about our country as a Christian nation, but we have long since replaced the God of Abraham with the God of the Marketplace. 

One only need to look at the last month in Congress to understand that.

The tax reform bills passed by the Senate this week and in the House previously do not follow Jesus’ admonition to “Love thy Neighbor as thyself” or any of the other hundreds of places in scripture that instructs believers to care for the vulnerable and poor.  Instead, they cater to the wealthy, Wall Street and large corporations, leaving the rest of us to carry the debt and figure out our own survival.

And here’s another thing that happened this week, getting less attention --  legislation was introduced in the House this week to repeal some of the already pretty weak consumer protections around a practice known as pay-day lending. Imagine: you have a job but not enough to have much of a buffer in your bank account.  You have an unexpected expense – a car repair, for instance, and you need that car to get to your job, to keep your job.  So, what do you do?  Often the only line of credit available to you, especially if you aren’t from a family with resources, which is so often the case for low wage workers, is to go down to the pay day lender.  To get a loan against your future paycheck.  And then to find yourself, when all is said and done, paying upwards of 300% interest on that loan, for years.

The regulations that this legislation want to roll back simply say, you can’t do this too often with the same person.  There’s not a cap on interest.

The reason I’m raising this today is because there’s a group right here, through the Blount County Ecumenical Action Council, that is considering what alternatives we might set up.  How might we create a pool of money that could be loaned at very low or no interest to people who need it?  What if instead of going down to the pay day lender, people had an option to talk with a person in their community whose highest regard was for their health and dignity and not the bottom line of shareholders or banking regulations?  What if we based a system on trust and reciprocity and compassion instead?  What if instead of telling ourselves a story of scarcity and competition, we told ourselves a story of abundant gifts, that we already have what we need to meet every need, if we would share?  What if?

Robin Wall Kammerer writes,

“We are showered every day with gifts, but they are not meant for us to keep.  Their life is in their movement, the inhale and the exhale of our shared breath.  Our work and our joy is to pass along the gift and trust that what we put out into the universe will always come back.” (p.104)

We need each other, and in the years ahead that may become more and more clear to more and more of us as social safety nets get sacrificed.

May we, even in these days when we might despair that the decisions people are making in Washington are all too big and too mean for us to do anything about – may we remember that we still yet have the ability to ask “What if?” What if we just did it differently?

In this season of gift-giving and gift-receiving, may we be mindful of the gifts of earth and each other which we already have received.  May we look for ways in the coming year to more often share and pass those gifts along, so that we might all live more abundantly and free.

Amen.