“This Is How We Are Called” by Kimberley Nelson-Beyer

In the hours
before the birds stream airborne
with chiming voice,
a silent breath rests
in the pines and upholds
the surface of the lake as if it were
a fragile bubble in the very hand of God.

And I think
this is how we are called.

To cup our hands and hold this peace,
even when the sirens scream out,
even when sorrow cries out, old and gnarled,
even when words grow fangs and rend.
Cupped hands gently open
supporting peace like the golden hollow of a singing bowl,
like the towering rim of mountains
cradling this slumbering and mist-draped valley.

I’ve been in your position. The position you’re all in right now. It’s a place of excitement and anxiety and hope and fear. You’re listening to me wondering if I’ll say something that matters. Will I say something that will move you or give new insight? And if I don’t, you might be wondering what you’ll do. Your Search Committee’s worked hard making this moment happen. A year navigating the UUA system, sorting through resumes, holding phone interviews, doing massive reference checks, spending weekends with potential candidates, arranging meetings and conversations and now this entire Candidating week...what if you don’t like me? I’ve been there. I’ve been the member holding my heart in my hand waiting to see what will happen to it.

So you come to this service both thrilled and terrified. So do I. At the end of this week, we will decide whether or not we want to commit to this relationship. We each come with our hands cupped. We are wondering if the fragile bubble we are holding is safe in this new relationship, if we can hold the peace together.

This week is not about employment or contracts or job descriptions. It’s about connection, about whether or not we think we can share the ministry of this congregation, and for you, about whether or not I will be able to honor the work and history of this well established community. Next week I’ll talk more about that in a sermon I’ve entitled “Who Are We”, but today I think it’s fair to do a deeper introduction of myself so you can have all the information you need to approach the week before us.

Ministry is, in my opinion, about authentic relationship. I came to that insight at the end of my internship year in Poughkeepsie. I’d spent much time investigating all the ways a congregation works. I attended every meeting of the Finance, Religious Education, Worship, Ministerial Relations, Disruptive1Persons, Endowment, Social Justice, Arts, Membership and Hospitality Committees as well as every meeting of the Board of Trustees, every conflict mediation and every staff negotiation. And at the end of it, I realized that what was most important, what I really needed to know about ministry, had nothing to do with any of it. Ministry wasn’t about any agenda item from any of those meetings; ministry was about the people gathered around the table. Ministry was between the lines, it was the magnet that brought us all together, it was the inspiration to care about the mundane details of church life. Ministry was about the people in the room and how they cared for each other, how they worked through their deepest fears and labored to embody a greater world and make manifest a grand vision of hope. I could see during each of those meetings the ways in which the cupped hands gently held the fragile bubble, how each person became the cupped hand holding the peace of the Fellowship, even when the sirens began, even when the sorrows cried out, or the words grew fangs.

I’ve been in ministry my entire adult life, which is fairly unusual. Many contemporary ministers follow different paths first and then turn to ministry later in life, sometimes at the end of a “what’s it all about” crisis. I started my first ministry while I was still in college, and my life as a minister has taken many different forms. I have been minister on the streets of NYC, in a Floridian migrant camp, on two college campuses, on a Lakota Sioux reservation, with a Westchester county youth group, in Boston and Washington, in a Mexican squatters village, in city council meetings, in Ireland and France, with the homeless and helpless in Tennessee, Maine and in the Appalachian mountains of West Virginia and Kentucky, in churches and fellowships, in high school classrooms, and on farm land all over the tri-state area.

Of all the places I’ve been and all the ways I’ve lived this call, I know at the core, ministry is about presence, about authentic relationship. It’s not about being in particular places of need since everywhere is a place of need, but it’s about bringing my entire self wherever I am. For all the years of schooling required, true ministry can’t be taught. It’s not about something I know but about an offering of self at all times. It’s the ability to see and hear everyone; it’s a willingness to pay attention and to become the bearer of hope in places of light and dark.

There’s a line in a movie with which you may be familiar. The movie is Shall We Dance and the line is spoken by Susan Sarandon who is talking about marriage. She says: “We need a witness to our lives. There [are billions] of people on the planet... I mean, what does any one life really mean? But in a marriage, you're promising to care about everything. The good things, the bad things, the terrible things, the mundane things... all of it, all of the time, every day. You're saying 'Your life will not go unnoticed because I will notice it. Your life will not go un-witnessed because I will be your witness'.” This may be true of marriage, but it’s also true of ministry. It is the job of the minster bear witness, to be companion. And, with that, I should say, of the entire congregation. Our theology is one of shared ministry. There may be one person with the Office of Minister, but we are all called to minister to each other. This is my work, which is different from saying this is my job. This is a Great Work, the Great Work of transformation and healing and community building and creating and holding a fragile peace. But that this is also our Great Work. Ministers are the carriers of hope, revealers of truth, gate-keepers of secrets, instruments of redemption, mediators of mercy and midwives of justice. That is how I understand my vocation. And it’s how I understand yours. We are in this together.

One of the things I love about being a UU minister is that at our center, our shared spiritual path is about relationship which means I am called to be myself. I don’t have to pretend I am anything that I’m not. I have a friend who is a Pentecostal minister. In his tradition, he has been called and ordained by God and is therefore the perfect vessel for God’s Word. As a result, he is nearly untouchable. His congregants carry enormous respect for him which can serve him well, but he also can’t ever relax. He never admits to his congregation that he’s wrong or sorry or hurt or unsure. He isn’t bringing his whole self and therefore won’t ever be in authentic relationship with his congregation. In my theology, he isn’t practicing ministry.

As Unitarian Universalists, we have let go of a creed, a faith claim that we believe to be true now and for all time. Instead, we are open to ongoing revelation. We recognize that insight and information unfold, often slowly. Over millennia humans have come into new ways of knowing and as a result, we know new things. UUs keep ourselves open, understanding that peoples around the world have important insights intothe human condition and we attempt to bypass arrogance by embracing the possibility that we don’t know. We are vigilant in our search for truth, open to it in all the ways it comes.

But, if we are not held together by a shared doctrine or system of belief, what makes us a community? The answer is to be found in our covenant, our agreement to be together, our commitment to our community and our shared willingness to be a balm for the world.

I’ve been part of four congregations in addition to being an active member of the minister’s cluster where important experience and insight is shared. I’ve seen UU congregations bear witness to human dignity after a cross burning, celebrate the adoption of three teenagers out of foster care and the creation of a new and very non-traditional family, commit to living their values by joining the new sanctuary movement, share the experience of betrayal after the arrest of a trusted member, and band together to support their community during financial uncertainty. I’ve seen members make meals for the sick, return lost keys, chaperone youth during a lock-in, organize surprise parties, fill in last minute in an RE classroom, make room for one more in the car or the pew or at the dinner table. And having seen all that, I think that what we have here is more important than the search for truth; I think what we have here is meaning itself.

Our covenantal theology comes to us from the Cambridge Platform, written in 1648. Between 1620 and 1640, tens of thousands of Puritans, our spiritual ancestors, came to this new world to live and work and pray together. At their core, they had a covenant, a basic agreement, a simple promise that constituted their church.

Rev. Alice Blair Wesley tells us that “A covenanted free church is a body of individuals who have freely made a profoundly simple promise, a covenant: We pledge to walk together in the spirit of mutual love. The spirit of love is alone worthy of our ultimate, our religious loyalty. So, we shall meet often to take counsel concerning the ways of love, and we will yield religious authority solely to our own understanding of what these ways are, as best we can figure them out or learn or remember them, together.”1

Our forebears were religious radicals who stripped the established church down to its simplest elements. Those elements included faith, hope and a profound commitment to each other. A commitment that brought them in the thousands across the Atlantic Ocean to an untamed and unknown land where they could live out the promises they made to be a faithful people in intentional relationship with each other.

We don’t have at our center a creed or doctrine that can be easily declared. For this reason, when asked what we believe, some UUs might say we believe nothing, which, of course, isn’t true. A larger group might say “we don’t have a creed” or “we believe in the search for truth”. In those moments of groping, some might point to our Seven Principles, which sometimes substitutes for a creed in this country that understands religion to be synonymous with declared doctrine. It’s an unspoken and often unconscious assumption in the US that to be religious means you can make very specific faith claims and to belong to one or another faith tradition means you abide those claims and the behavioral implications that are extracted from them. This is a false supposition, but powerful in its broad acceptance which leads us to habitual reliance on our Principles to give us grounding. While it’s true that we’ve found basic tenets upon which many of us will agree, they are far from creedal and to amplify that point, we reconsider these Principles every 15 years and vote on whether or not to keep them.

But rather than saying we don’t believe anything or pointing to a substitute canon, I agree with Rev. Wesley’s profound hope that most of us will respond to the question of what we believe by saying “Ours is a covenantal church. We join by promising one another that we will be a beloved community, meeting together often to find the ways of love.” 2

We are held together by our decision to be together. I’m not talking about a behavioral covenant like the ones our RE classes create at the beginning of the year that says we’ll remember to raise our hands. I’m talking about a fundamental choice to be with each other. It’s a covenant that says I am for you and you are for me. We are in this together. It’s a covenant that says I will include you in my circle of concern. I will bring you soup when you are sick and celebrate with you when you rejoice and I will teach your children ourshared values and stand up for you when you are treated unjustly. I am for you and you are for me. We are together in our common search for truth and we will find meaning in the relationships we build. I will make coffee and you will bring bagels. I will shovel our walkway and you will balance our books. I will set up the chairs and you will light the candles.

Before arriving here at the beginning of Candidating Week, I had many conversations with members of this congregation as part of our mutual discernment. Obviously, I’ve been in conversation with the Search Committee for months, but I’ve also had the opportunity to speak with Diane and Alan, Jef and David, Roseann and John, Arlin and Sireta, and what I’ve learned is that the members at 1st Unitarian are each lovers and travellers, peacemakers and justice workers, seekers of meaning and searchers of truth, committed to walking this path together.

For me, this is good news. I am also a lover and travellor, peacemaker and justice worker, a seeker of meaning and searcher of truth and looking for a community with whom to walk this path. I am looking for a home, a place I can do the work I am called to do. I will be honest with you and say that I love 4th Unitarian in Mohegan Lake where I currently serve and leaving will have its difficulties. The only thing that will move me out of there is a place where I can do more. There are a good number of folks who are upset about my leaving. I’m a half-time consulting minister on a one year contract, so leaving shouldn’t be a huge surprise, but it’s been a source of real sadness for some. (It’s also been the catalyst for profound transformation.) A fair number of people, though, have told me that the comfort they find in my leaving is connected to the experience that I should be doing what some have called a “bigger ministry”. I have to agree. My call to ministry might be larger than might make sense in such a small congregation.

All week long we can talk about the things we might want to do together- and I’m hoping we do- but for now I’ll tell you that I want to enter a covenant and become a witness to the lives of a congregation already in authentic relationship with each other. And as partners committed to the life inside this building, I want to carry our message of hope to the world outside our walls. I am not yet for you and you are not yet for me, but a week from today I’m hoping we will be eager to declare our readiness to share this ministry, eager to enter a covenant of relationship. The week is filled with opportunities for us to get a feel for each other.

So here we are, together, hands cupped, holding this fragile bubble of peace and companionship and witness waiting to see what happens next.

Rev. Peggy Clarke