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Community Ministry Sunday Sermon
Countryside Church Unitarian Universalist
The Rev. Dr. C. Scot Giles
Community Ministry Sunday
Today our denomination observes Community Ministry Sunday. Each year we ask our congregations to set aside a Sunday and invite a Community Minister to take the pulpit to talk about the craft of Community Ministry. As the Affiliated Community Minister to our congregation this task falls to me.
As sort of a double whammy, I am also the current President of the Unitarian Universalist Society for Community Ministries, the professional association of Community Ministers in our denomination. That gives my view of all of this a national scope as I am now included in higher level discussions and planning on the national stage.
Community Ministers are ministers who work beyond the walls of the local congregation. We are like missionaries to the wider society and our task is to help society move in the direction of Unitarian Universalist Purposes and Principles.
In my case I work with the medical community. I am both a Board Certified Chaplain--a minister trained to do health care, and a Board Certified Diplomate of the National Guild of Hypnotists. I combine those two skills--pastoral care and hypnotism--into a craft that is more effective than either would be alone. My work is a healing ministry and I specialize in the most difficult cases, which I define as either life-changing medical problems or problems that have resisted other methods.
I’m best known for my work with cancer patients, and in conjunction with three hospitals and two wellness centers, I run four cancer clinics in an arc around Chicago, including in Palatine. I work with up to 100 cancer patients each month in those four locations for free. Research is clear that cancer patients who receive hypnotism in addition to conventional medical care do better.
That’s just one example of what Community Ministers do. We work with the public. We work beyond the walls of the local church. We may be healers, teachers, social justice workers, university faculty, spiritual directors, prison workers, counselors or many other professions. But we are also Unitarian Universalist ministers. We try to get the places where we do our work to be like what Unitarian Universalism teaches that society should be: fair, democratic, just, balanced and caring.
My sermon title is suggested by a piece of jewelry I saw someone wear last Summer. As some of you know I am a total geek for the Bristol Renaissance Faire. I go every week during the season, in costume, and belong to the Friends of the Faire organization that provides a special garden, changing rooms and VIP parking for the members.
You see all kinds of things at the Faire, and people often feel free to costume themselves in a way that recalls some aspect of their ancestory, fantasy life or darker side. There is a huge contingent of people who show up dressed as neo-heathans, Vikings, Druids, Seers and Warlocks. My own peasant costume pales in comparison.
The neo-heathens wear amber jewelry. Lots of it. There are whole shops at the Faire that sell nothing but Baltic Amber. It is not uncommon to encounter guys dressed as Vikings wearing necklaces of amber rocks the size of hen’s eggs. They sort of “clank” as they walk by. I would chuckle if the men who do this didn’t also carry large swords or axes.
Last year as I was reclining in the Faire Garden I found myself next to a woman who was wearing an amber necklace that was more reasonable. The beads were teardrop shaped, reasonably sized, and each one contained a fossil of some sort. I admired it and she explained that as amber is fossilized tree sap, it is not uncommon for prehistoric insects to have gotten caught in the sticky sap, then as the sap turned into amber gemstones, the fossils are preserved forever.
She took off the necklace and ran the teardrop beads through her fingers, naming each fossil in Latin (I later found out she was a Professor of Entomology).
I thought it was neat. Each bead of the necklace captured a moment of prehistory, stuck in time, dipped in amber, and preserved forever. That made me reflect on memory and I came up with a psycho-spiritual technique that I’ve taught since then.
A Dirty Trick of Evolution
Memory plays tricks on us. Yes it does. There isn’t anyone in this room who has not had a memory that you later discovered was completely false. You simply recorded something wrong. Your aunt never lived in that old house like you thought. Your father didn’t own a red convertible; it was owned by your uncle instead.
In fact there was a huge scandal in the mental health community in the Chicago area in the 80s and 90s. I know the history well as long before the scandal happened I actually trained with the psychiatrist involved. He was a brilliant hypnotist. The best I’ve ever seen. But he seriously misunderstood the nature of memory. When his most disturbed patients began to tell fantastic tales about abuse as children, he uncritically believed them.
Now, lots of people are in fact abused as children. It’s a sad and horrible fact. But the psychiatrist was not just finding a few dozen of these people. He started using hypnotism to help his patients “recover” memories of abuse they did not know they had. He began to find thousands of such people, or so he thought.
We now call what he was doing “causing a False Memory Syndrome,” and every hypnotist is now taught how to avoid it. If you get people into the right frame of mind you can suggest that they remember something that never happened. If you do it in a certain way, they will come to believe it.
Sometimes when I am lecturing about this to hypnotism students I will demonstrate how easy it is to create a false memory in someone. I don’t even do it using hypnotism. I can do it to someone just by talking in normal conversation. All I have to do is make up some fearful scene and I can persuade anyone to act like they remember it as happening to them.
Unfortunately, this prominent psychiatrist and a psychologist associate were in charge of the Dissociative Disorders Unit at Rush Presbyterian St. Luke’s Medical Center. Before long they were creating False Memories in people in wholesale numbers. When the scandal finally came to light, they were discovered to be using a combination of hypnotism, drugs and the token-economy of the in-patient psychiatry ward, to convince people that they had been the victims of abuse as children. Abuse committed by parents or cults of one sort or another.
What they did was unconscionable, and the medical center ended up paying one of the largest malpractice settlements in history. But it taught us all a lesson about how memory worked.
I still sometimes encounter the people who were treated by that psychiatrist and psychologist. My wife Lindsay, who is a hypnotist at the first level of Board Certification, has had several as members of her church over the years. They have an odd mental state. I call it a “divided consciousness.” They intellectually know the abuse never happened. Yet they still remember it. The memories still hurt them.
What happened to them, to a lesser degree happens to us all. Memory plays a dirty evolutionary trick on us. Of the 60 chemicals that your brain uses to regulate its functioning, 45 are involved in the experience of fear. The result is that fear is the easiest emotion to experience and the easiest one to remember.
Memories connected to fear are the easiest to recall.
The reason for this is obvious enough. Fear makes a creature cautious. Cautious creatures tend to survive and reproduce, whereas incautious creatures tend to become dinner for other, larger creatures. Therefore, the ready experience of fear has a survival value. If you experience fear easily you are more likely to live and reproduce.
At this point in human evolution the “fearful gene” has been so concentrated in the human population that fearful thoughts and feelings are the default setting of our brain. Unless we actively do something with our conscious minds to counteract that default setting, most of us go through our lives feeling more fear than situations actually warrant. We look out at the world through smoke colored glasses.
To deal with this we develop psychological defenses that protect us from feeling the deep resevour of fear, and it’s close cousin, anger. That’s what the psychiatrist I mentioned was tapping into. Without understanding it he probed until he found the wellspring of fear in the minds of his patients, and then he used psychiatric techniques to shape it into horrible false memories that left his patients devastated.
However, understand this. He was only doing in a calculated way something that actually happens to us all. We all have the default fearful setting in our minds. We all worry about things needlessly because of the biochemestry of brain, created by evolutionary forces. Long ago this biochemestry helped our ancestors survive. Now, not so much.
We feel fear needlessly. We are like Winston Churchill who once said, “I’ve had lots of worries in my life. Mostly about things that never happened. So obviously, worrying helped.”
Overcoming the Fearful Gene
It doesn’t have to be this way. There is a solution. But it takes some effort because you have a lot of evolution to overcome.
Overcoming the fearful gene is well worth the effort. When the human community invented clothing and harnessed fire our physical bodies stopped evolving. But our society continued to evolve. Our physical nervous system developed to cope with the stress of a Neolithic campsite. But our society has far more stress and complexity than our nerves can handle.
As a result, stress-related illnesses abound. Generalized Anxiety Disorders and the resulting Depressions are the most commonly diagnosed mental health problems. Anti-Anxiety and Antidepressant drugs outsell Aspirin and Tylenol combined. In fact one client of mine who was a physician of some repute seriously suggested that we should just add Prozac to the water like we do Fluoride. He called Prozac “the P Vitamin,” a joke common among Family Practitioners.
The trick of defeating the fear we all feel is to adopt conscious strategies to counteract the evolutionary bias toward feeling fear.
And that’s where the teardrops of amber come in.
If I gave you all a notebook and asked you to list your unhappy, fearful and negative memories, you’d all be able to give me a long list.
If I were to ask you to list your happy and empowering memories you would all struggle. You’d give me some, but the negative list would be far longer. Try it at home. Because of the biochemistry of your brain, you remember fear, and associated emotions, best.
Yet we’ve all got happy memories too. Good times. Empowering times. Delightful times. What you need to do is to find a way to mentally dip those memories in amber so they can be preserved forever, just like the fossils in my friend’s teardrop necklace.
This will not happen by accident. You’ve actually got to sit down and make a list of the good times, the powerful times. Then, just like you had to do when you tried to memorize your multiplication tables, you’ve got to go over that list again and again.
I keep mine in a special place in my journal and review it every few months. Even with only a few months elapsing between reviews, I often discover that I have managed to forget something on that list until the list itself reminds me.
Over time, that list of positive recollections, carefully reviewed, becomes like an inner rosary of mental amber and you develop the discipline of positive recollection. In this way you fight the evolutionary tide. Your sense of yourself elevates. Your mood improves. You laugh more and you disappoint the psychiatric establishment and the drug industry by making yourself into less of a market.
But you have to make it a point to create and put on the mental necklace of positive amber. It cannot happen by accident. There is too much evolutionary pressure to encourage you to remember only the negative, to feel only the fear.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. We can deliberately list and recall the good things. As the Book of Sirach suggests, we can fight back and our good memories will take root, “like a grapevine,...putting out lovely shoots;” “blossoms that give way to rich and glorious fruit.”
Fearful Unitarian Universalism
This metaphor gives me hope for the future of Unitarian Universalism.
I am a Unitarian Universalist Community Minister. Like our Senior Minister, Rev. Hilary, I’ve given my life to this cause. If you encounter any UU minister these days you will find yourself talking to a worried person. Because our denomination is in transition.
The Unitarian Universalist Association, or UUA, isn’t really a denomnination. It is an association of independent churches and fellowships that vary widely in their character.
Our movement grew out of the New England Congregational Churches. Our denomination was originally a clergy association where ministerial colleagues set standards for each other while they served independent free-standing churches.
Gradually the churches got tired of being isolated and wanted the comfort of being part of a larger movement. Therefore, the clergy association was replaced by an association of congregations to bring our churches closer together. Officially, to this day the Unitarian Universalist Association is just that--an association of congregations. Its charter is merely to provide services to its member congregations. For example, it exists to oversee the training of qualified clergy, to publish hymnals, church school curriculum, etc.
This has stopped working. Unitarian Universalism has been in numerical decline for a long time. In proportion to a growing American population, our voice is much diluted. I believe that the numbers have been juggled at the national level for many years to paper this over. In the last four years the decline has become obvious to everyone because the decline is no longer slow. We’re noticeably losing ground.
Therefore, the associational model is giving way to a new model for our way of religion. We are moving into a post-congregationalist future. While our congregations will always be at the center, we are now coming to define ourselves not as an association or a denomination. We are now calling ourselves a Religious Movement in the same way that Progressive Christianity or Sunni Islam is a religious movement.
The President of the UUA, Rev. Peter Morales has just published a manifesto titled “Congregations and Beyond” which is the result of a long, and on-going, national process. You can read it on the denominational website at UUA.ORG and I suggest you do.
In this manifesto President Morales argues that Unitarian Universalism needs to become a Religious Movement that is larger than the UUA itself, and far larger than our churches.
People no longer participate in churches the way they used to. A hundred years ago just about every American belonged to one church or another, and those churches were centers for the community they were in. Town meetings were held there. They were the centers of civic life.
But no more. Only a minority of the population goes to church these days. While churches are usually regarded as good institutions, other secular civic groups now hold equal status
However, President Morales points out that on the last census, 650,000 people identified themselves as Unitarian Universalist. Yet our congregations have less than 160,000 members, a gap of more than half a million people. Many more people consider themselves Unitarian Universalist than our churches could hold, more than four times over.
About half of the participants of major Unitarian Universalist events are not members of any congregation. Some of the most generous donors are not members. Most of the young people who go through our religious education continue to identify themselves as Unitarian Universalists, but are not members of any congregation.
So where are these people? They are out there in Amnesty International, Planned Parenthood, staffing Food Pantries, helping the Art Institute preserve cultural heritage, volunteering at the Field Museum, running organic farms and standing in the Occupy Movement, and in many other places and institutions. They are not in our churches, but they are a huge positive force in the world.
As they are not in our churches we don’t see them or think about them. Just like positive memories get lost in the fearful environment of our evolutionary brain, these fine people get lost amid the day-to-day concerns of keeping our church communities afloat and funded.
But they are out there. Each one carrying with him or her a positive recollection of having been part of a congregation once, because that’s the only way one can become a Unitarian Universalist. They have a positive recollection of us in their inner amber rosary and we’ve helped them find a calling. As a Religious Movement we need to both accept and claim them.
In addition to everything else that they are, our congregations are training grounds for people who will carry our religious philosophy of enlightened tolerance out into the world. Most of those people will eventually drift away from congregational involvement but not from their identity as Unitarian Universalists. They will move out into other movements and institutions, where like the Book of Sirach says, they become “like an oak spreading out branches, magnificant and graceful.”
Community Ministers like myself, who intentionally minister beyond the walls of the local congregation increasingly will be seeking out these people. Our goal is not to bring them back into the fold of Sunday Morning attendance (although that would be nice). Our goal will be to reconnect with these people and find a way to harness their energy toward the work all Unitarian Universalists prize.
It is easy to feel fear. It is easy to remember bad things. It is easy to look on the dark side of personal memory, or the denominational census. It takes work to see the positive in all of that. But it’s a work worth doing, for ourselves and for our Religious Movement.
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The Rules of the Mind
It’s actually very easy to put a person into hypnotic trance. I could teach any of you how to do that in an afternoon. The hard part is to know what to do once you have the other person entranced. That’s the craft Consulting Hypnotists study and it’s very, very difficult.
What we do is to create a Suggestion Patter, layers of words, images, stories and metaphors created by following a handful of rules. For example one of these rules is the Rule of Imagination. It says that “When Will and Imagination Conflict, Imagination Always Wins.”
As an example, I want every person in this sanctuary to not imagine that Ms. Sarah Palin, the half-term Governor of Alaska, is standing in the middle of the Church Hall right now. Do not think about her. Do not wonder if she has helped herself to a cup of your coffee. Do not ask yourself where in the room she is standing. Do not even consider what she might be carrying in her left hand. Most important of all, do not picture her in your mind wearing a dark blue mini-skirt and black fish-net stockings.
Can’t do it, can you? No one can. Some of your are probably feeling the urge to leave this room to check out what’s happening in the Church Hall right now.
Where Will and Imagination Conflict, Imagination Always Wins. No exceptions. All I have to do is paint a graphic picture in your minds and you will see it there; even if you don’t want to.
Another of these rules hypnotists know is the Rule of Dominant Affect. What it means is that stronger emotions always push out weaker emotions.. Very strong emotions can actually change patterns of thought because the desire to be reasonable is a weak emotion.
While I use this Rule for healing, it’s got a darker side known to every politician, advertising executive and marketing consultant.
If you want to fool someone, all you have to do is to put your proposition out there framed by things associated with strong emotions. The people who hear it will get so tangled up in the emotion that they will not notice that you actually pulled a fast one and said something that doesn’t make logical sense.
It’s called “Emotional Reasoning”--thinking that what you have heard makes sense because it also makes you feel a strong emotion.
This has a far-ranging impact on our lives that we underestimate, and is the very tool used by governments to keep us in line and prevent us from questioning what we’re told.
One of the places I most enjoy pointing this out is in our understanding of the Bible, because that’s the “authority” a lot of preachers and politicians use to justify what they want you believe.
Some of you are not going to agree with me in the Sermon, and that’s okay. I thank you for giving me a hearing.
The Bible
I love the Bible. I actually have some reasonably serious credentials as a Bible Scholar and routinely use its poetry and metaphors in my personal spiritual life. I take none of it literally, but view it as a book that tells me a lot about how the human mind works.
But we misunderstand it all the time.
Most of us were taught the Story of Noah’s Ark as the story of a God that lovingly sheltered people and animals from disaster. I’ve seen church school toys that are small copies of this Ark filled with cute statutes of animals and waving and smiling people. Because that’s what we expect it to be about, that’s what we perceive it to be.
Yet if you actually look at that story it’s not a happy story. It’s a story of divine genocide on a planetary scale. It’s actually a horrible story about a mean-spirited and unforgiving God.
We hear the Parables of Jesus like the Good Samaritan or the Prodigal Son, and think they have something to do with helping others or forgiving children. That’s what many of us were told they meant, and so that is how we read them. I recall the song from my Methodist upbringing, “Jesus loves me, this I know. ‘Cause the Bible tells me so.” I grew up thinking the Bible was a collection of nice stories about warm feelings and good thoughts.
That’s hogwash.
As Professor Jennifer Wright Knust, a Professor of Religion at Boston University whose recent work I draw on in this sermon, said in her book Unprotected Texts, “The only way that the Bible can be regarded as straightforward and simple is if no one bothers to read it.” (p. 10)
Those parables of Jesus I mentioned were not nice stories, and they meant something very different in Jesus’s time than now. The Good Samaritan was an outcast in 1st Century Society and no respectable person would have accepted help from one. It would be like accepting help from a group of terrorists.
The crime of the Prodigal Son wasn’t that he was greedy, but that he worked as a pig farmer and made himself ritually impure under the Holiness Code of Jewish Society.
The Parables of Jesus are actually about subverting the authority of the culture of the time, and we miss that meaning completely.
The Two Ways of Understanding the Bible
There are basically two ways of understanding the Bible. Theologian Brian McLaren, one of the leaders of what is called the “Emerging Church” movement contrasts people who think of the Bible as if it were a Constitution, and those who view it as I do, as a Library.
People who see the Bible as a Constitution believe that every word has authority. They believe that apparent contradictions can be reconciled into a uniform meaning, and that the document contains rules that we are supposed to live by. It’s a rule book. Just like the Constitution of the United States is supposed to be a rule book, interpreted and reconciled by a Supreme Court so that everything stays consistent.
This view of the Bible has many problems. In some cases the rules make no modern sense or become outdated with social changes. For example, the rule in Leviticus 19:27 that men should not trim their beards is one I routinely ignore. I can also verify from regular attendance at a Summer Renaissance Faire that the rule in the next verse that no one should get a tattoo is obviously ignored by many young women--to my absolute delight.
Then there are the contradictions. Such as when Isaiah 2:4 urges us to beat our swords into agricultural plows and our spears into pruning hooks, while Joel 3:10 urges us to beat our agricultural plows into swords and our pruning hooks into spears.
On the other hand people like me see the Bible as a Library of a particular culture. A culture is a group of people who have informally agreed to argue about the same issues over a sustained period of time.
Now, I argue that the library that is the Bible is actually a psychological library, because it tells us how the minds of the people who were, in most cases, our ancestors worked. Their psychological assumptions have become encoded in every facet of our civilization and government.
Now in any library, all the books will not agree with each other, nor is there any expectation that they will. If we collected a library of books on, say, Global Warming, the books would not all agree. Some would be proponents of the theory, others would be in opposition and few would exactly agree with each other.
So too the books in the library of the Bible. They fight, disagree and contradict each other.
But those books had in influence on the minds of the people who read them. The earliest of the books in this library were gathered at the end of a long literary dark age, and contain fragments of stories that are far older than the Bible itself. One of those stories is the Story of Sodom and Gomorrah. And it’s not what you think.
It’s Not What You Think
In our time, popular culture views the story of the destruction of these two cities in Genesis 18-19 through the lens of Victorian social mores. The sin of the people who lived there was supposed to be sexual immorality, and the the cities were destroyed in a cataclysm because that immorality offended God. That’s what we expect this story to be about because that’s what those of us who were taught anything about it were taught.
Therefore, when we read it now we assume it must be about sexual immorality.
Actually, that interpretation is nonsense.
In an era before kings and centralized government, the people who lived in the Fertile Crescent were ruled by warlords, called Judges, who would be singled out from among the people when there was a need to respond to some crisis. The Book of Judges in the Hebrew Bible is about them.
There were legends about one sort of warlord that never failed. These warlords were more than human. They were a race of Demi-Gods, and they were called “the Nephilim.”
To understand this you have to grasp an obscure section of the Bible found in Genesis 6: 1-2 that mostly puzzles people.
When people began to multiply on the face of the ground, and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that they were fair; and they took wives for themselves of all that they chose. ….The Nephilim were on the earth in those days--and also afterward--when the sons of God went in to the daughters of humans, who bore children to them. These were the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown.
What’s this about? There is little that survives in the Bible to explain it. However, we know from other old documents that the Niphilim were believed to be a race of semi-divine beings that were the offspring of union between humans and Angels (or, the Sons of God).
These offspring were immensely powerful beings who became invincible Warlords, enabling the City-States they represented to conquer and enslave their enemies. In an age before for creation of Kings, these Warlords were the ultimate political and military leaders.
Some of the legends say these Warlords, or Nephilim, were so powerful that God was afraid of them and set out to destroy the Angel-Human hybrids.
Perhaps that is why right after this passage, the text goes on to describe the Great Flood and Noah’s Ark. Some scholars think was more about the destruction of these semi-divine hybrids than people, who were after all, permitted to survive.
The tale of the Great Flood is ancient--it actually comes from a Sumarian text called the Epic of Gilgamesh written about 2500 BCE, almost 1000 years prior to the writing of the Book of Genesis.
However the story was dusted off and re-written by people who had a vested interest in explaining why there were no more Angel-Human hybrids. These people were the early Kings in Israel who wanted everyone to understand that there were no more Invincible Warlords to be found. Therefore, you see, the institution of Kingship and central government made sense. As did everything that went along with them; like a royal court, a royal army, taxes, police and a moneyed aristocracy.
No more Invincible Warlords, so we have to tolerate kings.
A false proposition, we don’t have to tolerate kings, but put forward wrapped in a scary story of divine genocide that would frighten anyone who believed it might be true. Who would quake at any sound of thunder, lightning or rain.
So scary was it, that people didn’t notice that it actually was a rationale for the institution of an ancient monarchy. That’s the Rule of Dominant Affect. If you put it out there with enough of an emotional charge, people will not notice that is doesn’t make sense.
By an amazing coincidence, the writers who were putting all this down on paper are believed to have been scribes in the court of King David, the second King in Israel, or his son Solomon. They employed the best spin doctors and marketing professionals of the age. They dredged up the old Sumerian Story of the Flood and put it down in scripture in a way to shore up their own political position.
So what about Sodom and Gomorrah? Very much the same. Sodom was a beautiful city located in present-day Iraq. At the time it enjoyed a magnificent climate like the best of our Southern California Coast. It was a rich and prosperous city. But Sodom was locked in perpetual war with its sister city Gomorrah. The wars were mostly trade wars, but they cut into the profit margin and real estate values.
The story is that two Angels travel to the City of Sodom after visiting with Abraham, the Patriarch of Israel. They come to the house of Abraham’s nephew in Sodom, a man named Lot.
According to the story, the citizens of Sodom realize that Lot’s guests are not humans, but Angels. They demand that Lot allow the citizens to rape the Angels.
Trying to protect his guests, Lot offers the citizens his daughters instead, but the citizens say no (what the daughters said has not been recorded; and don’t feel bad for them as they get even later in the story).
Finally the angels use their supernatural power to strike the citizens blind. Lot and his family escape. As they flee the city it is destroyed in a cataclysm, as Lot and his daughters flee to the hills. Lot’s wife looks back upon the burning Cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, and is turned into a pillar of salt.
This story is almost always presented as a tale of the dangers of immorality or a denunciation of homosexuality. That’s what we expect when we hear the names of those two ancient cities, so that is how we perceive the story. When conservative preachers condemn gay, lesbian, transgenered or bi-sexual people, they routinely use the story of Lot and the City of Sodom as their authority. But that’s not really what it is about at all.
The citizens of Sodom wanted to rape Lot’s guests because they knew they were Angels. Angels were thought to be androgynous. An Angel that appeared male could still take the female part and give birth. The story of the City of Sodom is really a story about an attempt to have sex with Angels. It’s about an attempt to create Nephilim.
The goal was not rape. The goal of the citizens of Sodom was to create what, in their time, was understood as the ultimate Weapon of Mass Destruction. They wanted to create Angel-Human hybrids that could become Warlords, and allow their city to conquer and enslave its enemies. We don’t see this because we are expecting it to be about something else, because we were taught to believe that it had a more risqué meaning. The Rule of Dominant Affect again. The emotional charge around sexual mores keeps us from see that the payload of the story is different.
God hates Invincible Warlords (the Angel-Human hybrids). Look what God did to the City of Sodom when they tried to create them. Because God destroyed them all in the Flood, there are no more Invincible Warlords around now. Therefore, we have to have Kings, and taxes, and police and nobility because there is no other way to hold society together in a world without demigods.
Said the government scribes, spin doctors and marketing consultants.
A Historical Basis?
The story of the destruction of the Cities of Sodom and Gomorrah probably does have some historical basis. Likely it was based on a dim ancient recollection of the destruction of two actual cities in a Pompeii-like volcanic eruption. If you look at how the destruction is described it’s very much like that--fire, explosions, brimstone, etc. At the ruins of Pompeii to this day you can find the petrified remains of its citizens whose bodies were covered in ash that calcified and look for all the world like salt.
Many scholars believe that the story of the destruction is actually a survival of an older end-of-the-world story just like the story of Noah’s Ark. Indeed, later when living in the hills, Lot’s daughters do something that makes it look very much like they believed they were the only surviving family in the world. However, I will leave you to read that part of the story on your own.
The stories of Sodom and Gomorrah and Noah’s Ark turn out to be ancient stories resurrected by Kingly-Appointed spin doctors to justify the imposition of centralized government on the people of Israel.
Much of what we have in the earliest writing of the Bible are prehistoric stories dusted off an given new life by kingly scribes because they provided a justification for the political life of the time.
Controlling Expectation
If you can control the emotional orientation a person has toward a story, you influence almost completely that person’s reaction to it. If the emotional orientation is powerful it can so influence opinion that people will overlook the fact that it is actually about something else.
The Story of Sodom and Gomorrah is about--gasp-- immorality. The Story of the Flood is about--gasp--divine genocide. Not. They are in fact scriptural examples of the Rule of Dominant Affect used to influence the minds in a culture.
A smart spin doctor can do a lot with the Rule of Dominant Affect. Governments have always used it, from ancient to modern times.
You can use this principle to justify a war fought to control oil production, by dressing it up in a claim to be “democratic liberators”--as did a former Presidential Administration.
You can break up the families of minority groups by dressing up the laws that prosecute them as laws intended to insure “public safety”--as did the Legislature of the the State of Arizona.
You can destroy a whole class of people by building walls through their neighborhood so they can’t get to work or find water, provided you justify those walls by saying they are there to “prevent terrorism”--as does the current government of the secular state of Israel.
You can bust unions and deny whole classes of workers job protection by claiming that your actions are intended to promote “economic responsibility” in a time of “fiscal crisis,” as did the Governor of the State of Wisconsin.
You can destroy wetlands, parks, forests and tundra by claiming that doing so is really about “promoting jobs.”
You can argue that people should be deprived of affordable health care if you put that claim out wrapped in the emotional language of “freedom.”
You can deprive people of a constitutional right by saying you are doing it to “make our streets safe” as do the more unreasonable advocates of gun control.
You can rig elections by creating a swollen public payroll of people who will vote for you provided they don’t have to work hard, by saying you are doing to to establish civic “stability,” as did the Chicago Political Machine for decades.
So long as the claim you put out there has enough of an emotional charge, the brain will work its magic and most people will not see that you are actually doing something else. The way the brain works can be our liberator, but it can be used to enslave us too if someone knows how.
Breaking the Bonds
How can we prevent this from hurting us and those we love. How can we stop the chemistry of our brain from being tricked?
As any hypnotist will tell you, that’s almost impossible. Where will and the mechanics of brain chemistry conflict, brain chemistry almost always wins.
I personally take refuge in the psychological counsel offered by the Bible, which when considered separately from the interpretations imposed on it by the traditional church often offers expert guidance.
In Ephesians 4:14 we read, “We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness and deceitful scheming.” That is, we should automatically maintain a skeptical doubt about any claim made in our hearing that also carries a strong emotional charge. We should automatically subject such claims to analysis, even if they come from people we trust.
Learning to adopt a pervasive skeptical doubt about any claim that also carries an emotional charge is an excellent policy. I do it myself. I never assume my emotional response to something is the same as a logical response. I separate them and when possible, give my emotions a chance to calm down before I decide an issue.
That is, I always doubt what my emotions tell me, at least at first. As an old Chinese parable puts it "With great doubts come great understanding; with little doubts come little understanding."
May we all come to have great understanding.
And that’s my sermon.
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You were "insanely great." Right up there with Edison, Ford, Marconi, Tesla...
God bless
]]>Introduction
Four months ago I selected a topic for my clinics called “Living Free from Clutter.
In the 1970s, the physician who was my mentor, Dr. Bernie Siegel at Yale, studied the people who beat the odds with life-changing medical problems. He discovered that they had certain personal characteristics in common, and that these characteristics could be taught.
He created a program based upon teaching those “survival skills,” and research continues to show that people who learn them do better medically.
Living an uncluttered life is in fact a characteristic of the long-term surviving people with a range of illnesses. I figured it was time I put together a program of self-hypnotism to assist people in learning how to do that.
Did I get a surprise.
Almost immediately the clinics were filled. I even received requests to let extra people in. I agreed, and was startled to realize that the “extra people” who wanted to come in were actually the staff of the hospitals and wellness centers where my clinics are based.
That’s when I realized that most of us live lives that have far too much clutter in them.
If You Came Into My Home....
If you were to visit me in my home, or in my office, you would not see clutter. In fact, the rule is that there can be absolutely nothing on any horizontal surface that is not there for some important reason. Everything has its place, and unless it is being used, everything is in its place.
I was not always this way. In fact as a kid I was routinely criticized by teachers and relatives for being messy and disorganized. However, as I got older I realized that I wanted to be effective. As I had only so much energy to go around, I found that I was more effective if I was organized.
I had some help. At an early age I went to work in restaurants, joining the culinary union and rising in its ranks from Apprentice to Journeyman Chef. I left professional cooking to enter the ministry, but had I wanted to stay in food service, an Executive Chef’s ticket was well within reach.
Being a chef isn’t an easy life. The hours are long, and you work them in volcanic heat usually at a fast pace. On my first day as an apprentice, the chef who was my trainer, a madman, showed me the most important place in any professional kitchen.
Any idea what that is?
It’s called the “misen en place”, French for “putting everything in place.” When a professional kitchen is in operation the first thing done is to put everything that will be needed during the shift into a particular place so it can be located quickly.
“I should be able to cook in this kitchen with my eyes closed,” roared my trainer. And God help you if you used something and didn’t put it back where it belonged. He would very likely call you over, dump it down your chef’s jacket and make you wear the stained jacket for the rest of the shift.
Like I said, he was a madman; but a madman who could makes sauces that were so etherial people would fly to New York to taste them. That’s why he could get away with being a madman.
Oh but I learned. In a professional kitchen every motion has to count, because every second does. I learned the value of organization and the peril of clutter. I put that lesson into use in other areas of my life and quickly saw it’s value.
ECaP
When I studied with Dr. Siegel and his Exceptional Cancer Patients Organization I was both pleased and surprised to learn that living free from clutter was one of the survival skills we found in our research.
“Every time someone walks by a pile of clutter that they were meaning to do something about,” Dr. Siegel said, “that pile reaches out and takes a little bit of their energy away from them. That’s deadly, because these people need all their energy in their own lives to heal.”
Think about that. Do you live in a world where there are stacks and piles of stuff you are meaning to get to?
Consult your feelings every time you walk by such a stack or pile and see what your feelings tell you. Very likely you will feel a resigned, downward emotion and experience a thought like “I got’ta do that stuff....someday....” and when you walk on you will notice that you are a little bit weaker than you were.
Try it. You’ll be amazed at what those stacks and piles are doing to you.
I’ve even encountered cases where getting rid of the stacks and piles of clutter was sufficient to help some people resolve actual clinical depression. The energy they recovered when the clutter was no longer draining was enough to reverse their mental state.
Physical clutter is only one kind of clutter. Some of us clutter up our bodies with excess pounds. Some of us clutter up our spiritual lives with too many practices instead of mastering just a few. Some of us clutter up our minds by not thinking ideas through to reasonable conclusions, and end up holding positions that are inconsistent and contradictory.
Clutter is a problem. I’ve found that by tackling physical clutter first helps bring the other in line.
I do need to say that my sermon today is about normal clutter. I’m not addressing people who have a clutter problem brought on by depression, obsessional disorders of attention deficit. Those are medical problems that have a medical solution. Today I’m just talking about having too much stuff.
The Flylady
When Lindsay and I got married almost 24 years ago, one of the issues I had to face was that I was marrying a handicapped person. Lindsay has had severe osteoarthritis since childhood and during the time of our relationship she has had three of the five major orthopedic operations that allow her to walk today.
And Lindsay also cannot cook...
What this meant is that I was marrying a partner who could not do any housework. As we could not afford a maid, If we wanted to be homeowners, all of the shopping, cooking and cleaning was going to have to be done by me.
Unlike some men whose idea of housework approximates to living in a cave, I’ve always kept my home in reasonable shape. I know that if you don’t stay on top of things they inevitably fill with clutter, and the the chores become far more difficult.
As I practice from a home office, every one of my clients was going to get to see how good, or bad, a job I was doing. I couldn’t afford to do a bad job.
Thankfully, I discovered the Flylady.
The real name of the Flylady is Marla Cilly. Her website is flylady.com and her best known book is Sink Reflections. If you like this sermon I suggest you check out her work. I swear by it, and honestly don’t know how I’d keep up my home without her ideas.
If you are not sure if you would benefit by her ideas, ask yourself how you would feel if I came over to your house today directly after church. Would you be okay with how things looked and smelled, or do you have what the Flylady calls CHAOS; an acronym for Can’t Have Anyone Over Syndrome. If so, get her book and check out her website.
Marla Cilly lives with severe clinical depression. In her book she describes how that illness caused her entire life to get out of control. As part of her recovery she created techniques to get her from one day to the next.
She started out with two daily chores. First, she would get out of bed and get dressed. Second, she would clean her kitchen sink. That’s it. That’s all she had the energy to do.
Over time that clean kitchen sink became a symbol of sanity for her. It was a beachhead of order in a home of chaos. Gradually she expanded that into a complete system to maintaining a home that took minimal time and effort. She became the Victor over her Kitchen Sink and you can be too.
Her system, everywhere called The Flylady System, is based on staying on top of things, cleaning as you go and tossing things you don’t need, so the clutter doesn’t even get started. That way things never get too far out of control.
She recommends that you create certain household rituals for yourself. Interestingly, the most recent motivational research confirms this. It’s as if all of us have a limited pool of energy that we can use to think our way through things. Every decision you have to make deceases that pool. Therefore, you just set up rituals that you do without thinking.
The Flylady wants you to have a Morning List and an Evening List of things that you do as routinely as brushing your teeth, along with an Outside List of things you do whenever you are outside of your home.
Here are some examples of such rituals:
-When you get out of bed in the morning, immediately make the bed.
-Once the bed is made, shower and dress yourself all the way to your shoes.
-When you fill the car with gas, use the time you are waiting for the tank to fill by cleaning all the trash out of your car and putting it in the trash can next to the gas pump.
-When you finish up your day, put the dishes in the dishwasher and clean your kitchen sink so it greats you in the morning in all its shinny glory.
-Just before you get into bed, lay out your clothing for tomorrow so you don’t have to think about it when you get up.
These are all simple things, and not all of them apply to everyone. But the basics of her system are:
Have a Morning, Evening and Outside list of rituals that you just do without having to think about them.
You divide your house up into five zones for the 4.3 weeks in each month. Each week you clean one zone. Every day, you set a timer, and do exactly 15 minutes of cleaning in the zone for that week. No more. No less. Just 15 minutes is all it takes and everyone can find 15 minutes. Apart from that, just try to clean as you go so nothing piles up.
Once a week you do a one-hour House Blessing, where you vacuum and mop the high traffic areas.
Have a three ring binder or a computer file where you list all the important reference information such as the phone number of your plumber, your kids’s soccer schedule, your mother’s birthday, etc. So there is only one place you have to look for find an important bit of information.
(This is the hardest one) If you are not really using something, get rid of it. Throw it away or give it away. Minimize the clutter in your home by getting rid of everything you don’t really need.
The hardest of her rules is the one about tossing the stuff you don’t need. A lot of people make the mistake of thinking they can organize clutter. But taking a big pile of clutter and using a system of bins and folders to break it into small piles of clutter doesn’t actually do anything. You have to let the stuff go. Throw it away of give it away or there will be no real progress possible.
As it says in the Bible, “there is a time for everything under the sun,” including “a time to keep and a time to throw away (Ecc. 3:6)
Now I’m not saying you can’t have collections of something or mementos. I’m talking about clutter, and the difference is obvious. Collections and mementos are neat and orderly. Otherwise they are not collections. They are a heap or a pile, and that’s clutter.
Well, that’s what the Flylady has to teach. Follow it religiously and you will never have CHAOS. Your home will always be orderly enough to have someone over. Millions of people have found this works, including me.
Of course I do other things. At my office I’ve followed a formal system for workflow management for decades called Getting Things Done, created by productivity guru David Allen.
David Allen argues that you need to get your tasks and responsibilities out of your head and into a simple external system that you can trust. Provided, he says, that any system you have is so simple that you can keep it up even on a rainy Monday morning when you have a bad flu. If you’re interested, look him up.
Clutter is a Symptom
Most of us have too much stuff. Comedian George Carlin had a wonderful 1986 routine about “Stuff.” Commenting that the “meaning of life is trying to find a place for your stuff,” and “your house is just a pile of your stuff with a cover on it.” Hey. Carlin knew his stuff.
As one looks at all the stuff most of us have laying around there is a question that comes to my mind. Why do we collect all this stuff in the first place?
So I began to ask people, mostly clients, but sometimes friends, why they were keeping all the stuff around them that they had? I looked for people who obviously had a lot of clutter in their lives (which wasn’t very hard) and asked what was in those piles and stacks that was so important they didn’t just throw it away? I got three basic answers.
Some people responded that they were “buried in treasures.” That is, they knew all the stuff they had around them has some value. They really didn’t want it themselves, but they knew that some idiot on eBay might pay a pretty penny for it if they ever got around to selling it on eBay, They were clinging to their stuff for fear of getting rid of something valuable.
Others responded that the stuff they had around had a sentimental value. They had their dead grandfather’s Chest of Drawers, and their departed Aunt’s tea service, High School yearbooks and the granddaughter’s kindergarten pictures. They were living surrounded by a sort of “deconstructed” shrine to other people. They were clinging to stuff because they thought that throwing it away would show disrespect about people they loved.
Finally, a third group, by far the largest of the three, responded that they held onto things because “they might need them some day.” They tended to be the hoarders who would throw nothing away that didn’t actively smell. They lived surrounded by books they would never read again, empty jars that might be useful to holding things if they ever got organized, old rugs, newspapers and magazines, and a long list of other things that might “someday” be needed. They held onto stuff because it had a hallucinogenic quality. It appeared to be an asset when actually it was mostly a liability. Some of their homes were so cluttered you could hardly move from room to room.
That’s when I figured something out. even after you have gotten a grip on your stuff by organizing the “misen en place,” using the Flylady System or reliably getting you paperwork under control, there is still another sort of stuff that you have to deal with. That’s the stuff in your head. If you don’t deal with the stuff in your head, you will live a life that is cluttered with stuff.
The Stuff in Your Head
Fundamentally, I have come to believe that there is only one reason why people live with clutter. They may have clutter in different degrees, but there is one reason.
I’ve come to believe that this reason is essentially a spiritual reason. People have clutter to the degree they do not feel safe. It’s a lack of religious confidence.
The word “religion” comes from the Latin word meaning “to connect.” Religion is that thing which connects us to a Higher Power and to the world that is the offspring of that power. When we really feel our religion we feel connected and supported. We have a place in the process. We’re part of the whole.
People who feel secure and safe about their place in the world are willing to let go of things that are really in their way, even if they might be valuable.
They know what they have what it takes to get their needs and responsibilities met, and the thought of “cashing in” on every little thing is outweighed by the thought of their own convenience and effectiveness.
While they may miss the people who have left this world, they understand that an appropriate way to keep a memorial going is at a cemetery, in a memory book or at an annual day of remembrance. Not by stacking stuff in the living room or elsewhere around the house.
People who feel safe about their place in the world have confidence in their own abilities to cope. Therefore, they don’t cling to old books, magazine, articles or objects that “might someday be useful.” They know that in most cases these things will not be useful, even if one could find them amidst the clutter.
They are confident that if they really needed to they could figure out a way to get the same information without turning their home into an obstacle course.
Fundamentally, people who have conquered clutter have also conquered their religious insecurity about being in the world. They don’t need stuff, and they don’t need their home to be a cover for their stuff. They know they are supported by a power greater than themselves and therefore don’t need to hold themselves up with piles of stuff.
Clutter is, I’ve concluded, a spiritual issue and it has a spiritual solution.
So how do we find that solution?
To answer this question I turn to the work of William James, the 19th century philosopher who many believe was the founder of modern psychology.
“Feelings follow behavior!” exclaimed James. If you want to feel a certain way, first you must behave in that way. Then, over time, your feelings will fall into line, and you will come to feel as if your behavior was completely appropriate.
If you want to feel more self-confident, act in the same way that the self-confident people in your world act.
At first it will feel strange, for you know you are playing a role, but over time your feelings will change to match your behavior. If you wait until you feel a certain way before you act that way, you never get there.
Feelings follow behavior. If you want to feel a certain way you must first act as if you already did feel that way.
People in this congregation who have had the chops to work a Twelve Step Program know what I mean. I admire such people, because Twelve Step Programs are among the most spiritually rigorous disciplines in our word today.
In such programs the principle I am talking about is called “Fake It Till You Feel It,” or “Fake It Until Your Make It.” They are all based on the same insight from William James. If you want to be different, act as if you already are. Then, things will change for you.”
This is true for the Great Spiritual War Against Clutter too. If you want to live free from the feelings that drive you to live a cluttered life, the best way to get there is to actually take the risk and declutter your home or environment.
Throw Stuff Away. Reduce your possessions to the minimum you need. This will feel weird at first, but Fake It Until You Make It. After a short while you will discover that you are happier in your uncluttered environment and that you would never go back to the way things were.
If you want the spiritual confidence that will let you lead an uncluttered life, start by tossing away the clutter. Soon you will feel like you too are the Victor of the Kitchen Sink and clutter is something that you will automatically remove from your world.
As the Bible says, “there is a time to throw things away.”
And I agree. And that’s my sermon.
Community Ministry Sunday 2011
The Rev. Dr. C . Scot Giles
Countryside Church, Unitarian Universalist, September 30, 2011
Talk Like A Pirate
Several years ago I learned about the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster when, within a single day, several clients arrived at my office talking like they were Pirates.
“Avast Ye Hardies! There be Booty and Spoils today! Argh....”
Now, some of my clients are unusual people, but this was more unusual than usual, so I asked what in the world was going on. That’s when I learned that it was September 19th, the “International Talk Like a Pirate Day,” the official holiday of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, whose members call themselves “Pastafarians” and end their prayers by saying “Ramen.”
Several of my clients turned out to be members, and one gave me a copy of The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster where I learned about the religion, it’s vision of heaven (complete with a Stripper Factory and a Beer Volcano), and of course about His Majesty, the Great Flying Spaghetti Monster, Blessed Be His Noodly Appendages.
The design on the Order of Worship today is the car ornament honoring this deity. And yes, it’s a joke.
The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster
The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is a parody religion created in 2005 by Bobby Henderson, who was at the time a graduate student in Physics at Oregon State University. Enraged by the decision of the Board of Education in Kansas to start teaching Intelligent Design as an alternative theory to Evolution, he created his church as a way of demonstrating that just because a theory has an explanation for everything, does mean that it is a sound theory.
Most broad theories about how the universe works can’t be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. What scientists and logicians do to test them, is to try to disprove them. If you can’t, then it’s more likely that the theory is true.
For example, you can disprove the theory that “all mongooses live forever,” by looking for the carcass of one dead mongoose. However, the broader theory that “mongooses can live forever” can’t be disproven, as one would have to live forever oneself to determine if there is some mongoose, somewhere, that never dies.
The theory of Evolution is like that. It explains the data we can observe about how living creatures change over time. It explains the historical record left by petrified dinosaurs. It allows us to explain why common pesticides no longer work on bedbugs, and how some bacteria become resistant to antibiotics. However, one cannot prove it.
In order to prove it, you see, one would have to possess the ability to observe all life, over all time, and thereby observe that Evolution took place, and nothing else. It’s not possible to do that, so the Theory of Evolution cannot be proven.
This led some people to claim that the theory of Intelligent Design; that the universe is actually the work of an intelligent God who designed everything to be exactly the way it is, is just as good a theory, as Evolution.
Intelligent Design also explains why things are they way they are. Things are the way they are because God wants them that way. And it can’t be disproven either. Dinosaur skeletons? God put them there as decoration. Bedbugs resistant to pesticides? God’s punishment on a sinful world.
However, all theories are not created equal. Some make more common sense than others, and the burden of proof is always on the people we believe the more unlikely claim.
For example, if I had arrived late this morning and excused myself by saying I’d had a flat tire, you’d probably believe me as flat tires happen to us all. However, if I explained that I arrived late this morning because on my way to church I was kidnapped by aliens, you might want me to say a bit more about that.
The more unusual claim requires more than usual justification. People who believe that everything can be explained by an appeal to an invisible power from God, have more explaining to do than people who think things can be explained by observable, natural forces.
Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t get this, and want all sort of improbable things taught to children in schools. To illustrate what’s wrong with that, Bobby Henderson created a parody of religion that explains everything by appeal to the power of an invisible, undetectable, Flying Spaghetti Monster.
For example, the Power of Gravity comes from the Flying Spaghetti Monster invisibly pushing us all down with His invisible, undetectable Noodly Appendages.
People around the world are getting taller because the population has gotten larger. As the Flying Spaghetti Monster only has so many Noodly Appendages to go around, he can’t push everyone down as often, and so people are getting taller. Got it?
This church quickly became an Internet sensation. The Pastafarian Religion now has more members than our denomination. You can buy stained glass windows, personal jewelry and bumper stickers honoring the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Astronomers have located distant galaxies they claim resemble the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and under my pulpit robe this morning I am wearing a tie that is has a pattern made up of little tiny Flying Spaghetti Monsters.
The tie was a Christmas gift from our Parish Minister, Rev. Hilary. Now, I think she was just being supportive and I’m pretty sure she isn’t a member of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Although I did give her the “Sign of the Noodle” just to be safe. Perhaps you might want to as well.
Unitarian Universalism
Unitarian Universalism isn’t a parody of a religion. We are a old and distinguished denomination, but there are some things we do have in common with the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
We are endlessly creative and are more than willing to build in new insights and methods. We know better than to take ourselves too seriously, and we’re about as non-doctrinal and open to new spiritual insights and theories as it’s possible to be, and still be serious.
Because we are friends of science and reason, because we value education and evidence, because we know the dangers of irrationality and religious extremism of all sorts, we are not unlike the people in the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Those people created their parody religion to point out the dangers of the religious style that we also identify as dangerous, and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that there is an overlapping membership.
I personally find the path of parody to be problematic, as it makes fun of other people and what they believe. That’s a negative energy and I try to keep negative energy out of my life.
I think it is possible for religion and science to get along. One does not exclude the other. Each can take the other seriously, and we don’t need to make fun of religion to honor science. But that’s only my view.
Community Ministry
I’ve been a Unitarian Universalist clergy-person for 33 years now. My ministry isn’t a minstry in the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, but it is a ministry as an nontraditional minister in an nontraditional denomination. A denomination that is almost as strange as the one spoofed by the Pastafarians.
I spent 13 years serving as a Parish Minister to two congregations. In 1991 our denomination created a category of ministry called Community Ministry. It was something I had always wanted to do, and I jumped into that new category of ministry that same year.
As a result I am one of the longest-standing Community Ministers in our denomination, and one of the very first to receive Full Fellowship, our permanent ministerial credential. For the last 20 years, it’s been my work.
Community Ministers are Unitarian Universalist missionaries. We work “beyond the walls” of the local congregation directly with secular society. We are politicians and lobbyists. We are chaplains and counselors. We are in the prisons and in the hospitals. On the whole we raise our own salaries and fund our work independently of the local congregations. We strive to make secular society match the democratic and educated principles of Unitarian Universalism.
We go back to the work of the Rev. Dr. Joseph Tuckerman, who was the first formal Community Minister working on the streets of 18th century Boston. A colleague of the Rev. Dr. William Ellery Channing, who would be the first President of the American Unitarian Association.
Tuckerman called what he did “ministry-at-large,” and worked with anyone who was in trouble whom he thought he could help. He was a spiritual guide, a first-aid worker, a political activist and a personal banker. He showed that ministry did not have to contained in the walls of a church building.
Because Community Ministers have to have the same basic training as our Parish Clergy, plus specialized training, the training curve is expensive and steep. There are only a few of us--about 250. We are represented by the Unitarian Universalist Society for Community Ministries, of which I am the current President.
Today is Community Ministry Sunday, where we ask all of our Community Ministers to speak to one of our congregations. As we work beyond the walls of the congregation, most members of our congregations don’t know what we do. We’re trying to fix that.
As many of you know, my ministry is one of spiritual healing. To accomplish that healing I use the hypnotic arts and sciences, and hold a high level of standing with the National Guild of Hypnotists as well as the Association of Professional Chaplains.
I limit my private work to the more difficult and challenging cases and in conjunction with several hospitals, maintain a network of free clinics around Chicago where I help people who otherwise cannot afford to pay.
Research has shown that hypnotism helps the medically ill enormously, and while many scoffed at me when I began this work, few scoff now. The evidence has steadily accumulated.
The Ministry of All Believers
But enough about me. Let’s talk about you.
I bet many of you have the mistaken idea that I am the only Community Minister in the room this morning. In actuality, we’ve got a room full of ‘em.
While there is no sense that every Unitarian Universalist is a member of the clergy, there is a sense that every Unitarian Universalist is a minister.
Being a member of the clergy is an identity--just like being a lawyer or a certified snowmobile mechanic is an identity. It requires certain education, passing specific tests and jumping though an ever-expanding series of hoops. Either you have done those things or you have not. You either are a clergy-person or you are not.
However, ministry is behavior. It is what one does when one extends oneself to help another person. You “minister to” them. There is a sense in which every person in this room is, or at least could be, a minister. All you have to do is “minister to” someone else.
Further, as almost all of you do your ministry “beyond the walls” of this building; most of you are Community Ministers, just like me. You’re just not trying to make a living at it.
We Unitarian Universalists are the descendants of the radical wing of the Protestant Reformation. When Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the Wittenberg Cathedral in 1517 he initiated the movement that would split the Christian world into Catholic and Protestant. Some of those ideas got to Eastern Europe. In Transylvania, those ideas took hold in their more radical form, and our denomination descends from that wing of the movement.
One of the key beliefs has always been that everyone is as worthwhile as everyone else. It is still the First Principle of the Unitarian Universalist Association: The inherent worth and dignity of every person.
Because they believed that all were equal before God, our spiritual ancestors announced the “Ministry of All Believers.” That is, they believed that everyone had a Call from God to do something important in the world. God’s favor did not rest on the priesthood alone.
Everyone had a mission from God. It didn’t matter if you were the King or a Queen, a shoemaker or a Knight. Each person was special in his or her own way and each was here on earth to do something important.
What a King or Queen might do would be very different from what a shoemaker or a nurse might do, but all had a role to play. All were important. Everyone was, in some sense, a minister; and a priesthood was unneeded. Which is why our congregations have “ministers” elected by congregations rather than “priests” appointed by “bishops.”
Your Call from God
Now we all have our own opinion about what is ultimate in life. You may believe in God as I do, or you may have some other conception completely. But still, there is some ultimate concern. There is something you think is important in the world or you wouldn’t be trying for an effective life; you would just embrace nihilism.
So, what are you are here to do? Why are you on this planet?
A time-management consultant I like, called David Allen, talks about what he calls our “Horizons of Focus.” Like an airplane sitting on the runway at the lowest elevation of our lives we spend out time dealing with our projects and tasks. But as the aircraft climbs into the sky we start to see a more expansive horizon. Finally, at 50,000 feet we are so high the curvature of the Earth can be observed.
He argues that we should all spend time time periodically to think about our lives as if we were that soaring aircraft at it’s highest elevation. We should think about the ultimate meaning of our lives. What are we striving for in the big picture? What do we want to be remembered for?
If our spiritual ancestors were correct, you are here because you have a Call to a ministry. It may be major, it may be minor, it may be something in between. If may be something special you do--like working on a committee or a project, a political party or with a charitable group.
It may be doing what you would otherwise do to earn a living, but somehow doing it in a way that makes a difference.
You may be a law enforcement professional who shows an exceptional wisdom. You may be a helping professional who shows an extraordinary compassion. You may be an engineer who goes that extra little bit to make what is created of high quality. You may be a parent who reflects on how to help children be of good character.
In Chaos Theory, a form of speculative mathematics, there is something called the Butterfly Effect. It’s become a popular metaphor, but it relates to the work of Edward Lorenz. In 1961 he was using a computer model to run a duplicate weather prediction, and as a shortcut entered a variable as .506 instead of the full value of .506127. Much to his surprise he got a completely different result from his computer model. In 1963 he gave a paper to the New York Academy of Sciences where he said it was like the flap of a Butterfly’s wings could change the weather forever.
The point is that what we do, no matter how small it may seem to us, might, in a larger scheme have a far-reaching effect. None of us knows the ultimate effect of our “ministry.” It might seem minor to us, but it could have a profound effect.
Like Dan Aykroid said when he was playing Elwood in The Blues Brothers, “They not going to catch us. We’re on a mission from God.”
While I take a great deal of personal comfort from the undeniable testimony of the scripture, where it is clear that God is not picky about His help, I believe each of us has a mission. We're all Community Ministers. Even a true scoundrel can still be on a mission from God (whatever meaning you give to that word), how much more so those of us who try to be good.
The Burden of Proof
As I said earlier, the burden of proof is always on the people who believe the more unlikely claim. If anyone thinks that my claim that every person in this room as a special “mission” in their lives, isn’t an unlikely claim; I think they should have a second cup of coffee at the Coffee Hour this morning.
Of course, it’s an extreme claim. But it is a claim that has a long tradition.
In the Gospel of Thomas, a Gospel that was lost and then rediscovered at an excavation at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945, Jesus is quoted in Saying #70, with words I take to heart. “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” We’re supposed to find our Mission in Life, and bring it forth.
Some churches engage in what is called “evangelism.” That is, they seek to covert others to their way of belief. They hold Revivals and Rallies, they pack stadiums with Promisekeepers, they buy ads on television and say “Get Right With God; Before It’s Too Late.”
We don’t reach out like that. But we do have a way of reaching out. We try to live our own lives in such a way that others see the spirit we have, and want it for themselves too. That’s what brings new people to this place. This is sometimes called “Lifestyle Evangelism,” but I just call it trying to be the Best We Can Be. We do that by trying to be the persons we were created to be, by answering that inner call.
The very fact that new people come to join us in our spiritual path speaks to the reality that at least many of us have found a way to respond to that inner call. That creates an attractiveness that brings others to us, in the way that steel is draw to a powerful magnet.
Without that attraction this place would not exist. We would still just be a small group of friends drinking Bloody Marys on Sunday morning in the lounge of an athletic club. Because that’s how this congregation began.
We all reach out to the Community in our own way, and we’ve been successful. Look at us now.
Can We Be Successful?
I believe that effective Community Ministry is vital to preserving and advancing what is important in civilization. There are powerful forces arrayed against us.
When the human community developed clothing and harnessed fire, our physical bodies stopped evolving, or at least slowed in their evolution. There were fewer physical forces that could cause us to perish, and so Natural Selection lost some of its ability to shape what we are like now in our flesh and in our nerves.
But our society has continued to evolve. It’s become much more stressful, demanding, interconnected and complex. We’re reachable 24/7/365 and our bodies have trouble keeping up with the strain. Dr. Herbert Benson, one of the foremost experts on Mind-Body Medicine calls “stress” the “hidden plague” of our age.
Craving anything that might might make an overly-complex world seem simpler and more understandable, people have begun to cling to fundamentalisms of all sorts. Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Political or Economic--people want simple answers. People want things they can understand.
That craving is vast. To it, people seem willing to sacrifice free inquiry, artistic liberty, civil rights, fairness and justice. Some days it seems to me that the various fundamentalisms of this world have placed in peril the very flower of high culture, civility and reasonable order among people.
But I take courage from people like us. For we are all in our way Community Ministers working “beyond the walls” of a congregation with society-at-large. Like paratroopers dropped behind enemy lines to soften up the opposition, we can have an influence that is larger than our numbers.
Jesus said this long ago, in the Gospel of Matthew when he compared his follows to the salt used to season a dish, or the yeast that leavens a loaf of bread. In comparison to the rest of the meal, the salt is a tiny amount. But it changes everything. In relation to the flour, butter and sugar in the recipe for a loaf of bread, the amount of yeast is very small. But it changes everything.
In comparison to secular society and the stress of our age, the number of people who seek to make the world a better place have no numerical advantage. There are many more people who are out just for themselves. But we can change everything. We are Community Ministers together.
We are the yeast. We are the salt. And we are here.
And that’s my sermon.
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