This gallery contains 10 photos.
The tradition in our home is to put the Christmas tree up sometime during the weekend following Thanksgiving. The reason for this is found in a combination of factors including timing (teachers catch an extra day or two off during … Continue reading
Part of our worship service yesterday on Justice touched on ethical eating and a big tip of the hat to folks on facebook who shared this link on how to shop for better food choices.
This is the short witness talk I gave at the opening worship service of the UU Christian Fellowship Revival on Thursday, October 14, 2010.
When I was a little boy, my parents tell me, they would bring me to church – I was raised Catholic, and my father would hold me, I was no more than two or three, and I would point at the statues and call out at the statues, “There’s Mary and Joseph… … and baby Jeez!”
I knew I would end up here. doing this, but I didn’t see it.
When I was in college, the priest at the campus ministry where I went to school submitted my name to the Roman Catholic Diocese of Worcester’s priest recruitment program – Called by Name…and when they called me up, by name – I responded.
I knew, ever since I was boy, this mystery I can’t explain that transforms me has had a claim on me and when I got a letter from the Roman Catholic Bishop inviting me to a dinner to explore becoming a priest I had to admit that I was seriously considering it.
I was also seriously dating a young woman at the time, not my wife now as it turns out, but knowing that if I responded to being called by name,
Being the conscientious type, figured that since I was seriously considering being a priest thought I should bring her along – that she should be in on this conversation. I expressed this thought to the nun – at least I imagined it was nun – who took my RSVP phone call, and she told me to stop joking; that this was a very serious matter – and then she hung up on me.
Well, that settled that. I went off to Harvard Divinity School.
I was the only one in my family who was surprised that I went off to Harvard Divinity School, that I had been Called by Name. When I told my parents and my friends that I was going to Divinity School they all said, Oh yeah, we figured on that.
When I met with the Ministerial Fellowship Committee of the Unitarian Universalist Association, no less a distinguished colleague than Carolyn Owen-Towle told me, “I’m so happy that person hung up on you.”
I am here because Jesus called me to here, because Jesus is important to me. And yet Jesus is problematic for Unitarian Universalists. Unitarian Universalists are great when it comes to the search for the historical Jesus. UU’s will tell you all about Marcus Borg’s “Spirit Person.” UU’s will tell you all about the Jesus Seminar. UU’s will tell you all about John Shelby Spong and how Christianity must change or die. BUT Unitarian Universalists are not so good at answering a very simple question. A very simple question about Jesus, a question Jesus asks about himself, a question Jesus posed to his friend and disciple Peter:
Who do YOU say that I am?
Not who do the Bible Scholars say that I am?
Not who does Marcus Borg say that I am?
Not who does John Shelby Spong say that I am?
But Who do YOU say that I am?
I am here at the Unitarian Universalist Christian Fellowship Revival because after growing up Catholic, it became clear to me that it was only as a UU minister I could live out my calling-a calling I heard from loud and clear from Jesus when he read the scroll in the temple (Luke 4:18-20):
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’
I’m here at the UUCF Revival because it is as a UU I can heed the call of Jesus to pray to God in spirit and truth and cling to Jesus’ advice about how to pray, and it’s pretty simple really:
God you are holy.
Forgive me what I’ve done wrong.
Help me forgive others for what they’ve done wrong and how they’ve wronged me, because it’s hard for me to this.
Give me what I need to get through this day.
Keep me from evil.
May the kingdom, the commonwealth, the community of God come, and may I do my part to ….
make it so….
Amen.
Yesterday I gave the annual Stewardship Sermon at my congregation.
I thought I did a good job. It was creative and incorporated a nice quick quote from Rabbi Irving Greenberg and another from Thoreau, as well as a skit during the second half featuring a member of the congregation as a carpenter. Whether or not it was one of my best sermons, I’ll let others decide. A member of my congregation (and member of the Stewardship Committee) thought enough of it to announce during the Stewardship Luncheon after church that it should be considered for the UUA Stewardship Sermon Award. He meant it because today I received an email from him saying “Go for it!” with a link to the UUA website about the sermon award.
I’m appropriately flattered. No one mentioned the award after last year’s sermon. However, that’s not the point of this post. I read about the guidelines for submission. All they want is text in 12 point font. I thought this strange. What about video or audio? I thought what made my sermon different, unique, and effective was the carpenter skit in the second half. Do I include the script for that? Even if I did, can you really get the experience from reading the script without hearing the banging nails and sawing?
Granted, you can’t keep the contest anonymous if the preachers are on video, but really, who cares? All sermons are given in context. We live in a post-modern age and part of what makes any sermon really effective (or not) is how well the preacher knows his or her audience. It’s a sermon, not an essay. Judging or evaluating a sermon solely on the basis of the text is like evaluating a song solely on the basis of the lyrics. The lyrics might be fantastic, but the melody might be horrible.
Any sermon today can be captured on audio and turned into an mp3 by most cell phones. You don’t even need a laptop in the congregation. Many cell phones, not to mention digital cameras, can record video – you don’t even need a video camera. Preaching isn’t just about the text any more.
Reading the “rules” of this sermon award made me sad. We may be finding some good essays about why people should financially support our liberal faith tradition called Unitarian Universalism, but the guidelines themselves tell a deeper and more important story – our faith tradition has been left behind by the 21st century. We are a modern church in a post modern world. The twenty minute lecture sermon is going the way of the 13 station dial on a television and a land line phone.
We may have a great theological tradition. This tradition may very well be worth supporting financially. But if all we’re talking is 12 point font, we’re speaking a dead language.
Hi, I plan on being arrested by the Muscular Dystrophy Association at 1 p.m. on April 1, 2010. No fooling – they’re coming to get me at Pathways Church and take me away to Spring Creek Barbeque in Grapevine, TX where my bail is $1,480.00 and you can help bail me out ahead of time by going to my donation page for the Grapevine Area Lock-up by clicking here. $1, 480 might seem like a lot of money, but here’s what it buys: 20 minutes of MDA research. 20 minutes.
Twenty minutes was about the length of this visit, one of Andy’s first with his Godson, my son Zack, who is now 13.
My best friend, Andy Maxfield, died just after Christmas in 2004 from complications related to Muscular Dystrophy. You can read about Andy in the last of a July 2007 sermon series I did on friendship, “When You Paint a Purple Sky.” Andy was a minor celebrity in our small Massachusetts city as was always out and about in his chair in good weather until his health deteriorated too much near the age of 40. He was in the news quite a bit for as both a fund raiser for MDA and for his work as an artist.
When Andy died the local papers covered his passing and published reflections by his brother (part1, part2), spurring one woman, the mother of another young man with Muscular Dystrophy to write a Letter to the Editor in appreciation for sharing Andy’s story. I could tell you all about the 6 clinics MDA funds here in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, how an initial MDA diagnostic work up costs $300, or how it costs almost a $1,ooo to pay for one week of MDA summer camp for one child, but I’d be kidding you and lying to myself if I told you that for me, this was about something besides Andy first. He was my best friend, he changed my life, and Muscular Dystrophy took his. If you’re reading this and you’re able to make a donation, please go to my donation page and give. One of the last things Andy said to me was to not take my life and health for granted. I’m trying my best to follow his last request.
You can see some of Andy’s original artwork from throughout his career at my flickr photostream.
I recently returned from a week at Walt Disney World in Florida. Truth be told, I wasn’t looking forward to going. I was going to spend a week with 17 other members of my (wife’s) family on a vacation in a very crowded place. I have nothing against family, or my wife’s family, but am an introvert. Being around large groups of people drains my energy, I need time alone to regroup and recharge. I tend to like quiet places and time for solitude on vacation. My vacations in the last couple of years have not been filled with such times and I was even planning a vacation from my vacation to make sure I had the recharging time I needed. Well, surprise, the magic happened. The family agreed that we didn’t need to all be together every day and each of five family units each went their own way during the days. The crowds didn’t bother me too much (even though they were ginormous), and I had a fantastic time. I even took time to reflect and wonder. Here’s what I learned, or relearned during my week in Disney World:
Have a Magical Day. Make every day magical. I grew tired of hearing every Disney World employee say this until I realized that it was up to me to take their advice. So I did.
Celebrate today. This phrase decorated many pins and buttons and various items around Disney. It’s good advice. All we have is this moment. Live in it. Celebrate it, even.
Be a kid again. Rediscover wonder. I realized, after about two days, I was just having fun. I felt like a kid again. I wasn’t worrying about things. I was amazed and enthralled. Too often I let the weight of the world drag me down. This led to…
Escape is necessary…as a break, but dangerous as a lifestyle.
Fantasy is wonderful and required, but I also knew that Disney World wasn’t the real world.
If Disney World, with it’s hundreds of thousands of visitors to a half dozen theme parks and various hotels and resorts every day can keep every single rest room crystal clean and stocked with toilet paper and soap and towels, then why is it so difficult for the local filling station or fast food store to maintain one stall? Why is it so hard for me to keep my bathroom at home clean?
It really is a small world, after all. Given all I saw and all I did all week, my favorite moment was the morning I gave up my seat on the bus to a senior citizen as we boarded the shuttles to a theme park. Then I felt a tug on my shirt and little Japanese girl patted the seat next her. She was pushing her little brother over (the two of them fit in one seat) to make room for me. I bowed and sat down. Smiles all around. Bows and smiles again leaving the bus. I ran into this family four or five more times during the week and each time the smiles were bigger and the bows deeper. I will now learn how to say “thank you” in Japanese.
It’s not necessary to be entertained twenty-four hours a day. Even at Walt Disney World, sometimes all I wanted to do was just sit down and watch the people and world go by, or sit and read my book.
All people, including me, get grumpier, nastier and less friendly in direct proportion to how tired and hungry they are, how many small children they are caring for and how long they have been standing in a line. Preparing for these things ahead of time, makes for a better you and a better world.
Wearing name tags is a universal act of radical hospitality. I had a number of great conversations with Disney “cast members” based on their name tags including a ferry boat captain from Lowell, Massachusetts.
Playtime, nap time, dessert, and staying up late are all good for you in moderation.
Realize that not only theme parks, but the everyday world we live in are both full of illusions.
Family isn’t perfect, but family is important.
Go at your own pace.
Not everything is for everybody. I just can’t do roller coasters and such – I get sick.
Get used to waiting. How you handle waiting correlates to how you handle the ride, not just amusements, but life in general. It’s not about the destination, but the journey.
There’s no way to see it all or do it all or experience it all – at Disney or in your life. So don’t try. It’s all about the choices we make that limit our experience. Go for quality over quantity.
Sometimes “Thank you,” is all that’s necessary even when you feel that “Thank you,” isn’t nearly enough.
So, Thank you to my in-laws who gave us this incredible gift: the plane tickets, the theme park passes, the hotel room, the meal money. It was the gift of a lifetime. Oh yeah, one last thing, the most magical thing of all – Love.
We practice theme-based ministry at Pathways and November’s theme has been gratitude (thanksgiving, appreciation). Doing my best to practice what I preach, walk the talk and do some pastoral modeling, I have engaged the spiritual practice of gratitude in earnest since November the first. It has been an engaging experience. Like all spiritual practices approached with honesty and openness, intentionality, repetition and depth, my engagement with gratitude has taken me places I never would have imagined when I began.
First of all, gratitude seems like such a positive thing. Gratitude is a no-brainer theological concept for a month containing the holiday of Thanksgiving, right? Yet, like the holiday season itself, my spiritual practice of gratitude has had it’s darker, shadow side – or rather revealed my darker shadow side and forced me to grapple with it. During the weeks while I have been preaching and teaching gratitude, I have encountered two periods where I experienced a couple of stretches – a few days at a time each – that contained more than their share of expressions of ingratitude aimed at me. Whoa! OK. Here we go. Don’t take it personally. Or try not to take it personally. What can I be thankful for here? What can I learn? Geez this sucks. OK. I am grateful this isn’t worse, and so on getting back on track. Then I noticed how my practice of gratitude and my attention to cultivating thankfulness and appreciation helped me right the ingratitude ship and not get knocked down by what was some pretty hefty negativity. Like all practices, gratitude helps you more, the more you practice. I’ve benefited a little bit for my little bit of practice this month and I’m eager to see how much more this practice can enhance the rest of my spiritual life and my life in general. It’s good ministry and it’s just a plain good way to be.
I’ve also noticed that gratitude pays itself forward like random acts of kindness intentionally committed. The more I talk about gratitude, the more others do as well. I’ve received thank you notes for sermons (indeed! how about that?!), gifts left on my desk at the church office, more people are mentioning things they appreciate about me, the church, my ministry, dropping notes, and this is great, but it’s all reciprocal as I have been very conscious during the last month to say thank you, tell people I appreciate them and how grateful I am for what they do. No blowing smoke, no false praises, but trying to remember not to let things go and not forgetting to remember to tell people their contributions are valued and they are valued and what they mean to me. At first it was a bit of an exercise and I was ashamed that I noticed it took some effort. Do I really not do this enough? Do we all really not do this enough? I guess so. Well, another lesson learned. I suppose that’s why it’s called a spiritual practice.
I also made it a habit during November of giving thanks for something every morning during my sitting meditation and posting something for which I was thankful as my status update on facebook. This was a personal exercise, another change of habit exercise, if you will, to train my attention to be more focused on appreciation. I’ve noticed it has resulted in an appreciation contagion. Over the last week or two, I’ve noticed more and more friends on facebook starting to post status updates making note of things for which they are thankful. I don’t know if I am responsible for this or not. If I am, that’s great. If I’m not, that’s perfectly fine because my practice has made me wake up and notice that others do this and for that, I’m grateful. It’s probably a better gift in the second instance.
I’ve also noticed that even in terms of social justice issues, and social justice is a particular passion of mine, I’ve moved in the last month from trumpeting and sounding siren calls to giving thanks for those that do the hard work.
All around, as I close in on Thanksgiving I am realizing that I probably won’t be able to keep up the intense focused practice of gratitude that I have engaged in the past three weeks, but if I can carry one of them forward that will be great personal progress. I have made a forward looking commitment to doing this again next year with the intention of making it a yearly practice. To borrow another holiday tradition – Gratitude has done me good, will do me good and I say God bless it!
I will admit to the bit of pride I felt when learning that this blog had once again made the Blog Roundup of UU World Magazine for my comments on last issue’s cover story on the Gospel of inclusion.
Here’s my original post.
Here’s what UU World noted about my post:
The Rev. Tony Lorenzen at “Sunflower Chalice” thought everyone should be exposed to the story of “The Gospel of Inclusion,” our Fall cover story. “The first lesson is that of Universalism. It’s a grand lesson to revisit for Unitarian Universalists and a great idea for non-UUs to be introduced to for the first time. A loving God doesn’t send people to hell. . . . The second is the point made by Rev. [Rosemary Bray] McNatt at the Berry Street Lecture (and I paraphrase): UU Culture is keeping us from being multicultural.” (September 8).
Yay me.
Really, sometimes I don’t know jack, or just feel like I don’t know Jack. When I feel like this, I re-read something by Jack – Jack Mendelsohn. This passage is from Jack Mendelsohn’s book Why I am a Unitarian Universalist. I underlined it in my copy the first time I read it. I had it read at my installation. About a month and a half ago, a friend emailed it to me to lift my spirits not knowing, or perhaps indeed knowing it was and is my constant meditation on why I do what I do. I do know Jack, at least a little bit anyway. He was kind enough to have to me to his house one day while I was an intern minister in Massachusetts. Still, I don’t know Jack, like I don’t know jack. That’s the point, I guess. The ministry isn’t about what you know, it’s about showing up, being present, and giving it your best shot in a world that is full of holiness while many people and things try to convince you otherwise.
Who is a Unitarian Universalist minister?
A person who is never completely satisfied or satisfiable, never completely adjusted or adjustable, who walks in two worlds—one of things as they are, the other of things as they ought to be—and loves them both.
A UU minister is a person with a pincushion soul and an elastic heart, who sits with the happy and the sad in a chaotic pattern of laugh, cry, laugh, cry—and who knows deep down that the first time the laughter is false, or the tears are make-believe, his or her days as a real minister are over.
UU ministers have dreams they can never wholly share, partly because they have some doubts about those dreams themselves and partly because they are unable adequately to explain, describe, or define what it is they think they see and understand.
A UU minister continually runs out of time, out of wisdom, out of ability, out of courage, and out of money. A UU minister is hurtable, with great responsibility and little power, who must learn to accept people where they are and go on from there. UU ministers who are worth their salt know all this, and are still thankful every day for the privilege of being what they are.
The future of the liberal church is almost totally dependent on two factors: great congregations (whether large or small) and skilled, effective, dedicated ministers. The strangest feature of their
relationship is that they create one another.-Jack Mendelsohn
OK, I think I’m back. I’ve deleted all suspect code from my posts and comments, thus I believe I’ve purged the hack attack. I exported, imported and in a sense restarted the blog from scratch. I’ve also moved it. I’m thinking your bookmarks should still work, but I don’t know. I hope you are still finding me.
