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A United Methodist Minister at a Unitarian Congregation¹

I want to begin this morning by saying how truly flattered I was when Wayne asked me to preach for him today and at the same time how reluctant I was to accept his invitation. After just about two years of living here in Ft. Myers (we got settled in just in time for Charlie) and of actively searching for a church home for all of that time, we find we look forward to hearing Wayne’s challenging and well researched messages as an important part of the start of each week.  To me they always have an exemplary high level of scholarly insight, social relevance, and a heartfelt depth of compassion which I feel any congregation would be privileged to receive on a regular basis.

My other hesitation came from the desire not to be too Christian, something I feel personally comfortable with and something which obviously has been the basis of my entire ministerial career. At the same time I have always had a great deal of respect for people whose approach was different than my own and for the wide range of paths to spirituality that I have encountered in this world. I would never intentionally want to bring offense to anyone who had gathered here or anywhere else to celebrate life’s meaning and their own sense of purpose in a completely different way from my own with any message or word that seemed indifferent to their own thinking.  I shared all of that with Wayne who assured me that the underlying concept of All Faiths Unitarian Congregation is a respect for each person’s journey of faith and that exposure to what United Methodists call a “worship experience would be just one more element to throw into the mix.  He further suggested that perhaps some aspect of what United Methodists do or believe may be something that some of you may not have encountered before and would possibly find useful or at least interesting.

Now I know that Wayne has a background in the United Methodist Church so I’m somewhat surprised that he would think that there are such outstanding differences between what goes on there and what goes on here as to be revelatory in any way. Each United Methodist congregation is unique of course, but I would guess the same is true with each Unitarian Congregation. In every place of worship there are people whose lives have been shaped by experiences largely secular, and their presence in worship signals some desire to bring spiritual meaning to those events. John Dominic Crossan, co-founder of The Jesus Seminar, former Irish monk and Professor Emeritus at De Paul University says “We are born hard wired for religion, for some kind of faith, and finding it gives reason for our very being.

Every church I’ve served had very few members who had been born and raised in the faith of that institution.  Most had married into the system, or came as the result of some falling out with a previous one,…generally a wedding, a baptism, or a funeral refused or challenged on the basis of some trivial church policy which maintaining at the time seemed of more importance than potentially losing a congregant. Some actually felt that they had evolved on their spiritual journey to a new level of understanding which took them down this present path, and having said that clearly implied without words that this place was also likely to be a transitional stage. 

Most however wanted affirmation as much as they wanted theology,…and so the bottom line in my personal experience, and in most of the studies that I have read of why people worship suggests that connecting with other people whose ideas and lifestyles affirm one’s own may be of far more importance than any one doctrine, sacrament, edifice or personality on the staff.

People join religious bodies, or they at least stay for a while, primarily because they feel not just welcomed but valued-- and they pass through rather quickly those where they feel merely tolerated or where the waiting period for acceptance becomes just too long and tedious.

Being able to be open, welcoming and tolerant of different opinions should be the goal of civilization in general and certainly of any group that claims to have its grounding and purpose in the realms of spirituality.

All of that of course is well in keeping with Methodism in its “ideal” state since it supposedly respects the individual methods which people find enable them to relate to “the holy”…wherever and however they find it.

Over the years we have had wonderful national campaigns to stress that kind of acceptance.  Most recently it was “Open hearts, open minds, open doors” which came on the heels of continuing to refuse the total affirmation of gay, lesbian and transgendered people as equal in every way to all the other recovering sinners in our congregations, …factoring them in merely as “people of worth.”

Large banners proclaiming that slogan “Open hearts, open minds, open doors” hung outside the very doors of churches that were denied the right to perform commitment services for anyone but heterosexual couples and charges were pending for clergy who did and do. Candidates for ministry could not openly profess or practice their sexuality if they were homosexual and to do so would result in the loss of credentials and pension credit as was recently demonstrated in the case of Beth Stroud whose highly publicized trial as Assistant Pastor of First United Methodist Church of Germantown, Pennsylvania confirms just how little progress has been made.

Like most mainline denominations United Methodists continue to circle the wagons against anything that seems too progressive or too liberal in its approach to inclusion.  Instead they busy themselves with long term study committees appointed to ponder controversial issues ad infinitum while choosing to deal in the here and now with more saccharine subjects such as the responsible use of recyclables or the great need to stop the unexplainable hemorrhaging of church memberships.  

Despite the fact that the Methodist Church was one of the first to ordain women as pastors when Alma White became an elder in the Methodist Pentecostal Union in 1902 we still have the highest drop out rate for ordained women who find that after all their studies and scholarship they are not accepted or cherished within their local congregational charges or supported in their conferences in collegial relationships with clergymen who seem to value patriarchy more than inclusivity in ministry.

Like most organized religions we have said a great many wonderful things, and have too often been guilty of not following through on our promises. We became the United Methodist Church in an attempt to bridge the gap of racism within the Wesleyan community.  It was supposed to promise a totally open appointment system which would enable bishops to bring clergy of differing racial backgrounds, economic and life circumstances into previously privileged and predominantly all white congregations and vice versa.  It would stress of course that the community of believers was ONE.  As an ideal it was wonderful, as a universal practice it has certainly not happened!

Perhaps the saddest commentary of all would be that John Wesley himself would most likely have a hard time recognizing the church founded on his principles. A radical reformer whose concern for the forgotten, mostly the impoverished, uneducated and the imprisoned led to a zeal for a more methodical approach to personal piety that included social action and transformation as well as study and prayer,…he never intended to start anything more than what he already knew existed. He claimed “the world is my parish” only after being excluded from the very pulpits that had nurtured his own faith. He saw a love of fallen humanity as the natural outcome of personal holiness… no matter where one found it… and questioned the validity of any form of worship if such increased awareness and response was not the direct outcome.  Most likely if it had not been for the revolutionary war and the break with the Church of England, Methodist Churches as we know them today would never have existed.

My own arrival within the Methodist system was very similar to those I later came to serve; it happened almost by chance. I have been a pastor in the United Methodist Church in what is now called the New Jersey Conference for thirty-four years. Prior to that time as a United Presbyterian candidate for ministry I served as a pastor to an America Baptist congregation for three years. I had been raised in that tradition and baptized by immersion at the age of 13, but following a family move to a different community I spent the rest of my teenage and college years attending a United Presbyterian Church. It had nothing to do with theology.  It was close by, it had a wonderful youth program and my parents said that’s where we we’re going. Parents did things like that in the late 50’s and I, like most of my peers, never questioned authority and did as we were told.

I spent four years of undergraduate study at a very conservative Baptist College in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania where tobacco and alcohol usage were placed right up there with the cardinal sins and then followed that up with four more years at a very liberal seminary at Princeton. By the end of the 60’s the world as I knew it and the compliance of emerging baby boomers to their parents’ ideals, their country’s ideals, their churches ideals… maybe even “ideals” in general were already on very shaky ground. We spent as much time protesting in seminary as we did in class and ethics and morals as taught in the traditional sanctuaries or our youth were all up for debate.

I think it was the first time in my life that I became conscious of the difference between being an observer of or a participant in my own life. Which brings me to my struggle to find a comfort level with the sermon title that Wayne picked for me this morning and with trying to find a way to deal with it. “A United Methodist Minister at a Unitarian Congregation” sounds like an observer to me. Someone writing a paper about the lab rats they have been studying for the past two years. Or perhaps worse yet a lurker, someone who hangs on the fringe, observing, recording, comparing, criticizing,but never really being a part of that which is before them. An observer stands outside looking in which may be tolerable if that stance is a personal choice but is a sacrilege for those who have it thrust upon them.

I did not view my transition to membership in the United Methodist Church as anything divinely inspired at the time. It came as the result of an employment opportunity which in hindsight did provide a great spiritual breakthrough for me. I found myself struggling with the bureaucracy and politics of my Presbytery and was lured by the opportunity to teach comparative religion at a Methodist Prep School in Pennington, New Jersey which included the opportunity to serve as a full time Assistant Pastor at the local Methodist Church and a position of area director of YMCA activities in the Hopewell borough. In essence they would be getting a lot of work for a comparatively small amount of money due to my youth and inexperience, and I would be exposed to a wealth of opportunities for learning. All I had to do was become a United Methodist instead of a United Presbyterian. How simple was that?

It was a great ride, and it lasted three years. I got to loose myself from all that I found intolerable at the time and to move on in a lifestyle I seemed to be designing for myself. United Methodists however are subject to Episcopal appointment. They can be moved at will and have very little recourse to appeal. At the end of three years it was determined my skills were needed elsewhere and I was sent to a place where I did not wish to go despite the fact, and in hindsight largely because of the fact, that I didn’t know anything about it. Fear is the greatest opponent of learning and of choosing full participation in one’s life.

It turned out to be a two point charge, which means you serve two congregations…two separate facilities, two different services, two sets of boards and agencies, and was located on the northernmost part of the Jersey shore right opposite the Manhattan skyline. Once again it involved twice the work but still one salary.

I hadn’t been there very long before I recognized that I was needed and what a great feeling that was! I also discovered that many of those skills I had been learning for the past three years were perfect for this new location. The biggest challenge was to let go of the past that I loved and fully embrace the present that was before me. I heard more than once in that first year how I probably wouldn’t be there for very long as most people saw the place simply as a stepping stone to somewhere else.  Living here, but looking there. Observing…but not really participating in terms of a full investment.

I stayed for the next twenty-six years and in the course of those years I learned more than I ever taught, I gained more than I ever gave, and I loved fully but not nearly as fully as I was loved in return. In many ways like a marriage “the two” (in this case separate congregations) became one over the course of those years and our stories, concerns, and journeys fused together as well. 

I think this happens when people are able to commit and it doesn’t happen when they can’t.

After all that time,…having married the same children I had baptized, and baptized their own children, and buried the parents who were almost as young as me when I’d first arrived,…a new bishop decided I was needed again…it was time to move…this time to a much larger and more important church just seven miles down the road.  Once again after all those years I found I did not want to go. This time it wasn’t fear. I couldn’t say I didn’t know the area. I couldn’t even say that I didn’t know the church and at least some of the people in it. It was much larger in terms of recorded membership, much grander, with just as many needs and so many more people wanting so many different things. The biggest issue for me however was that I was not sure I still wanted to commit and especially if that meant I would feel I had to spend most of my time at the age of 53 validating my right to minister since as a single man who had never married I would automatically be a suspect in many a stranger’s eyes.

I did everything I could to get out of going…and once there I tried to be as honest with my new congregation as I had been with my previous one.  I told them on more than one occasion that I was fairly certain that I was the wrong person for them…and then tried to be everything and anything they wanted me to be. It was not that there was something wrong with them in any way but that some experiences cannot be repeated simply because we want to try.

Joan Didion writes of coming to terms with her husband’s death in The Year of Magical Thinking. Toward the end of the book she says “you can love more than one person.  Of course you can, but marriage is something different. Marriage is memory, marriage is time. ‘She didn’t know the songs,’ I recall being told that a friend of a friend had said after an attempt to repeat the experience. Marriage is not only time; it is also paradoxically, the denial of time. For forty years I saw myself through my husband’s eyes. I did not age. This year for the first time since I was twenty-nine I saw myself through the eyes of others. This year for the first time since I was twenty-nine I realized that my image of myself was of someone significantly younger… We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves.  As we were.  As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.”

Religions are world constructions, ways of seeing reality; as such they are also of necessity human constructions. Reality is always more. It is so easy for us to confuse our maps of reality with reality itself, and always ludicrous to believe we can in our limited descriptions fully capture what reality is.

In the Christian Calendar today is the 4th Sunday of Lent, and in many Christian Churches around the world it is celebrated as Mothering Sunday, very different from our Mother’s Day. It is a religious festival, not a civil celebration. During the 16th century, people returned to their “mother church” for a service to be held on this day of Lent. It was often the only time that whole families could gather together, if prevented by conflicting working hours since at that time it was not unusual for children at the age of 10 to begin their part in the work force.  For some Anglican churches of which John Wesley would have been a part, it was the only day in Lent when marriages could be celebrated. All domestic servants were given the day off to make that all important yearly visit to their "mother" church. So each year in the middle of Lent, everyone who possibly could would come home, to the main church or Cathedral of the area and inevitably the return to the "mother" church became an occasion for family reunions.

Past injuries were forgotten, old promises were renewed…and a heightened consciousness of the passage of time and the brevity of life was palpable. People were reminded that there was a place where they were truly valued and loved. Whenever we come into the presence of the holy, wherever people feel they are drawing close to the meaning of life…there should be such openness and a welcome to every stranger. In the end it is always a personal choice, an act of righteousness that says---you are welcome here…be one with us…be home.  I hear in Lincoln’s words an echo of Jesus before him…a reminder that what we deny to others we cannot deserve for ourselves.

Therefore be swift to love and make haste to be kind.

 ____________________________________

¹ Sermon by the Rev. John P. Wood, retired United Methodist Minister,

  given at the All Faiths Unitarian Congregation on 3/26/2006

  meeting in the Foulds Theater at the Alliance for the Arts,

  10091 McGregor Boulevard, Ft. Myers, Florida