Inside Work, No Heavy Lifting
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the Second Congregational Meeting House on Nantucket Island
Sunday September 3rd, 2001
***
Twenty-some years ago, when I was still a student at the Harvard Divinity School, and working as a student minister at the First and Second Church in Boston, my mentor there, the Rev. Dr. Rhys Williams, gave me some excellent advice about preaching. “Don’t try to tell them everything you know on the first Sunday,” Rhys told me. “They might just expect you to come back and do it again the following week.” So in the spirit of that advice, and in honor of the Labor Day holiday, I thought I’d start out my ministry here on Nantucket simply by talking a little bit about my own vocation and on-going spiritual journey, which has brought me here now to your lovely island to spend a year as your interim minister.
In many ways, the job of an interim minister is a simple one. It is my responsibility to perform “the usual and customary duties” of a parish minister while you, in turn, search for a new, permanent regularly-settled pastor. What makes things interesting, of course, is that the search for a new, permanent, regularly-settled pastor is anything BUT a “usual and customary” event in the life of a congregation. I was still in High School when Ted Anderson preached his first sermon from this pulpit. For an entire generation, Ted was not only the spiritual head of this community, in very many ways he was its face, its hands, its heart and soul as well. So now that he’s retired, as you’ve been finding out for yourselves, it’s a lot more complicated than simply putting an ad in the paper and hiring a replacement, because (lets face it), you are never really going to be able to REPLACE him.
Instead, you’ve had to do some hard thinking about who you really are as a congregation: where you’ve been, where you want to go, who your other leaders are, and how you are connected with our larger religious movement. And part of my job, in addition to the “usual and customary duties” part, is to assist you in this process of self-scrutiny and self-discovery -- both by helping you to see yourselves from a new and unaccustomed perspective, but also by being someone different and unusual myself: a kind of combination coach and cheerleader who can help instruct and encourage you as you pass this important, historical milestone.
As some of you already know, I grew up out on the west coast, where my parents were members of University Unitarian Church in Seattle, and then later the church in Palo Alto, California, where my family finally stopped attending services in 1969 after my father became upset about the congregation’s politically active opposition to the Vietnam War. So unlike a lot of people in our society, who are “Unitarians without knowing it,” as a youngster I knew that I was a Unitarian-Universalist, I just didn’t know very much about what that meant, except that we were different both from Catholics and from “born-again” Christians, and that we were against the Vietnam War.
I’m not going to say too much more about my “tender years,” except to add that I didn’t go off to college planning to become a Unitarian minister. When I started at the University of Washington in 1974 I expected to go to Law School, and it wasn’t until the beginning of my Junior year there, when I actually met a few aspiring lawyers, that I started to think about another career. I was working as a Residence Hall advisor in Lander Hall, which is directly across the street from the University of Washington Law School, and about half of the residents on my floor were first year law students. It took me about three weeks to figure out that these folks weren’t interested in any of the things that I was interested in. To put it plainly: I was interested in Justice, and they were interested in Negligence. So I started to look around for an alternative career, one that would be intellectually stimulating, but still give me plenty of opportunities to work with people and to help make the world a better place to live in.
And I hit upon this: the parish ministry. I did a little research, wrote away for applications, was accepted everywhere I applied (with the exception of the Starr King School in Berkeley, which likes their students to have a bit more “life experience”), and was offered a very generous financial aid package by Harvard, which had already been my first choice anyway. So I guess you could say that my initial call to ministry came in the form of the “thick envelope,” rather than a thundering voice from heaven, or even a still, small voice in the dead of night. I chose this profession because I thought I would like it, because I thought I would be good at it, and because I thought it might give me an opportunity to help other people and accomplish something important with my life. It really was just as simple as that.
I suppose I should also say that initially I was very intimidated by being at Harvard. I wandered around that campus for months waiting for someone to come up behind me and tap me on the shoulder, apologize for this terrible, humiliating mistake, and put me on an airplane back to Seattle where I belonged. It was only after I realized that there were a lot of other folks there who felt exactly the same way that I did, and that the ones who didn’t you really wouldn’t want to hang around with anyway, that I was able to loosen up a bit and really enjoy and appreciate the experience. Even so, the entire time I was at the Divinity School I could hardly wait to get out. I completed all my course requirements in the minimum three years necessary, together with twice the amount of required field education, and was ordained to the UU ministry at the age of 24, only to discover that in a denomination where the median age was 59, there wasn’t a lot of call for a 24-year-old senior pastor.
In retrospect I can appreciate why that was, but at the time I was really kind of angry and disappointed: I’d done all the work, and done it well; I had all the formal qualifications and credentials, but still I couldn’t get anyone to give me the kind of position I felt I deserved. So when I was told that the Department of Ministry would only send out my name for openings for assistant or associate ministers, I naturally did the mature thing and simply stopped opening their mail. Instead, I returned home to the Pacific Northwest and found a position as a Residence Hall Director at Western Washington University in Bellingham, where I also enrolled in the Graduate Creative Writing program and was a student of Annie Dillard’s. After two years at Western, I finally accepted an offer to be the intern assistant minister at University Church for a year, and from there I eventually received a call to become the settled parish minister of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Midland, Texas, just a few weeks after my 28th birthday.
One of the nice things about Life is that so long as you can manage to stay alive, you can pretty much count on getting older, sooner or later. The following summer, for example, I instantly became middle-aged when I married my wife Margaret (who is six years older than I am) and became the step-parent to her two half-grown children, Jacob and Stephenie (who are now 28 and 25 themselves). Being a step-parent is a lot like pitching in long-relief (or for that matter, being an interim minister); you don’t really have to worry about winning or losing -- all you’ve got to do is throw as well as you can and try to keep the score as close as possible, and give your teammates a chance to win the game themselves. Without a doubt though, becoming an instant parent in this way has truly been one of the most enjoyable and rewarding experiences of my life. Nothing teaches humility more quickly than learning to see yourself through the eyes of teen-aged children, and then seeing reflected in their lives all of your own private idiosyncrasies and foibles. It really gives you a lot more respect for what your own parents must have suffered, as well as a better understanding of why they were still always so proud of you in spite of the torture you put them through.
After four years in Midland, I was offered a chance to move back to the Pacific Northwest to work as a New Congregation organizer in Hillsboro, Oregon, which is a suburb of Portland. This was great news for Margaret and the kids, who couldn’t high-tail it out of West Texas fast enough, but not an especially satisfactory experience for me; after two years of that very interesting but also very challenging work, I was feeling a little burned out by parish ministry and decided not to renew my contract beyond its original term. But since in the meantime Margaret had just started Law School, we chose to remain in Portland until she had completed her studies, and I found a job as a retail bookseller rather than seeking another full-time pulpit in some other part of the country.
I hadn’t really intended to recount my entire resume here this morning, but since I’m almost to the end of it anyway, just let me add that when Margaret graduated from Law School in 1993, passed both the Washington and the Oregon Bar exams that same summer, and received a very attractive job offer from the firm where she had been working as a clerk, we once again decided to remain in Portland and follow her career for awhile, and I began what turned out to be a very satisfying ministry of working part-time with various small congregations without regularly-settled ministers, while at the same time pursuing additional graduate studies of my own, which eventually resulted yet another Masters Degree in American Studies from Oregon State University (my third, I’m embarrassed to say, just in case you’ve lost count by now), and then this past spring a PhD in American History from the University of Oregon. (I also want to say, in my own defense, that I’m not the only one in my family to suffer from this compulsion: in addition to her law degree, for example, Margaret also has an MBA, an MSW, and a Bachelor of Science in Home Economics, while Stephenie is just now completing her Master’s Degree in Exercise Physiology at Springfield College here in Massachusetts, and her brother Jacob is out in San Francisco working as a software engineer in a struggling dot-com start-up, and planning to take the Graduate Management Admissions Test and apply to Business School himself sometime this fall.)
But it was the lessons I learned working with these small, lay-led congregations that have turned out to be the most important ones. Because what they have taught me is that parish ministry is not about education and credentials and getting people to give you the kind of position and respect and professional privilege you think that you deserve. Instead, it is about authenticity, and relationship, and the privilege of being invited to share in other people’s lives and to become part of a faith community committed to working together and helping one another make the world a better place.
In any event, I’ve talked an awful lot about myself this morning, as much by was of introduction as for any other reason, but now I want to try to bring the subject around to something that some of you might actually find useful or inspiring in your own lives. Throughout my rather unorthodox twenty-year career as an ordained Unitarian-Universalist minister, I have often had occasion to reflect upon that wry observation by former Beatle John Lennon, that “Life is what happens while you’re making other plans.” And yet I’ve also discovered that if you can just remain flexible, and open to new possibilities, and confident in your own ability to solve problems as they come up rather than trying to figure out everything in advance, the Universe will sometimes surprise you in remarkable and miraculous ways.
My coming here to Nantucket at all is a perfect example of just such a miraculous surprise. Last Labor Day I had just gotten back from a semester-long academic exchange in Aalborg, Denmark, followed by a four-week summer research fellowship at the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston; it had been over five months since I had been home in Portland for longer than just a few days at a time, and I was getting ready to begin an academic schedule which would prove even more demanding, since I was going to be working with two different part-time congregations: one three hours south of Portland, the other four hours north; as well as teaching at the University two to three days a week (a four-hour round-trip commute from my home in Portland), and still trying to finish a complete first draft of my dissertation manuscript. And it was at that point that Margaret pointed out that we just couldn’t keep on living like that indefinitely; that I simply needed to rent an apartment in Eugene and concentrate on finishing my dissertation, so that at some point we might look forward to having a relatively normal life together again.
Six months later, as it was beginning to look like I might actually be able to defend my dissertation in the Spring, she was also the one who suggested that I put my name in for an interim ministry position, as a prelude to either seeking a permanent, full-time regularly-settled ministry of my own, or else making the decision to pursue a career in academia. But either way, once I started looking seriously for a relatively stable and permanent position, it would be much easier for her to make plans about moving her practice to a new location, maybe even taking a little sabbatical while she studied for another bar exam, so that we could both settle down for the long term. And to be honest, I’d kind of hoped to be recommended for a position somewhere on the West Coast, where Margaret and I could at least be in the same time zone, and we might be able to take advantage of inexpensive commuter airfares. Instead, my name went out to a congregation in Michigan and four here in New England, one of which, of course, happened to be Nantucket.
And yet for some reason, when I saw that you had received my name, I just knew that this was the place that I was supposed to be this year. And I was so thrilled when your interim search committee seemed to feel the same way, and your Board invited me to come spend the next twelve months living and working with you while you search for your next permanent settled minister. I have no real idea what the next twelve months will bring, but judging from the adventures I’ve had just getting here in the first place, I’m confident that we will be equal to whatever opportunities and challenges happen to present themselves.
at the Second Congregational Meeting House on Nantucket Island
Sunday September 3rd, 2001
***
Twenty-some years ago, when I was still a student at the Harvard Divinity School, and working as a student minister at the First and Second Church in Boston, my mentor there, the Rev. Dr. Rhys Williams, gave me some excellent advice about preaching. “Don’t try to tell them everything you know on the first Sunday,” Rhys told me. “They might just expect you to come back and do it again the following week.” So in the spirit of that advice, and in honor of the Labor Day holiday, I thought I’d start out my ministry here on Nantucket simply by talking a little bit about my own vocation and on-going spiritual journey, which has brought me here now to your lovely island to spend a year as your interim minister.
In many ways, the job of an interim minister is a simple one. It is my responsibility to perform “the usual and customary duties” of a parish minister while you, in turn, search for a new, permanent regularly-settled pastor. What makes things interesting, of course, is that the search for a new, permanent, regularly-settled pastor is anything BUT a “usual and customary” event in the life of a congregation. I was still in High School when Ted Anderson preached his first sermon from this pulpit. For an entire generation, Ted was not only the spiritual head of this community, in very many ways he was its face, its hands, its heart and soul as well. So now that he’s retired, as you’ve been finding out for yourselves, it’s a lot more complicated than simply putting an ad in the paper and hiring a replacement, because (lets face it), you are never really going to be able to REPLACE him.
Instead, you’ve had to do some hard thinking about who you really are as a congregation: where you’ve been, where you want to go, who your other leaders are, and how you are connected with our larger religious movement. And part of my job, in addition to the “usual and customary duties” part, is to assist you in this process of self-scrutiny and self-discovery -- both by helping you to see yourselves from a new and unaccustomed perspective, but also by being someone different and unusual myself: a kind of combination coach and cheerleader who can help instruct and encourage you as you pass this important, historical milestone.
As some of you already know, I grew up out on the west coast, where my parents were members of University Unitarian Church in Seattle, and then later the church in Palo Alto, California, where my family finally stopped attending services in 1969 after my father became upset about the congregation’s politically active opposition to the Vietnam War. So unlike a lot of people in our society, who are “Unitarians without knowing it,” as a youngster I knew that I was a Unitarian-Universalist, I just didn’t know very much about what that meant, except that we were different both from Catholics and from “born-again” Christians, and that we were against the Vietnam War.
I’m not going to say too much more about my “tender years,” except to add that I didn’t go off to college planning to become a Unitarian minister. When I started at the University of Washington in 1974 I expected to go to Law School, and it wasn’t until the beginning of my Junior year there, when I actually met a few aspiring lawyers, that I started to think about another career. I was working as a Residence Hall advisor in Lander Hall, which is directly across the street from the University of Washington Law School, and about half of the residents on my floor were first year law students. It took me about three weeks to figure out that these folks weren’t interested in any of the things that I was interested in. To put it plainly: I was interested in Justice, and they were interested in Negligence. So I started to look around for an alternative career, one that would be intellectually stimulating, but still give me plenty of opportunities to work with people and to help make the world a better place to live in.
And I hit upon this: the parish ministry. I did a little research, wrote away for applications, was accepted everywhere I applied (with the exception of the Starr King School in Berkeley, which likes their students to have a bit more “life experience”), and was offered a very generous financial aid package by Harvard, which had already been my first choice anyway. So I guess you could say that my initial call to ministry came in the form of the “thick envelope,” rather than a thundering voice from heaven, or even a still, small voice in the dead of night. I chose this profession because I thought I would like it, because I thought I would be good at it, and because I thought it might give me an opportunity to help other people and accomplish something important with my life. It really was just as simple as that.
I suppose I should also say that initially I was very intimidated by being at Harvard. I wandered around that campus for months waiting for someone to come up behind me and tap me on the shoulder, apologize for this terrible, humiliating mistake, and put me on an airplane back to Seattle where I belonged. It was only after I realized that there were a lot of other folks there who felt exactly the same way that I did, and that the ones who didn’t you really wouldn’t want to hang around with anyway, that I was able to loosen up a bit and really enjoy and appreciate the experience. Even so, the entire time I was at the Divinity School I could hardly wait to get out. I completed all my course requirements in the minimum three years necessary, together with twice the amount of required field education, and was ordained to the UU ministry at the age of 24, only to discover that in a denomination where the median age was 59, there wasn’t a lot of call for a 24-year-old senior pastor.
In retrospect I can appreciate why that was, but at the time I was really kind of angry and disappointed: I’d done all the work, and done it well; I had all the formal qualifications and credentials, but still I couldn’t get anyone to give me the kind of position I felt I deserved. So when I was told that the Department of Ministry would only send out my name for openings for assistant or associate ministers, I naturally did the mature thing and simply stopped opening their mail. Instead, I returned home to the Pacific Northwest and found a position as a Residence Hall Director at Western Washington University in Bellingham, where I also enrolled in the Graduate Creative Writing program and was a student of Annie Dillard’s. After two years at Western, I finally accepted an offer to be the intern assistant minister at University Church for a year, and from there I eventually received a call to become the settled parish minister of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Midland, Texas, just a few weeks after my 28th birthday.
One of the nice things about Life is that so long as you can manage to stay alive, you can pretty much count on getting older, sooner or later. The following summer, for example, I instantly became middle-aged when I married my wife Margaret (who is six years older than I am) and became the step-parent to her two half-grown children, Jacob and Stephenie (who are now 28 and 25 themselves). Being a step-parent is a lot like pitching in long-relief (or for that matter, being an interim minister); you don’t really have to worry about winning or losing -- all you’ve got to do is throw as well as you can and try to keep the score as close as possible, and give your teammates a chance to win the game themselves. Without a doubt though, becoming an instant parent in this way has truly been one of the most enjoyable and rewarding experiences of my life. Nothing teaches humility more quickly than learning to see yourself through the eyes of teen-aged children, and then seeing reflected in their lives all of your own private idiosyncrasies and foibles. It really gives you a lot more respect for what your own parents must have suffered, as well as a better understanding of why they were still always so proud of you in spite of the torture you put them through.
After four years in Midland, I was offered a chance to move back to the Pacific Northwest to work as a New Congregation organizer in Hillsboro, Oregon, which is a suburb of Portland. This was great news for Margaret and the kids, who couldn’t high-tail it out of West Texas fast enough, but not an especially satisfactory experience for me; after two years of that very interesting but also very challenging work, I was feeling a little burned out by parish ministry and decided not to renew my contract beyond its original term. But since in the meantime Margaret had just started Law School, we chose to remain in Portland until she had completed her studies, and I found a job as a retail bookseller rather than seeking another full-time pulpit in some other part of the country.
I hadn’t really intended to recount my entire resume here this morning, but since I’m almost to the end of it anyway, just let me add that when Margaret graduated from Law School in 1993, passed both the Washington and the Oregon Bar exams that same summer, and received a very attractive job offer from the firm where she had been working as a clerk, we once again decided to remain in Portland and follow her career for awhile, and I began what turned out to be a very satisfying ministry of working part-time with various small congregations without regularly-settled ministers, while at the same time pursuing additional graduate studies of my own, which eventually resulted yet another Masters Degree in American Studies from Oregon State University (my third, I’m embarrassed to say, just in case you’ve lost count by now), and then this past spring a PhD in American History from the University of Oregon. (I also want to say, in my own defense, that I’m not the only one in my family to suffer from this compulsion: in addition to her law degree, for example, Margaret also has an MBA, an MSW, and a Bachelor of Science in Home Economics, while Stephenie is just now completing her Master’s Degree in Exercise Physiology at Springfield College here in Massachusetts, and her brother Jacob is out in San Francisco working as a software engineer in a struggling dot-com start-up, and planning to take the Graduate Management Admissions Test and apply to Business School himself sometime this fall.)
But it was the lessons I learned working with these small, lay-led congregations that have turned out to be the most important ones. Because what they have taught me is that parish ministry is not about education and credentials and getting people to give you the kind of position and respect and professional privilege you think that you deserve. Instead, it is about authenticity, and relationship, and the privilege of being invited to share in other people’s lives and to become part of a faith community committed to working together and helping one another make the world a better place.
In any event, I’ve talked an awful lot about myself this morning, as much by was of introduction as for any other reason, but now I want to try to bring the subject around to something that some of you might actually find useful or inspiring in your own lives. Throughout my rather unorthodox twenty-year career as an ordained Unitarian-Universalist minister, I have often had occasion to reflect upon that wry observation by former Beatle John Lennon, that “Life is what happens while you’re making other plans.” And yet I’ve also discovered that if you can just remain flexible, and open to new possibilities, and confident in your own ability to solve problems as they come up rather than trying to figure out everything in advance, the Universe will sometimes surprise you in remarkable and miraculous ways.
My coming here to Nantucket at all is a perfect example of just such a miraculous surprise. Last Labor Day I had just gotten back from a semester-long academic exchange in Aalborg, Denmark, followed by a four-week summer research fellowship at the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston; it had been over five months since I had been home in Portland for longer than just a few days at a time, and I was getting ready to begin an academic schedule which would prove even more demanding, since I was going to be working with two different part-time congregations: one three hours south of Portland, the other four hours north; as well as teaching at the University two to three days a week (a four-hour round-trip commute from my home in Portland), and still trying to finish a complete first draft of my dissertation manuscript. And it was at that point that Margaret pointed out that we just couldn’t keep on living like that indefinitely; that I simply needed to rent an apartment in Eugene and concentrate on finishing my dissertation, so that at some point we might look forward to having a relatively normal life together again.
Six months later, as it was beginning to look like I might actually be able to defend my dissertation in the Spring, she was also the one who suggested that I put my name in for an interim ministry position, as a prelude to either seeking a permanent, full-time regularly-settled ministry of my own, or else making the decision to pursue a career in academia. But either way, once I started looking seriously for a relatively stable and permanent position, it would be much easier for her to make plans about moving her practice to a new location, maybe even taking a little sabbatical while she studied for another bar exam, so that we could both settle down for the long term. And to be honest, I’d kind of hoped to be recommended for a position somewhere on the West Coast, where Margaret and I could at least be in the same time zone, and we might be able to take advantage of inexpensive commuter airfares. Instead, my name went out to a congregation in Michigan and four here in New England, one of which, of course, happened to be Nantucket.
And yet for some reason, when I saw that you had received my name, I just knew that this was the place that I was supposed to be this year. And I was so thrilled when your interim search committee seemed to feel the same way, and your Board invited me to come spend the next twelve months living and working with you while you search for your next permanent settled minister. I have no real idea what the next twelve months will bring, but judging from the adventures I’ve had just getting here in the first place, I’m confident that we will be equal to whatever opportunities and challenges happen to present themselves.
posted by The Eclectic Cleric at 1:30 PM
