Acting My Age
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the Second Congregational Meeting House on Nantucket Island
Sunday October 21st, 2001
READINGS: Genesis 32: 3-8; 22-31. 2nd Timothy 3: 14 - 4:5
***
I suppose by now it’s safe to assume that most of you are aware of the article about me in last Thursday’s Inquirer and Mirror. I have to admit that for someone who is basically kind of private and introspective, this small taste (and trust me, it is a VERY small taste) of celebrity is both a little heady, and also a little unsettling. I mean, I don’t really mind being greeted on the street by people I know, or even people I recognize although I may not know them well, but to be nodded at knowingly by people I can’t recall ever having seen before is a little spooky -- it kind of makes you feel like maybe the whole world is spying on you, and they just haven’t let you in on the secret. That being said, it’s also kind of nice to open up the local paper and see your own handsome visage staring out at you -- not just once, but twice. It makes you feel kind of important, which is always a good way to feel. Of course, this was balanced out nicely by a taste of humility earlier in the week, just before the story ran, when the paper called me back wanting to check a few facts, and then asked for the name and breed of my dog. So I don’t know, maybe she’s the real celebrity, and I’m just a warm body on the other end of the leash.
I thought it was a good story, though, and was particularly pleased with the photographs, and the nice things that everyone else had to say about me. And I’m not too upset about the half-dozen or so little factual errors and mis-impressions about me that have now managed to work their way into print for posterity, things which I might have easily corrected had they been willing to let me look at what they had written in advance, which is apparently a violation of some sort of journalistic ethics. Why bother to get it right when you’re working on deadline and a week from now no one will care anyway? But as a historian, it bugs me a little to think that a century from now, some poor graduate student may stumble across this article, and then have to try to figure out whether or not I actually graduated from the University of Washington before enrolling at Harvard, or if my Ph.D. is in American Studies rather than American History, or where in the world these other interim ministries might have been. It just goes to show, you can’t believe everything you read, and kind of makes me wonder just what else I’ve read lately that doesn’t quite match up with the way things really are.
In any event, I hope you will indulge me a little this morning, since I am feeling a little self-indulgent today. As you all know, tomorrow is my birthday -- my 45th -- and while this is not exactly a “round” birthday, like 40 or 50, it’s still a pretty significant one, in that only one member of my family has ever lived past 90, and thus I am undeniably on the high-side of “middle-aged.” Of course, as my father (who still sees himself as a relatively young man at age 67)... as my father keeps reminding me, “Age is just a number.” Nevertheless, the numbers do keep getting larger, which is actually not such a bad thing in my line of work, since (unlike playing basketball) parish ministry really is something one becomes able to do better and better over time.
Age is a funny thing. I am the oldest child in my family, and yet I’ve also, since High School at least, typically been the youngest in my peer group, and this has created kind of an interesting “double consciousness” in me when it comes to age. My parents would sometimes admonish me to “act my age,” and yet it always was just an act, whether I was trying to set a good example for my younger brothers, or affecting a sophistication beyond my years in order to fit in with my older classmates. I enrolled in college at the age of 17, was the youngest Unitarian student at Harvard the entire time I was there, and for a long time afterwards was probably the youngest ordained minister in the denomination as well.
Of course, I also stayed in college an unusually long time -- a total of nine years and three degrees in my first incarnation as a graduate student -- enjoying what I suppose might best be described as a somewhat prolonged adolescence, and scandalized my mother when (on my 26th birthday, actually) I started dating an 18-year-old freshman, who (if the truth be known) actually picked me out in the first year French class we were both taking at the time, and then stalked me all over campus until I finally got the hint and asked her out. So, cherchez la femme -- that was probably the most difficult and tumultuous relationship I have ever been involved in, yet at least it convinced me that it was time to get out of school and get on with my adult life; and believe it or not, we’re still friends -- a decade ago I officiated at her wedding (to a guy five years older than me), and even now she still teases me about what a “cradle-robber” I was, and I tease her about how the next time I hook up with an 18-year-old girl, I will probably appreciate it a lot more than I did when I was with her.
My own marriage was kind of the opposite experience. Margaret is five-and-a-half years older than me, and came into my life complete with a 10-year-old son and a 7-year-old daughter. I said “I do” and suddenly became middle-aged overnight: two professional incomes (and a much more complicated tax return to go with them), a mortgage, life insurance, orthodontics for the kids. And then when I returned to graduate school again at the age of 37, at the beginning of my daughter’s senior year of High School, I experienced yet another time warp: a student the same age as many of my professors, and with a much more accomplished resume than was typical of my classmates, most of whom had only recently completed their bachelor’s degrees.
And now here I am on the eve of my 45th birthday, still young at heart, but in some ways wise beyond my years as well (which is kind of how I got into this line of work in the first place), and the only part of my body whose age I think much about these days is my knees, where it is not so much the years that matter as the mileage. A sixteen-year marriage and two grown children; seventeen years of college (with five earned degrees); twenty years in the ministry, serving a dozen different congregations in three distinct regions of the continent, not including countless more one-time preaching engagements. And the most exciting part is knowing that the best twenty years of my ministry are probably still ahead of me, now that I am finally, at age 45, starting to figure out what it is that I actually want to do when I grow up.
I’m going to change the subject now for just a moment, and talk a little bit about the passages from the Bible I read earlier in the service. I didn’t really select these readings; they are actually the assigned Lectionary passages for this particular Sunday, but I wanted to give you a little taste of what they were talking about over at Saint Paul’s today, and also comment on these texts myself, because, believe it or not, both of them have actually been relatively important to me in my life, and I just wanted to share a little of that insight with you.
The selection from Genesis -- the story of Jacob wrestling with the Angel -- was the subject of the very first term paper I ever wrote at the Harvard Divinity School 23 years ago. I don’t recall the exact grade I got (although I do recall it wasn’t quite as high as I had hoped), but I do remember how excited I was when I came upon this passage for the first time. Having grown up Unitarian, I’d never really read that much of the Bible before, and I think I somewhat naively assumed that because it was all brand-new to me, it was new to the rest of the world as well, and that I was going to be the one to reveal to the world the true significance of this heroic, Promethean struggle of a man who refused to give up, and who wrestled God to a standstill in the middle of the night, and then at sunrise extorted a blessing from him. And I remember also while doing my research I came across a print of Paul Gauguin’s “Vision After the Sermon” (which I had never seen before either), and which I xeroxed, in color, as a frontispiece to my brilliant disquisition, and then three-hole punched and bound together in a clear plastic cover (exactly the sort of pretentious paper in a plastic cover I would later learn to dread as a professor), and turned in with the expectation of having my work recognized and praised in front of the entire class as the brilliant piece of innovative, groundbreaking Biblical Scholarship that I was certain that it was.
So much for the optimistic illusions of youth. What strikes me most now about this passage, 23 years later, is the story that leads up to it. How Jacob, as a middle-aged man, having already tricked his older brother Esau out of the parental blessing that was his brother’s birthright, and having consequently lived his entire adult life in exile in a foreign land, then becomes alienated from his father-in-law and is forced to leave that place as well and return home to the land of his birth, having no place else to go, still uncertain and afraid of the reception he may find there. And when he learns that his brother is approaching with a company of 400 (presumably armed) men, he divides his family into two groups, out of concern that if his brother massacres the first group, the second might still be able to escape. And then he is left alone, in the middle of the night, to wrestle with his Creator. And the point is not that Jacob was able to wrestle God to a standstill. The point is that the BEST you can expect when you wrestle with God is a stalemate, and a reluctant blessing at the dawn of a new day, which leaves you crippled, but with a new identity, limping away at sunrise into the rest of your life.
The passage from Paul’s Second Letter to Timothy (which, as you know, I’ve always kind of felt was written to me personally), and particularly the part about how “all scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness,” is often quoted by Fundamentalists as a proof text for the doctrine of Biblical Inerrency: God said it, I believe it, that settles it. But Unitarians have historically turned this proposition upside-down and inside-out: what makes something “scriptural,” for us, is the fact that it IS useful for teaching, etc. -- which is why these writings were included in the Bible in the first place. Something is not true just because it’s in the Bible; it’s in the Bible, because somebody thought that it was true. But some parts of the Bible are frankly a lot more useful than others, and likewise we are not limited only to the writings we have received, but are free to seek inspiration wherever we can find it, provided we are willing to be taught, reproved, corrected and trained for righteousness by whatever it is that we find. And what intrigues me most now about this passage is the part about the “itching ears,” and the admonition to “be persistent whether the time is favorable or unfavorable.” Because one of the greatest sources of misunderstanding about Unitarian Universalism is the stereotype that we are a people “who will not put up with sound doctrine,” who accumulate for ourselves teachers to suit our own desires, and who “turn away from listening to the truth” and instead “wander away to myths.”
And this just isn’t so. Unitarian Universalists are not people who are free to believe whatever we like. Unitarian Universalists are people who are compelled by conscience to believe what our reason and our experience tell us to be true, regardless of what other people may be telling us to believe. And we often find ourselves wrestling with difficult questions at times when others have simply accepted the congenial answer of the conventional wisdom. It is a profound matter of faith to believe that all men and women are our brothers and sisters and children of God, and then to act in the world accordingly. It takes a lot of courage to love your enemies, and to try to return good for evil, when everyone around you and all your own natural human instincts are urging you to blow them all to hell. And yet, as we wrestle with these questions, the radical truth of the Scripture becomes apparent to us, and makes us a little radical as well. We’re not just here, in a free church like this one, to parrot naively something we’ve heard repeated over and over again from time immemorial. We are here to discover whatever truth it may contain in our own hearts and in our own lives, and sometimes that takes a lifetime of heart-felt soul-searching until we finally begin to figure it out.
There’s just one more thing I want to talk about briefly here today, and then we can all sing together and go next door and eat cake and drink champagne. But shortly after Margaret and I left Texas and moved back to the Pacific Northwest, I found myself urgently in need of a drain cleaner, having foolishly tried to stuff all the potato peelings down the disposal at once, only to have them revolt and refuse to go. So the next morning I opened up the yellow pages and started looking: Roto Rooter, Rescue Rooter, Reliable Rooter...and then I saw an ad that was simply titled “The Sewer Man With a Conscience.” It even had a picture of a little angel working a drain-cleaning snake. So that was the number I called, and I told him my problem and where I lived and what my name was and at the end of the conversation he asked “Now, are you the same Tim Jensen who is the new Unitarian minister?”
Well, that kind of caught me off guard, as you might imagine -- it’s one thing when it happens on Nantucket, but Portland, Oregon, is a pretty big city; but it turned out that “the Sewer Man with a Conscience” was actually one of my new parishioners, and as we got to know one another better, it also turned out that John and I had the same birthday: October 22nd. I eventually left the ministry of that church, and a few years later John stopped attending there also, but we continued to live in the same part of town, and occasionally we would run into one another at the supermarket or a High School basketball game or our local brewpub. We were friends, although we didn’t really see one another that much. I was back in school working for my Ph.D. and traveling all over the Pacific Northwest on weekends to preach in small churches; John had only completed a year or two of college (so far as I know; it wasn’t really something he spoke that much about), and was working day and night trying to support his family and keep his business afloat. John was also a very talented musician, who was constantly trying to organize small, pick-up bands to go out and perform in clubs, following his passion and supplementing his income at the same time; while I can hardly carry the tune of a simple hymn unless I’ve heard it a million times. My daughter played competitive Volleyball for four years of High School and four years of College; John’s son competed in the Special Olympics, and John was his basketball coach. So our lives were similar, but they were also very different; mostly though we just kind of liked one another, and enjoyed each other’s company, even though we didn’t really get together very often.
And then the week before I left to move out here, I got a message on my answering machine from a mutual friend telling me that John was dying of lung cancer, and that he had just come home from the hospital and was under the care of hospice. So naturally, I phoned over to the house, and went out there that afternoon to visit with him and his family, and to say goodbye; and sometime that following week, while Parker and I were driving across the country to come here, John passed away. So John won’t be here to celebrate his birthday today. But I hope that all of you will join with me and help me in celebrating it for him. He was truly a very remarkable guy; I feel privileged to have known him; and the world will be a lesser place, without his presence in it.
at the Second Congregational Meeting House on Nantucket Island
Sunday October 21st, 2001
READINGS: Genesis 32: 3-8; 22-31. 2nd Timothy 3: 14 - 4:5
***
I suppose by now it’s safe to assume that most of you are aware of the article about me in last Thursday’s Inquirer and Mirror. I have to admit that for someone who is basically kind of private and introspective, this small taste (and trust me, it is a VERY small taste) of celebrity is both a little heady, and also a little unsettling. I mean, I don’t really mind being greeted on the street by people I know, or even people I recognize although I may not know them well, but to be nodded at knowingly by people I can’t recall ever having seen before is a little spooky -- it kind of makes you feel like maybe the whole world is spying on you, and they just haven’t let you in on the secret. That being said, it’s also kind of nice to open up the local paper and see your own handsome visage staring out at you -- not just once, but twice. It makes you feel kind of important, which is always a good way to feel. Of course, this was balanced out nicely by a taste of humility earlier in the week, just before the story ran, when the paper called me back wanting to check a few facts, and then asked for the name and breed of my dog. So I don’t know, maybe she’s the real celebrity, and I’m just a warm body on the other end of the leash.
I thought it was a good story, though, and was particularly pleased with the photographs, and the nice things that everyone else had to say about me. And I’m not too upset about the half-dozen or so little factual errors and mis-impressions about me that have now managed to work their way into print for posterity, things which I might have easily corrected had they been willing to let me look at what they had written in advance, which is apparently a violation of some sort of journalistic ethics. Why bother to get it right when you’re working on deadline and a week from now no one will care anyway? But as a historian, it bugs me a little to think that a century from now, some poor graduate student may stumble across this article, and then have to try to figure out whether or not I actually graduated from the University of Washington before enrolling at Harvard, or if my Ph.D. is in American Studies rather than American History, or where in the world these other interim ministries might have been. It just goes to show, you can’t believe everything you read, and kind of makes me wonder just what else I’ve read lately that doesn’t quite match up with the way things really are.
In any event, I hope you will indulge me a little this morning, since I am feeling a little self-indulgent today. As you all know, tomorrow is my birthday -- my 45th -- and while this is not exactly a “round” birthday, like 40 or 50, it’s still a pretty significant one, in that only one member of my family has ever lived past 90, and thus I am undeniably on the high-side of “middle-aged.” Of course, as my father (who still sees himself as a relatively young man at age 67)... as my father keeps reminding me, “Age is just a number.” Nevertheless, the numbers do keep getting larger, which is actually not such a bad thing in my line of work, since (unlike playing basketball) parish ministry really is something one becomes able to do better and better over time.
Age is a funny thing. I am the oldest child in my family, and yet I’ve also, since High School at least, typically been the youngest in my peer group, and this has created kind of an interesting “double consciousness” in me when it comes to age. My parents would sometimes admonish me to “act my age,” and yet it always was just an act, whether I was trying to set a good example for my younger brothers, or affecting a sophistication beyond my years in order to fit in with my older classmates. I enrolled in college at the age of 17, was the youngest Unitarian student at Harvard the entire time I was there, and for a long time afterwards was probably the youngest ordained minister in the denomination as well.
Of course, I also stayed in college an unusually long time -- a total of nine years and three degrees in my first incarnation as a graduate student -- enjoying what I suppose might best be described as a somewhat prolonged adolescence, and scandalized my mother when (on my 26th birthday, actually) I started dating an 18-year-old freshman, who (if the truth be known) actually picked me out in the first year French class we were both taking at the time, and then stalked me all over campus until I finally got the hint and asked her out. So, cherchez la femme -- that was probably the most difficult and tumultuous relationship I have ever been involved in, yet at least it convinced me that it was time to get out of school and get on with my adult life; and believe it or not, we’re still friends -- a decade ago I officiated at her wedding (to a guy five years older than me), and even now she still teases me about what a “cradle-robber” I was, and I tease her about how the next time I hook up with an 18-year-old girl, I will probably appreciate it a lot more than I did when I was with her.
My own marriage was kind of the opposite experience. Margaret is five-and-a-half years older than me, and came into my life complete with a 10-year-old son and a 7-year-old daughter. I said “I do” and suddenly became middle-aged overnight: two professional incomes (and a much more complicated tax return to go with them), a mortgage, life insurance, orthodontics for the kids. And then when I returned to graduate school again at the age of 37, at the beginning of my daughter’s senior year of High School, I experienced yet another time warp: a student the same age as many of my professors, and with a much more accomplished resume than was typical of my classmates, most of whom had only recently completed their bachelor’s degrees.
And now here I am on the eve of my 45th birthday, still young at heart, but in some ways wise beyond my years as well (which is kind of how I got into this line of work in the first place), and the only part of my body whose age I think much about these days is my knees, where it is not so much the years that matter as the mileage. A sixteen-year marriage and two grown children; seventeen years of college (with five earned degrees); twenty years in the ministry, serving a dozen different congregations in three distinct regions of the continent, not including countless more one-time preaching engagements. And the most exciting part is knowing that the best twenty years of my ministry are probably still ahead of me, now that I am finally, at age 45, starting to figure out what it is that I actually want to do when I grow up.
I’m going to change the subject now for just a moment, and talk a little bit about the passages from the Bible I read earlier in the service. I didn’t really select these readings; they are actually the assigned Lectionary passages for this particular Sunday, but I wanted to give you a little taste of what they were talking about over at Saint Paul’s today, and also comment on these texts myself, because, believe it or not, both of them have actually been relatively important to me in my life, and I just wanted to share a little of that insight with you.
The selection from Genesis -- the story of Jacob wrestling with the Angel -- was the subject of the very first term paper I ever wrote at the Harvard Divinity School 23 years ago. I don’t recall the exact grade I got (although I do recall it wasn’t quite as high as I had hoped), but I do remember how excited I was when I came upon this passage for the first time. Having grown up Unitarian, I’d never really read that much of the Bible before, and I think I somewhat naively assumed that because it was all brand-new to me, it was new to the rest of the world as well, and that I was going to be the one to reveal to the world the true significance of this heroic, Promethean struggle of a man who refused to give up, and who wrestled God to a standstill in the middle of the night, and then at sunrise extorted a blessing from him. And I remember also while doing my research I came across a print of Paul Gauguin’s “Vision After the Sermon” (which I had never seen before either), and which I xeroxed, in color, as a frontispiece to my brilliant disquisition, and then three-hole punched and bound together in a clear plastic cover (exactly the sort of pretentious paper in a plastic cover I would later learn to dread as a professor), and turned in with the expectation of having my work recognized and praised in front of the entire class as the brilliant piece of innovative, groundbreaking Biblical Scholarship that I was certain that it was.
So much for the optimistic illusions of youth. What strikes me most now about this passage, 23 years later, is the story that leads up to it. How Jacob, as a middle-aged man, having already tricked his older brother Esau out of the parental blessing that was his brother’s birthright, and having consequently lived his entire adult life in exile in a foreign land, then becomes alienated from his father-in-law and is forced to leave that place as well and return home to the land of his birth, having no place else to go, still uncertain and afraid of the reception he may find there. And when he learns that his brother is approaching with a company of 400 (presumably armed) men, he divides his family into two groups, out of concern that if his brother massacres the first group, the second might still be able to escape. And then he is left alone, in the middle of the night, to wrestle with his Creator. And the point is not that Jacob was able to wrestle God to a standstill. The point is that the BEST you can expect when you wrestle with God is a stalemate, and a reluctant blessing at the dawn of a new day, which leaves you crippled, but with a new identity, limping away at sunrise into the rest of your life.
The passage from Paul’s Second Letter to Timothy (which, as you know, I’ve always kind of felt was written to me personally), and particularly the part about how “all scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness,” is often quoted by Fundamentalists as a proof text for the doctrine of Biblical Inerrency: God said it, I believe it, that settles it. But Unitarians have historically turned this proposition upside-down and inside-out: what makes something “scriptural,” for us, is the fact that it IS useful for teaching, etc. -- which is why these writings were included in the Bible in the first place. Something is not true just because it’s in the Bible; it’s in the Bible, because somebody thought that it was true. But some parts of the Bible are frankly a lot more useful than others, and likewise we are not limited only to the writings we have received, but are free to seek inspiration wherever we can find it, provided we are willing to be taught, reproved, corrected and trained for righteousness by whatever it is that we find. And what intrigues me most now about this passage is the part about the “itching ears,” and the admonition to “be persistent whether the time is favorable or unfavorable.” Because one of the greatest sources of misunderstanding about Unitarian Universalism is the stereotype that we are a people “who will not put up with sound doctrine,” who accumulate for ourselves teachers to suit our own desires, and who “turn away from listening to the truth” and instead “wander away to myths.”
And this just isn’t so. Unitarian Universalists are not people who are free to believe whatever we like. Unitarian Universalists are people who are compelled by conscience to believe what our reason and our experience tell us to be true, regardless of what other people may be telling us to believe. And we often find ourselves wrestling with difficult questions at times when others have simply accepted the congenial answer of the conventional wisdom. It is a profound matter of faith to believe that all men and women are our brothers and sisters and children of God, and then to act in the world accordingly. It takes a lot of courage to love your enemies, and to try to return good for evil, when everyone around you and all your own natural human instincts are urging you to blow them all to hell. And yet, as we wrestle with these questions, the radical truth of the Scripture becomes apparent to us, and makes us a little radical as well. We’re not just here, in a free church like this one, to parrot naively something we’ve heard repeated over and over again from time immemorial. We are here to discover whatever truth it may contain in our own hearts and in our own lives, and sometimes that takes a lifetime of heart-felt soul-searching until we finally begin to figure it out.
There’s just one more thing I want to talk about briefly here today, and then we can all sing together and go next door and eat cake and drink champagne. But shortly after Margaret and I left Texas and moved back to the Pacific Northwest, I found myself urgently in need of a drain cleaner, having foolishly tried to stuff all the potato peelings down the disposal at once, only to have them revolt and refuse to go. So the next morning I opened up the yellow pages and started looking: Roto Rooter, Rescue Rooter, Reliable Rooter...and then I saw an ad that was simply titled “The Sewer Man With a Conscience.” It even had a picture of a little angel working a drain-cleaning snake. So that was the number I called, and I told him my problem and where I lived and what my name was and at the end of the conversation he asked “Now, are you the same Tim Jensen who is the new Unitarian minister?”
Well, that kind of caught me off guard, as you might imagine -- it’s one thing when it happens on Nantucket, but Portland, Oregon, is a pretty big city; but it turned out that “the Sewer Man with a Conscience” was actually one of my new parishioners, and as we got to know one another better, it also turned out that John and I had the same birthday: October 22nd. I eventually left the ministry of that church, and a few years later John stopped attending there also, but we continued to live in the same part of town, and occasionally we would run into one another at the supermarket or a High School basketball game or our local brewpub. We were friends, although we didn’t really see one another that much. I was back in school working for my Ph.D. and traveling all over the Pacific Northwest on weekends to preach in small churches; John had only completed a year or two of college (so far as I know; it wasn’t really something he spoke that much about), and was working day and night trying to support his family and keep his business afloat. John was also a very talented musician, who was constantly trying to organize small, pick-up bands to go out and perform in clubs, following his passion and supplementing his income at the same time; while I can hardly carry the tune of a simple hymn unless I’ve heard it a million times. My daughter played competitive Volleyball for four years of High School and four years of College; John’s son competed in the Special Olympics, and John was his basketball coach. So our lives were similar, but they were also very different; mostly though we just kind of liked one another, and enjoyed each other’s company, even though we didn’t really get together very often.
And then the week before I left to move out here, I got a message on my answering machine from a mutual friend telling me that John was dying of lung cancer, and that he had just come home from the hospital and was under the care of hospice. So naturally, I phoned over to the house, and went out there that afternoon to visit with him and his family, and to say goodbye; and sometime that following week, while Parker and I were driving across the country to come here, John passed away. So John won’t be here to celebrate his birthday today. But I hope that all of you will join with me and help me in celebrating it for him. He was truly a very remarkable guy; I feel privileged to have known him; and the world will be a lesser place, without his presence in it.
posted by The Eclectic Cleric at 2:42 PM
