Good Morning.

I’m excited to preach for you this first time.

This is my 20th year in the ministry, and also the fourth church I’ve served as minister, but, interestingly (you might find this interesting, who knows?) this is the first time I’ve ever had to preach a sermon to a congregation that I didn’t already have a relationship with.

Let me explain.

The first church I served, starting back in 1998, just after I got my MDiv from Claremont School of Theology, was the Unitarian Universalist Church of the Verdugo Hills in La Crescenta, which is the north end of Glendale.  But when I started at the Verdugo Hills church I had already been preaching to that congregation once a month for about a year and a half while I did my internship down the road at Studio City.  So I already knew the Verdugo Hills congregation.

After I had been at Verdugo Hills for three years, a new congregation started getting themselves formed up in Santa Clarita and they asked me to preach for them once a month.  I did that for two years, and then, in 2003, I resigned from the Verdugo Hills church and became the half time, and then, later, the three quarter time minister at Santa Clarita.  So by then, in 2003, I had already been preaching to the Santa Clarita church for two years.

I served Santa Clarita until 2010, but in 2009, something similar happened.  The Los Angeles church had an opening for a quarter-time minister and asked me to work with them.  Again I served two churches for a time, until, in 2010 the Los Angeles church asked me to be their full time minister and I resigned my ministry at Santa Clarita.

So I’ve always had this experience of sliding from one pulpit into the next, and my first official day in the new position looking not too much different from the week before.

That makes a difference, and that’s why preaching to you today is an interesting challenge.

Preaching is a very particular kind of public speaking.  Preaching is not the same as giving a lecture, or a talk.  Preaching arises from a relationship.  I am your preacher, for the next two and half years.  It’s a particular role, not a generic role.  I am your minister.  My task, during worship, is not to speak at you, but to speak for you.  The minister’s role, in preaching, is to lift up the concerns and issues and spirit and wonder and wonderings of the congregation, pass them through my own experiences and education and with the inspiration of the spirit give them back to you.  Preaching is not a performance by a minister.  Preaching is an element of worship.  A minister’s role is to lead your worship, our worship, a rite that we all participate in together.

So you can see why a first sermon presents a challenge.  How can I speak for you when I don’t know you?  How can I preach to you when I don’t yet know you well enough to know what’s turning in your hearts and minds and spirits?

So for the first couple of weeks, as I get to know you and the church, I’ll have to guess.  So here’s what I guess:

You’ll probably want to know something about me.  Who is this person who’s come to be with us for two and a half years?  Will I like him? What’s he going to do?  Is he going to love us, the way Judy Tomlinson loved us, and Mitra Rahnema loved us?  Where is he going to take us?  Will I want to go there?  Will he be helpful in getting me where I want to go?  Does he understand the unique and special community that is the Long Beach church?  Will he respect how important this church is?  Will he realize that this church is where my heart has lived for blah, blah years?

How am I doing?  Do those sound like your questions this morning?

And maybe those questions are particularly present this morning, and my presence standing here this morning particularly shocking, because I’m an interim minister and I came to be with you through an interim search process which is so different from what you will go through for your next settled minister.

I was hired by your Board of Trustees.  You didn’t get to vote.  And you didn’t get to participate to a large extent in the search process.  When you get ready to start the search for your next settled minister there will be a much more extensive and inclusive process:  a deep dive into gathering hopes and dreams from the church members, a several months-long process of your Search Committee getting to know potential ministers and those ministers getting to know you, resulting, finally, in the Search Committee bringing you all a candidate who will spend a week and two Sundays preaching to you and getting to know you, before you have your vote to call.

You will know your next settled minister pretty well before they start, and they will know you.  No sliding from one ministry into the next, or starting cold, the way I did this time.

So with me here today, the result of an effective, but shortened, Interim Ministry search process, this may be the first time that some of you have ever seen me.

So hello!

I’m your Interim Minister!

So let me start (finally, when is he going to start?) by answering a few of those questions I guessed you might be asking earlier.

Who am I?

Well I told you a little of my background as a minister.  I’ve been in this business 20 years.  I’ve served three churches, all in Los Angeles County.  This is my fourth church.

Prior to starting at the Verdugo Hills Church I was in seminary at the Claremont School of Theology, and I did a two year, part time, internship at the Studio City church.  Prior to that I was a lay-person in the congregation at the Santa Monica UU church.  

I grew up in Santa Monica, although I was actually born in Phoenix, Arizona and I also lived briefly in Klamath Falls, Oregon before my family moved to Santa Monica when I was 5 years old.  I have three brothers, no sisters.  I’m number 3 in the birth order.

I went to public schools in Santa Monica.  My mother taught sixth grade at the same elementary school I attended.  My dad worked for a sister company of the Rand Corporation called SDC:  Systems Development Corporation.

I was a good kid.  Well behaved.  Good in school.  I most enjoyed music.  I played the piano (still play) and the clarinet, and I was in all the school bands and orchestras.

After high school I went to Santa Monica College for a year, and UCLA for two years, and then I transferred to California Institute of the Arts and majored in music composition.  I graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1985.

I worked for a couple of years at a bookstore in Hermosa Beach after graduating, but the mid-80s was also the time that the HIV epidemic was becoming a serious health crisis, so I started volunteering at the AIDS Project Los Angeles.  In 1987 my volunteer work became a full time job (another example of my pattern of sliding slowly into new jobs).  I worked at AIDS Project Los Angeles from 1987 until 1995, first as the Personnel Assistant and then eventually as the Director of Human Resources.  In 1995 I left APLA to go to seminary.

My family attended the Methodist church when I was growing up.  But I stopped going to the Methodist church around age 13.  Two things made me stop.  One was that I had just gone through the confirmation class where the church asks you to confirm your childhood Baptism by, as an adult, agreeing to the teachings of the church.  I realized in that class that I really didn’t agree to a lot of the Christian doctrines.  I don’t believe in the divinity of Jesus.  I don’t believe that there is a mystical, or supernatural reality that doesn’t conform to logic or the laws of physics.  And I can’t reconcile the doctrine of a loving, omnipotent God who would allow the suffering we see on earth or who would create a Hell of eternal suffering for some after death.

Sounds like a Unitarian Universalist, doesn’t it?

I also felt a need to separate from the Methodist church as a 13 year old kid, because I was discovering my sexuality as a gay man and the Methodist teaching was then, and still is, unbelievably, that homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching.

I was happily unchurched for the next 15 years, like a lot of teens and young adults.  I was spiritually fed through art and music, which is still an important part of my spirituality.  The response of many of the Christian churches during the AIDS crisis affirmed my sense that I had no need or interest in ever being part of a religious community.  And then, in 1990, at the age of 28, a boyfriend at the time took me to the Unitarian Universalist Community Church of Santa Monica and, well, here I am.

Don’t worry.  I’m not usually going to talk so much about myself.

So just one more thing to say about my resume.

You can see that I come to you with a love for church community that I learned from my parents.  I come to you with an arts and music background; that’s helpful for worship.  I come to you with a background in non-profit administration; that’s useful for the technical parts of running the “business” of a church.  And my call to get involved with AIDS work and then my comfort with joining the Santa Monica Unitarian Universalist church comes from my need to be active in the important social issues of the day, based on liberal spiritual principles of the unique and cherished, diverse and blessed, natures of every individual combined with the essential truth of all existence being inextricably connected into a single and universal divine reality.

So here I am, with all that, at your service, for the next two and a half years.

My role, as your Interim Ministry, my service to you, will be to step into the moving stream of this church’s journey, to move with you for a little while, through some rough water, perhaps, and hopefully some gentle patches, and then in June of 2020, to step out from the stream, to shake myself off, and then wave goodbye from the shore as you all continue your journey with your new settled minister.

I’ll be with you two years, plus sixth months so that you get back on the normal church year cycle of ministers starting in the summer rather than in January.  And more or less we can imagine that we will spend about a year looking backward, and about a year looking forward.

The backward year will continue the work of healing from the pain of Mitra’s resignation that Judy already began.  And we will look more deeply, too at the history of the church.  Other stories.  Proud moments and painful ones.  Maybe patterns that get repeated.  An embedded culture.  Lessons from the past.  The aim is to get a clear understanding of who you are, good and bad, obvious and hidden, conscious and unconscious, getting as much of your identity as possible lifted to the surface so we can ask, what is essential, what should we let go of, what is crucial to keep, what is keeping us from being the church we want to be?

The forward year will be the year of search for your new settled minister.  With a more certain understanding of who you are and what you want to do, you can search for the right minister to help take you there.

So we have an interesting couple of years together in the life of this church.  Sort of a hinge year, connecting a past and a future, with two sides of the hinge swinging back and forth.  You were in one room of the church’s history for the last several years.  We’re going to move through the doorway of these hinge years now.  And then you’ll step through into a new room of this church with your new minister.

Or, to use the metaphor of a stream, again, we’re at a bend.  The stream gets a little confused here for awhile.  Sorry about that.  Things might get uncomfortable.  The path forward isn’t clear.  The stream circles back on itself for a time and meanders.  But eventually the stream will find its new way forward again, and with clear water and the gentle pull of certain gravity, off you will go.

So now I’ve stepped into the stream with you.  And in a little while, I will step out again.

But that’s not so different from you, is it?

You stepped into the stream some time ago when you first joined the church.  That might have been a long time ago for some of you.  Today’s the very first day at the church for our guests, just like for me.  Our visitors are hesitant and just getting their toes wet.

And sometime, eventually, all of you will step out of the stream, as well, one way or another.  The only difference between me and you is that I already know the date I will leave:  June 2020.

But we’re all interims, aren’t we?  We all joined a church that had a history before we got here.  We learned the stories of the course of the stream upstream from where we stepped in.  We will float and dive and swim and splash for awhile, go through some terrain on the course downstream from here.  And then step out and leave the church to carry on without us.

So you know interim work.  We’re all interims.

Hello Interims!

Even in life, we’re all interims.

Thousands of years of human culture prior to our birth.  Millions of years of evolution.  Billions of years since the beginning of it all.  We have our brief window of life, doing our thing, adding our piece.  And then we hand it off to whomever, whatever comes next, and we step out of the stream.

As David Eaton observed in our Opening Words:

“All living substance, all substance of energy, being, and purpose, 

are united and share the same destiny.

Birth—Life—Death

Unknown—Known—Unknown

Our destiny: from unknown to unknown.”

Knowing that there’s an ending coming, even if we don’t know the exact date, gives a special purpose and meaning to the time we have together.  Knowing that we’re in a limited period of knowing and that the unknown is approaching, is always approaching, the unknown is always approaching because that’s the nature of the future even while we live, gives a special quality to the present.

Let us recognize the power and the possibility of being here now.  Let’s do what we can do, while we can.  Let’s enjoy the pleasures of this day, and the company of these fellow companions who happen to be with us on this portion of the journey.  Look around, go ahead, and cherish these wonderful people who dived into the wonderful stream with you and are swimming beside you.

Give thanks for these, life’s holy times, moments of grief, days of delight.

Work hard, and diligently, and faithfully, to move the mission of this church forward so you can be proud to hand off what you have done, to the next swimmer who will take your place.

If you’ve been swimming for awhile welcome the newer ones, still unaccustomed to the water.  If like me, you’re new in these waters, learn the strokes and strategies from those around you, and also lend us your fresh energy and bold imagination to take us further on the way then we’ve yet gone.

Let your swimming, floating, diving, paddling, be done in love.  With care and concern for those in our shared enterprise.  And when the time comes to step out, and you will step out, Part in peace, and let love be your legacy.