As we begin our exploration of the spiritual question of Identity, “Who am I?” you might be curious to know something about me. What’s my story? What’s my theology? What are my ministerial credentials? What are my personal passions? Why is it, when we’re asked to introduce ourselves, that some pieces of our lives seem important and others not?
Watch the video of this worship service
About ten years ago, when I was the minister at the Los Angeles UU church in Koreatown, I had a member of the congregation who was also a practicing member of a Buddhist community.
One day, she told me that she was part of a study group at the Buddhist community where a group of people were reading one of the books written by the founder of this particular Buddhist sect. The book laid out this particular man’s interpretation of Buddhist teaching and practice.
The study group was reading this book very closely, very thoroughly, and very slowly. In fact, they planned to take an entire year to read just this one, not unusually long, book.
They would read only a few pages each week. And they would read those same few pages over and over, both on their own, and out loud to each other. The goal was to glean not just the high-level meaning, but to let the words themselves seep into their consciousness. They were looking to be changed by the text. They were reading with the intent not just to understand the ideas of the founder of their sect, but to enter into his consciousness, and to let themselves be transformed.
I heard this woman’s plan with a mixture of fascination and revulsion, frankly.
I was worried about the cult-like quality of such deep reverence for the founder. It felt unhealthy to give so much credence to the words of a single person, who was certainly just as human and flawed as the rest of us. My approach to spirituality is to cast my net widely and learn from as many wisdom sources as I can. I couldn’t imagine any single person whose mind I cared to enter that deeply, or who I trusted that completely. Nor could I imagine any book I thought was worthy of that kind of year-long, focused attention.
You know, I like Moby Dick very much, but I don’t want it to enter my consciousness to that extent. I understand that many people memorize large portions of scripture, but that doesn’t seem a profitable exercise for the way I understand spirituality.
So part of me worried for this woman. And I did some research on her Buddhist community to satisfy myself that she wasn’t getting involved in anything dangerous.
She wasn’t. She was just taking her religion very seriously.
So another part of me admired what she was doing.
Wouldn’t it be exciting, I thought, to think of our spiritual journeys in our Unitarian Universalist congregations as something where we could really devote ourselves, to do really serious work, and with the intention that we would not just spend an interesting year together, but we would emerge together, at the end of the year, deeply knowing something we didn’t know before, really changed: transformed?
And then I thought of the year that was upcoming in my own spiritual community, the First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles, and I found the comparison paltry.
What were we planning?
A year of Board meetings, and choir rehearsals, and Sunday lunches, and meetings of the book club, and so on, and all of that would be very fine. We would definitely learn a few things. And we would do good work together. But I imagined we would end that year very like we began that year, personally and as a community, everyone a year-older, but not transformed in any meaningful way.
I looked particularly at the program for the church year that I had most personal and direct control over, my preaching calendar. And I decided to make a change that I have continued with every year since.
Prior to that conversation with that woman in my congregation, I arranged my worship year the way most Unitarian Universalist ministers do, and the way I had learned from previous ministers. That is, I was what is called, a “topical” preacher.
Each week, I would choose a subject for my sermon based on whatever I happened to be reading, or a story I happened to hear, or something curious that had happened to me and made me think. Sometimes a sermon idea would respond to what was in the news, or a conversation with a friend, or something happening in the congregation.
That’s topical preaching. Every Sunday is its own independent event. From one week to another the subjects range all over the place, and disconnected from each other.
Lately, many of our congregations have adopted a different way of organizing worship called thematic preaching.
In this case, the minister and the worship team assign a theme for each month of the church year. A lot of congregations subscribe to a service that gives them the themes, the most popular one is called Soul Matters,. So this year the Soul Matters theme for September is Belonging, October is Courage, November is Change, and so on. Soul Matters was designed to assist congregations that didn’t have a minister, but many churches with minister use it, too. Soul Matters is a UU organization by the way.
But for me, thematic preaching has the same problem as topical preaching. The themes are arbitrary, and they don’t add up to anything. It’s one monthly theme after another, just as topical preaching is one week after another. They are important spiritual themes, but there’s no larger goal of taking on a course of work in our spiritual lives, with the intention of being different people at the end of the year, changed, deepened, transformed.
I wanted worship to be more than a morning’s entertainment, but to be a practice that lifted us into a different sense of being. What if we could take our Unitarian Universalism as seriously, as this woman’s Buddhist study group took the project of reading a single book for a year?
So, here’s how I organize worship, now.
During the summer, I choose some big spiritual project I want to work on. I project with some heft that I think would be profitable for the congregation’s spiritual development. Then I lay that project over the course of the entire church year, from September through June. I organize the material in work for the Fall, the Winter, and the Spring. Then I further assign each week it’s own sub-theme. All arranged so that one week leads to the next in a logical order, one week building on the week before, and always moving forward toward the larger goal.
It’s a very different idea for Unitarian Universalist worship, but it’s really not so unusual. Most churches following a liturgical year. Christian churches trace the story of Jesus’ life from Advent to Jesus’ birth, to his death and resurrection and on through the history of the church. Jewish congregations read the Torah in its entirety every year, and then when they finish re-roll the scroll back to the beginning and start again.
And, of course, the school year, arranges itself this way. There’s a subject to be studied, with a syllabus that assigns topics and readings for every week, and the intention that by the time you get to the end of the year you will have deeply engaged with the material and achieved some mastery of it.
If it’s good enough for a community college course in statistics or psychology, why couldn’t we do the same with a year at a Unitarian Universalist church? Shouldn’t our faith be treated as seriously as art history 101?
So I have a year planned for us.
Now this year, in thinking about what might be appropriate for us to spend a year on, I had a bit of a challenge, and a bit of an opportunity.
My challenge was that I’m starting a new ministry with you, so I don’t really know you that well, and I can’t really know what spiritual subjects you might be curious about, or might be useful for you to explore.
But my opportunity in choosing a subject for the year, is that I’m starting an interim ministry with you, and the interim work comes with its own particular assignments of subjects for the congregation to work on as you prepare yourselves for searching for and calling your next settled minister.
So here’s what I have planned for us to work on in the coming church year.
I’d like us to look at the three core issues of spirituality. These are the spiritual issues of Identity, Meaning, and Purpose.
I like to phrase these as questions: the three spiritual questions. The question of identity, “who am I?” The question of meaning, “why does it matter?” And the question of purpose, “what should I do?”
The question of identity means asking who am I truly? What is the real me? Is there an inner nature I need to uncover, buried under bad habits and a history of experiences that shaped me in a particular direction and maybe steered me away from my true divine self? Am I a self-defined individual, or am I defined by a web of community relationships and roles expected of me?
The question of identity also includes the question, “Who are we?” as human beings. Are we inherently good, or evil, or neutral? Are we immortal beings with a soul that enjoys or suffers a continued existence after death, or are we finite beings, dependent on our physical bodies and death means the end? Are we more like animals, or angels?
Identity, also touches on one of the core areas of work this congregation will need to accomplish as you prepare to search for and call a settled minister. Who are we, the UU church of Studio City? What’s our character? What’s our personality? What kind of people are we? Before we can confidently answer, “what kind of minister would be the best fit for leading us? We need to know who us, is.
Starting in January, we’ll turn to looking at the spiritual question of meaning, “why does it matter?” which concerns ethics and morals. Why be good? Why do we care? Why do we value what we value? Why do we covenant each Sunday to, “To dwell together in peace, to seek knowledge in freedom, to serve humanity in fellowship”? Why does it matter?
And then in the spring we will turn to the last of the three spiritual issues, the issue of purpose. The question, “What should we do?”
That last question is another core area for interim work, the question of mission. Why does this congregation exist? What are you gathered together for? Before you can search for the right minister to walk with you, you have to know where you’re going.
So hopefully, by the end of this year, we all will have thought a little more deeply about the key concepts of spirituality. Who am I, individually? Who are we, as human beings? Who are we as a congregation? Why does it matter? What do I care about? What do we care about? How can I live my life in a way that honors my true nature and my core values? What should we be doing together as a Unitarian Universalist community?
In our opening hymn this morning, we sang together, “We will all do our own naming.”
That’s an affirmation the one of the primary goals of a healthy spirit is to be able to say clearly and proudly who we are. Who we truly are, freed from any negative messages we were told as children or any negative messages we learned to tell ourselves. Free from pride or arrogance. Free from delusions of being better than we really are, or somehow being the one person who ever existed that can judge the world entirely objectively without bias.
As Renee Segall shared in the words of our chalice lighting this morning, “Pulled in many directions by the demands of our days…” we arrive on Sunday, “Longing for lights that lead us back to our truest selves.”
What a gift that would be to know ourselves truly, and to name ourselves honestly, and to love ourselves compassionately!
What a gift a faith like Unitarian Universalism is, and a congregation like this one is, that in the words of our call to worship, “welcomes us as we are, from wherever we have come.” but then, in the words of our third principle, encourages us to spiritual growth.”
Today we had the wonderful privilege of welcoming new members into our community
We asked each new member to introduce themselves, and because I’ve been thinking about the question of identity, and how we name ourselves, and how I might introduce myself to you as I join your community, I thought about what I might say to you.
How do we introduce ourselves? What do we choose to say? And why?
I might say that I was raised in Santa Monica. And that except for being born in Phoenix, Arizona and spending a few years in Klamath Falls, Oregon, I’ve spent my whole life in Los Angeles. I went to UCLA for two years. I graduated from California Institute of the Arts with a degree in music composition. After college, for ten years, from 1985 to 1995, I worked with the AIDS Project Los Angeles, first as a volunteer, then as the Personnel Assistant, and finally as the Human Resources Manager. Most of what I learned about suffering, and compassion, and life and death, and effective work for social change, I learned during those years during the AIDS crisis.
I first attended a Unitarian church in 1991, the Unitarian church in Santa Monica. I started seminary in 1995. I did my internship with this congregation from 1996 to 1998, which is also the year I graduated from seminary and was fellowshipped and ordained.
My career as a UU minister has been rewarding. I’m proud of what I’ve done, and enjoyed myself. I’ve served the congregations of Verdugo Hills, and Santa Clarita, and Los Angeles, Long Beach, and last year in Bakersfield. I’ve been a consultant with other churches, a guest preacher in many pulpits, a mentor to student ministers, a UUMA chapter president, a justice ministry board member, and a consultant on national initiatives with the UUA. I’ve mostly loved my work, and once or twice had my heart-broken about this work.
As I thought about what I might say to you, to introduce myself, I realized that no introduction ever says very much. I’m sixty years old. But even if I was ten years old, I couldn’t put all of who I am in a paragraph or two. All those parts of me I left out. Joys and sorrows, relationships, hopes, fears, doubts, big successes, little stories. Moments of laughter, and treasured memories, experiences I was lucky to do once, and experiences I never want to repeat.
What an introduction really is, is not a life, but an invitation. An introduction gives just enough information to find a way in, to ask for more. Oh you grew up in Santa Monica? You have a degree in music? Tell me more!
What we’re interested in is not introductions, but relationships. Not a different taste, week after week, but a full meal. We want depth. We want to go slow, to savor. To turn an idea this way and that. We want not just to meet you, but to know you, meaning to let your life enter my life, and thus to change me, so by our encounter we both come out, transformed.
Identity, can’t be reduced to a chronological telling of our life stories, even if we had time to write a memoir and read it. Identity is revealed, and also created in the first place, by sharing just a little, asking a curious question of ourselves or a friend, then sharing a little more, and probing a little further.
Introductions are a necessary place to start, but friends, new members, new minister, long-time members, our journey together is barely begun. I’m excited for a year of all of us exploring who we are, and sharing what we discover with each other.
“on and on the circle’s moving,
sisters, brothers, all.”