Some of you will remember me from many years ago when I served an internship with your congregation. Others will recognize me as a UU minister in the area or as an occasional guest in your pulpit. And to some, I’ll be meeting you for the first time. Now, I return, from “Intern” to “Interim” meaning even those who “knew me when” will need to meet me again in a new role. We will be talking this Fall about the ways we create, discover, and share, our identities.

Watch the video of this worship service.

I am very excited to be with you this morning.

Not as a guest preacher…

Not as a consultant, or a friend…

Not as the President of the Pacific Southwest Chapter of the UUMA…

And not as your intern, as I once was

But as your actual, official, honest-to-God, interim minister…

Your minister.

(singing) “At last my love has come along”

It’s been a long strange trip.

I was this congregation’s Intern Minister from 1996 to 1998 while I completed my last two years of seminary at the Claremont School of Theology.  Your minister at the time, Rev. Sue Spencer was my Intern Supervisor.  I met with an Internship Committee, some of whom are still in this congregation.  I preached for you occasionally, and sat in on board meetings, and led classes, and practiced all the things that ministers need to learn how to do, before I actually had to do them for a church of my own.

            It was a great experience for me.  I have fond memories.

After seminary I served churches all around the Los Angeles area.  First at Verdugo Hills, then the congregation in Santa Clarita.  I served the Los Angeles church in Koreatown for nine years, then did an interim ministry with the Long Beach UU church.  For the last year I’ve been a contract minister with the UU Fellowship of Kern County, up in Bakersfield, and I’ve been consulting with the Sepulveda UU Society formerly known as “The Onion”.

With every new position I always felt I was circling around Studio City.  Like a fly circling around a crumb.

Every time I was in transition, you were settled with your own minister:  Jay Atkinson, or Darrel Richey, or Hannah Petrie.

And every time you were seeking a new minister, I would be settled somewhere else.

And now, at last…

I’ve landed.

So to some of you, I say hello, again.  You remember me as that long-ago intern.

To others of you, you know me more casually, because I’ve been involved in Unitarian Universalism in Los Angeles for so many years.  

Many of you, I’m sure have never met me before.

And maybe, for some of you, today is your first day ever at a UU church, and you are wondering, what the hell is going on, and why is this guy going on and on like he was some long-lost Danny Boy finally making his way back to County Clare?

But the point I want to make today, as much as there is time for a spiritual point in the midst of all the excitement that comes occasionally, on a day like today, in the life of a church, is that whether you know me or don’t know me, or think you know me, if you only knew me when, then you don’t really know me.

And I don’t really know you, either.

You might remember that intern minister named Ricky Hoyt, but you don’t know the Interim Minister named Rick Hoyt-McDaniels

You might remember that young man twenty-five years ago who was so excited and eager, and talented and fun, and let’s face it, a little full of himself.  But you don’t know the bitter old crumedgeon he’s become!

I’m not the person I used to be.  And neither are you.  None of us are.

            To remember a person, is literally to put them back together again, in your mind.

            To re-member, is to put back together an experience that has come apart.  To remember is to reattach the members that have become separated.  Like the members of a body.  Or the members of a church.  Brought together again.  What was dismembered is remembered.

            That piece from over there.  That piece from here.  That piece from a year ago.  That piece from twenty-five years ago.

But if you’re remembering me as the person I was twenty-five years ago, well, that isn’t the me that’s standing here today.  I today, in many ways, am as new to those of you who knew me when as I am new to the person next to you, who’s never met me.

Our memories of the past may be fond ones, but our present task isn’t to re-member each other, but to meet each other today, in this present time, in these present lives, in the persons we need to be for each now.  

As an intern, I was here to learn.  And you served as my teaching congregation.  A gift from you I’ve always cherished.  But we have different work to do together now.

As an Interim Minister, my role is to help you pass through an interim period between the leaving of one settled minister and the search for and the hoped-for calling of this congregation’s next settled minister.

To help make that next settled ministry successful, we have some work to:  the work of the interim.  We will look at the systems of the church.  We will examine what’s working and what’s not.  We will ask the question, “what happened to you?”  We will look further back than recent history to see if we’ve become unconscious to long-standing habits that keep repeating unhelpfully.

We will explore together, and question together, and comfort together, and heal together.

            And we will prepare for the future, by strengthening the church’s support structure:  strong leadership, helpful policy, good boundaries, healthy communication, bonds of friendship, love, shared faith.

            Most centrally, we will ask the question of identity, “Who are we?”  Who are we, now, as a congregation.  What do we care about?  What’s our congregational character?  What do we want to do together?  Because you’ll need to be clear about who you are before you ask minister to partner with you.

We will spend the next several months in worship together looking more closely at the spiritual question of identity.

The Buddhists talk about the fiction of a permanent, existing thing, called the self.  Buddhism teaches there is no lasting self that endures throughout our lives, or even from one moment to the next.  The self is no more permanent than is any other material thing.

            Actually, we move through a constant series of momentary beginnings and endings.  One form of existence, in its dying, influences the creation of a subsequent form of existence, and due to that influence from the past, the present moment can appear very like the one before, but nothing permanent actually carries over.  We don’t change greatly, from moment to moment, but change is constant.  And every “we” or “I” is gone forever as soon as it’s had its momentary existence.

It’s only due to our ability to remember the past that we link up all of these discrete forms of existence to create the experience of a long chain of being, stretching back to our earliest childhood, and we call that thing, completely fancifully, “I”.

I was born in Phoenix, Arizona, though I don’t remember it.

I remember riding my tricycle in the backyard of my house in Klamath Falls, Oregon, and being stung by a yellow-jacket wasp that emerged from its nest in a broken wall.

            I remember sitting beside my grandmother on the piano bench as she taught me to play.

            I remember sleeping in bunk beds, now in Santa Monica, with my little brother in the bunk below me.

I remember breaking my arm.

I remember playing the clarinet.

I remember a terrible crush I had on one of my teachers in high school

            I remember failing at UCLA, and thriving at Cal Arts.

I remember working through the AIDS crisis at AIDS Project Los Angeles.

I remember the first day I walked into a Unitarian Universalist Church.

            I remember sitting in my office here upstairs, meeting with my Internship Committee.

Some of those memories feel like me, when I re-member them.

But for most of my life, the “me” they happened to feels very distant.  I see an image of myself as though I were looking at someone else.  He’s a guy I feel sympathy for, or fondness, but I don’t feel identity.  That little Ricky Hoyt seems like a good kid.  I like him.  I smile for him when I remember his successes.  I ache for him when I think of him struggling through the tough years of adolescence.  I admire his audacity as a young man.  I wonder about some of the choices he made as a young adult.  I forgive his naivete.  He feels like a character I could write a story about.  Or someone I once knew.  But he doesn’t feel like me.

He leads to me, but he doesn’t add up to me.

My husband Jim and I did quite a bit of traveling this summer.

We took a big trip to Italy.  And we took smaller trips to Cedar City, Utah for the Shakespeare festival, and to Santa Fe for the opera.

There are two experiences of the traveling itself that I particularly remember.

One, was during our flight to Venice.  We flew out of LAX late in the evening, and arrived at the Paris airport the next morning.  Then we changed planes and flew on to Venice that morning.

I had the window seat and I looked out the window for the whole two hours.  The suburbs of Paris became farmland, and then hills.  And then we crossed the alps, and the mountains came up and there was snow, and glaciers.  And then across the other side, the mountains fell away, and there was farmland again, and little villages, and rivers, and roads, and then we arrived at the Marco Polo airport outside Venice.

The other traveling experience I remember was driving from LA to Cedar City Utah, which is about two hours past Las Vegas in the southwestern corner of Utah.  We drove out the 10, and up the 15.  We stopped for breakfast in Victorville, and then on to Barstow.  And then across the Mojave Desert, past Baker.  Beyond Baker there was a terrific monsoon storm.  And then we were past the rain, and we came into Las Vegas.  Then more desert, and some scattered rain showers, and then up the Virgin River, past St. George, and into Cedar City.

In both these experiences, I was struck by the way the earth connects mile by mile, or inch by inch.  One thing follows the next.  It’s this and then that, and then that.  First Paris, then farms, then the alps, then farms again, then Venice.  First LA, then Victorville, then the desert, then a storm, then Las Vegas, then more desert, then a river, then Cedar City.

Paris is not Venice, but there’s a path that connects them.  Venice is its own thing not the sum of all the miles you pass before you get there.  LA is not Cedar City, and what’s between LA and Cedar City is very different from either of them.  But it’s all connected.  There are no gaps in existence.  If you just follow the path you get there from here.

Change is always happening but subtly, subtly.  Everywhere, every time, it just feels like, “and now there’s this.” And then there’s this.  And then there’s this.

And before you know it, that sweet kid has become an adult.  Not by holding on to a permanent self, but by allowing each moment to live its full existence, and then to let it go.

It’s as though we’re all pilgrims, walking through a journey of our lives.  But it’s a strange kind of pilgrimage where each pilgrim, after one step, is replaced by a nearly identical but not quite the same pilgrim, who also takes a single step, before being replaced by another.

We must have the grace to let our past selves go.  They lived then, not now.  That kid doesn’t exist any more.  That young man is long gone.  That person who thought those things, or could do those things, is not the person in front of you now.  This person thinks some different things, maybe better things.  This person can do different things, maybe more, maybe fewer.  If we want to stay in love with one person for a long time, we must fall in love again everyday with the person that are that day, not cling to the person they were when we first fell in love, 40 years ago.

And the same is true for congregations.  Our past leads to us but doesn’t define us.  We aren’t the Christ Memorial Unity Church we were when Herb Schneider founded this congregation in 1943.  We aren’t who we were when you joined, or when I did my internship here, or who we were last year.

We are free.

“A freedom that reveres the past, but trusts the dawning future more.”

We are new today.  Ever new.

So we have a big adventure ahead of us.

We’re about to start a new church year, together.

We’re starting anew, with a new minister, and many new people in leadership positions.

You’ve been through a rough year, or maybe more than a year.  Perhaps you’re feeling broken, or betrayed.  Perhaps you’re just exhausted.  Perhaps you’re relieved.

In some ways the church became dis-membered over the last few years.  It came apart.  And now is the time to do the work of remembering, not who we were but who we are, and who we will be.  Our interim work is to bring the past forward, so long as it’s helpful and healing, and also to recognize when it’s best to let it go and let the new creation come.

Like any big adventure this one feels exciting, but maybe also a little scary. 

Perhaps you’re feeling bold and ready to explore.  Or perhaps you’re feeling doubtful and dubious.  Unsure of your own skills.  And unsure of me.

Have we got what it takes?  Well we have each other and that’s a lot.

I know you’re hoping for the best.  I am too.

But hope can feel a long way from confidence.

(singing) What will this year be like?

I wonder

What will our future be?

I wonder.

It could be so exciting to be serving the church that launched me

My heart should be wildly rejoicing.

Oh what’s the matter with me?

I’ve always longed for adventure,

to do the things I’ve never dared

Now here I’m facing adventure,

Then why am I so scared?

A church with a hundred members,

What’s so fearsome about that?

Oh I must stop these doubts, all these worries.

If I don’t I just know I’ll turn back.

I must dream of the things I am seeking.

I am seeking the courage I lack.

The courage to serve them with reliance,

Face our mistakes without defiance,

Show them I’m worthy and while I show them

They’ll show me, so

We will tackle all our problems

We’ll do better than our best

I have confidence they’ll put me to the test.

But no need to fuss, I have confidence in us.

Somehow I will impress them.

I will be firm but kind.

And all those committee chairs

Heaven bless them,

They will look up to me and mind me!

With each day I am more certain.

Ev’rything will turn out fine.

I have confidence our dreams can all come true.

Though starting a-new I have confidence in you.

All our dreams we give our hearts to

We will do what we must do.

I have confidence our love will see us through!

I have confidence in U U C S C!

Besides which, it’s true, I have confidence in you!