Mission, whether a personal mission or the mission of an institution like a church, lies at the intersection of self-identity and social need. Sometimes the call to act comes from an urge to express our inner self. Other times the call to act comes from a need of the world outside ourselves demanding our response. The life and work of Martin Luther King, Jr. models both the inner and outer call.
After a couple of months in worship looking at the question of leadership, we now turn to look at the question of Mission.
We are working, this year, through the five tasks of an interim ministry, aiming to prepare for the search for your next Settled Minister, to call the minister who will be the best possible match for who you are and what you want to do, and to strengthen the physical, social and spiritual infrastructure of the congregation to make the coming ministry successful.
We started this church year with a couple of months of looking at our church history, asking what are the themes and patterns that have unfolded in this congregation over the 80 years from our founding and what lessons, positive and negative, can we learn from that history.
Then we looked at Leadership, asking what are the qualities that make for healthy, successful leaders, both lay leaders in the congregation, and what we want to look for, and watch out for, as we select our next professional leader.
The question of Mission is the question of what do we want to do as a church community? And Mission is related to the fourth Interim ministry task, Vision, which is the question, where do we want to go? We will look at Mission and Vision together from now through Easter.
And for the final months of our church year: April, May, and June, we will look at the final interim ministry task: Connections, which is the task of placing our congregation and our work within the larger network of Unitarian Universalist churches, and other community partners in our Studio City neighborhood.
Mission is the spiritual question of “What should I do?” We looked at that question quite extensively a year ago. But rather than talk about specific work of a congregation, instead, I preached about general strategies that are helpful in doing whatever work we might choose to do.
You might remember that I advised to build a broad coalition focused on a shared goal and not exclude people merely because you disagree on some unrelated issue. I advised that you be clear about what your work will look like when you’re done, and not let the mission creep. I advised that you remember to keep your work focused on relieving the real suffering of real people, rather than upholding an abstract ideology of what “ought” to be. And I advised that you receive gratefully all contributions, understanding that not everyone shares your passion, and not judging a small effort as being insufficiently devoted to the cause.
All those sermons are available online, by the way, if you want to read or view them again.
As we pick up the issue of Mission again, this year, I want to focus now on the specific work of a church, “What should we do?” As a church, what should be our work?
Let’s begin by considering that the answer to the spiritual question, “What should I do?” comes from a combination of two sources: internal and external.
What should I do, depends on an inner knowledge of who I am. My unique self. My gifts. My skills. My desires. My interests.
And What should I do, also depends on the needs of the world around me. This particular moment. What’s available to me. What’s possible to do. What the world values, and is willing to pay for. What should I do depends on the particular point we find ourselves at on the long arc of the moral universe that bends toward justice.
The first sense, the internal sense of who we really are, is marked in the Christian holiday of Epiphany, which is celebrated on January 6 each year, the twelfth day of Christmas. Also known as Three Kings Day.
This is the day when the Kings, or Magi, from the East arrive in Bethlehem and visit Joseph, Mary and Jesus in the stable. They bring gifts of Gold, Frankincense, and Myrrh. They recognize the true nature of Jesus, the unique person of Jesus. Their gifts symbolize that Jesus is born to be powerful like a king (Gold); holy like a Priest (Frankincense); and mortal like all human beings (Myrrh). An observation that comes from Origen, by the way, the early Christian Bishop who was also a Universalist.
So Epiphany is the holiday of recognizing and naming who you really are and who you will become.
It’s appropriate that Epiphany comes near the beginning of the year when many of us are making resolutions for who we want to be in the coming year. Who are we really? What is your best life?
Epiphany is also an appropriate time for a child dedication as we together imagined and made promises of how we would help Atlas become who he will be.
By the way, Epiphany is not just a holiday but is also a season in the church calendar that lasts from January 6 through to the beginning of Lent on Ash Wednesday, which is February 14 this year. So it’s appropriate to continue contemplation of and naming of your true self for several more weeks.
This weekend we celebrate yet another holiday, the secular holiday of Martin Luther King’s birthday. Celebrated on the third Monday of January, this year the MLK holiday falls on Dr. King’s actual birthday of January 15, born in 1929.
Dr. King provides an excellent example of how an inner truth and an exterior context come together to create a life’s mission. He was who he was, and the man we celebrate today, because of who he was born to be, in response to the world into which he was born.
King describes how he arrived at his life’s mission in his autobiography. Here is an excerpt:
“When I went to Morehouse as a freshman in 1944, my concern for racial and economic justice was already substantial. During my student days I read Henry David Thoreau’s essay “On Civil Disobedience” for the first time. Here, in this courageous New Englander’s refusal to pay his taxes and his choice of jail rather than support a war that would spread slavery’s territory into Mexico, I made my first contact with the theory of nonviolent resistance.
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No other person has been more eloquent and passionate in getting this idea across than Henry David Thoreau. As a result of his writings and personal witness, we are the heirs of a legacy of creative protest. The teachings of Thoreau came alive in our civil rights movement; indeed, they are more alive than ever before. Whether expressed in a sit-in at lunch counters, a freedom ride into Mississippi, a peaceful protest in Albany, Georgia, a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, these are outgrowths of Thoreau’s insistence that evil must be resisted and that no moral man can patiently adjust to injustice.
Because of the influence of my mother and father, I guess I always had a deep urge to serve humanity, but I didn’t start out with an interest to enter the ministry. I thought I could probably do it better as a lawyer or doctor.
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My college training, especially the first two years, brought many doubts into my mind. It was then that the shackles of fundamentalism were removed from my body. More and more I could see a gap between what I had learned in Sunday school and what I was learning in college. My studies had made me skeptical, and I could not see how many of the facts of science could be squared with religion.
I revolted, too, against the emotionalism of much Negro religion, the shouting and stamping. I didn’t understand it, and it embarrassed me. I often say that if we, as a people, had as much religion in our hearts and souls as we have in our legs and feet, we could change the world.
I had seen that most Negro ministers were unlettered, not trained in seminaries, and that gave me pause. I had been brought up in the church and knew about religion, but I wondered whether it could serve as a vehicle to modern thinking, whether religion could be intellectually respectable as well as emotionally satisfying.
This conflict continued until I studied a course in Bible in which I came to see that behind the legends and myths of the Book were many profound truths which one could not escape. Two men- Dr. Mays, president of Morehouse College and one of the great influences in my life, and Dr. George Kelsey, a professor of philosophy and religion-made me stop and think. Both were ministers, both deeply religious, and yet both were learned men, aware of all the trends of modern thinking. I could see in their lives the ideal of what I wanted a minister to be.
It was in my senior year of college that I entered the ministry. I had felt the urge to enter the ministry from my high school days, but accumulated doubts had somewhat blocked the urge. Now it appeared again with an inescapable drive. I felt a sense of responsibility which I could not escape.”
Ministers love to tell our “call” stories, a drive toward the ministry which we could not escape. In fact, we’re required to tell our call stories in our application materials before we meet with the Ministerial Fellowship Committee of the UUA.
I’ve told you how my call to the ministry came during my work with AIDS Project Los Angeles and how I looked for a way to cope with the spiritual issues of suffering and injustice during the AIDS crisis. During that time, I attended a spiritual retreat for gay men at an Episcopal Monastery in the hills above Santa Barbara. The monks prayed the hours, which meant prayer and chanting services several times a day from Matins and Lauds to Vespers and Compline. I joined the monks for their services during the retreat, finding the ritual and regularity comforting.
One afternoon one of the monks pulled me aside and said, “I noticed how devoted you are to worship. I think God might be calling you.”
I thought to myself, “Well I sure hope I’ve left my answering machine on. Because that’s one phone message I don’t want to miss.”
Like Dr. King, it took me several years to get over my doubts and skepticism about a religious life before I could accept the call. Dr. King says, “I had felt the urge to enter the ministry from my high school days, but accumulated doubts had somewhat blocked the urge.”
Notice how Dr. King’s call story is a combination of inner and outer forces.
He says, “I guess I always had a deep urge to serve humanity, but I didn’t start out with an interest to enter the ministry.”
So he has an urge, but how that urge will be expressed depends on what the culture has available. Will he express his urge to serve humanity as a minister, or as a doctor, or as a lawyer?
And what need does humanity have, at that time in the mid-twentieth century, that young Martin might be able to serve? His life might have looked very different had he not been born at the time when our nation was struggling widely with civil rights for negroes.
Through his reading of nonviolent resistance in the face of moral wrong, learned from the Unitarian Henry David Thoreau, and the influence of his father the Baptist Minister, who was so inspired by the work of the German Protestant Reformer Martin Luther that he changed his son’s name from Michael to Martin Luther, to respected teachers at college who opened to him a new way of understanding the Bible, Martin’s inner sense, his “urge to serve humanity”, was molded by influences outside himself, and by the crying need of a world suffering under racial injustice, to become the minister with the mission we celebrate today.
The divine spirit of the universe calls to us, both from deep within ourselves and from beyond.
As we heard in this morning’s Call to Worship in the words of the poet Starhawk: “I who am the beauty of the green earth and the white moon among the stars and the mysteries of the waters, I call upon your soul to arise and come unto Me.”
Do you hear that voice calling to you? How will you respond?
But Starhawk reminds us that the same voice calling us from afar, is also urging us from within: “For if that which you seek, you find not within yourself, you will never find it without. For behold, I have been with you from the beginning, and I am that which is attained at the end of desire.”
Who’s calling? An push from within, a pull from beyond, but ultimately the same voice.
“Do You Hear?” we sang together in our opening hymn. “Do you hear, oh my friend, from the place where you stand to the outermost strand?” The call is heard both here and there.
And the call is both the needful quest of your own heart and soul, and the needful call of the world beyond. “All the dreams, all the dares, all the sighs, all the prayers — they are yours, mine, and theirs — do you hear, do you hear?”
If I had time to do a Children’s Message this morning, I would have brought out lumps of Play-Doh and the plastic tools that force the dough into different shapes. Or think of cookie cutters. Or a pasta maker.
We are who we are. But then we come to a world that offers only certain opportunities, and needs specific work. Without losing ourselves we are molded into lives that fit the world. We start out as lumps of dough. We end up shaped as stars, or moons, or Christmas Trees, or spaghetti.
Or ministers. Or civil rights leaders. Or teachers. Or parents. Or poets. Or monks.
As we consider over the next several weeks the mission of this church, let us listen for that call that comes from within and without. What do we need to do, for ourselves, and to honor the character, personality, gifts and interests of this particular congregation? And what does the world need us to be and to do? What are they asking of us? What are they hoping to find when they walk through our front door?
What should we do, a mission that will both minister to ourselves and to the world?