I want to offer two quotes to begin this morning, in what I hope will be both an informative, and challenging, sermon. Our focus this morning is on Ministry, which is largely misunderstood in todays world, especially liberal religious UU ministry, and thus the need for information. Our focus this morning is on Ministry, which is largely misunderstood because it is a calling whose chief concern is Depth, and depth, living deeply, finding depth in the midst of our lives, is something that is sadly and dangerously in very short supply: in our individual lives, in our families, in our communities, in the wildly narcissistic global culture that is spreading with whiplash speed across the entire planet.

I want to begin with two quotes this morning because they point to that depth, the depth that ministry seeks. The first is by Protestant Theologian and writer, Frederick Buechner. It is one of our centering thoughts.

"The place where God calls you is the place
where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet."

For those of you for whom the word God is a hindrance, or difficulty, let me read it this way:

"The place where your hearts most authentic desire calls you is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet."

So this is another of ministrys lessons: my life will be a success, will be authentically consummated, if I am able to bring the joy of my deep gladness to my work. Which leads me to the second quote I want to offer you today. It is taken from the last two stanzas of Marge Pierceys poem, To Be Of Use.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.

Greek amphora's for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

Ministry is a real work. Ministry is about doing real work. Ministry is about responding to the cry for what is real: what is real in the way we live our lives, in the work that we do to support our lives, in the work that we must do to find meaning in our lives. And if Frederick Buechner is right, authentic work---work that is real and true, work that has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident---comes out of a place of gladness, and . . . it is devoted to satisfying the deep hungers in the world outside our skins.

When I decided to talk about ministry for todays sermon, that was back in January, I believed that I was going to travel to Birmingham, Alabama at the beginning of this month, for a once-every-seven-years convocation of UU ministers. I had even purchased my airline tickets, made a deposit on a hotel room and gotten a roommate, Rev. Roger Jones of our Sunnyvale congregation. The convocation was entitled, The Mind & Soul on Fire: When Hunger & Passion Meet. Instead of one keynote speaker, the planning team had invited a diverse group of ministers to, as they said it, infuse our experience with thoughtful, cutting-edge reflections. The lectures were: Deepening Our Call, Nurturing Our Faith, Claiming Our Prophetic Voice, and Living Our Mission. That five day convocation did occur. Those lectures, that say so much about our ministry, were held. I did not attend.

My choice to miss this historic and professionally rich event, in the end, says more about ministry, the real work of ministry than any words I could ever devise to describe it. I stayed home from the convocation because Lora Hawley, beloved member of this church, whose memorial service we will host at 2:00pm today, Lora had come to the very last days and hours of her life. I had been pastoring to her, and to her husband Fred, for several months. My relationship with Fred and Lora intensified when Lora made the decision to stop any further major medical interventions because they could not eradicate the cancer that had invaded her jaw, and they would only prolong the suffering she would experience as the disease advanced to its inevitable end.

I did not go to Birmingham, because I was called to be here, instead. I was called to be here, because I felt it here [in the heart]. Be with these people, my heart said. And deeper still was, I, the very me of me, wants to be here with them. Showing up at the Hawley household, in response to the demands of my heart, thats what you would expect me to do, isn't it? To put aside whatever I had planned, in order to be available to a family in extreme need, thats what ministry requires, isnt it? But whatever was I supposed to do there? What comfort can one truly be expected to give up against the tragedy of a life ended before its time, of a good person who has done no one any evil, having to suffer mind-numbing pain as an outrageous disease invades not just the workings of her body, but even of her personhood. How could anyone be expected to offer balm at such a time?

So . . . its at this point that we can really begin to talk about what ministry is, because its at this point that whats really at issue is exposed. It has to do with the practical and the impossible.

There is a local Christian Church over on Middlefield Avenue that has a Sunday morning as well as a Sunday evening service. Both of the services are announced with a posted bulletin in the foyer of their sanctuary. Recently the bulletin read: The sermon this morning: Jesus walks on the water. The sermon tonight: Searching for Jesus.

The impossible---some might say, the miraculous---and the practical, the what-must-be-done. These are the two roiling streams that create the river of ministry.

First I want to consider the practical.

To do her work a UU minister has to have earned a Masters of Divinity degree, or its equivalent; completed a unit of Clinical Pastoral Education (which is 12 weeks of full time supervised work as a chaplain on, for instance, a hospital ward, that is intensely self-exploratory, requiring two group sessions and one counseling session per week); she must have successfully completed an internship in an approved site under the supervision of a UU minister who has earned final fellowship (tenure); and, lastly, she has to receive the approval of a committee appointed by the Board of Trustees of the UUA, the Ministerial Fellowship Committee.

Once a person has done all of that, on the practical side, the litany of the tasks for a minister who serves a congregation is short and quite simple: preach, pastor, teach, provide the priestly role of leading ceremony and ritual, and provide congregational leadership in both governance and the work for justice.

First a humorous story to help ease the our entry into the issue, the issue of the impossibility of being a minister:

There is a minister driving down to Los Angeles from the Bay Area and he gets stopped for speeding in San Louis Obispo. The Highway Patrol office smells alcohol on the minister's breath and then sees an empty wine bottle on the floor of the car.

He says, "Sir, have you been drinking?"

"Just water," says the minister.

The officer says, "Then why do I smell wine?"

The minister looks at the bottle and says, "Good Lord! He's done it again!"

The point here is that the psychological pressure for ministers to be both morally fully evolved as well as somehow above human error is enormous. And because such expectations and pressure are unwarranted, they create a strange interpersonal dynamic within ministers, within congregants and within the space of relationship between them. UUs do not escape this dance. At the very least, we have to contend with the problem that such projections are possible, and that our religious community is embedded in a larger social matrix where such dynamics are full blown and unconscious. Its an old dilemma, one that plagues all of us, no matter what our work or profession: the confusion of the role a person fills with the person themselves. Which in another permutation leads to confusing the stereotype we have about a person or their role with the person themselves.

But there is more. Consider:

A minister is called to do her work out of a commitment to service and caring---but she is also called to stir discomfort in the comfortable. She is required to undergo specialized, academic graduate training of an extremely heady nature---yet she is also expected to have a special engagement with spirit, or meaning, or Goddess, or at least to have special wisdom into human foibles---which is simply not teachable, not even at Stanford and Harvard.

She is presumed to be non-materialistic and therefore outside of, as it were, concerns about money---yet she must contend as an independent contractor for equitable pay up against the whims, the contingent generosity, the financial control of those she serves. A minister is called to take a major role in creating a spiritual home for others---but she is without such a home for her self.

In UU congregations, especially, the minister is supposed to help people when they want it (which often means telling them what to do to deal with their problem because they expect advise), lead people when they need it, be at every committee meeting that needs help---but somehow she is supposed to keep her nose out of peoples business, and never tell them what to do.

And it goes on and on and on. It is amazing. It is a living and breathing conundrum of impossibilities. A prodigious paradox of human culture. An outrageous vortex swirling with the difficulty and impossibility of leading democratic community. And so what can we do? How can we deal with whipsaw demands of such polarity? Partly, as Woody Allen said in his quip, Showing up is 80% of life, you just show up; with skill and training, and intention, most of all. You show up and things work their way out, things get done, difficulties are made better.

Yet there is something more. There is another impossibility I want to return to. It is in this impossibility that we can see clearly that we all minister, whether we are called to do it professionally/vocationally, or whether it is in what you do here, as members, as stewards, to sustain this community, to care for one another, to bring justice to the larger community from this base of values and faith---it is all ministry. There is something more than those paradoxes in professional ministry I just listed.

It is, simply, the human impossibility of dealing with the unfairness, the tragedies, the raw inequities of life. Like a cancer that strikes a person who has led a good and healthy life, a cancer that is terribly painful and disfiguring. Like the breakup of families that started out so well, families with children who are innocent and love both their parents. Like the political, economic and racial oppression that is so violently destructive to many and so completely misunderstood and/or unnoticed by others who live in the very same communities. Like the person who is dismissed from their job, after many years of dedicated and loyal service, because the company was exploited by leaders numbed by their own greed. Like the child born with a degenerative disease who will never know the glow of good health, and will probably die young. Like an elder whose life irrevocably narrows, whose friends and family have all died or who are emotionally estranged.

From what well must a person draw to minister to people struggling with these assaults on their lives? What word can one say? What balm can one offer? What hope can one have that their presence will make any real difference in the end? For it seems rather arrogant and egotistical, or at least naive, to believe that one could somehow really make it better.

There is only one answer that I have any certainty about, against the implaccable, deep and gigantic immensity of all of that seeming unfairness . . . and that is to listen . . . to listen . . . to listen here [the heart], to feel into here, into the heart. Its from here the voice will come, the voice of ministry, the voice of humanity, the voice that says, Be with these people. And deeper still, those other words: I, the very me of me, wants to be here with them . . . no matter what.

Ashé. Amien. Shalom. Blessed Be. Namasté.

What is your reaction to this sermon? Please send comments to Reverend Kurt Kuhwald