Let me begin this morning by thanking you. First, for all the lovely calls, letters and visits about last week's sermon. It was a wonderful welcome to my twenty-first year as your minister. Second, for your patience with our renovations. We are very close to being on schedule, but a couple of weeks off does cause inconvenience to everyone. I'm sorry about that. Third, for your generosity in making all this possible. This past week we passed the three million mark in our four million dollar capital campaign.
I don't like talking about money from the pulpit, but in a deeper sense this is not about money. It is about commitment, generosity, and sharing. Because of all three, by this time next year, we will be fully handicap-accessible. We will have added three wonderful rooms for our religious programming -- both for our young people and for us. If the gifts keep pouring in, we will have air conditioned both the sanctuary and fellowship hall, each admittedly a bit of a luxury, yet holding real promise for the expansion of our summer programs and services. If you have not yet made a three-year pledge to our capital campaign or a long-term commitment through planned giving, I hope you will join the rest of us soon. We need a few more big gifts and lots of small ones. Actually, no gift is small. Every gift from the heart is a gift of love.
As for the renovaion process itself, let me thank a few of you by name, speaking for all of us. Our church administrator, Annie Gorycki, is simply the best in the business. If there were an All Souls person of the year award, she would win it hands down, not only this extraordinary year, but every other.
It's always dangerous to single out members of the congregation from the pulpit, but several other people have been instrumental over the past weeks, by keeping things both close to schedule and even closer to our budgeted cost. Past presidents, each a stalwart, Bernie May and Jeff Friedlander and our wonderful treasurer, Lisa Yeh, have devoted far more of their summer than they intended to our restoration project. Also, our board, so ably headed by Kami O'Keefe, who opened the service this morning, have been supportive from the outset, and are eager to participate even more in future months, as we bring our work toward conclusion.
Before I get to my sermon proper, if in fact I do get to it, let me also say this. In general, Unitarians by nature are anti-institutionalists. I am, at least I started that way. You probably are as well. The problem is, when an anti-institutionalist joins a religious institution, the only thing he or she knows by both instinct and experience is how to savage it. And, yet, All Souls, almost miraculously, not only during my tenure but during the almost 180 years of our history has been a remarkably cohesive, corporately run, institution. We tend to row in the same direction, and don't hit one another on the head with our oars. That makes being your minister easy. I can't tell you how thankful I am for that.
As for my sermon, the good news is, given that Kami sent my last week's sermon about the Clinton mess out to everyone, and given that my mind hasn't changed over the last seven days, I can talk about something else this Sunday. The bad news is, for those of you who came to church to hear something really important or earthshattering, I am going to devote my last sermon as a forty-something person to a free-flowing set of ruminations about myself.
Actually, I'm going to do this twice over the course of the fall -- I'll wait till November for the second -- sharing with you how my mind has changed, which means in essence how I have changed, during my twenty year call as your minister. I have to do it twice, because I have a few theological observations that won't fit in this morning's sermon. How my mind has changed about the Bible, for instance, and how my mind has changed about God. But before I get to that, I have to do something that almost undoubtedly is less important but does by nature take precedent, how my mind has changed about myself.
To ensure that you will leave this morning with at least one story that will make you feel better about yourselves -- better at least about the most stupid thing you have done recently -- let me share with you the most egregiously stupid act I committed on the verge of fifty.
Until about a month ago, I have been completely bored by members of this congregation who came in for pastoral counseling about the trauma of turning forty or fifty, or even thirty for goodness sake. Fortunately, by the time we reach sixty most of us have come close to growing up, by seventy we've made it, and by eighty or ninety our daily pains are more likely to preoccupy us than our birthdays are. Nonetheless, until last month, I had little sympathy for any prospective fifty-year old who was obsessing about getting old. And then it happened to me.
So what did I do? I went back to the gym. I changed my diet. I lost 20 pounds. And then, or during the course of all this, I simply lost it. I did the stupidest thing among those things that don't really matter that I'd done since I was sixteen. I dyed my hair.
Don't laugh (Okay, you can laugh!) But just think of how magnificent I would look right now if you had seen me the day I did it. Black. I chose black. My hair has never been black, but since I always take three aspirins rather than two when I have a headache, black somehow seemed right. Fortunately, I was alone at the time, alone for three days at home writing, with my wife away on business and the children at camp. I dyed both my hair and my beard. I dyed them black.
After an initial blush of admittedly vain self-satisfaction, I looked at myself in the mirror the next morning and was appalled. I may have looked fairly good, but I sure didn't look right. So I started taking showers. Three a day. I even tried shampooing with something made for men than is supposed to enhance one's gray hair. The problem was, my hair wasn't gray any longer. It was black.
But not for long. At the end of three days, not only was I cleaner than I have ever been before in my entire life, my hair was no longer black.
"What's happened to your hair," Carolyn said. "Your hair is green." To be fair, my hair was green with a tint of yellow. I confessed, and took a shower.
"Why would you ever do such a stupid thing?" she asked. (By the way, this is a woman who has always accused me of being insufficiently vain.)
"I guess I wanted to feel young," I sheepishly replied.
Before I try to turn this into a sermon, I have to tell you one more completely embarrassing story. It is the same story. I was 16, away on summer break. I was working at a ranch. All the girls put lemon in their hair to lighten it in the sun. At the end of the summer, liking the effect but a month behind and needing to catch up, I put lemon, lots of lemon, in my hair. Nothing seemed to happen. So I added a full bottle of peroxide. This was a mistake. It was a bad mistake. My hair turned bright orange.
With three days till school, all I could do was to cut it all off. So I had very short, very bright orange hair. To draw attention away from it -- I've never had much of a sense for fashion -- I went to school the first day in a bright orange shirt and electric orange socks. I looked like a carrot on speed. Clearly, dying my hair was one thing I would never do again.
So here I am, thirty-four years later, preaching a sermon on what I have learned. Obviously, in certain respects, not a heck of a lot. But even here, maybe something. Maybe that all of us are at least a little insecure. Maybe that we try to camouflage our insecurities sometimes in superficial ways. Maybe that, when do we embarrass ourselves, the best thing we can do is get a good laugh out of it. Even let others laugh at us and with us. My favorite line in all theology is G. K. Chesterton's quip that "Angels fly because they take themselves lightly." By the same token, the devil fell on account of his gravity. In general, we humans are remarkably, if not always intentionally, humorous creatures.
It's not a bad thing to laugh at ourselves. In fact, it's a good thing. I may have learned this out of necessity, but I also have learned that if we don't laugh at ourselves, we may be overly tempted to be severe with others.
For instance, my memory of orange hair, not to mention the foot-long proto-Ziggy Top beard and very distressed levis made at least half way decent by safety-pins that I sported in college, stilled my tongue this summer when my eldest son, who in other ways is quite stunningly successful, showed me his nipple ring. To a parent there is nothing stunningly successful about a nipple ring. But, given that I was about to have green hair, I a very pleased with myself for giving the nipple ring a pass.
So that's the first thing I have to say this morning. If you can, when you can, give yourself and others a free pass. Accept and forgive. Lighten up.
Just remember, all of us are going to die. And when we do, none of us is going to have much more than the faintest idea what life was all about.
If there is a heaven, and if I go to heaven, my guess is that I will have scored more points by being kind to taxi cab drivers and over-tipping waitresses, than for anything else I have done or not done.
I must admit, I don't think much about heaven, but I have always -- and in this job you have too -- thought a lot about death. As most of you know, my own definition of religion is a simple one. Religion is our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die. We are the animal who knows it is going to die and therefore questions what life means. These are religious questions. They are religious questions, both for atheists and true believers.
Over the years, I have come to believe that what our lives mean has far more to do with what they mean to others than with what they mean to ourselves. I have also slowly begun to realize -- even though I often fail to act on this, that when we are too absorbed with ourselves --with our careers, positions, needs, even our dreams -- we close others out, and our circle of meaning is diminished.
For me, therefore, one of the great things about turning fifty is this. I am finally beginning to reckonize -- and this is truly redemptive -- most of the things I dreamed of accomplishing, I will not. For instance, though I have been blessed with the opportunity of writing books, I am never going to be guilty of committing a best seller. For me, spiritually, at least today -- you may have to check back tomorrow -- that is more of a relief than in is a disappointment.
We should always do our best. Of course we should. We should always strive to do better in our lines of work. But to get obsessed about our accomplishments (so often framed in a negative print image against others' apparent but often imagined accomplishments) only serves to cut us off from others, even, and sometimes especially, from the people who have the best chance of redeeming our lives.
Think about these people. Our family. Our coworkers. Our friends. If we let them, they redeem our lives by loving us for who we are, not for who we'd like to be. They redeem them by challenging us to be better people in little ways, not major ways, the little ways in which we can surely change to make their own lives better, their own lives and ours as well. And finally, perhaps most importantly, they redeem our lives by reminding us daily that their own lives are as important as our own. As important, as flawed, and as wonderful.
In this regard, much of what I have learned in life are the things I know I have to keep learning. Love takes practice. And kindness, that too. And forgiveness. Even self-acceptance takes practice. This is simple, daily, and supremely important stuff.
For me, my most important teacher is my wife, though she is and probably always will be frustrated at how poor I sometimes am with my lessons. My children also teach me. In part they teach me to remember what it is like to be a child. Not to be childish, but to be a child. We all are children. We continue to be children. Ultimately -- and I do believe this, I finally believe this -- we are children of God. That, of course, is another sermon.
As I close these remarks, I realize that I may be as guilty this morning as the person who says to you, "Well, enough about me. What do you think of my hat?" All I can promise is, my next sermon, whether you like it or not, will have nothing to do with my hat.
But I will say this. You are all, almost every one of you, far more lovable and forgivable people than you think you are. I know that. And you need to hear that. You need to hear it from the pulpit, even if you have to put up with the preacher saying that he himself is actually a far more lovable and forgivable person than he thinks he is. Not that he fully believes it. None of us does, not fully. If we did, we might be dangerous, far more dangerous than we actually are.
What I can say this morning, without exaggeration, is that I love you. I love you not only for the little things you do to make this world, our world, a slightly better place, but also for accepting your failings when you fail; for your weaknesses, which connect you to all of us; for daring to expose yourselves by reaching out for help; and also, perhaps especially, for your courage (most of us are far more courageous than we know) in times of trial.
I can also say this. I need you just as much as you need me. That goes for you too, for you and others. Especially in matters of faith and spirit, we need one another. We need one another's love and inspiration, others critique and chastisement, not more -- that would be silly -- but at least as much as we need our own self-love and self-esteem. And they need us too. They need us as much as we need them. Salvation may be an individual quest, but redemption is a corporate enterprise.
That's all I have to say this morning. Thinking about it, I retract my apology. I really haven't been talking about me. I've been talking about us. And we're okay.
Amen. I love you. May God bless us all. Copyright AllSouls 1998.