INTRODUCTION TO THE SERVICE
I have such a public job, it always surprises me when a parishioner tells me they don’t think they know me very well, or that I don’t share very much about myself personally. Even longtime members say that on occasion. Of course, it wouldn’t surprise me if there were some other parishioners who wish I wouldn’t talk about myself so often. The latter folks are in trouble this morning because a lot of this service is about me, although I hope that more than that it’s about religion and ministry, church life and Unitarian Universalism during these past thirty years, albeit as observed by … me.

One of the advantages of being in such a small denomination is, you get to observe a fair amount of what goes on. For example, the many readings and hymns that we will do together this morning, taken from the new hymnbook, were all written by people who had a significant part in my own life.

Jacob Trapp, who wrote our opening  and closing  hymns, our first responsive reading  and the words with which I will introduce our time of silence later , was the minister of the Unitarian Church of Summit, New Jersey, in the ‘50s, when I attended Sunday school there. Those who were here for my sermon on nature, when I referred to Jake, will not be surprised that he authored the words, “Morning, so fair to see, night, veiled in mystery – glorious the earth and resplendent skies!”

My family moved to the Jersey shore when I was twelve. There, I attended the Unitarian fellowship, back before they had a building of their own and they met where they could, like the YMCA. I graduated from Red Bank High School, went off to Amherst College, came back after graduation and married Carol in the fairly new Unitarian Universalist church, spent a year doing basic training in several branches of our national government, and ended up at the Harvard Divinity School, where I took a course in ethics from James Luther Adams, one of the most important theologians and ethicists in the history of our movement and author of one of this morning’s readings . One year, a group of Wayland First Parish people met monthly to discuss a book of Adams’ we read together, and at the last session, Jim joined our discussion.

He has since died. In fact the only one of our four authors still alive is Ralph Helverson, who was the minister of our church in Harvard Square when I was pursuing my theological studies nearby and who wrote the words of our meditation . I bet I’ve used one of Ralph’s prayers almost every year of my ministry. He lives in Bedford now.

And finally Vincent Silliman. He and I were ministers in Maine together, he serving in Yarmouth, the last placement in his long, distinguished career. He wrote this morning’s next reading , second hymn  and choral response , all favorites both here and in the denomination at large.

THE SERMON
It wasn’t all that long ago, when you consider that this congregation was gathered in 1640, and even the First Church of Houlton, Maine, has been around almost two centuries. It was just thirty years ago this past Thursday that I began my career in the Unitarian Universalist ministry in Houlton, up on the Canadian border.

 Still, thirty years is a pretty long time to spend doing some one thing for most of one’s waking hours. It is enough of a milestone that one can’t help but notice it as one passes by, especially if you get to thinking, the next of those ten-year milestones is probably the last one, professionally speaking.

 Thirty years. I was twenty-six, married and the father of two-year-old twin daughters, beautiful, ebullient, and bright – the daughters, that is, like their mother. Me, I was fresh from the Harvard Divinity School by way of Boston City government.

 I had started working for the city in the Little City Hall program the summer before my final year of seminary. These were the late sixties, the days of John Lindsay and the urban frontier, when work to revive American cities was enticing and exciting. The Little City Hall program tried to bring government closer to the people in the neighborhoods.

My job was to know Boston’s neighborhoods, to prepare the information that Mayor Kevin White would need to know before appearing in the neighborhoods, to create press releases for neighborhood papers, and to visit the neighborhoods, their little city halls, and neighborhood meetings. Which is to say, if you had wondered at the end of 1969, how many miles of streets have been skim-coated this year in Hyde Park, or how many basketball nets have been replaced in Allston-Brighton, I was probably the person to ask.

I stayed on through that year, and upon graduation went to work full-time for the City. After all, the Mayor was running to be governor (a race he lost badly) and some folks needed to stay at work in City Hall to attend to the needs of the city, as overseen by the Deputy Mayor, young Barnie Frank.

Plus, jobs in our ministry were hard to come by just then. It wasn’t until mid-fall that I got an offer, although then I got two in a row. On successive weekends I met with congregations in central Massachusetts and in northern Maine and was offered a call by each. The congregation in central Massachusetts was larger and better off financially, which wasn’t hard, since the Houlton church only had 34 members and just enough money in the bank that by spending down their little endowment they could afford to hire a minister in hopes of making a comeback, though they couldn’t guarantee more than a year’s employment, at which time they would have to decide whether to spend all their endowment on this endeavor or to stop having a minister while there was still enough money in the bank to pay to keep the building intact.

So the Houlton call came with certain apparent disadvantages. And then there was the matter of the weather. And the isolation. I was once chair of a community group that tried to hire a professional to come do a study of child care needs. We would tell applicants that the town was isolated and in the winter, quite cold, and over the phone they’d say cheerily, “Well, sure, that’s okay” – and then they’d look at a map, maybe even find out that cold in Aroostook County means whole weeks in winter when it never gets as warm as zero degrees, and at least one morning every year when it drops to 40 below – and they’d withdraw. We ended up hiring a local person.

 There was one year – 1978 – when the First Church was looking for a new minister again. Because they have so little money, the search committee often skips over the pre-candidating stage and goes right to bringing a candidate to town. That year, the first three candidates turned down the call. By the third, with the expense of the process mounting, the search committee was stressing as hard as it could, before you accept the chance to come candidate, please know, Houlton is isolated and cold. “Well, sure,” the candidates would say, “that’s okay” – or words to that effect. And then they’d arrive and realize, hey, this place is really cold. And isolated. The church ended up calling a minister from Maine.

But if there were certain apparent disadvantages in starting out in Houlton, some of those same factors were really causes for going there. For folks from New Jersey, Houlton was a real adventure. We had enjoyed Cambridge and Boston, small as they seemed to us. Imagine our living in a town of eight thousand, and it’s the market center that people drive an hour to get to.

By 1970 Cambridge was a less enjoyable place to be anyway, as the culture of the street and the Cambridge Commons turned more menacing. I was at a class at a professor’s house in Lexington one evening when we got a call to return home to our loved ones as a street gang was trashing its way through Harvard Square, smashing windows and threatening passers-by. We went from that to living in a town that seemed to be still in another century, except for the cars.

But an even bigger draw was the Houlton congregation. The other congregation that called me was pretty small, too, but large enough and with enough means that they were getting by okay. But the Houlton folks knew they were all but defunct, and they weren’t willing to let that happen without putting up one last struggle to survive, to get back to self-sufficiency if they could.

They had been federated for eighteen years with the Congregational congregation. When the federation began, the Unitarians had a church building, the Congos (as they were called) had a minister, so they held their services together. The agreement was, they would switch back and forth between UCC and UU ministers. But that led to nine years of a UCC minister, then one year of a UU minister who didn’t work out, then eight more years of UCC ministry.

Throughout the federation, the two congregations had held separate annual meetings and had their own officers. But as far as Sunday worship went, the church had effectively become UCC. The Unitarian Universalists were ready for a change. So they dissolved the federation, the Congos took their minister and got themselves a building, and the UUs took their building back and got me.

So it was not just an adventure in living, but an exciting challenge, to see if we could save Unitarian Universalism in this town on the border, where people had eighteen other congregations to choose among just within the town, most of them evangelical. And a third of the town was Catholic. There probably wouldn’t even be a UU church there, except the town was founded by Unitarians, up from New Salem, Massachusetts. Hence the name: the First Church of Houlton.

The denomination helped out with a subsidy, and by my fourth and final year there, we had increased pledging to the point that the congregation was self-supporting. They had gone through their endowment to do it, but then a bequest came in that restored what they’d spent. By then, I was here, arriving in the summer of 1974, and here I am still.

A lot has changed in the thirty years since I began, and a lot has remained the same. One of the biggest changes, it seems to be, occurred sometime in the ‘70s when it became clear that at least here in the United States, churches and other religious institutions were not going to disappear. For those of us who decided to go into ministry in the ‘60s, this has been a nice surprise in many ways, but definitely a surprise.

For myself, I always expected to help create churches that would be important communities of faith, support, and transformation. I had a very positive regard for liberal churches of the sort in which I had been reared, and I hoped I could foster their growth and wellbeing. That seemed like one good way of spending a life, and it still does to me.

But the amount of cultural affirmation for those high hopes in 1970 was basically nil. Occasionally I read books about preaching or ministry in general, skimming through a bunch of them quickly to research some topic. The greatest number are from the late ‘60s, from when I was in theological school, and they stand out right away: they all assume that the church as an institution is on its way out, or at least is facing changes that will make it unrecognizable.

It being the late ‘60s, most of these books assume that radical social change was at hand, and the church’s role would be to help out as a last, dying act. I’m exaggerating, but not a lot. And ministry or preaching.… People going into the ministry these past twenty years all seem to expect that they have made a respectable choice, like telling a friend might elicit congratulations and not a blank, incredulous stare. Telling someone of your own age in 1970 that you were a minister, you might as well have said you were devoting your life to raising chinchillas.

Regard for preaching has made a comeback, too. Actually, I think preaching was never as out of favor with parishioners as people in seminaries believed back then. It is a persistent fiction that parishioners – and preachers who serve them well – don’t care much about skill or craft from the pulpit. You still hear that, but it was a really popular outlook back in the ‘60s. A Methodist minister turned journalist observed in 1965, “Members of the younger generation of pastors with churches do not really enjoy preaching; they kiss it off as a quaint chore.” [John Stewart, The Deacon Wore Spats 180] Whereas, for many years courses and workshops on preaching like I give myself on occasion are taken seriously and well-attended.

It’s funny, what seems to me to have changed so much in the situation of churches, ministry, and preaching since I began, might seem to be the very things that are unchanged from 1955 or 1978. Maybe I just came into the ministry at a curious time. Yet other changes from 1970 are more clearly real and substantial from any perspective. The people predicting dramatic change when I was in school just guessed wrong what the changes would be.

Yes, many denominations went into decline, even a tailspin, but others have thrived. It’s not institutional religion that was doomed to decline, but mainline Protestant denominations, all the while membership increased in conservative denominations and in alternative religions, including (in some modest way) our own.

And yes, as predicted, the ranks of ministers in many denominations, including our own, have grown more diverse, but much more quickly for women than expected, except in those denominations which have strengthened their resistance in reaction. Meanwhile, racial diversification in the ministry is progressing much more slowly than one might have hoped.

Through all the changes, so much has stayed the same since I started out that November thirty years ago, off on my mission to do ministry, such a peculiar decision at the time. It is a choice I have never regretted for long.

Oh, there have been times…. But I have never stopped believing that the importance of what you are trying to do.

I believe in the importance of what I do sometimes, too. You give me the authority to be of help at times, significant times, and I honor and am grateful for that.

But for thirty years what has mattered even more is my honor for what you try to do, and with persistent success – not unfailing success, for we’re all human here – but over and over again, you try and often succeed at creating religious community, where people can find acceptance and mercy, encouragement and solace, challenge and forgiveness, fun and warmth of spirit, chances to improve oneself and the world, faith and hope and peace.

To be party to that, that’s what sent me off in November, 1970, to live where by Thanksgiving we had four feet of snow on the ground, and it stayed that high into April. The last of the snow in the back yard finally melted in June.

Of course, with global warming, maybe it’s tropical there by now. But with congregational warming, it was always a place I was happy to be, in a calling I was happy to pursue. Like you, they wanted to be a religious community. They wanted me to help. I couldn’t resist. I still can’t.
 

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