"More Deeply I Serve"
Unitarian Universalist Church of Muncie
May 2, 2010
© 2010 by Beth Lefever

Well, here we are. My last sermon as your Student Minister, with only two weeks left of my Internship. Who knew that nine months would speed by so quickly? Who knew that in the blink of an eye it would be over?

I have noted, for some time, that time passes by more quickly as one ages. It also passes by more quickly when one is in love, in wonder, in awe, as I have been here among you; when one finds oneself living a life of engagement, involvement, enlargement, and improvement, as I have been with you; when ones finds oneself living life at full-tilt, as I feel I have been living here with you.

Most of last summer I was anxious and depressed about leaving all that I knew and all whom I loved to come to Muncie to start my Internship. "Anticipatory grieving," I called it, knowing life would go on without me at my small church in St. Joseph, Michigan, my home church in Elkhart, and within the lives of my family, friends, and community. It was a reasonable response given my psychology and experience, but it made for a long and miserable summer, which generally is my favorite time of the year.

Soon after I got here, I left all that sorrow behind me and set about falling in love with my life here in Muncie. Sure I still missed everyone, and missed some of the ongoing events of the churches and in the lives of my friends. Sure I missed my beloved husband and the dog I left behind, having only brought one dog to live with me here in Muncie. But life here became almost immediately rich and full and extraordinary and I found that my thoughts seldom dallied in the life I had, for a time, left behind.

Perverse as I am, though, I found myself telling Thomas, relatively early into my Internship, that, having grieved all summer, I was already beginning to grieve the thought of leaving Muncie, come May; already beginning to know how much I was going to miss this church, this community, and all of you wonderful people.

Mental health experts, the spiritually astute and other wise souls will encourage us to try to stay in the moments of our hours and days rather than getting caught up either in memory or anticipation, and I believe that is sound advice. And despite my early admission to Thomas, I found that I have done it quite successfully here in Muncie.

For one thing, there is no fear in my return, as there was fear in my coming. I'm returning to the familiar, and that often ameliorates fear. Additionally, my life was simply too rich here for me to do much other than stay in the moment. My moments and hours were too gratifying for me to stray into thoughts of past or future. How fortunate am I to be able to say so!

Still, as the time for my leave-taking draws near, I find that I am sad. I will hate to leave this particular juncture of my life.

A wise man once told me that to say hello is to begin to say goodbye. I'm quite sure I flounced around in quite a bit of a snit at that snarky observation, but the fact is, it is true. All of our relationships end. They may end in the sense that they change or in the sense that they cease, but eventually they will end. I will soon move on to new endeavors, new learning, new experiences, and so will you.

You will move on to new adventures both individually and as a church family. Next year, for instance, you will have the same amazing church bazaar you have had for decades (can I say more than a century?), only it will, of course, be different. You will attend the same wonderful Pokagon retreat you have attended for years, but with people who have grown and changed through the year, and with new faces and absent faces, and it will be a different event. You will be moved by a new young woman wearing the candle lit crown of Saint Lucia. You will munch Cookie Communion treats served by children who have changed with a year of growth, or children new to the experience.

A year or two down the road you will have a new Intern, I hope, for the work you do here as a teaching congregation, is invaluable to the future of the unique liberal religious voice of Unitarian Universalism, and it is invaluable to the lives of future UU ministers, whose task, you must agree, is rather imposing.

As part of my educational and Internship processes, I have been encouraged to contemplate the qualifications necessary to ministry, to continue to assess myself and my strengths against those qualifications, to continue to discern my "fit for duty" status. The current wisdom lists the qualifications quite specifically:

"The perfect minister," say my colleagues, in an effort to be helpful, "is a young energetic person, but with a maturity beyond his years. Her sermons are thoroughly researched, intellectually stimulating, yet down to earth, and emotionally satisfying, and they last precisely twenty minutes after which she promptly sits down.

"He condemns injustice, but never hurts anyone's feelings. She works on her sermons all day long, and takes care of maintenance chores on her lunch break.

"He makes $100 a week, wears good clothes, maintains an extensive library, is single with a nice family, drives a good car, and tithes 10 percent to the church. And Habitat for Humanity. And public television.

"She is 26 years old and draws on 30 years of ministerial experience with glowing recommendations. She is a humanistic theist, with Buddhist and pagan influences most of the week, reverting to Christian and Hindu practices on weekends.

"On his day off, he meets with the various church committees, and the Board. And he publishes the newsletter.

"Always taking a stand, but never confrontational, she has a burning desire to work with the teenagers, and spends all her time with the older folks.

"He smiles frequently and graciously, and with a straight face because his sense of humor keeps him seriously dedicated to church work.

"She makes 15 pastoral calls a day – after hospital visits – spends 20 hours a week in denominational work, meets daily with the interfaith ministers group and is never out of the office."

Pretty daunting, huh? And as humorous as that might be, it is true that there is much to learn about effective ministry, and no where is it learned more sufficiently and thoroughly than in the church setting.

One can learn infinite amounts of knowledge in seminary… invaluable knowledge that is affecting and transformative… but it is at the hands of the laity, in the meeting rooms of the churches, in the hospital rooms of the sick, in the living rooms of the people of the Beloved Community, where one truly learns how to minister. That is why teaching congregations are so essential. That is why the task you take on in being an Internship Site is so critical to our movement.

In order for new ministers to truly and broadly understand the hurts and hopes of the human heart, and the complexities of human behavior in an ever more complicated world…

…in order for them to truly grasp the dynamics of churches so often pressed for resources, and yet ceaselessly and urgently called to service, justice, and to stand firm against the torrent of popular but often misguided opinion on troubling issues of fairness and human dignity…

…in order for them to learn how to effectively guide others in traversing the common life milestones of birth, death, loss, and transition, and to guide and nourish them in their spiritual seeking…

…in order for new ministers to learn the nuances and intricacies of ministry, they must learn it at the hands of the people.

As I have learned it, much of it, here with you.

I find that I am more whole as I leave here… fuller, rounder, more at one with the cycles of life and the hum of the earth. Partly this is due to an emotionally tumultuous year in which I experienced a lot of loss. We lost yet another beloved member of the small church in St. Joseph: Kate Fuller, whose husband had died just before I came down here; this on top of a year in which that small church lost six members or close associates.

I lost a good friend, Renie, in September. I lost the dog I had left behind in Elkhart, a greyhound too sick and elderly to make the journey here. I lost a very close friend, Mike, and within hours of learning of Mike's death, while I was feeling raw and vulnerable, I participated here in a challenging, provocative poverty simulation exercise that opened me wider and more intimately to the pain and hurts of the world.

I feel I have more fully joined the human family through these experiences and losses, as well as through the loneliness I experienced, particularly my first week here, the week before I really got started at, and connected to, the church. I feel more akin with the human condition through these happenings, and more through my experiences with you as you allowed me to walk with you through some of the challenges and trials, celebrations and observances of your own lives.

I wonder if you know what a privilege it is for a minister to be invited in to the intimacies and ultimacies of people's lives. I wonder if you know how you honor us with your trust...

You know, I have to tell you I obsessed over this service. I absolutely obsessed over it. I wanted to find the perfect words to convey just how much this nine months has meant to me, how much you have all meant to me, how much you all have helped me to learn. I wanted to find the perfect readings to convey my sentiments, my belief in liberal ministry, the thoughts and feelings so close to my heart.

Oh my gosh! What to choose, what to choose!!!

In the end, I had to settle. There are no perfect words. And the really good readings were endless. I had to choose what I would leave you with; I had to decide.

I chose Whitehead's reading, because I think religion is supremely important in our lives, and I like his definition of it: "…something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts; something that gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the final good, and yet is beyond all reach…" How well he has captured the elusive, essential nature of religion. Whitehead was an English mathematician and philosopher who died in 1947.

I chose contemporary UU minister Paul Rasor's reading, because I think if religion is important, liberal theology is crucial, and we must embrace it as such. It is there where the fires of religious inquiry may burn hot without scalding. It is there where the torrents of religious devotion may flow freely without flooding the culture or drowning the soul.

But, as he says, it is not for the faint of heart. It is a way of approaching religion that asks much of us, and to which we, in our religious tradition, give much. Still, we must not underestimate its demands or become complacent about its value in today's world.

And is it apparent to you why I chose Mendelsohn's reading? Here it is again:

"I want him to be sure he'll know when he's chickening out on himself. I want him to get to know exactly the special thing he is or else he won't notice when it starts to go. I want him to stay awake and know who the phonies are. I want him to know how to holler and put up an argument. I want a little guts to show before I can let him go. I want to be sure he sees all the wild possibilities….And I want him to know the subtle, sneaky, important reason why he was born a human being and not a chair."

I chose it because to a great extent, what Gardner's character, Murray, wanted for his nephew is very much what I might have asked of you, had I thought about it in such terms. I wanted you to help me learn where my courage flags, so that I may know when to regroup. I wanted you to help me see where my gifts lie, to enhance my ability to serve. I wanted you to help me learn about people and what moves them and holds them back, and what in that we share as part of the human condition. I wanted you to help me learn to proclaim my values ever more boldly, both within and outside the pulpit. I wanted you to help me see all the wild possibilities.

And I wanted you to help me understand that "subtle, sneaky, important reason why [I] was born a human being, and not a chair," a mystery surely at the heart of all great religious endeavor.

And you? You did not let me down. Not once. Well, except for that last bit, a little… You have helped me immensely in my becoming, helped me in ways too numerous and sometimes inexact for me to articulate, but which I know and feel, and for which I will ever be grateful. You have particularly done ministry here this year; you have ministered to me and to our tradition. Yaaay!

Many of you have asked me what's next for me. So let me take a moment to talk about that a little.

If I were on schedule, I would have one more year of class work, would appear before the MFC, or Ministerial Fellowshipping Committee, after which I would proceed into preliminary fellowship and go into search for a settled position.

As it is, I have been doing half-time ministry at the St. Joseph church for four years, and fitting school in around that. I am quite a bit behind, and was pleased enough to be doing half-time ministry that I was okay with that. But with the encouragement of Thomas and other ministers with whom I have spoken this year, and because of the utter delight I have experienced in doing relatively full-time ministry here, I find that I cannot wait to get on with my journey into settled, full-time ministry at a larger church.

So after considerable conversation with Evan, and considerable conversation with the leadership of the St. Joe church, and with their support and Evan's, I have decided not to return to that ministry, but rather to accelerate my schooling with hopes of completing it within two years. I appear before the MFC next March, and so upon my graduation in 2012 (?), will hopefully be ready to go. Keep your fingers crossed!

In the meantime, I leave an Internship here that has been growthful, productive, and exceedingly informative to my life and my ministerial formation. It has been an Internship in which I have felt deeply, and experienced much, from which a rounding out and deepening of my being was inevitable. It has been an enriching, enlarging experience from which I believe I will ever be enabled to more deeply serve.

I will miss you all, as will Evan, though we will be back again as soon as August, when I am scheduled for pulpit supply. But it will be in a different capacity; we all will have changed, we all will have moved on, for that is the way of the world.

And yet the connections we have made will never be severed, for that also is the way of the world, the way of love.

Meditation, Spoken and Silent

I labored over this service, my heart so full of you and me and this church we love, and the ministry we have shared this past nine months; so full of the work we have done together, the laughter we have shared, the tears, the occasional bewilderment, and the bright flashes of insight; so full of passion and excitement longing and gratitude and fulfillment, of rawness and tenderness, and oh-so-greater a depth than ever I have felt before, for we all add to one another's inner depths, and you have added profoundly to mine.

I labored over this service because I am so full, and wanted to find just the right way to tell you of my fullness, to tell you how you have fed me and nourished me and brought me to fuller fruition both as a human being and as a minister. You strengthened me within, where an inner fragility resides, and you ignited a hotter fire of ardor and resolve for the outer world that calls to me.

I labored over this service because I wanted to find just the right words that would help you understand how you have touched me.

You have told me, many of you, that I, too, have touched you, that I, too, have deepened your depths. I will accept that that is true because you say it is so, and you have allowed me to trust you. I will accept that it is true because I understand that all ministry is mutual. I will accept that it is true because ministry occurs between and among people, and that for you to have so exquisitely ministered to me, I must also have succeeded in ministering to you.

Now has come the time when my ministry will veer off in other directions, and your ministry, as a church and as individuals, will move and grow and change and continue. But nowhere will any of us minister separate from one another, for we have become a part of one another's touch and a part of one another's depth.

And that is the great gift of ministry. That is the sublime gift we have given one another.