Sharing Ministry | Rev. Dr. Daniel Kanter | 10.01.23
What does it mean to be part of a wider community and what does it do for us as individuals? Maybe that’s where real power is. This is the second sermon in our Living a Purposeful Life series, during which we are exploring the spiritual inner work required to transform our personal lives.
Sermon Transcript
Behind the Robe
Well, have you ever seen a ministerial robe hanging in a sports arena? I have. One summer day in 2003, my colleague, Gary Smith, preaching a sermon about ministry. Gary, a Boston native preaching in the Boston Garden, the home of the Celtics and the Bruins, to a few thousand Unitarian Universalists. An imitation of when a player’s jersey is retired and hung in the rafters, raised a black preaching robe by the magic of arena tactics up into the sky. It went up and we all cheered. Like the jersey of the heroes of sport, the gesture at that moment meant that a minister could also be a hero, even if only for an hour, honored by tradition, seen for all we give.
And in that sermon, my friend Gary said to the gathered, “We ministers are committed to a profession in which we serve in so many invisible ways in our communities as chaplains and social workers, in our work with children, in our parish ministry with congregations across the land, in our day-to-day struggles to try to get the ministry right, to say this word and not that word, to make peace here, to hold our peace, to put the pieces back together. Please, some of the people, some of the time say the word God enough, but not too much. Laugh at the jokes about ministers working only on Sundays. Shop at supermarkets out of town so our parishioners wouldn’t discover that we buy really big bags of chips. And keep things running when struggling with an economy that has squeezed the living daylight out of the institutional budgets that support our ministries and of the insane world in which we have to scream, ‘Hey, I’m a patriot too.'”
He was showing a little behind the curtain, or the robe, as it were. And I will never forget after that robe went up into the dark arena, he said, “Here is what I know about my own ministry. There are Sundays when I walk into the pulpit in Concord, Massachusetts and I look out at the congregation and I think to myself, what am I doing here? If these people whom I know and love so much only knew how inadequate I feel, how inadequate I am, would everything come tumbling down?”
Give ‘Em the Old Razzle Dazzle
Give them the old razzle dazzle, I can hear Billy Flynn sing in the musical Chicago. And there are days it could be me singing it. Give them the old double whammy. Daze and dizzy them. Show them the first rate sorcerer you are. Long as you can keep them off balance, how can they spot you got no talents? Razzle dazzle them. Razzle dazzle them. Gary is and was one of the most honest ministers I have ever known. His folksy New England style captivated the Concord, Massachusetts church for 25 years. And he was naming something we who stand up here, and maybe we all struggle with at times, that being the feeling of being imposters in our own lives. The fake it till you make it quote resonates with me sometimes, and I wonder if it resonates with you.
The truth is that we’re making this all up all the time. And yes, we stand on some tradition. And yes, we have some expertise. And yes, we feel inadequate to do the jobs we are tasked to with sometimes. We are called boss or grandma or friend or uncle or colleague or minister, doesn’t matter. Striking the balance, being okay with who we are and pushing ourselves to be good at what we do is par for the course in life. The truth is, though, most of you don’t have to stand up in front of 500 people each week and pour your heart out in public. We do, but we knew that coming into it. I don’t think any of us really knew how hard it would be.
Burnout and PTSD in Ministers
A minister from a whole generation ago, Jack Mendelsohn, who served a church in downtown Boston, used to say, “Ministers sit with the happy and the sad in a chaotic pattern of laugh, cry, laugh, cry, and know deep down that the first time their laughter is false or their tears are make-believe, their days as real ministers are over.” Isn’t that the truth? We professional ministers are called to be authentic, and it shows when we are not, and we know that. And you probably have moments in your life like that too when you slant the truth or go along to get along and it’s not you and you know it. The only difference is your livelihood may not be on the line. For whatever reason, ministry is required a certain level of integrity no matter what. It’s part of why you’re reading articles on Facebook about ministers leaving their posts because it’s too hard. It’s partly why a colleague of mine said that he learned in a webinar this last week that 81% of all clergy and chaplains surveyed exhibited some symptoms of PTSD.
He said there had been over 2,200 studies done on burnout in helping professions for clergy and chaplains and therapists, and only eight offered interventions. Too hard to keep up all we have to keep up to balance all the issues and the opinions and the jobs. Too hard to be, as one article recently articulated, that to be a minister is to be a professional speaker, a CEO, a counselor, a fundraiser, a human resource director, a master of ceremonies, and a pillar of virtue. For Pastor Alexander Lang, the Presbyterian minister who wrote that list in his resignation letter, that included that, “All these jobs are done,” he said, “with a thousand bosses, unrealistic expectations, being underpaid, and living with the annual stress of whether everyone will pledge enough to pay the staff among political divisions.” And I’m sure he might add the feeling of the need to be upstanding, razzle dazzler.
UUs and Pledging
His choice was to leave the ministry. Now, I only share Pastor Lang’s concerns on a few points. In our church, leadership is honored. I only have 13 bosses who sit on the board, not a thousand. And I don’t feel the political divisions here, but certainly they exist beyond the walls. I am paid enough. But I do wonder if all of you who come and enjoy this place are funding it to your full capacity. Just being honest. UUs are the highest compensated people on average in America with the highest educational levels on average in America and still pledge at the lowest levels on average of all denominations.
You see, I’m saying to you we need you. And we need you this year especially to show us your generous love. But that’s not why I’m here today. What I’m talking about is ministry, mine, his, Beth’s, and yours. In this church, it is a shared thing to do ministry. Together, we do ministry. And in part that’s what makes it possible for us to do what we do, even if we have to shop in other towns to buy those big boxes of Fig Newtons. My friend Gary said that day in 2003 that the ministry is mostly in the moments we share.
What Does Ministry Look Like?
He said how we will guide and inspire and comfort and forgive and challenge and love one another and all those who are concerned, it probably will not happen in any of the big moments. His point was that my ministry and T. J.’s ministry and Beth’s ministry and your ministry happens in the small, patient, attentive moments in life. In the silence between the tears and the story and the diagnosis and the treatment plan and in the gratitude over life and the hug at the end of a counseling session or a memorial. Or a moment when we truly see each other for real, sitting on a bench in the playground with someone we care about. The real ministry happens in the moment when we cheer our coming of age youth and our high school graduates appear on this stage and we tear up and we see their pictures of them as children growing up among us. And then occasionally they grow up and become adults. And we touch them with the rows when they become members. That’s ministry.
And the real ministry happens when a member of this church’s women’s group puts Plan B and a voter registration card in an empowerment kit that some patient at a clinic in Planned Parenthood in Dallas or one of our travelers on our program to Albuquerque will open up and receive and know nothing about the person who put it there. Only that it came with some unitarian loving hands to make their lives better. Ministry is when, in a classroom a member of our church, a person of color courageously looks at a white member and tells them what they said hurt, and then they both find common cause to go further in conversation and in relationship.
It is this ministry that is forged in relationships of us all. And it does happen from the pulpit in a relationship we call the freedom of the pulpit and the freedom of the pew, even when the person in the back row only heard the first word of the sermon and the last word of the sermon, and still it changes who they are. All this is ministry. Mostly not razzle dazzle, mostly not put on in any way. But rather like my old universalist friend Bucky McKeeman said in this reading that TJ read today, “wherever there is a meeting that summons us to our better selves, wherever our lostness is found, fragments of ourselves are united, our wounds are healed, our spines stiffen, our muscles strengthened, there is ministry.”
And there it is, friends, here among us. In front of you, yes, in black robes that will never be hoisted into another arena ever again. Ministry done and present because the people up here love this calling and love you and would never call this a job. It is life for us. And it is also wherever we strengthen each other for the journeys of life. Whenever we really see each other, whenever we really hold each other as holy children of God just trying to do what is right. Whenever and wherever that happens, so does ministry.
There is No Ministry Here Without You
What I’m saying up here is ministry happens. And there is no ministry up here without you out there. There is no ministry for us without a congregation. A parish minister without a congregation is no minister at all. And a parish minister without a congregation that is engaged in the ministry to one another and to deepening faith and to addressing the world is just an entertainer. Without a congregation, a preacher is nothing. Without a people of faith, a pastor is a social worker. When I’m preaching up here knowing that you are here looking for ways to deepen your life, to find spiritual insights, to find faith and spirit, that means something. And I wouldn’t do it if I thought I was just up here entertaining.
And your ministry is done not in preaching robes and pulpits, but when you see each other and see us with love. It is through your ministry and your presence and your worshiping together and your attention and, yes, your money that our mutual ministry is both not razzle dazzle and possible. It is your deepening faith that confers on us and affirms on us a place among you. You get what I’m telling you? I’m reading you your job description. So what are you doing this afternoon? I don’t mean what your plans are, sorry. Of course you’re coming here at four o’clock, right? Because what you’re doing today is affirming a ministry at four o’clock here in the sanctuary. You are affirming a specific ministry of care and engagement that Reverend T. J. so elegantly conducts already with us.
He is not called with tenure for organizational reasons, not personal reasons. But in our affirmation of him, we are saying together we have ministries to do here. And we want him to be part of it for a long time. And we are also saying that we know it is difficult to be set aside in robes and regular preaching duties, but we are saying to you that it is made easier with your love and your support. And more than anything, it is made easier because you work on deepening your faith in this place with these people for this time in a God of love or no God of love, in a movement of affirmation and service, in service of affirmation and love.
Now, friends, you and I have shared a ministry now for 22 years. I came here when I was really young, man. And I hope this today is the beginning of a relationship with Reverend T. J. that we affirm in his ministry that lasts even just that long, because it is ours to do and your work to do. And it matters in the world that we take this up together.
