First Parish Church - Hoehlers – Endings and Beginnings

ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS

A dialogue sermon delivered by The Rev. Judith L. Hoehler and Rev. Harry H. Hoehler
at The First Parish Church in Weston on January 9, 1994.
Texts: Psalm 23 and Romans 12:1-31

I.      Judy: In keeping with the old Puritan New England tradition of confession, I’ll begin today’s sermon by confessing that, while I have had to preach difficult sermons in the past, this is by far the most difficult. How do you tell people you love that it is time to leave? We moderns, particularly in the West, have seldom been good about endings, rarely acknowledging how they flow into beginnings. We might benefit from the wisdom of the ancient Hindus, who divided human life into stages. First was the student stage, in which one began the search for meaning in life and learned basic skills and morals. Then came the householder stage, when one took on the responsibilities of adult life, of raising a family, of contributing to the stability of society by productive work and ethical behavior. The ancient Hindus recognized that the householder stage was a full and busy existence, one that left little time for study and contemplation. Therefore, they provided for a third stage: retirement from public life. After the birth of the first grandchild, one was allowed to withdraw from business or professional activities, give up direct family responsibilities, and go to study in a forest hermitage.
         Now, while Harry and I do not see a forest hermitage in our immediate future, there is long-postponed study and writing that we want to do. But that is not our main reason for announcing our retirement at this time. If we look again at the Hindu scheme, we see an interesting insight. By pegging the commencement of the forest stage, as it is sometimes called, to the arrival of the first grandchild, the Hindus are focusing not only on those who are leaving fulltime active involvement but also on those who are taking over – on the next generation now ready to flex their muscles, to put their ideas to work, to bend their vigor, energy and creativity to fulfilling responsible roles in society. Harry and I firmly believe that now is the time for the next generation of ministerial leadership at First Parish.
         The church is strong and flourishing. The dedicated lay participation in this parish is nothing short of phenomenal. You are in an excellent position to call talented new clergy. The continuing growth in the church school and in the adult congregation brings with it new challenges – the kinds of challenges and problems which a healthy church not only expects, but about which it needs to develop creative new ways of coping, while at the same time remaining faithful to its historic mission –its very reason for being – as expressed in our church covenant.
         Some of the challenging issues facing this congregation in the future – nay, already on our doorstep, as you gathered from the Standing Committee report in the January 2nd newsletter – are off-street parking, stewardship, and long-range planning. Gone are the days when everyone knew everyone else on Sunday morning. How do we incorporate new members into the church in such a way that they feel welcome and known by longtime members? How do we expand our educational and devotional opportunities? How do we accomplish effective communication so everyone knows what’s going on within the church and feels part of the decision-making process? And what of our witness beyond our doors? Among the 30 or so large churches within the UUA, ours is one of the few which is avowedly Christian. There are many more Unitarian churches with Christians in their membership whose ministers look to this church and other churches in the Council of Christian Churches within the UUA for help in dealing with their members’ religious needs. Former UUA president William Schulz, himself not a Christian, has said that it is the UU Christian churches which anchor the denomination in the ecumenical world and which prevent the UUA from slipping into a small, cultic entity irrelevant to the larger religious scene. How do we here at First Parish more effectively witness both within our own denomination and within the interreligious world in which we live? These are but a few of the challenges which will benefit from fresh new ministerial insights and skills.

II.      Harry: Well, what have we learned over these past thirty years as your ministers? The answer, of course is many things. You have helped educate us. You have taught us how to deal sensitively with peoples’ sorrows and losses, how to confront creatively dissension within the church community so that it doesn’t become destructive, how to honor diversity of outlook in the congregation without permitting it to move the church away from its fundamental allegiances. All these things we have learned through our interactions with you, and for them we are eternally grateful.
         But your gentle criticism of our early ministry here also enabled to understand something else about our tasks. And that had to do with our preaching, (Here I’m referring to my preaching, not Judy’s. She had not yet been called as minister.)
         When our family arrived in Weston in January of 1964, the civil rights movement had not reached its zenith. The March on Washington had taken place the summer before. The Civil Rights Bill of ’64 had not yet been crafted. Selma was a year away, and the Voting Rights Act took another half year after that. Martin Luther King died four years later.
         During that period much of the preaching heard here, as well as many of the church’s activities, focused on forging better racial relations. The church developed its own tutorial program in Roxbury. Church members were heavily involved in the Weston Coalition, a group dedicated to improving interracial understanding, in the founding of Roxbury-Weston, and in paving the way for METCO in the public schools. Heady times indeed!
         It was during this period that several active members of the parish individually took me aside. The sum and substance of their remarks went something like this: “You know,” they said, “we support all that you are trying to do here. We’re glad that you are raising our consciousness on civil rights and other matters. But we wish you would give us a deeper appreciation of the faith vision that lies behind your urgings. We want a fuller understanding of how it all connects.”
         Needless to say, I was somewhat taken aback by these comments. No preacher wants to be told that he isn’t doing it right. Later I eased into the matter with a venerable member of the congregation. By a rather circuitous route, he informed me that my friendly critics were not alone in their concern. “We are so needful,” he said, “of an overall vision – one that not only helps us to grapple with large social issues but with our fears, our insecurities, and the great mysteries that daily confound us. And we have to be able to see all this in the light of a tradition that makes sense.”
         These unsettling encounters led me back to reading the sermons of Martin Luther King, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Paul Tillich. All three in quite different ways were prophets to our age. All addressed the day’s political, social and economic complexities. But each grounded his words in an understanding of the Christian gospel. Beyond this, each took pains to interpret to hearers the meaning of that gospel and its relevance for all aspects of human life, the personal as well as the societal, the spiritual as well as the secular. Even the bulk of Martin Luther King’s sermons focused on people’s commitment to God and Christ’s way for day-to-day living.
         It was this collection of experiences that changed the emphasis in my preaching. Instead of commenting on every current social controversy, as if a sermon were little more than a New York Times editorial, I came to see the purpose of preaching as setting forth the biblical message as the faith context for interpreting the significance of human life. It became the encompassing frame for my preaching,
         Now, not for a moment did I then or do I now believe that all of God’s truth is revealed through the Bible or in the Christian tradition. There is, after all, in the words of one of the church’s greatest hymns, “a wideness in God’s mercy;” and we should never lose sight of this fact. But I do believe that we have to come to truth in matters religious through the lenses of a particular tradition, for there is no universal tradition. No religious pathway gives us an unencumbered vision of the Transcendent. No one, as St. Paul reminds us, sees God face to face. Only through the glasses of a particular faith stance do we glimpse something of that sacred mystery we call God. Only then do we begin to understand a measure of God’s ways for our lives. And only then, paradoxically, as we become steeped in the loyalties of a particular integrated tradition, are we freed to benefit form the insights of other ways and include the best of them as influences in our own faith perspectives.
         This I came to appreciate, over a period of time to be sure, as a result of the promptings of some of you years ago.

III.     Judy: I, too, have learned much from you. Whereas Harry had been minister in Beverly, Massachusetts, for five years before coming to Weston, I have spent all of my professional life in this one church. And one of your strengths as a church, before which I stand in awe, is your ability to tolerate dissent without becoming divisive. My first dramatic encounter with this ability I related in our twenty-fifth anniversary sermon five years ago. It is a story I have told every year to my preaching classes at Harvard because it epitomizes the meaning of the freedom of the pulpit. We had been in Weston but a short time when UU minister James Reeb was murdered in Alabama. A call went out from denominational headquarters for clergy to join Martin Luther King in Selma. Harry notified the chairperson of the Standing Committee that he would be leaving for Selma on the following Monday and that his sermon the day before would outline why he was going. That week the parsonage was besieged with phone calls and visitors urging him not to go. Fearing a split in the congregation, the Standing Committee met early that Sunday morning. By the time of the service – which was standing room only – the Standing Committee had prepared and distributed to the congregation a statement to the effect that, while some individual members of the Committee might disagree that the Minister’s action was an appropriate one, the Committee looked upon his going as an extension of First Parish’s tradition of the freedom of the pulpit; that, in effect, Harry was simply putting into practice what he preached from the pulpit. The official Standing Committee minutes of that early morning meeting – March 14, 1965 – read in part: “It was unanimously voted to reaffirm the right of the Minister to act in this, as in all matters, in accordance with the dictates of his conscience.”
         My own firsthand encounter with your ability to work through dissent came at the time of the co-ministry. After Harry had been here ten years, and I had worked part-time the last several of those years as your Director of Religious Education, you sent our family on sabbatical to Oxford. Before we left, the Chairman of the Standing Committee said to us: “First Parish is getting to the point where it needs a second minister. How about Judy coming back with a proposal to be that minister?” I was already ordained, and we had planned to seek a co-ministry when the children were older, but this request precipitated our making the proposal on our return to Weston. That September the parish began holding meetings about it. Two things impressed me about those meetings. First was the honesty yet gentleness with which the controversy was addressed. Legitimate questions were raised – some of them over and over again – and people were not afraid to disagree. Remember that women in the pulpit were not a common occurrence back then, and co-ministries were practically nonexistent. Where would the buck stop? Who was finally responsible? How could you complain about one minister to the other if they were married? Suppose one were better in the pulpit than the other? What about jealousy? Harry’s been here ten years; is it fair to bring in Judy at the same level? Shouldn’t she be assistant minister and Harry senior pastor? By the time the vote was taken at the annual meeting in February 1975, the issues had been so thoroughly aired that even those who were not convinced felt comfortable with the decision. The dissenters abstained so that the vote to call the co-ministry would be unanimous.
         The second thing which impressed me about the co-ministry process was the role of the Benevolent Alliance, at that time an all-women’s organization. It was the common wisdom among our ministerial colleagues and in all the literature that the strongest opposition to a woman in the pulpit came from women; they were the ones who did not want women ministers. Yet within days of the announcement of our proposal, it was the B-A Board which was the first to endorse it, and the endorsement was unanimous.
         The Vietnam War . . . Watergate . . . the Nuclear Freeze . . . Desert Storm . . . eight presidential elections . . . subsidized housing in Weston . . . Christmas wreaths and graduation prayers: all had strong proponents of both sides of the issue, yet through the many discussion programs, sermons and action groups, you never allowed your partisan views to divide you as a church. The going was not always easy; but always you tried to adhere to the Apostle Paul’s advice to the church in Rome read for our second lesson: “to let love be genuine; to hold fast to what is good; to hold one another with mutual affection.”

IV.     Harry: As for our personal plans! The letter you received earlier in the week mentioned that we anticipate taking up the parish’s kind offer of a sabbatical, starting in September. Our current plans are to conduct the summer services and leave the parsonage by the end of August. At that time we intend to return to the Tantur Ecumenical Institute in Jerusalem where we studied during our sabbatical leave nine years ago. There I hope to add to my work on Christian Responses to the World’s Faiths. Judy wishes to pursue her interest in Christian spirituality and its relation to social action. Our official connection as ministers of First Parish Church will terminate with the church annual meeting in February 1995.
         As for our intentions when we return to the United States, most likely we will want to continue our studies as well as involve ourselves in some of the voluntary associations we have long been interested in but till now, because of church responsibilities, have had only superficial participation.
         Where will we live? Our denominational ministerial guidelines strongly recommend that we not live in the community where we have served as ministers.
The reason for this is obvious and fair: so that the new leadership of the church are not hindered in their efforts by the presence of former clergy. So we will be living in the vicinity but not in Weston.
         Permit us to close with a word of profoundest gratitude to all of you who make up this very special congregation. Each of you has blessed our lives over and over again. As Judy recounted in the sermon we preached five years ago at the end of our quarter century with you, “We arrived with three children, two of them in diapers. You saw us patiently through the child-rearing years; you educated us, challenged us, respected our privacy, laughed at our jokes, fought with us, let us share your tears and your joys, and lovingly cared for us in a thousand quiet and generous ways. [We} count it as a great privilege to [have] walked among you.”
         What a wonderful community of God’s folk you are. May the Lord bless you as you move forward into the next phase of your ministry to each other and to that larger world God calls you to serve.

Prayer

         O Lord God, praised be your name in the sanctuary. You have given us to know the times and seasons, give us the grace to love what we have been given.
         Generations have stood before you in this place, and we return to this community of memory and hope out of our need to keep up the life-long quest for meaning and wholeness,
         We come here to find courage for the days ahead, for we face temptations that may cause us to fall.
         We come here to find judgment and direction, for on all sides contrary voices speak.
         We come here to find confidence and hope, for we know that duties call us, and we need the strength to meet them.
         But most of all, we come here as followers of Jesus Christ, that in all that we say and do and are, we may learn to be agents of his self-giving mercy.
         In this light, O God, help us to see our world with clearer vision and seek the insight we need to create a more compassionate, just, and peaceful society!
         Grant that our hearts are kept in “the wisdom we seek, the courage we need, the hope that will carry us on.” May we grab hold of the opportunities that come our way, that we may touch our world with enlarged sympathies and an ever more constant faith.
         So may we be “grafted anew to your will for this our world and our time in it.” Thus may we, all of us who gather here, live as signs of your coming kingdom. Amen.