“The End of Who We Were and the Beginning of Who We Will Be.”
a sermon by Reverend Roberta Finkelstein
Our closing hymn, Rank by Rank Again We Stand, is the processional hymn at almost every ordination and installation that takes place in a Unitarian Universalist church on this continent. It is also sung every year at General Assembly at the beginning of the Service of the Living Tradition. That service marks the significant passages in the lives of ministers and credentialed religious educators in our movement. I can count on being part of the Service of the Living Tradition four times, two of which have already happened. When I received Preliminary Fellowship - the entry level of credentialing into UU ministry – I walked across the stage for the first time, to shake hands with the President of the Unitarian Universalist Association. I was full of the idealism of the new minister, thrilled and scared. I had so little idea of what I was getting myself into! The walk across the stage was, for me, a ritual culmination of many years of work and many more years of struggle. Struggle to first recognize and then answer the call to ministry – a call that I wasn’t really looking for and wasn’t, at first, ready to acknowledge let alone answer. But I did, and there I was.
Three years later I was again honored to receive Final Fellowship - the end of a mandated probationary period, a minimum of three years of evaluated ministry. Having been judged minimally competent by mentors, by the Ministerial Fellowship Committee, and by the congregation I was serving – I took that walk again. If I plan well and am lucky, I will walk once more when I officially retire from full time ministry. Each time I walk across the stage, I know, for at least a moment, that the last time my name will be called, I will not be present to hear it. At our proudest moments, we are most aware of our mortality. At the moments, when I received both preliminary and final fellowship, when I looked into the future and caught a glimpse of the world without me in it, I did not feel morbid or depressed. It was affirming to know that when I die, the movement I served will make note of it, and celebrate my place in the living tradition, simply by speaking my name in memory.
The Service of the Living Tradition is yearly evidence of how profoundly Unitarian Univeralists are connected to our past, to our present, and to our future. I take that connection, and the obligations it places upon me, very seriously. As a minister I believe that it is my job to help this congregation live in what Robert Fulghum called “ the paradox of ritual patterns and sacred habits” – those things that provide us with both a solid footing and springboard – roots and wings - those times and experiences that encourage us to be most genuinely who we are, while encouraging us to grow robustly into who we are called to be. We don’t need the pomp of the Service of the Living Tradition. All we need is each other – and our willingness to gather each week to worship, to celebrate, to listen, as David Rankin suggested in our opening words, “for the calling that awaits us and invites us to live our truth.”
It is inevitable that as I think back to the Services of the Living Tradition in which I have participated I would also remember and relive the experience of being ordained. As I stood at the back of the church, by tradition the last in the processional line, hearing the opening chords of "Rank by Rank" being played, I had a moment of doubt and even panic. "I can't do it!" I thought. The strains of that all too familiar hymn made me think about the endeavor I was about to undertake, and I quaked in my shoes. Ministry is something I take very seriously.
I was ordained jointly by the members of the Arlington UU Church and the Bull Run Unitarian Univeralists. The members of BRUU gave me this book as a gift that day in May 1992. Over the years I have occasionally taken it out and have particularly enjoyed reading the many loving inscriptions on the inside cover - remembering faces and names and connections. I was especially struck by the one that said, "I'm glad we get the privilege of ordaining you . . ." In the free church, ordaining a minister is a privilege reserved for the local congregation. There are no bishops, no experts that mediate the process. Ordination is conferred by you. Those two congregations gave me this charge on that day: "Wherever you may be called to serve, we would have you preach the word of truth in freedom and love, to minister to all in times of joy and of sorrow, empowering those around you to growth and change in the direction of peace and justice. Will you, by your words and by your living example, set forth the principles of our free faith?" They spoke those words not just for themselves, but on your behalf as well. And I responded with these words: "I am aware of the privileges and obligations that this ordination confers on me. I enter into this ministry with a deep sense of commitment, with gratitude to you who have ordained me, and with a sense of joy and excitement. In humility I promise to try always to live my life in unity with the principles by which this act of ordination takes place." I wasn't just speaking to them, I was speaking to you. I didn't know you yet, but I spoke them to you just the same. Those words hang on the wall in my office, and I read them every time I sit at my desk. I take the vows of ministry very seriously.
The members of BRUU understood the connection between that single event – the ordination - and the role that ritual plays in our communal lives. Ritual does three things for us: it connects us to our history - to the living tradition out of which our personal contemporary faith emerges. We didn't invent Unitarian Universalism, even though we are constantly in the process of reinventing it. We owe a debt of gratitude to our spiritual forebears, and every time we celebrate together a ritual that affirms that faith, we pay that debt.
Ritual also connects us to the larger community. Whenever a Unitarian Universalist congregation gathers to ordain or install a new minister, or to dedicate a building, they invite others to join in the celebration. "We are gathering to celebrate", they say. "Please come." When celebration reaches beyond the walls of the local congregation, the ties between us are strengthened. We remember that we are not alone, that others have faced the same issues, the same questions, the same joys and the same frustrations that we now face. Others have made the transitions, done the growing, and paused to celebrate their successes.
Thirdly, rituals connect us to each other. A ritual is a ceremony of promise making. We articulate how we will be together, how we will treat each other, what we hope to accomplish in making those vows. We do so knowing full well that each of us will, at times, fall short of the ideals, that over the long haul all of us will fail to keep those promises. But the ritual allows us to envision and reach for the ideal, and to keep it in front of us, as something that, when we do fall away, we can turn back to and reach for once again. I made my promise, on the evening of my ordination, in humility - the humility that comes from knowing full well my human limitations; from knowing that the ministry is an ideal that I can only strive for, and never fully embody. Trying and falling short and trying yet again is my life work.
So the ritual of ordination made me a minister. No by itself, of course. That service was the culmination of a long process. But the service itself was an important part of that process. The promises made that day imparted meaning to all who participated. When we plan and take part in a ritual, we are saying something about who we are and who we hope to be. Our identify is affirmed, even as it is changed by the process. We are, and we become more.
And that brings me to the question of what we are doing together on April Fools Day. I hope that you all know that on Sunday April 1 at 4 pm South Church will formally install me as your settled minister. I hope that date is written on your calendars in indelible ink, that you understand how very important your presence is on that occasion.
Whenever a liberal church and a minister agree to walk together, some kind of installation service is conducted. The Installation, a word chosen well before it became associated with the technical process of inserting new software into a computer, serves the same purposes that any ritual serves. First of all, it helps to connect us to each other. It is a public statement of relationship - including the making of mutual promises to each other about how we will work together and what we hope to accomplish together. It is a celebration of all the careful thinking and communication and intention that went into the search process. A time of ministerial transition is well known to be a wonderful opportunity in the life of a congregation – a time when assumptions can be questions, priorities reordered, old habits re-evaluated. The time since Will and Marta announced their retirement has been a time for South Church to struggle with questions of identity and intention. And after the struggle comes the celebration. After all the hard work and determination that went into offering a new minister a call, you get to celebrate the achievement in worship, and you get to throw yourselves a party!
I want to point out that though my process for much of that time was invisible to you, there was hard work and struggle and determination in my path as well. But all of that hard work on both our parts will be affirmed if, in the intersection of your path and mine, we are able to create a mutual ministry that will bear fruit for many years as we walk together.
“The End of Who We Were and the Beginning of Who We Will Be.”
a sermon by Reverend Roberta Finkelstein
In addition to formally connecting us to each other, the Installation Service serves to connect us to the larger community. This is a service to which many people outside of South Church have been invited - and all have accepted with enthusiasm, knowing that it is an honor and a privilege to join any congregation in marking a significant event in it's communal life. Ministers, religious educators, other staff and members of UU churches around the District will be in attendance. Clergy from other Seacoast faith communities, representatives from community organizations, and the mayor of Portsmouth will also be present. Their presence will remind us that we do not practice our ministry in a vacuum – we are part of a larger movement of Unitarian Universalism and we are part of the larger cultural context of Seacoast life. So we invite our neighbors, and we thank them for sharing ours special day with us by offering them hospitality. (The Installation Committee would welcome your tangible help with this hospitality piece. They need food, and they need money. Would the members of the Installation Committee please stand?)
The Installation Service will connect us with our past and our future. In planning and conducting this service, we join a long line of liberal churches who have also celebrated the beginning of a significant relationship - and for a church, there is probably no single relationship more important than the one between congregation and minister. By being part of the service, you as individuals also join that long line of free-thinkers and activists who have chosen a voluntary association with our movement – the living tradition we all share. Some of the people in the sanctuary on the afternoon of April 1 will know all the words to "Rank by Rank" by heart, and will get chills or an eyeful of tears with the first chord - just as couples in long-time relationships often weep through weddings and commitment ceremonies as they recall their own vow making. Others in the room on April 1 will be hearing that hymn for the first time. Some of you who are present his morning may be hearing it on April 1 for the second time. As you sing it, know what it means not just here and now, but in congregations across time and place. Feel the ties that bind you to the many who have sung it before, and will sing it again long after we are gone.
Rituals serve a basic human need – the religious impulse. We engage in rituals because they help make life bearable in times of loss and they help make life richer in times of happiness and change. Ritual brings us together to mark the dramatic and significant passages in our lives. These passages, whether personal or communal, are inevitably a mixture of joy and sorrow, of embracing a future and letting go of a piece of the past. If we had to do all that alone, it would be too hard. We would stagnate and despair. But we have the privilege of gathering to celebrate - to support and encourage and cheer each other on.
Recently I talked about sacrament, about the notion that I learned from my Episcopalian mother that a sacrament is an external evidence of internal grace. We could say that a ritual is similarly a public (external) evidence of internal transformation. A couple does not become joined as one at the moment when the minister makes the pronouncement. A ministry does not gel at the moment when the congregation pronounces the words of installation. But the ritual does make real for us what we have been working on in a progressive and intentional way for months, even years. The Installation will indeed be external evidence of an internal intention – on your part and on mine. It will be external evidence of a change, a transformation, that is already underway. We are inevitably made different by our coming together. As Marion Woodhouse said, "It is good to remember these rites of passage that mark the end of who we were and the beginning of who we will become, and the images that supported us in our crossing."
This Installation is indeed the end of something – the end of what South Church was in it’s previous incarnations, the end of what ministry was for me in previous congregations. It is indeed the beginning of something – what South Church will be as we engage together in mutual ministry in this community. That is good news, joyful news. But as with any change, it is tinged with sadness and anxiety and hesitation. That is why we need the ritual itself, to support us as we cross together into our future.
I cry at ordinations and installations, and I cry every year at the Service of the Living Tradition. At those moments, I stand in awe of the truth that change is inevitable and life is unpredictable, and it is so wonderful to be alive and to feel the joy and the pain of those passages that I wouldn't want to trade it for anything. I have had the privilege of walking across the stage to the sound of my name twice now at Services of the Living Tradition. I know my name will be read at least once more. In the meantime, I plan to revel in and celebrate the awe and the wonder of a life in ministry. Particularly this chapter of my life in ministry; a life I share with all of you.
I am grateful to know that over the years, we will have many opportunities to create and experience together rituals which will allow us to find those elusive secrets that Robert Fulghum refers to: inner harmony and knowing when to let go. Those rituals will "anchor us to a center while freeing us to move on" - solid footing and springboard in one. Together we will learn to juggle. Just one more ball, for just one more precious minute.