Mastering Divinity

Mastering Divinity

A Service for Association Sunday

Sunday, October 12, 2008

Service offered by

Rev. Wayne ArnasonPam Rumancik

WestShoreUnitarianUniversalistChurchRocky RiverOhio

Sermon - Part 1:Wayne Arnason

I’m a Master of Divinity! At least that’s what it says on a piece of paper I have filed away some where. Of all the titles that there are for graduate degrees in higher education, the one for people who are preparing for the ministry has always seemed to me to be the most presumptuous. It sounds like a title that should be splashed in a forty point Showcard font across a Comic Book cover rather than a college diploma. How do you even study “Divinity”, let alone master it? That’s the koan, that’s the spiritual conundrum, that every seminarian who enters an M.Div. degree program has to answer for themselves – and so its very appropriate and gratifying for all of us to be able to have two seminarians, seekers of the mastery of divinity, here for this service today – our own West Shore member Pam Rumancik, who will be sharing the sermon and her colleague at Meadville Lombard Theological School Karen Mooney, who will be offering the special music. It’s good to have both of them here today also as a reminder of the larger association of Unitarian Universalist congregations and institutions of which West Shore is a part, and which we celebrate and affirm on this annual Association Sunday.Their theological school and the congregations in the Chicago area that they have gotten to know have broadened their understanding of what Unitarian Universalism means beyond the culture and style of any one church.

Both Pam and Karen, I’m sure, will tell you that part of what it really means to become a Master of Divinity is to learn to see the world with the eyes of theology. I use the words “see with the eyes” very purposefully here, rather than use a phrase like “think theologically” because I think it’s a better way to talk about what a theological education means. Theological education is not just about thinking in new ways, as a result of the reading and discussion you have undertaken. Rather, it’s about approaching all of your experiences with a different set of eyes. The punch line for these reflections we will offer today invites us beyond the walls and the student body of any seminary, however. We want to help you see that theological education is not just something that happens in a formal degree program. Indeed, it is one of the central tasks of the church and one of the possibilities and promises that you are offered when you become involved in a Unitarian Universalist Church.

All of us have the opportunity and the challenge to become Masters of Divinity in our own unique way through the community of the church, and today we want to explore what that means in some very concrete ways. So let me give you an example of seeing the world through the eyes of theology. Let’s look at the most pressing issue that has dominated the news and preoccupied our minds all week: the global financial crisis, and let’s look at how we see it through a different lens than the one used by all the media commentators.

I have to admit, that there have been times in our life together at West Shore when Kathleen and I wish that the college degrees we have in our drawers said Masters of Business Administration instead of Masters of Divinity!! This week has been one of them! It is no small task to have scheduled a service like this one, which includes a request for a special offering for denominational projects in theological education, at the end of a week when everyone is worried about their money. So, I hope you won’t see it as a digression from the themes of this service if I say a word as both your co-executive and your co-minister about the stock market crash we have seen this week.

During the upcoming weeks, our Finance Committee and our Stewardship Committee and our Board will be assessing the damage and reassessing our planning for our financial future. The ministers will be telling our leadership that we think both our challenges and our plans remain the same, only tougher, because of the decline in the equity markets. It has been clear for some time that the financial challenge before us is finding a way to either pay off our remaining mortgage, or raise the funds needed to keep paying the mortgage. This week has made it less likely that the capital funds we thought would allow us to make those payments through 2011 will be available to help us that long.

I expect that this week we will be looking at spending freezes or reductions, both for this year and next to make up for lost investment income and capital resources. In the year following, we will likely need to ask for an additional commitment at canvass time to either pay off mortgage principle or to simply continue to make the payments that the operating budget can’t afford.

I think almost all non-profits, churches, denominational bodies, and service organizations, will have to face doing more with less over the next several years, and they will all be asking their regular supporters for more help to make up for lost investments assets. So the church will have to make its case to remain high on everyone’s list of priorities. Luckily, the most valuable things that a church has to offer its members are not dependent on the fluctuations of the economy. Indeed, in difficult times, people who have meaningful church involvements have found that the church becomes even more important to them.

Our mission as a church, after all, is to help more people lead lives of meaning and purpose. One of the most important spiritual questions that people ever ask themselves is: How much does the meaning and purpose I find in my life depend on the money that I have? It’s a question whose answer helps determine the career you aspire to, the choices you make about marriage and family, where and how you choose to live, and how you spend your time, as well as your money. If what we are in the midst of is a financial hurricane that will require some time for recovery, and if some realignment of all our expectations for credit, goods, and income will be one of the results, then I think a lot of people will be looking to reassess where and how they find meaning and purpose. This requires being able to look with new eyes informed by theologicaldepth and religious understanding.

So let us look for a few minutes with theological eyes at what we are seeing in this market panic. We hear the words “fear” and “trust” frequently from the media pundits who are explaining why the markets won’t turn around. “Fear” and “trust” are not numbers on a spread sheet. They are spiritual issues in our lives. The mathematics and computer models of economic theory prove to be less influencial than a kind of spiritual crisis among investors, a crisis having to do with how deeply we all fear taking our losses and how much we are willing to trust each other to respond to a crisis in a way that all will finally benefit everyone.

The fear of loss, at its root, is a denial of change and impermanence. If every investor is acting all at once in a way that they think will insure self-preservation even ifeveryone else goes down, then the end result is that no one is safe and no one is preserved. It requires trust to act in ways that seem contrary to your short term self interest – to hold onto or to buy stocks that continue to decline, for example, but that is exactly the behavior, multiplied by millions of individual and corporate decisions, that will end the stock market free fall. The trust that is required has to respond to the question: If I go ahead and do this, will other people will have the same trust that I do and take that same leap, despite no guarantee it will work? Sometimes in the world of the spirit, we are asked to set aside the intellectual debates about matters of belief or creed and ask ourselves: what if we acted as if the highest and best moral claims of religion were true? What if we took the leap and acted without being sure others would do the same. Would we be abused by those who thought that us naïve, or would others respond in kind? The same dynamic is going on in the world’s financial markets today, and they would probably benefit from more theological reflection and less economic theory. The Masters of the Universe on Wall Street could have used a Master of Divinity or two in their board rooms.

Sermon - Part 2: Pam Rumancik

When Wayne asked me to come here for Association Sunday and talk about how theological beliefs affect our lives my mind went all over the place. It started at my seminary - Meadville Lombard – where I’ve been in the midst of agonizing over just what theology is – it’s a word we use daily but what does it actually mean? What do I believe? How do those beliefs affect my life choices?

But as I got quiet, as I settled in to listen to my heart, a memory floated up from first grade. It was the day I first heard the golden rule. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” I was quite struck by it. I had to walk a long mile home (really – although it wasn’t uphill both ways) and I clearly remember my 6yr old theologian self thinking “wow – if everybody did that the world would be a wonderful place” We wouldn’t have to worry about the war we prayed about each night. People wouldn’t be mean to each other. I thought Sister Regina Marie was absolutely brilliant and that the future of the world had suddenly gotten brighter. Eventually it dawned on me that people didn’t always live like that – that people acted in inexplicably hurtful ways toward one another, but it didn’t stop me from trying to live that way – to use the golden rule as my childhood theology.

As I grew older I passed through different perspectives. Places where I suddenly saw my relationship with the world in a new way and tried to act from that understanding. I stumbled across a copy of Desiderata in 8th grade and adopted its outlook. “Go placidly among the noise and haste, you are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars, you have a right to be here” It made space – a place of peace in my rocky and seemingly isolated adolescence. I used it to steer my life without realizing I was doing theological work.

Later, when my children were born I embraced and clung tightly to a theology that promised to keep us safe. To make us part of God’s chosen people. I find myself embarrassed now by the way I bought the party line hook, line and sinker. The way I loved God by making cupcakes for the bake sale, by becoming a cantor, a Eucharistic minister, by making my children be altar servers. These were the ways my theology channeled my actions. They were how I expressed my relationship with God, with the universe and looking back now it feels like a very small god, a very small universe.

When I found this church I found my theological home. WestShore helped to shape and guide me. It gave me language, perspective, context and examples. Through sermons and relationships, I came to understand what respecting the inherent worth and dignity of each person looks like – up close and personal, warts and all. It gave me confidence in my own perspective – a larger context in which to make sense of views which seemed so out of kilter with much of the rest of society. That support gave me the confidence to take the big leap and enter seminary.

And now here I am on the path to Unitarian Universalist ministry. I think my universe has changed. I know my theology has. I’ve come to see the divine in each and every being; to look for the worth and dignity inherent in each of us. I’ve come to recognize my actions as connected to my community, as shaping and affirming, as supporting and challenging. Kind of full circle to the golden rule I guess…

One of the great joys of seminary is discovering folks in history who have been exploring these topics – living these values - for a very long time. I learned of a 60 year long experiment in Racovia, Poland in the 1500’s where an entire city lived values of tolerance and reason – publishing books challenging the Trinity and leaving a space for open dialogue – in the midst of reformation politics and the never ending fires of the inquisition. They didn’t believe in the divinity of Jesus but they thought people should be able to trust their own hearts in the matters of the spirit. Radical heresy in that time – and our ancestors.

I’ve come across many engaging and challenging people who changed the course of liberal religion; William Emory Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Florence Nightingale, Hosea Ballou. People who struggled and worked hard at defining theologies which made sense to them – which enabled them to live lives of authenticity and meaning even when those theologies ran counter to the prevailing mindset. Which is what it seems to be about in the long run - finding an authentic way to live lives of meaning and purpose. Lives which are bigger than the scripts we’ve been handed; lives which call us to awareness of our connection to one another, our interdependence, our relationship to the stars.

Why is theology important? Because our theologies, whether we work them out explicitly or not are the road maps by which we guide our days. If they are grand theologies, if we see ourselves as connected to the stars, we live lives that reach for those stars.

So how do I see seminary as important – vital – to this process? It’s in the space it creates and the bridges it forms. Throughout our liberal religious history the evolution of theology has been minister driven. It is in the works of Emerson, Channing, and Parker that we find huge shifts taking place. Shifts which affected not only Unitarians but society at large.

But they did not create those shifts in isolation. Ministers evoke – articulate – what is happening in the world. They hold up a mirror to their congregations and they amplify the development and vision of the people who sit in those pews, who make up those churches. The most amazing idea in the world will not have legs if it doesn’t find resonance with an audience, if it can’t be accepted as having pertinence and meaning to the lives of listeners.

Unitarian Universalist seminaries offer spaces for ideas to blossom. Enriched by ideas of our predecessors, we luxuriate in Emerson, we struggle with Schleiermacher, we open our hearts to Theodore Parker and James Luther Adams. New ideas which reflect the lives and concerns of people today emerge from groundwork laid by past thinkers.

Seminaries are unique institutions. This same growth and evolution of thought takes place in the ivory towers of academia. In the University of Chicago Divinity school new theological ideas are hatched and new perspectives found – but these are offered to other academics – taught to students who will become professors and teach other students. It’s all very heady and exciting in the rarified air of academia –and rarely seeps down to the public in any meaningful way. When my classmates and I take classes at the Div school there sometimes is a sense that seminarians are second class students. We’re not scholars. We’re only going to be ministers…

But that misses an important point. Ministers are a link that brings these heady ideas into the real world where they are tested to see if they have validity or not. Do they have anything to say in the lives of ordinary people? Is there any truth in this fabulous new insight on the bible (or Hegel or Kant) that helps to form a workable understanding of life; a theology that nurtures and challenges; that feeds a hungry spirit?

Seminaries are places for new ideas, new theologies to germinate – but our churches are where they take root. It is in the community that lived experience intersects with theory and forms something real, something tangible, something by which lives can be lived, by which meaning and purpose can be found.

It’s Association Sunday and we are exploring how the Unitarian Universalist Association helps us lead lives of meaning and purpose. I believe that happens in the space made for larger conversations, for passed on knowledge, for generational wisdom. It happens in our seminaries, our churches and our assemblies. It happens when we call one another to realize our place among the stars, call one another to lives that are so much larger than we can possibly imagine alone.

At least, as a seminarian, that’s my take on things. Let me know if that finds resonance with you.

Sermon - Part 3: Wayne Arnason

The theme for Association Sunday this year is “Growing in Spirit”. For the last couple of weeks I’ve been enjoying a class Barbara Howell and I have offered called “The New Retirement”. Unfortunately, retirement got even “newer” during the two weeks that the class has been meeting, but since its not a financial planning class but a spiritual planning class for retirement, we’ve had a chance to look at issues of meaning and purpose as you prepare for the last third of your life. For many people some form of new career after retirement has been part of their retirement plans. For the last three decades, we have routinely seen mid-life and post-retirement career changers entering seminary to become Unitarian Universalist ministers, particularly women leaving empty nests and earlier career choices. The vast majority make wonderful ministers. However, in my years on the Ministerial Fellowship Committee, I have sometimes seen people whose true motivation was to serve Unitarian Universalism and engage in a theological education, and they believed that the only way to do that was to go to seminary and become a minister. Twenty years ago, that belief was true. However, it today’s world you can easily obtain as much theological education as you desire and serve Unitarian Universalism in a variety of ways without leaving your home, uprooting your life, or changing your career.