Into the Wilderness (December 10, 2006 by James Montgomery Jackson)
(Webmaster's note: The reading for the day was from Lewis Carrol's Alice Through the Looking Glass.)
At some point in the not too distant future Jan and I will disappear into the woods between Michigamme and Amasa. The grade to Michigamme will become impassable as the snows accumulate to block our “short” route here. To get to Amasa and the long route, I will have to plow my way either ¾ths of a mile; 2 ½ miles or 8 miles depending on where they are doing logging this winter and so keeping the roads open. That route to church, assuming it is plowed on a Sunday, would take us something a bit less than three hours. So you are unlikely to see us much until after mud season ends.
Our nearest overwintering neighbor will be more than two-miles away by snowshoe. The Cheshire Cat rightly said to Alice, we’re all mad here. As Jan and I start our great adventure into the northwoods wilderness we leave you on a great adventure into a different wilderness – a wilderness of opportunities. Answering Alice’s question to the Cheshire Puss, “Would you tell me please, which way I ought to go from here?” is central to finding our way through this exciting wilderness. The Cheshire Cat’s response, “That depends a good deal on where you want to go to,” illumes the problem.
Last year, just about this time, Jan and I closed up our house in the woods and traveled to the Cincinnati area to spend the winter months. I had to pull batteries from the ATV and Bobcat, drain all of the water from the house, blow out the water in the line coming from the well, and put a thin coating of Vaseline on the wood stove. Despite the fact that I have two adult children, I remarked to Jan that for the first time I felt like a real adult. If I didn’t do the tasks right, bad things were going to happen. No backstop existed; it was all up to me.
Not that I was the first to ever close up a house. I had watched such things in my distant childhood and more recently had asked lots of questions of those with more experience, but in the end, it was up to me to do it right and I would have no one to blame for frozen pipes but me.
As one enters a wilderness, guides are helpful, but not always present. In a religious community the guide is often a minister, trained not only in the tenets of the religion, but in helping the community find its path, or return to it if they have strayed. Of course, guides are not unerring. For example, if one queries Yahoo on directions from our Meetinghouse to our place on Shank Lake, it will give you a precise route, but you will never get there because the route takes you on an abandoned road and over a bridge that has not existed for over twenty years. A great route, which could save fifteen or twenty minutes, if it actually existed. And if you take it, you will certainly get somewhere, if as the Cheshire Cat says, you only walk long enough.
The Unitarian Universalist Association has a class of ministers who are especially trained for such wilderness adventures: Interim Ministers. Unlike settled ministers, interim ministers are expected to work with the congregation for one or two years and then move on to another congregation in transition. The median length a settled UUA minister stays with a congregation is about five years. Let’s say interims average about a year and a half; that means in a congregation’s long life something like 20% of the time the congregation will be in transition from one settled minister to the next.
Why do ministers leave? All the same reasons each of us make job changes: they have a better opportunity (larger congregation, better paying job); they have gone stale and need a change; they switch from pastoral ministry to community ministry; they retire; sometimes they die. Regardless of the reason, the community is unsettled by the change. The emotions in the congregation can range from sadness or even grief over the loss, to elation that the (fill in the blank) has left, or maybe a proud joy that the minister we’ve seen grow with us is now stepping up to a new phase in their life.
One thing is for sure, not everyone in the congregation will be experiencing the same emotions and not everyone will agree on what should be done next.
Enter the interim minister, whose primary task is to ready the congregation for their next settled minister. So while they perform the routine ministerial tasks (preaching, pastoral care, etc.) they have one other: uncover the elephants hiding in the congregational closet and haul them out to the living room to get a good airing.
You may have noticed we are fresh out of interim ministers. Almost all are full-time – it is too expensive, monetarily, physically and emotionally to try to do the job on a part-time basis. So we bucked the UUA approved guided tour through the wilderness and bought a building instead. And we are faced with our wilderness of opportunities – and interim minister or no, we had better figure out who we want to be when we grow up, otherwise after walking long enough we will get somewhere, but it may not be the somewhere we want.
I’m not a biblical scholar by any stretch of the imagination, but of the living traditions we share, the bible is perhaps the most familiar to me. The first journey into the wilderness that I looked to for inspiration was that of Jesus.
Matthew, Mark and Luke all share the basics of the story. While being baptized by John the Baptist, Jesus undergoes a life-changing experience and journeys into the wilderness for 40 days and 40 nights to struggle with what he should do. Mark’s version is spare: tempted by Satan, wild beasts, ministered by angels. Matthew and Luke provide a bit of embellishment on the temptations: in short Satan offers Jesus the easy way, which he rejects.
Helpful for personal discovery, but not too useful for a congregation. Satan’s temptations in Matthew and Luke echo from Deuteronomy, which in turn is a recapitulation and exposition of Exodus. After leaving Egypt the Israelites spend forty years in the wilderness. Forty is one of those numbers with mystical powers I didn’t study when I got my BS in Mathematics decades ago, but it keeps cropping up in wilderness stories.
Why did the Israelites spend 40 years in the Wilderness? Simply put, they needed that long before they were ready to cross the river Jordan into the promised land. God had a master plan and tapped Moses on the shoulder as the interim minister, along with Aaron, who was Moses’ voice to the people.
The Israelites were coalesced by their slavery in Egypt, but once they escaped that bondage, they no longer had a unifying goal. The God of Exodus had not had the opportunities to learn modern management techniques. He was a top-down dictator. Even so, it took 40 days and 40 nights with Moses secreted on a mountaintop for God to come up with the Ten Commandments and we can see his agenda:
First, a question: Raise your hand if you think you know all ten of the commandments. Right – didn’t stick very well with me either, despite the current fight about where government can and can not post them.
The first four are all about God: no other god before me; no taking my name in vain, no graven images, keep the Sabbath holy. The fifth I think of as the transition commandment: honor thy father and mother. Six through nine are the social laws: no killing, adultery, stealing, bearing false witness. Last is the internal commandment about not coveting our neighbor’s possessions.
Straightforward, but still took a long time. Keep that in mind: this figuring out where we are going is not accomplished in a weekend retreat. Satan offers the easy answers, which Jesus knew he needed to reject.
So Moses comes down, commandments in hand and finds Aaron has molded a golden calf from the women’s earrings. In a fit of rage, Moses breaks the tablets and has to spend another forty days and forty nights closeted with God to come up with the same commandments a second time. God learned the hard way about backing up important documents, which is one of the reasons Jesus Saves.
Things go well for awhile with the Israelites until they experience a shortage of victuals. Suddenly, there are murmurings against this God who dragged them from bondage, where at least they were fed – maybe another god would do better. God provides manna and the murmuring stops – for awhile, then murmuring starts about water. God provides water.
Anyone else see some co-dependency issues here?
God is also a micromanager. You should read his specifications for the ark of the covenant and altar. As long as you remember what a cubit is and you have enough gold and shittimwood, you could go build them today.
Moses was becoming exhausted. He was the only one God would talk with and he had to relate everything to the priest Aaron who would talk with the people. And as leader, he was the only one who could decide any issues for the community, major or trivial. He figured out a better way: he delegated. Now trivial issues were settled locally, with higher levels for more serious issues. Only critical ones were brought to Moses. I’m sure not all of the minor issues were settled in the best manner, but in the long run what really coounts is that critical issues be resolved promptly and correctly. How does this compare with what we ask our Board of Trustees?
Did everything go swimmingly after Moses figured out how to delegate? No. Back to those commandments – people kept ignoring them, which really ticked God off. He forced Moses and Aaron to repeat them and repeat them and even in Moses’ last words shortly before his death and the time the Israelites would cross into Jordon, Moses finds it necessary to take everyone through the litany of events again: slavery, freedom, commandments, required celebrations.
Why? Partly because God did not use SMART goals. SMART is an acronym for Specific, Measurable, Agreed, Realistic and Timely. Let’s see how they measure up:
Specific – yep. No doubt about what he had in mind and he provided specific examples of meeting and not meeting the goals.
Measurable – yes again, no wishy-washiness about them
Agreed – first problem. They were top down, the Israelites were not provided any say into them and they were not subject to the democratic process as we espouse in our congregation.
Realistic – I don’t think so. Number ten about not coveting, especially seems impossible for humans, post Eden anyway.
Timely – Not really. These were all the goals, all the time.
What did the Israelites want? To be fruitful and multiply; to get to the promised land and have no physical wants. Is our congregation so different? We want to grow; we want our works, individually and as a congregation, to be meaningful. We too want the promised land.
Whatever that is, which is the rub. What are our primary goals: short-term and long-term. Of necessity we had a number of short-term goals around acquiring and moving into this Meetinghouse. They are, or soon will be accomplished.
What do we want to be when we grow up?
When addressing these big questions, we must avoid the minutia of day-to-day concerns. This is gigantic stuff and we will never get to our answer until we pull the elephants out of our closet. It only happens by grabbing the tail, pulling hard, and keeping in mind there may be many hands which are holding the elephant by the trunk because it is not comfortable to have the elephant in the living room. When they poop they make a big mess.
We don’t have an interim minister who can single-handedly haul our elephants out for viewing, so this morning I am going to give a solid yank on two elephant tails. All I can do is show you what I think is in the closet. It may be that when we haul together to get them out, they will actually be something else, but we won’t know until we get them into the bright light.
In roughly five months we will again ask the congregation to pledge to make monetary contributions to our operating budget. What will those monies support? To my eye we are a congregation unwilling to openly talk about money as a necessary (but certainly not sufficient) means to our ends.
And speaking of those ends, the second elephant – what are our SMART goals regarding professional ministry?
As we enter the wilderness of our opportunities we must prioritize our time to address these two issues, shining the bright light of our democratic process on them.
When we have agreed on the big issues facing us, the smaller ones become much easier to resolve: do they support the larger goal or do they draw away resources from what we find most compelling?
Edward Everett Hale wrote:
I am only one
But still I am one.
I cannot do everything
But still I can do something.
And because I cannot do everything
I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.
For our congregation I suggest the following changes:
We are only one
But still we are one.
We cannot do everything
But still we can do something.
And because we cannot do everything
We will not refuse to do the important things we can do.