Miles to Go Before We Sleep

By Rev. Tony Lorenzen

First Parish Church in Billerica, MA

Sunday, October 28, 2007

Happy New Year! If you’re at all like me, celebrating New Year’s in January just doesn’t work. I’m much more in tune with celebrating the New Year in the fall; with Samhain, with Rosh Hashanah, with harvest time. I spent most of my adult life as a teacher and now as a Unitarian Universalist minister. I’m used to the biorhythm of new cycles such as a new school year and a new church year beginning in the fall. As a gardener, I’m now more in tune with celebrating the harvest. I just brought in my carrots and my pumpkins and my last tomatoes. Happy New Year just feels right this time of year with pumpkins and All Hallows Eve, and apple cider instead of walking in from a winter wonderland to see if Boston College is still playing a meaningful football game.

Whenever we celebrate New Year, now or in January, the beginning of a new year is a demarcation point, a line drawn in the sand - or in the leaves, or in the snow. It’s a time for looking ahead, but also for looking back at what has been. We gather the harvest now, looking back on our bountiful growing season, hopeful that what we have reaped will last the winter. We look into the winter not knowing what will come. It’s easy to understand why so many peoples throughout history picked this time of the year to celebrate the year’s turning.

This same sense of looking forward and yet looking back at the same time underlies the winter New Year’s celebration as well. I understand why the Romans picked the month named for Janus to mark the New Year. “Janus is the Roman god of gateways, beginnings, and endings.” The Encyclopedia Mythica reports that he was usually represented with a double-faced head, each head looking in opposite directions. His likeness appeared on many Roman coins. He was worshipped at times of transition and beginning: harvest time, planting, birth, coming of age, and marriage. “Janus also represents the transition between primitive life and civilization, between the countryside and the city, peace and war.”[1]

Celebrating the turning of new year at any time, be it now at Samhain or on January 1, is always a time for celebrating the fact that we’ve made it through the past year while looking forward with hope and expectation into the future. The past of our celebration holds within it the safety of the known, the harvest, the company we’ve kept, the road we’ve taken, the well-trodden path. The future before us holds out hope for all our dreams, but also the anxiety of the unknown, the uncertainty that the stores of the harvest won’t last the winter, the adventure of the road less traveled, and the just plain fear of the unknown.

And yet, every year, each fall and each winter, however we mark it, we step into the new year with resolve. One of the well-worn customs of our January New Year is the marking of this resolve by making resolutions for the coming year. New Year’s resolutions are like mini-covenants with ourselves; small sacred promises to redeem ourselves to ourselves in some way for our own betterment. If you’re anything like me, New Year’s resolutions are also a study in broken promises and covenants not kept.

As you can see, my yearly vow to lose more weight, be less outspoken and less intense, and put fewer bumper stickers on my car go unheeded and I continuously, like most people, have work to do with myself, and promises yet to keep. If you’re anything like me, you’re also hardest on yourself for not keeping your promises, to yourself or others, and you get discouraged. Then it gets difficult to keep promises to yourself to do difficult work and you need some outside prod or kick in the seat of the pants, from someone like say, your wife – a person with whom you are in covenant. Someone who can say, “Uh, that’s not a spare tire, those aren’t love handles, that’s fat. Time to maybe stop watching football on T.V. and go outside and play football.” Ouch. The truth isn’t always pretty, but it’s always the truth. “Go on, your son’s been waiting for you to get home.” Sneaky – work in exercise as family time – I’m on to that devious plot! But that’s what the covenantal relationships in our lives do, they call us to be the best within ourselves, time and time again.

The people with whom we are in covenant will use whatever voice they need to in order to call us back to our promises. Sometimes they will cheer us on with supportive praise and encouragement, reminding us gently of the promise, urging us to not let it go, telling us we can do it. And sometimes they will speak in a prophetic voice, tell us what we need to hear, not what we want to hear, even though it may sting a bit, because the promise is too important to let slide and we’re letting it slip away.

Doing personal work is tough. If someone, like me, is trying to lose weight, it helps to have covenantal relationships to rely on for help – a spouse, a weight watcher’s group, Overeaters Anonymous. People who know the journey you’re on and call you back to your promises so that you reach the Promised Land and hold firm to your resolutions.

Congregations, like people, have personal work to do as well. And much like individuals it helps to have covenantal relationships to rely on for help while doing this work. Each congregation is different and the work each congregation needs to do is different as well. This fall, as we mark the turning of a New Year, I ask this congregation to make a resolution, to take on the work known as the congregational tasks of Interim Ministry.

Loren Mead, founder of the Alban Institute, an organization that works on issues affecting congregations and church life has observed that the single most difficult time in the life of a congregation is during a time of ministerial transition. This time is so difficult in fact, that an entire area of specialized ministry has developed around helping congregations move from one called and settled minister to the next. This specialized ministry is called Interim Ministry. Over years of observation and study, Loren Mead and the folks at the Alban Institute have noticed that congregations are called to work on five congregational tasks during a time of Interim Ministry. These tasks are:

1. Coming to terms with the congregation’s past

2. Glimpsing a new congregational identity

3. Making changes in lay and staff leadership

4. Connecting the congregation to new resources

5. Sealing a new congregational identity, including strengthening stewardship and engaging new leadership with zest

In the words of my colleague, Rev. Barbara Child, from the website of the First Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Ann Arbor, Michigan where she has spent the last two years as the Interim Minister. The role of an Interim Minister is to

• hold up a mirror so you can see some things you have had no particular reason to notice for awhile;
• help you come to terms with your history, celebrating glories, grieving losses, letting go;
• ·work with your lay leaders and staff to unstick stuck places and get the kinks and tangles out – in other words, to give the operating system a tune-up; and
• enable you to experience a different model of ministry and worship so that you can see that more than one style can be effective in meeting your needs and enriching your spiritual or religious life."

Since I have arrived here in Billerica, I have tried to fulfill the goal I felt implied by the committee that hired me, which was to help create a growing, vibrant congregation. I believe that best way to do that at this time in the life of First Parish Church in Billerica is to energetically engage Interim Ministry together. One of the reasons some people have found my arrival here and its accompanying changes so jarring is that no real interim ministry preceded it.

Again, in the words of my colleague, Rev. Child.:

"the congregation has the rare opportunity to take advantage of a breathing space – to take stock of who you are now, how your programs are faring, what worthy challenges you face, and how you are getting on together as a community. It is a time to do whatever needs doing to get ready to welcome a new called minister with enthusiasm for the possibilities of new paths, new ways, new ideas.

You might say that the work of the intentional interim minister is to help you make sure the next called minister is not an “unintentional” interim – that is, one who does not last long because the interim work was not done before the new called minister came."

Rev. Childs like to quote Ralph Waldo Emerson who wrote: “People wish to be settled. Only insofar as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.” Let's dare to be unsettled together, believing in faith that the best days of First Parish Church are not in the past in a historic building, but in the future in the energetic, bright faces of the women, men and children who are our church. Perhaps it is I who will end up being the called minister who benefits from the work we do together, but perhaps not. The important thing is the long-term health and vitality of the congregation.

It’s easy at this time of year to think all the work is done; the harvest is in, the patterns of life settle into church and school and winter rhythms. But there is much to do. It’s my hope that First Parish becomes a beehive of activity over the winter. Nothing that stresses anyone out or adds dramatically to packed schedules, but some adult education programs here and a couple of parish meetings there and an ongoing history project. Activities once in a while after church on Sundays that everyone will be invited to participate in as a part of intentional Interim Ministry.

The first order of business is an internal, spiritual one for each of you, for every member and friend of First Parish Church. It’s a question of discernment about a New Year’s resolution: Which Road? Things can’t stay exactly the same as they’ve always been and still at the same time change and grow. One person or one congregation can’t travel two roads at once.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth.

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Taking the road less traveled by is always a difficult choice. You don’t know what’s down the road. You can only see so far ahead to where the road bends and gets lost in the brush. It will mean a new direction, but it doesn’t mean giving up or forgetting where you come from or even that after going down that new road changing everything about who you are – it just means a commitment to exploring the new territory and seriously evaluating everything along the way.

As we go down this road, let us pay attention to the trail markers and guide posts that advise us to focus on issues instead of personalities; that remind us to speak for ourselves and use “I” language when we have opinions about church life or parish history, because it’s very difficult to know how many people are in an everybody when we refer to things such as “everyone says” or “everyone thinks.”

We have arrived on the cusp of a new year. Our journey has come 344 years as a congregation, yet in a very real sense our common journey is beginning anew as the life cycle does every year. We have come a long way, but the history of this place is not finished being written, the journey is not over. This is still a living, breathing congregation, not a museum. It’s New Year’s and the ball has dropped, but the party goes on. There are miles to go before we sleep.

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[1] [1] http://www.pantheon.org/articles/j/janus.html