Scripture: Deuteronomy 1:19-33
The title of this sermon is stolen from a church consultant who wrote a book with this title. To be honest I am not usually attracted to church consultants, but Gil Rendle, who wrote this book I have found to be helpful and some Sojourners besides me are familiar with him through being at the UCC regional annual meeting, or for other reasons. I find I have good reason again this week to keep my words on the short side. Regrettably there is no ice cream waiting for us today, but other things await us, so I’ll be brief again.
I am moved though to say just a few words this morning about the conversations that loom ahead of us as a congregation…maybe loom isn’t the right word, maybe that implies a dark cloud, a threat of some kind…or is it just that it sounds like doom…in any case the conversations that we will be engaging in in various ways throughout the fall season here at Sojourners. I guess those conversations begin today with the congregational meeting concerning by-law changes, but I’m frankly thinking more of the conversations that will be following the one today, and just in case some of you don’t have a clue as to what I’m talking about, let me try to describe the conversations I’m referring to very briefly.
There are two kinds of conversations that are in our immediate future. One set of discussions has to do with church finances and how we’re going to handle commitments we have already made and what we think we might be able to afford and how we’re going to afford it. You’ll be hearing more about this later so I won’t go into the details here, but there are a number of related issues, all having to do with finances that we will be setting out to discuss among ourselves throughout the next few months.
The other kind of discussion we will be having has to do with missions and outreach and social justice and how we express our basic commitments in those areas and, more in terms of energy than finance, what we think we can manage in those areas and how we’re going to manage it. That discussion will take place, or I should say will begin, at the church retreat we will be having on September 28 and 29 here at the church, and will continue beyond that as we move toward making decisions in that area of our life as well. These will be separate discussions so that we can focus in each case on certain specific issues, but of course they are not entirely unrelated. Our sense of community involvement and our social justice commitments will affect our approach to financial questions, and our financial situation will affect how we think about outreach and social justice. So those two kinds of discussions will relate some to each other. But in addition in the process of having the conversations, we will be talking about other things too, and it’s mostly those “other things” that I want to talk about this morning, to sort of frame these upcoming conversations that it’s really more than time for, conversations that we really need to have.
First, let me say a few words about the process itself. As many or most of you know, Sojourners operates by consensus as a method of decision-making, but even if most everyone is aware of that, it never hurts to remind ourselves of this part of who we are, because it is very much central to who we are, not just an incidental part of it. One thing consensus means is that at meetings like the one after worship today, we will not be using Roberts Rules but will be following a procedure known as formal consensus, which has a series of steps you go through in arriving at a decision, and a decision is not arrived at until everyone either has affirmed the decision or is willing to stand aside and let the decision go forward even though they may continue to have concerns or reservations about it. Some people find this process frustrating and inefficient since discussions can go on past the point where a vote could have been taken and we could move on. Others will argue that although the process can sometimes seem inefficient, in the long run it is actually more efficient because decisions are less likely to need to be revisited, there will be less likelihood of lingering resentment or conflict, less likelihood of a sense of winners and losers which can affect other decisions and relationships.
I tend to be among those who think that in the big picture consensus is actually a more efficient way of going about things, but then I also have to quickly say that as far as the reason Sojourners has decided to do things this way, as I understand it, efficiency is not really the point. Whether it is or is not in the long run more efficient to do things by consensus, the point of consensus so far as Sojourners is concerned is that it aims to guarantee as best we can that every voice will be heard and not overridden or silenced in the name of efficiency. It is not a procedure but a philosophy, and that philosophy applies not just to how meetings are run but to how we approach the total decision-making process. And so the conversations we will be having this fall are also guided by the idea of building consensus. They are conversations that are specifically not intended to produce quick decisions but are intended to let many voices be heard, intended to be exercises in listening, intended to build consensus gradually so that in the end, in the ideal, decisions will emerge out of discussion, not just be moved, seconded, and voted on yea or nay. Again, consensus is the total process, not just the rules of a meeting. I’ll say this now and come back to it again in a moment. These conversations will be holy conversations, not because the decisions we eventually come to are the most right, the most rational, the most sane and sensible ones possible. Of course we hope that any decisions we make will be rational, sane, and sensible. But these will be holy conversations if we have spoken honestly and listened carefully, if we have spoken and listened caringly.
And in a similar spirit, just as consensus is not just a technical means of decision-making, so the discussions we will be having are certainly not just technical discussions and are not just about finances and programming. Financial discussions, we all know when we think about it, are never just about finances. They are about values and choices and what’s important and fears and hopes—all sorts of things, never just about money. There is financial information to be shared, that needs to be widely shared among us. There are financial issues we face that need to be understood. But none of that is what will make these conversations holy conversations. Financial conversations do not need to be unholy, though they can be and have been and are often seen that way. They become holy conversations when we know that what we are dealing with is not just crunching numbers and wondering how much money we can raise, but is also about what has brought us here, (I tend to think that whatever it is, it is a calling of God), and what we feel we are called to be and to do as God’s people in this time and place. If we can talk to each other at that level, even as we are talking about balancing budgets and raising money, if we can talk to each other and hear each other at that level, those conversations will be holy conversations.
Likewise, our discussions about community involvements and social justice activities are not just about making programming decisions or talking about how we handle one issue or another. It is a question of exploring who we are, not so much who we are in any basic sense because I think the basic identity of Sojourners has been pretty firmly established, but where we have come to at this point in our journey as a congregation and what we are about at this point in our life as Sojourners United Church of Christ. We are not likely to have immediate agreement about any of the specifics of this, though we may all broadly understand Sojourners to be a church that is committed to social justice. But how we are called to live out that commitment needs some honest discussion, and it will be a holy conversation if we can talk and listen to each other about what we believe is or ought to be at the heart of our life together, not so much how we solve this problem or that. What are the next steps we need to take as a congregation?
I’m not going to take time this morning to go into a lot of detail about the scripture and the historical circumstances that produced it. Let me try to say quickly why I chose it. Much of the book of Deuteronomy has to do with Moses addressing the Hebrew people after they have spent 40 years in the wilderness and just as they are about to reach the what was for them the promised land. There are a lot of issues here that I’m not going to get into this morning, but in the first chapter, the words that we heard this morning, Moses is going back over some of the experiences of those 40 years. He is reminding them that they have had some holy conversations along the way. He doesn’t use that language. Those are my words not his. In fact the conversations they had among themselves probably seemed rather unholy at the time. People grumbled and complained about the hardships of being in the wilderness. Some people wished they were back in Egypt. Others weren’t so sure that what lay ahead was worth striving for, and when some people were sent out to scout out the land they were going to they brought back reports of a beautiful land, but a land that was inhabited with big, fierce, scary, warlike people. The reports excited some people, made others afraid, and probably made many both excited and afraid. People got testy and nervous and rebellious and maybe they didn’t carry out their conversations in the holiest of ways. But I am thinking of them, from this safe distance of three thousand years, I am thinking of them as holy because they were about matters that were very much at the heart of who they wanted to be as individuals and as a community. The parallels are not exact, of course, but I see our conversations as being holy in something of the same way, though I trust we will carry them out in a little more holy manner than the Hebrew people did on occasion.
We have four people joining the church this morning. It is a reminder that we are an ever changing community. The fact is that we are quite different from what we were three years ago when we moved in to this building. We are different because our situation is different and we are different because we are literally a different group of people, some people having moved on to other places, off to Atlanta and New Mexico and California and so forth, and new people have joined us. The conversations we will be having I said earlier are overdue. We have some community building work to do amongst ourselves. These are holy conversations because I hope in the process we will be re-forming ourselves as a community of faith. And they will be dominated, I hope, not by the fear of what may happen in the future but by the possibilities of what may lie ahead for this re-forming community of faith. Some of those possibilities we have not yet dreamed of. Some of them may begin to be dreamed of as we talk to each other this fall. In any case, if it doesn’t sound too trite, these conversations can be more about possibility than limitations. And in this sense too may our conversations be holy ones. Amen.
Jim Bundy
September 16, 2007