Rev. Barbara H. Gadon

First Unitarian Church of Chicago

January 22, 2012

What is your mission?  What is your purpose in life?  The other day I was in a bookstore and decided to pick up Rick Warren’s book on the subject.  You’ve heard of it:  A Purpose-Driven Life, it’s called, and is not only a book, but a whole series of books and products – devotionals, recordings, journals, key chains, coffee mugs.  I picked it up.  You have to keep up with what the competition is doing, right?  I was surprised by how much I agreed with what he said. 

It starts like this:  “[Your purpose] is not about you.  The purpose of your life is far greater than your own personal fulfillment, your peace of mind, or even your happiness.  It’s far greater than your family, your career, or even your wildest dreams and ambitions.  If you want to know why you were placed on this planet, you must begin with God.” 

Now let me say that I do not agree with now narrowly Rick Warren defines God and the way to know and serve God.  I do not agree with his views of the Bible as some sort of technical instruction manual, magically plopped down from the sky, every word, the word of God.  But I do agree that if you are going to feel a sense of purpose in your life, you have to serve something larger than yourself.  That’s how I would put it.  And if you can’t call that something “God” (that’s a word that some of you have an allergic reaction to) then you have to create your own language for it. When you do, you are speaking the language of mission.   

What is your mission?  It’s tempting to think that this needs to come from our paid jobs.  What is the first question people in the United States ask one another when we meet?  “What do you do?”  People in other cultures don’t size one another up by how we earn our living, but Americans do.  And it’s certainly where we give the handsomest share of our time and energy.  We shape our day around our job, we put most other things aside to do it.  And we work harder than ever.  Even retirees, I’ve noticed.  One retired man in a congregation I served noted that the big difference between being retired and working in his profession, was that when he was “working”, he got a day off.  Nowadays, his calendar was fuller than ever.  This seems to be true for all stages of adult life, including students.  It’s become a cliché to talk about how busy we are, but it’s true.  Americans are said to work longer hours than we did 30 years ago, for less pay.  And ramp this up several notches, with our precarious job market.  Work more than one job, if you need to.  If you’re lucky enough to have kept a full-time job, you may be doing what used to be two or even three people’s jobs.  When my husband, Robert, was working as a safety and health professional at a computer chip plant, he survived two rounds of down-sizing.  He was doing so much, he wasn’t so sure he was luckier than his friends who were let go.  All of this certainly wreaks havoc with the sense that we are doing what we are intended to do.

This is my job.  I’m at work.  Welcome to my job. Ministers are expected to have a strong sense of mission in our jobs.  We are expected to have a calling.  Through the years, I’ve been asked more than a few times about my sense of call.  I’ve always resented this question, to tell the truth - because I just don’t have a dramatic tale to tell.  My friend Dan tells the story about being on a business trip, and riding in an airplane that did a heart-stopping plummet.  Everyone on the flight, just for a moment, expected they would crash.  He was a computer consultant at the time, making decent money, having a pleasant enough life.  He said he always hoped that he would be the kind of person who helped others in such a situation, someone who would hold the babies, or comfort the old people, but he didn’t.  He just mourned his own life, and how much he had not lived.  And of course, the plane didn’t crash.  But he emerged with the clear knowledge that he wanted to become a minister. 

Now that’s a story.  I wanted a story like that.  It is certainly what people expect to hear. Instead, I found there were just clues scattered here and there.  Things I could remember from junior high, my first job out of college, working for a female minister, finding a church that could accommodate an unorthodox theology like mine.  Teaching and tutoring students in writing.  Nothing as good as airplanes dropping.  But little clues that add up.  But little clues are all I think any of us get. 

Let’s recall Fredrich Buechner’s words about mission.  He says it’s the place where our deep gladness and the world’s deep needs meet.  We get clues about our mission, and one of them is what gives us a deep sense of gladness?  What makes you happy when you do it?  Rev. Marilyn Sewell once said that she dreaded hearing about “mission” when she was a child growing up in the church.  She thought it would mean that she had to go to some awful, uncomfortable place, and do something that she absolutely hated, for the good of mankind.  It never occurred to her that perhaps if God was a loving God, or if our sense of mission came from the deepest place in our hearts, maybe it would be about joy, rather than suffering.

We can take a lot of the joy out of doing something, by putting conditions on it.  Robert Fulghum says that kindergartners know something about this.  He likes to ask them, “How many of you are artists?”  And most of the kids in the room shoot up their hands.  Me!  Me!  I am!  But when kids get older, he says, right around middle school, he will ask, “How many of you are artists?” and almost no one will raise their hands.  Maybe one or two.  Why is this?  Well, the inner criteria has shifted.  A kindergartner’s criteria for being an artist is the joy she feels in making art.  A 7^th grader’s criteria (and in this, my friends, I hate to tell you, most of us are still 7^th graders), the criteria is how talented one is.  “Artist” becomes a word that is only used for a select group of people.  Only special people have artistic talent, only so much to go around.  The shift goes from deep gladness to self-scrutiny of one’s gift.  It’s not about joy anymore.  It’s about us. 

To get to the joy, then, we’re required us to get over it.  Harder than it sounds.  Take “The Woodcarver” by Chuang Tzu.  Scholars of Chinese feudal society in Chuang Tzu’s time are clear about what would have happened to a woodcarver if he failed his commission.  If the bell stand did not please the prince, he would have been executed.  And you think your job is stressful!  The stakes in a lot of life situations feel this high.  We feel the pressure to succeed, to “get it right.”  And we don’t make all of it up – the world does give it to us.  A mother of a toddler once told me that about five or ten times a day, she does or says something to her child and wonders if that is going to scar her for life.  Certainly, a surgeon has to deal with the fact that a human life is literally in his or her hands.  How does a surgeon, or a mother, or a woodcarver possibly get the job done? There’s a lot of practice involved.  New York times columnist David Brooks said once that what we attribute to “genius” is actually hours and hours – he calls it your 10,000 hours of practice.  That is what you do. 

When I was starting out in the ministry, in my first congregation in rural Maryland, the gruff minister emeritus, another minister named Dan, gave me this advice.  It was in his sermon, and part of my installation ceremony.  He said, “It doesn’t matter that you succeed in your work, it matters that you are faithful.”  It doesn’t matter that you succeed, but that you are faithful.  He should know, having practiced his calling for 50 years, starting in a small pulpit his father built for him as a teenager.  He probably never served a congregation of more than 60, (church size means status in my professional world, especially if the congregation grew under your watch).  But he was so clearly and obviously a success.  Because he was faithful.   Because he practiced. 

Now, I hate to agree with Rick Warren twice in one sermon. (Or I might just be making sure my humanists are paying attention.)  But I would say that for me, that’s where God comes in.  What I mean is, I see my mission as being faithful to a kind of love that includes wisdom, creativity, justice, mercy – love in its most selfless, compassionate form.  I believe we all have that inside of us.  Psychologist David Richo describes it as “the unconditional love that lives so indestructibly in us and is charged with such zeal to become visible.”  (David Richo, How to Become an Adult)  All that takes a long time to say, so I call it God.  You may call it something else.  You and I may never fully succeed in living out this love, but it is our mission to be faithful to it. 

You were made for love.  Did you know that?  Do you believe that?  You were made for one purpose:  love.  The mystics say that love is the nature of your true self.  You were made to give love, and you were made to receive love.  That’s really all there is – it’s your only job on this planet.  And Franciscan priest Richard Rohr says, “If you’ve ever been loved, really loved by even one person, you get this.  That’s what it’s about, this is our true self.  Love.

How do you forget about success?  Practice love.  A spiritual practice of some sort would be helpful here.  Noticing the breath.  Noticing the exact placement of your hands next to your ankles and the way your thighs are turned in a yoga posture.  Noticing a tiny cardinal, deep into the forest.  When you can take the focus off yourself and how you’re doing, then you are free to do a lot of things you perhaps couldn’t before.

To rid yourself of the “success” burden, you must let go of the question, “How am I doing?” And we ask ourselves this all the time: something seems to be going badly, or not going, and we start saying, How’m I doing?  How’m I doing?  A spiritual advisor once told me to step back, and get off that question, and say, “How can I be useful here?  Ask – yourself, ask your higher power, just put the question out there to the universe – how can I be useful here?  We start to get at the second half of Buechner’s notion of calling.  Just as we need to pay attention to clues about our deep joy, we need to see the clues about the deep need around us. 

I remember teaching composition at the University of Illinois at Chicago, many years ago.  Students in this class were under a lot of pressure to succeed.  The final exam was an essay that determined whether or not they had mastered basic writing skills.  It was given late in their senior year; fail the exam, and you don’t graduate.  We were holding extra help sessions.  Students were asked to write on this question:  What is the value of a liberal arts education?  (It was really another way to ask the question, “Why are you here?” in that particular context.)  A young woman came to me, wanting help understanding the question.  It just didn’t inspire a lengthy answer, in her mind.  To get a job, right?  What else do you say? I said, “Okay, what’s your major?”  “Accounting,” she said.  My fellow graduate students rolled their eyes; what was she going to do with that?  So we ignored them, and I said to her, “How is your work as an accountant going to make the world a better place?  How will you, in your profession, make the world more just and loving?”  More eye-rolling from the others.  But you know, it was one of those wonderful moments, like finding the right tree in the forest, when you ask someone the right question, and it seems to unlock something in them.  Instead of being discouraged, her eyes flashed with enthusiasm, and she sat down and joyfully began to write. 

I wish I could tell you what she wrote. But let’s imagine.  Let’s say she saw herself serving the world with her gifts.  That she saw herself guiding small companies trying to get off the ground, or perhaps she donated her time helping people develop budgets they could live on.  Or maybe she thought bigger, and could be a partner in a world hunger-relief effort.  We don’t know.  But that’s the question, isn’t it?  How to see our gifts connected to the deep hunger of the world, as having something useful to give.

Whatever you see your personal mission, you have to remember to plug into a larger mission – one that tells us we are all of us made for love.  And that is where the church comes in.  Churches are in the business of helping us realize this.  I will be talking about this church’s sense of mission and identity over the next few weeks, looking at your mission statement, but this is the heart of it, helping people remember that they are made for love. 

One more story – told to me by a colleague. A pastor was new in a church, and was asked to call on the brother of one of his parishioners, and his wife. His parishioner said that his brother and sister-in-law were natural Unitarian Universalists, and he really wanted them to check out the church. So the new pastor goes and calls on the couple, and talks up the church, and Unitarian Universalism. The husband says, well, all that sounds wonderful, pastor, and from what you say, we certainly are Unitarian Universalists. But you won't see us on Sunday morning. The pastor said, “Oh? Why not?” “Well,” said the husband. “Let me tell you what we do every Sunday. We sleep in. When one of us stirs, they go downstairs and pick up the Sunday Times. Then they go around the corner to the bakery and pick up espressos and the most luscious blueberry muffins you've ever had. We eat our muffins and drink our coffee, and then we make love. Then we  read the paper until about noon, and we're ready to go on with our day. Can your church offer us something better than that?” The pastor blushed a little and said, “No, we can't.” And he left.

But here's the thing, my friend said. “I believe that we can. If we're doing church right, we can.” And I realized that I agree with him. Now our coffee isn't going to put Starbucks out of business, and we'd probably go broke buying muffins, and we're pretty G-rated around here. But I agree that we can offer something better than that.

Here's what I believe about the church. That we are in the business of helping people live from a place of love. In a culture that tells people they are both the center of the universe and nothing, we are called to honor them for who they are, and to call them to their best selves. We humans are the emissaries of love, love's human embodiment, as grouchy and reluctant vessels as we sometimes are. And my job and your job on Sunday morning is to look at every person who comes through our doors through those eyes.  We ought to be doing this all the time, but this is where we are reminded to do it.  This is our practice.  May we find deep gladness, may we serve the world’s deep needs.  May we do so together.  Amen.