Sermon: Only More So – Rev. Eric Banner

Rev. Eric:

On this day of goodbyes, of releases, and of reflection, I want to invite you back to a different time in the history of First Universalist. Back in 1921 our congregation was celebrating it’s first 30 years, and Amy Blake Colson wrote a brief history of what had been. I found myself reflecting on it this week as we come to the end of Birch’s time with us as an intern minister, because of a quote she offered from a sermon, now lost to us, given by the very first minister, Willard Selleck, who served this church, from 1891 to 1894. Amy wrote

“We have had a Church membership of over 300, but have suffered in this respect considerably due to a floating population. Many have been summoned by death, some have joined other Churches but more have located elsewhere. As Dr. Selleck so aptly put it in his farewell sermon “a Church in Denver is like a big Tourist Hotel. Guests come, tarry awhile, then move on.”

Interns, do, as well. But far from seeing this as a fault in our congregation, this community has long understood itself to have a role in spreading the values and virtues of our way of being to the wider Unitarian Universalist tradition. The list of ministers who have come out of here is long, and continues to this day, when not one, but two of those who call First Universalist their spiritual home are also in seminary right now.

I am sure I will miss some, but I know, for sure, that this congregation has sent into the world
Jann Schwab Halloran & Katie Bugosh Kandarian, who served as moderators of our board, before becoming ministers in their own right.

Kate Walker, who was an intern here, and returned to preach just a couple of years ago on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of her ordination by this congregation.

There are people like Gretchen Haley, and Jenny Amstutz, nee McCready, who raised children here before going on to serve in Fort Collins and Columbine.

Jeannie Shero came here as Jeannie Hufstadler with a small child 20 years ago, before serving as our assistant, and then senior minister, and there is a long list of interns, too.

People like Beth Chronister, Elizabeth Mount, now Barish-Browne, Aaron Norris, Nathan Woodliff-Stanley, Amy Rowland, and more, I’m sure. And we are glad, now, to add Birch to the list of those who have blessed us for a season, and then gone on to greater things beyond.

Endings are sometimes seen as failures, the fact that something did not continue forever a sign that it should never have been so in the first place. Perhaps you, too, have had small children who melted down at the end of a day of joy and fun because they could not bear to have it end (or so they said… none of us are at our best when we’re tired, or had too much sun, or both).

But our lives are journies of learning and discovery, and since that is so, the end of an internship is a reminder that goodbyes need not be about loss, but rather about gratitude for what has been, and will yet be. Because of what has been, something more may yet be.

Most of you won’t know this, and I warned Birch in advance that I was going to say this, but when they first approached us about the possibility of an internship, about which you’ll hear a bit more from them later, I had some recent experience with an intern who hadn’t worked out. The details of that circumstance are not important, but what is important is that I had a standing relationship with the team at Meadville Lombard, and the director of field placement, the Rev. Jules Taylor, and they knew what questions I was going to ask before I asked it. “Birch,” they told me, “Birch is not just the finest of our first year students, now looking for an internship. I think it would be fair to say that Birch is likely one of the best seminarians entering into search for an internship anywhere in the country.”

Now, as anyone can see, the Birch Cue that First Universalist sends on to the world is not the Birch Cue that arrived here in August of 2024. They have grown, developed new experience and skills, and they have shared much with us in the process. It is as it should be.

And so it is good that they help us remember one more thing, again, the art of the good goodbye.

I say with some regularity that I think church is here to help us remember what we already know. To practice the skills we need in our lives in a place where the stakes are not so great, or the challenge quite so deep, so that when we go to the high places of our lives and must do the things that are, and always will be, hard, we do them with a greater grace and elegance for having practiced.

Our lives our filled with goodbyes, from the time our parents drop us at kindergarten for the first time to the parties from which we head home late into the night, knowing that the fun will be long remembered, and when they are done well, they are better for having left without having overstayed our welcome. And there are, of course, the bigger goodbyes that don’t come with “see you next time.”

But what makes a goodbye matter is much the same as any ritual we practice. It marks a time apart, a change, a way of being differently in the world, instead of insisting that our lives be filled with a sort of bland sameness in every place and every time. I think a good goodbye does three things – it offers thanks for what has been, it alerts people of what will be different, and it releases us from the immediacy and intimacy of relationship that is right in front of us. We don’t always use the word goodbye, but it’s there in any case. We drop our kids at school and say “I love you,” and they say “Love you, too,” and in that moment is the recognition that we’ve each done our part, the food, the travel, the clothing, and the way that the teachers are now in charge until we meet again. We head out to work, or the golf course, or rehearsal, and we shout “Bye” across the house, assuring our loved ones that we are leaving, and that we will return, but they need not worry about us until we return. The thanks, I think, is more often implied than said out loud, but in a good goodbye, it’s in there. The thanks, the notice of change, and the freedom to do and be someone different in the ways that matter to our lives.

The poet Naomi Shihab Nye wrote a piece titled simply “Adios” in which she says

It is a good word, rolling off the tongue
no matter what language you were born with,
Use it. Learn where it begins,
the small alphabet of departure,
how long it takes to think of it,
then say, then be heard.

 

Marry it. More than any golden ring,
it shines, it shines.
Wear it on every finger
till your hands dance,
touching everything easily,
letting everything, easily, go.

 

Strap it to your back like wings.
Or a kite-tail. The stream of air behind a jet.
If you are known for anything,
let it be the way you rise out of sight
when your work is finished.

So our great thanks to you, Birch, for helping us bring forth the gifts of this big tourist hotel, where ministers and lay people alike learn together the art of living, and leaving, when the time is right. Our thanks for reminding us of who we have been, and who we might yet be. For reminding us of practice, and intention, of hope, and trust, and most of all, of love.

 

Birch Cue:

I thought it was a question we were prepared to answer. “How did it feel to respond to this poem by moving your bodies?”

I waited for an answer. We began this class on spiritual practices as we usually did. Check-ins followed our chalice lighting. And then we began a practice together. This morning, we were exploring embodied practices. So we began with one that invites us to respond to a poem through movement. We moved our arms and shoulders, hands and heads, eyes closed, eyes open. We moved our bodies as we moved through the poem, stanza by stanza.

The room was unusually quiet after I asked this question. Then someone spoke. She was surprised by how much she enjoyed the practice. Someone else found this challenging because of their particular neurotype. Someone else felt caught off-guard by the poem. One word snagged her, reminded her of ways she and other women have been criticized and demeaned.

This was not what I planned for. Had I made a mistake? I wondered. Had I asked too much of my congregants? After all, our bodies can be sites of great joy and intense shame. So, we stopped. I stopped, and changed the agenda to take the time we needed to spend with this.

As I opened up the conversation, people moved forward with courage and vulnerability. Those of you in the room joined me in caring for each other. Firmly and gently, we held both discomfort and wonder. You trusted each other. You trusted me enough to encounter what we each brought into the room. We honored the many experiences present there together. All of this was possible because we took the time to build trusting relationships.

None of this can be taken for granted. After I got here, a year and a half ago, I began to learn how deeply true that was. In those early weeks, I heard so many stories about the decade that preceded me here. Stories of great personal and institutional hurt. So much in fact, that in one of your congregational meetings a few years back, you voted on whether or not you could trust each other.

As I attended to all of these stories, I remember other hurt congregations I have encountered and been a part of. We pour so much of our hearts into these places, our spiritual homes. We meet our passions in these places. Passions for justice, spiritual fulfillment, beauty, connection. We choose to raise our families here. We find the loves of our lives here. We choose to remember our dearly departed here.

Which makes it all the more painful when our communities hurt us. When our love and trust go disregarded. Get taken for granted. And when our relationships rupture, our hearts can close us off. In acts of self-preservation, we extend less of ourselves. There’s less at stake that way. But being in community, fully, asks us to put almost everything we have at stake. Turn, for a moment, to everything you each have put into this community. [pause] Your hopes. Your dreams. Your passions. Your future.

You’ve traveled a long road to rebuild this community with each other. That can’t be taken for granted, either. You committed yourselves to naming who you wanted to be, and then moving toward that. You reimagined how you govern yourselves. You reconsidered the mission and vision that guide your way through this world. You called on professional leaders who could help you grow and heal. You opened yourselves to love and trust. That is good, hard, work of the heart.

And then, you did something you hadn’t done in a while. You welcomed an intern minister into your midst. I found my way here with a cold call. I had been reading the Happenings newsletter for a while before I sent Rev. Eric a letter expressing my interest in this community. That I hoped you would consider training a new minister. But, I didn’t know anyone here. I had never visited before. I really had no idea what to expect.

So I was almost a little surprised to hear back from you. Rev. Eric wrote back something like this. “Thanks for your letter. We haven’t had an intern in a really long time, and we hadn’t planned to have one next year. But, I believe that forming new ministers is an important practice of our faith, so let me see what we can do.”

An interview followed a couple of weeks later. And a couple weeks after that, you invited me to join you in the coming church year. You trusted the discernment of your minister and the lay-leaders who interviewed me. You trusted them to trust in me.

This, I have come to believe, is an intentional practice of Love. To open ourselves, to put some confidence in a person we haven’t even met yet. The activist and educator adrienne marie brown writes that “when you trust people, they become trustworthy.” This is one of her key convictions as a community organizer, realized from her own work and experience. But when I first encountered the idea, it seemed counterintuitive. Trust, I had believed, was something that had to be earned first. Demonstrated. Proven. It was not something I was often willing to extend on credit. But becoming a minister, encountering this new perspective, shifted how I understood this practice of love. Not as a good to exchange, but as a seed to plant and grow into something beautiful. You helped teach me this.

You’ve taught me a lot of other things, to be sure. How to preach a good word in troubling times. How to feed hearts as well as minds. How to run a successful stewardship campaign. But the power of trust is the greatest thing you have taught me. I say all of this, I bring up all of these stories, to say, what a gift you have given me. What a gift to trust a stranger in your midst.

And this gift has helped me to not only practice better ministry, but to answer an existential question, too. Especially in our most formative years, we ministers spend a good amount of time thinking, discussing, and arguing about authority. Where does a minister’s authority come from? Many in this world might say it comes from the Divine, or from the tradition that precedes them. But in a faith with a fluid relationship to both Divinity and tradition, where does a Unitarian Universalist minister’s authority come from? You taught me, it comes from the peoples’ trust. From their trust that their leaders care for and love them. From their deep knowing that they can trust someone with their deepest hopes and fears. From their willingness to go into uncertain futures together. I will probably cherish that lesson for the rest of my life.

I can’t thank you enough for this gift. You did a hopeful thing in a time when hope feels challenging for many of us to practice. My time with you is coming to a close. My internship ends with the close of the month. But then I will be back for my ordination. I won’t be your minister anymore. But we may still learn with and from each other in the future. And as we prepare to part ways, at least for a while, I wish these things for you. Keep practicing hope, even in the face of despair. Keep putting trust in each other, even in the face of rupture. Keep practicing love, the cornerstone of our faith.