Sermon: Talking About My Generation – Rev. Eric Banner

So we’re here in the middle of this series of services about leadership that is rooted in the idea that, though leadership has often come to have a negative association with it, our own Unitarian Universalist values offer us a way to rethink what leadership is, and as importantly, how it functions, so that we can build thriving communities that make a real difference in our lives and in the world. We started off by just naming the way that leadership comes in many forms, and not just the charismatic man, always a man, that is so often thought of when we talk about leaders. Last week we named the way that, within our tradition, there is an irresolvable tension that exists, and will always exist, between the value of the individual, and the need for there to be something larger that can hold us and help us do more than we can do alone, and good leaders know when to lean towards the individual, and when to lean into the larger faith.

And so this week I wanted to get right down to this congregation. Depending on what you look at, or what was going on in your life at the time, you might, or might not, know and remember that a year and a half ago we adopted both a new mission statement, and a new vision statement for First Universalist. Now, the mission statement is all over the place, and we speak to it every single Sunday when we remind ourselves that we are a sanctuary for spiritual growth, community, and connection, building the world we dream about, together.

But the vision statement doesn’t get quite so much press. It’s a bit longer, but equally important, so I want us to all hear out loud who we said we want to become –

“As Unitarian Universalists, our congregation is a mosaic of diverse generations, backgrounds, and identities, where we can bring all of who we are, and who we hope to become. Through arts, exploration, and justice, we cultivate possibilities, ministering with those who share the journey.”

Now, there’s an awful lot there, more than we can really unpack in a single Sunday, but what I want to highlight this week is the very beginning. Rooting ourselves in the tradition that we claim, and that, in some sense, claims us, we envision a congregation that is a mosaic of diverse generations. Before we get to all the other kinds of diversity we hope to hold, before we get to the multitude of ways in which we bring life and joy and hope and possibility, we talk about being a place of diverse generations. I think that matters. A lot.

Think about your life. If you’re like most Americans, the overwhelming majority of your time is spent around people who are largely the same age as you are. Maybe you live in a retirement community with other people who meet the minimum age to move in. Maybe you’re a young adult who is working in an early career job, or even not a career, but just a job, largely with people who are around your age. Maybe you’re a kid, and you go to school with other kids, who are your age, plus or minus a year.

And then, you come here, and there are people who are 8 and there are people who are 80, and it’s important, really important, that it happens. I know how important it has been to our family, and I know how important it has been for so many of you. But that doesn’t mean it’s always easy, and so as we continue this leadership series, the key idea I want to leave you with today is that as much as we talk about diversity and culture, and we hear those words as being about race and ethnic identity, the same idea applies to what it takes when it come to working with people across generations, and when we fail to see that, to recognize it’s impact, we make the same mistakes we make when we are engaged across the color line, of assuming that the way we do things is the right way to do things, and that other people, put bluntly, are just failing, rather than modeling alternative ways of being that are also good, right, and needed.

Now, someone in this room, right now is thinking “Yeah, yeah. But generations are arbitrary, and I never fit in with my generation. It’s all hogwash.” And I get it. My wife and I were born less than two years apart, but on either side of the Gen X/Millennial divide. I joke that we’re an intergenerational marriage. We both grew up in the same town. Went to the same high school. With largely the same teachers. We came into adulthood with the same markers around us, from the dot-com crash to the 9/11 attacks, to the way we didn’t have cell phones until we were adults, and we were in our 20s before the first iterations of social media came into being. Some have argued that people who were born around the time that we were are actually a sub-generation, known as the Oregon Trail Generation, because of how widespread that computer game was in the schools of our childhood, marking the first widespread use of computers for learning, but still far enough back that floppy disks were, in fact, floppy. Are we really different because of the 18 months that divide our births? No.

But what is true is that there are broad trends that are related to world events, and particularly, the author Jean Twenge, argues in her book “Generations” because of the way technology changed everything for people over the last century, from Silents, to Boomers, to Gen X (I promise I’m not forgetting you all), to the Millennials, to Gen Z, and whatever our youngest children will be called. It made possible the middle class, the modern city, a longer runway into the traditional markers of adulthood, and a lot of individual identities that once would have been subsumed into the family, or business, or neighborhood, or church, that you were part of. And the result is that we often, too often, end up getting all judgy about how people do things.

It’s different here, but I was struck to come across a poem by the Chinese American writer Ha Jin, titled “The Older Generation” about how things had gone for the adults before him.

I saw how they lived with restrictions.
Hardly past thirty they began to decline.
Like fish trapped in an invisible net,
they swam in all directions
but couldn’t get anywhere.
They had to surrender to the country
and it let it consume them at will.
They were like trees dependent
on the strength of the forest, but none
could stand tall and straight alone.
Their dreams were banished into caves
and withered away, never able to sprout.
While alive, they tried hard
to garner praise from everyone
so as to become model ghosts afterward.

In churches like ours, and in our lives outside these walls, we are often faced with the confusion that comes when what we assumed to be true, the way the elders Ha Jin knew had to surrender their identity to the country, while their own dreams were banished and withered away, when those experiences run headlong into people who grew up responding to the those restrictions, and then those people run into the experiences of people who grew up never having imagined those kinds of forces, and want to do things in yet another, different way.

The title this morning is from one of the first waves of that conflict. The song “My Generation,” was on the debut album put out by “The Who” in 1965, and was written by Pete Townshend, who was born in England the same month the war in Europe was ending. He famously declared that he wanted to die before he got old. He turned 80 last year.

And what I see around here, not often, not all the time, but enough to want to lift it up, is that sometimes wanting to do things differently means there is conflict. Not bad conflict. Not terrible fights. But conflict. In her book Dr. Twenge put it this way

“When I give talks on generations, I’m inevitably asked some version of the “blame question.” “Whose fault is it that young people are so entitled?” someone will ask. Or, alternatively, “Don’t blame us – the Boomers were the ones who messed everything up.” These are also extremely common questions when generational differences are discussed online or in books. For example, Millennial Jill Filipovic writes, “‘OK Boomer’ is more than just an imperious insult; it’s frustrated Millennial shorthand for the ways the same people who created so many of our problems now pin the blame on us.” This way of thinking has, to put it mildly, some issues.”

It’s not a new problem. Twenty years ago the church consultant Gil Rendle wrote a book about the multigenerational congregation. It might be easier to hear what the conflict was then, to understand the call on leaders now. The conflicts he saw then were largely about the GI, or Greatest, Generation, who had survived the Great Depression and won the war against the Nazis, and the generation that followed, known as the Boomers, or the consumer generation, as Rendle called them.

One of the fault lines Rendle spoke of was the meaning of membership in churches. For the older generation it was a matter of identity, whether you ever participated at all. For the younger generation membership was not about identity, it was about participation, and you could be a member of many congregations, because you loved particular programs and supported them, as they supported you. He tells the story of a church meeting in which people were talking about growth, and felt like they weren’t growing, when the data said otherwise. Caught between their sense of what was happening and the data in front of them, he paused the meeting to ask

“the participants to describe a “good member.” Not surprisingly, they described themselves, people of singular commitment to this one congregation, active in all of its parts, and willing to step over the formal line of membership to “sign on the dotted line.” They were offended by the “members by participation” who did not live up to their standards of “membership by identity.” But they were not aware that they equally offended the “‘members by participation” by devaluing them and making it harder for them to be included. Were one to ask the parties on both sides of this cultural value divide if belonging to this congregation was important to them, the answer would be a resounding “Yes!” But did they understand and communicate with one another well in ways that supported inclusion and community building? Not at all.”

I think we’ve largely moved past the Silent vs the Boomer generation gap here. But when I arrived nearly four years ago, I said to our leaders, and our staff, that we must be prepared for the fact that we were then facing the leading edge of a generational transition in congregational life. Maybe you’re facing it in your workplaces, too. Or in your families. That transition has come just as predicted. We bury our beloved elders. Our long-time leaders step down. Our financial model gets adjusted to reflect new trends in wealth, giving, and costs. With each new members we are remade, but too often what comes with that remaking is hurt on every side, as new experiences, new technologies, new ways of gathering, and organizing, and building community, all in that mosaic of diverse generations we hope for.

And this is part of the work before us. Learning about each other, and respecting the differences between us. Stepping up. And Letting go. Trying things because they have worked in the past, instead of needing to reinvent the wheel with each and every generation, AND reinventing the wheel when the tools behind it let us shift from wooden spokes to CNC machined aluminum wheels attached to powerful motors the likes of which our predecessors never imagined.

Our children, our church, our future, depends on us being able to do what the diversity trainers would call developing a cultural competence. Knowing our own ways of being, and understanding other people’s too. Being able to hold to our own identity, while also adapting, code switching, when we speak to, work with, and love people who are not having the same experience we are having, or had when we were their age. It will take work. Work on every side. But leadership, grounded, values based leadership, calls on us to make possible the ways that let everyone shine. Sometimes it’s working together. Sometimes it’s working side by side. Sometimes it’s letting us work in our own spaces, where we are most comfortable, and not insisting that everyone who does it differently is wrong.

The work before us is important. We can’t fix the whole wide world. Certainly not on our own. But we can make this the best church it can be, and let it be a beacon to the world beyond our walls. A model that we can take with us. We won’t always speak the same language. Or listen to the same music. Or organize gatherings the same way. We all have things to learn, me included. And, if we do that, we can offer something to ourselves, to the people we love, and to the whole wide world. As long as we’re ready, to ground ourselves in the ways we are always talking about our generation.

Rev. Eric Banner
Senior Minister