as preached at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston, October 20, 2024
Today is an exciting time in the life of our congregation. After the second service, you have called a congregational meeting to elect a settled Senior Minister. It has been more than a decade since First Unitarian Universalist held such a meeting. I am hoping that it will be the last time you do so for a generation.
Of course, I am biased. I am, after all, your candidate.
I would like us to have a long ministry together. The congregation’s membership has stated that your aspiration is to be “a growing multicultural, multigenerational, and multiracial congregation” that serves “as a pillar congregation for Houstonians of many faiths.” In other words, you want First Unitarian Universalist to return to being a large church.
I say return because the congregation has been large before. In the 1960s, when Horace Westwood was here, membership reached 800. I am not sure where they all fit. But in those days, First Unitarian Universalist was known as the first historically White congregation in the city to legally desegregate. Westwood marched in Selma. He spoke out against religious fundamentalism. He spoke in favor of reconciling science and religion.
The rolls declined in the 1970s but then, during the later years of Bob Schaibly’s ministry, the membership hit over 500 again. His time with you saw the congregation play a leading role in the national sanctuary movement, become Houston’s first non-LGBTQ congregation to embrace the ministry of an openly gay man, and offer a safe haven for LGBTQ youth by forming the HATCH Center.
Consequential ministries tend to build large congregations. Large congregations have long ministries. It is not a coincidence that Westwood and Schaibly had tenures of twenty years or more. It typically takes eight to ten years to change the culture of a religious community. The two of them each stuck around long enough to facilitate the kind of congregational change necessary for growth. I would like to do the same.
I am excited about the prospect of serving as your settled Senior Minister, in part, because I can sense congregational change coming. In the six and a half years since I arrived–theoretically for a one-year interim minister–First Unitarian Universalist has done a lot of work to prepare for growth. After struggling to operate two–three if you count the one in Mexico–satellite campuses, we have refocused our ministry on the center city. We have modernized and stabilized congregational administration. We have put the congregation on firmer fiscal grounds. We have started to move from a philosophy of scarcity to one of abundance. We are spending less time worrying about making payroll and more time imagining what kind of ministry we can collectively create.
Perhaps most importantly, for the first time in First Unitarian Universalist’s history, we are turning into a truly multiracial and multicultural religious community. Next week our first service will be entirely in Spanish. Our Sunday morning worshipping community has been steadily growing in diversity. The next chapter in congregational life is important. I am honored to have an invitation to build it with you.
Typically, when a congregation is considering a candidate for the settled ministry that person does not have a long connection to the community. The regular search process involves the Search Committee shifting through numerous candidates and then presenting the best one for consideration. In such circumstances, the membership gets to know the candidate over the course of a week. The minister arrives and preaches a sermon one Sunday. The next Sunday the minister preaches again and the congregation votes on whether or not to extend a call. In between the congregation and the minister get to know each other. It is quite a leap of faith.
Some of you have been through that process. The first sermon is usually autobiographical. The second one spells out something of the minister’s vision for the congregation.
About that first sermon… Our approach has been different. You constituted a Search Committee. They surveyed the congregation. They came to the conclusion that “a solid majority would like … [me] to remain at First” Unitarian Universalist.
I have already been your minister for several years. The situation calls to mind a verse from the old Philadelphia soul song, “If you don’t know me by now / You will never, never, never know me.” I think we can largely dispense with the autobiographical. Many of you know that I was raised Unitarian Universalist and that I come from an interfaith–Jewish and Christian–family. A lot of you probably recall that Sadé, Aiden, and Asa and I live in Midtown with two cats who like to wrestle and a sweet dog with a heart condition. You might even remember that I am a sometime academic who can often be seen riding my bike around town and who believes that mushroom foraging and dancing are both forms of spiritual practice.
If you cannot recall any of those details, I think we can dispense with them with a line from that great late twentieth century scripture, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. It is a work of science fiction. In it, we find the biography of the erstwhile President of the Galaxy–“the man who invented the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster … recently voted the Worst Dressed Sentient Being in the Known Universe for the seventh time”–summarized with the statement, “Zaphod [Beeblebrox’s] just this guy, you know?”
Just this guy, my story has already become entwined with yours. That is significant for both of us. My biography will always read Colin Bossen was the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston. Your congregational history will include an entry that scans much the same. For the truth of ministry is that ministers make congregations and that congregations make ministers. Calling me as your settled minister is an affirmation that we would like to continue in that act of co-creation.
A brief anecdote here, before I left Boston, I had the privilege of attending an event celebrating the sixtieth anniversary of Carl Scovel’s ordination. His name is probably unfamiliar. He retired from the ministry more than twenty-five years ago. As far as I know, he never came to Texas. But he was an active parish minister for forty-five years, thirty two of them as the Senior Minister of King’s Chapel in downtown Boston. It is one of our most historic congregations–it is a good ninety years older than this country–and has long been regarded as one of that city’s major civic and religious institutions.
Scovel’s ministry was the stuff of clerical legend. He rebuilt the congregation after a period of conflict and frightfully low membership. Renowned for his deep sense of spirituality, he became a sort of unofficial dean for area preachers. Offering a weekly radio sermon on a commercial station with a large audience, he could distill the entire conundrum of contemporary religious life into a sentence. “The unchurched are waiting for one thing: the sight of our transformation by the faith we profess,” he said.
The sight of our transformation by the faith we profess, Scovel was one of the people who offered remarks during that celebration. One thing he said has stuck with me. “When I arrived at King’s Chapel, I was not yet who I would become,” he told us. Accepting the call the meant, he stated, embracing the “slow hard work of transformation that was of my self but also another self.”
Over his years with King’s Chapel he learned, in other words, that the process of personal spiritual growth was closely connected to the work of congregational growth. The more he deepened his own spirituality, the deeper spirituality he could offer his congregation.
That is a very Unitarian perspective. In his classic sermon, “Likeness to God,” the nineteenth century Unitarian theologian William Ellery Channing told us, “that true religion consists in proposing as our great end a growing likeness to the” divine. Transformation by faith is not something that happens all at once. It is not sudden. It is the slow unfolding, the work of becoming. Between minister and congregation, it is the process of co-creation. I change. You change. We change together. Together we craft, “a growing multicultural, multigenerational, and multiracial congregation” that serves “as a pillar congregation for Houstonians of many faiths.” Not me alone. Not you alone. But us, together.
If you call me as your minister you will not be saying, “we think Colin is completely the minister we need to empower us to live out our mission.” You will be saying, “we have faith that Colin can grow with us into being that minister.” If I accept your call I will not be saying, “First Unitarian Universalist is already the congregation that I am supposed to minister to.” I will be saying, “I have faith that First Unitarian Universalist can grow with me into the congregation I am supposed to minister to.” Our time together will be transformative. It will be a testament to the faith we share in Unitarian Universalism, to our mission, to our vision of widening love’s circle.
Widening love’s circle, in what remains of this sermon I am going to focus on how I understand our shared vision. I would like to cast a glimpse of how we might transform each other. I am hoping for a long ministry. That brings us to Vision 2050. I will have retired by then. But First Unitarian Universalist will still be here. If our work together is successful then the congregation will have transformed spirituality and numerically. We will have regained our place as a major civic and religious institution. We will have returned to being a large church.
This will require two kinds of spiritual work. Sometimes these get referred to as the narrow gate and the wide gate. The narrow gate, we might think of this as the process of our individual transformation. The wide gate, we might consider this the work of collective transformation.
Jesus is recorded as having some particularly foolish words about them in the Gospel of Matthew. There we find the advice, “Enter by the narrow gate. Wide is the gate and broad the road that leads to destruction, and many enter that way; narrow is the gate and constricted the road that leads to life.” The implication is that the narrow gate–individual transformation–and the wide gate–collective transformation–are somehow incompatible.
The Christian New Testament, incidentally, contains a great number of contradictory sentiments. In it, Jesus is not immune from offering paradoxical positions. In some of his parables, he is depicted as embracing the wide gate.
That, however, is not the quarry we are after. Instead, in order to live out our shared mission we will need to engage in both kinds of spiritual work. I will need to change, you will need to change, as individuals. We will need to change as a religious community.
Before I say more about that transformational work, I have to offer you the difficult reminder that all of this will take place within the context of hard times. No matter what happens next month, we will be examining both the narrow gate and the wide gate within the context of a world in crisis. It is as I said last week, no matter who wins, it is hard to imagine that the United States will stop selling arms to Israel. No matter who wins, poverty will be allowed to persist. No matter who wins, resurgent white supremacy. No matter who wins, rising oceans, warmer summers, and fiercer storms.
Hard times, “[c]ontext is everything,” Carl Scovel told his fellow clergy at his sixtieth anniversary celebration. But so often, religious communities, “live in a world without context,” he warned. The spiritual life, the narrow gate and the wide gate, unfolds on this terrestrial realm, in this world, not apart from it.
We undergo our individual and collective transformation amid “all the tumult and the strife,” as our closing hymn will remind us. And for our readings this morning, I have pointed us to two guides I find useful in such work. The first is the Chinese poet and scholar Tu Fu. He is an inspiration for my own pursuit of the narrow gate. The second is the Unitarian Universalist theologian Rebecca Ann Parker. She points towards the wide gate.
Tu Fu is considered to be one of humanity’s greatest writers. He is frequently compared to William Shakespeare or Victor Hugo. His early life was marked by some challenges. It took him awhile to become established in his career. But by his mid-forties he had achieved a measure of success and secured an appointment as minor, but well compensated, civic official.
Even before he could start, China erupted into one of its worst civil wars. Over the span of ten years, more than two thirds of country’s population died. Tu Fu was forced into the life of a wanderer. He struggled with poverty. Sometimes he went hungry. One of his children died.
He also continued to pursue his narrow gate. In unsteady conditions, “The bitter cries of thousands of households,” he created “above the noise of battle … poetry and letters [that] persist in silence and solitude.” Some infuse my wakings, came unbidden in difficult times:
Flowers, and the dragonflies
Dipping the surface of the
Water again and again.
I cry out to the Spring wind,
And the light and the passing hours.
We enjoy life such a little
While, why should men cross each other?
I cry out to the Spring wind, Tu Fu for me is reminder that the narrow gate can pursued however life unfolds. Even in the most difficult hours, we always contain the likeness to God, as Channing put it, or the possibility of becoming more fully human, more truly ourselves.
We are in for hard times. In those hard times we will each be called to find our own narrow gates. I will not be able to take you on that path. That is for you to do. Our tradition, and our congregation, recognizes that there is not one path but many. Perhaps, Tu Fu is meaningless to you. Perhaps, you hate poetry. But there is a narrow gate out there for you. Through my preaching over the next years, I hope to help you to find it.
Rev. Scott and I have done something to point to the many narrow gates that exist in the world in the past years. Our “Lives of the Spirit” series directed you to some that a few of the great spiritual activists of the twentieth century found inspiring. In what is to come, we intend to help you look at these narrow gates more deeply and try to help you discover the ones that help you most fiercely kindle your inner spark. But neither of us can walk through that narrow gate with you. We can only point the way. Your work of individual transformation is your work. It is not mine. You alone can do it. So, let me ask you, do you know what where your narrow gate lies? As an invocation of Tu Fu should suggest, literature and art form a part of mine. But what about you? And what can I do to help you find it, walk through it?
The narrow gate, we could think of this as the Unitarian part of our heritage. The emphasis here is on personal development, the formation of character. There the minister serves as spiritual guide and tries to encourage you on your way.
The wide gate, in contrast, reflects our Universalist heritage. It is found in the hymn we sang earlier, “What Wondrous Love.”
What wondrous love is this, O my soul, O my soul?
[W]hen I was sinking down beneath my sorrow’s ground,
friends to me gathered round.
It is the work of creating together a community, as Rebecca Parker reminds us, where we can take “refuge.” This community is the wide gate. It contains the possibility of our collective transformation. It is the creation of a scared gathering place. It is how we come together to pursue “the sources that uphold and sustain life.”
Upholding and sustaining life, we are in the midst of hard times. There are more hard times on the horizon. If we are to devote ourselves to widening love’s circle then we will need to figure out how to build a strong enough congregation to carry each other through. We will be called to craft a religious community that is tough enough “to keep hate out and hold love in.”
We are called, as our choir’s song reminded us, to be a place for hope. We called to lift up the possibilities, find some room to act, and offer each other laughter and singing in the hard times.
First Unitarian Universalist has done this in the past when Westwood and Schaibly were here. That is why the congregation grew so dramatically during their tenures. Over their ministries, the congregation offered sanctuary to civil rights workers, peace activists, the GLBTQ communities, and refugees. The love we are called to provide in our hard times will be somewhat different. I am looking forward to uncovering it, to creating our wide gate of collective transformation, together.
The wide gate, the narrow gate, widening love’s circle, becoming “a growing multicultural, multigenerational, and multiracial congregation,” that serves “as a pillar congregation for Houstonians of many faiths,” my 2050 vision for First Unitarian Universalist is simple. I am inviting you to join with me in the work of individual and collective transformation. I believe that together we can grow into the best versions of ourselves–a minister and a congregation devoted to changing each other and, in doing so, laboring to bring into being the world we dream about.
To that, I ask, will the congregation say Amen?
