A Sermon by Rev. John E. Gibbons

Delivered on Canvass Sunday, March 18, 2001

At First Parish in Bedford

Ministers often approach Canvass Sunday with a mix of anxiety, dread and hope-against hope. In that spirit, here is a list I’ve seen of the “Top Ten Things You’ll Never Hear in Church:”

10. Hey! It’s my turn to sit in the front row.

9. I was so enthralled I never noticed your sermon went 25 minutes overtime.

8. Personally, I find church so much more enjoyable than golf.

7. I’ve decided to give the church the $50 per month I used to spend on cable.

6. I volunteer to be the permanent teacher for the junior high Sunday school class.

5. Forget the denominational minimum – let’s pay our minister so she can live like we do.

4. I love it when we sing hymns we’ve never heard before.

3. Since we’re all here, let’s start the service early.

2. Finance Committee chair to Minister: We’d like to send you to this interesting seminar in the Bahamas.

1. And the big #1 Thing You’ll Never Hear in Church is…Nothing inspires me like our annual canvass.

Actually, though I tell it for laughs, the truth is that I’ve heard almost every one of those things at First Parish. Well, maybe not the one about starting the service early. In general, we don’t fit the stereotype and – because I’ll beat up on us pretty hard in my words to come, I’ll say in all sincerity and self-congratulation at the outset: you are and this is a very extraordinary jewel of a people and a place.

The thing about Canvass Sunday, however, is that the people who most need to hear the sermon generally stay home or turn off their hearing aids; and at the same time, someone who is really doing the best he or she can to support the church will hear the sermon as directed to them and be hurt. There is some sense of being doomed to failure when you set out to talk about money. But that’s never stopped us before!

In the history of church fund-raising, almost everything has been tried. Remember – was it Oral Roberts? – “unless you send me lots and lots of money, God is gonna call me home!” I have a file that bulges with song parodies: to the tune of “Holy, Holy, Holy” there is not only “Coffee Coffee Coffee” but “Money Money Money”… to the Indian Love Call there is “Will your pledge renew-oooo-oooo?” Who can forget our own Charlie Schwerin’s contributions, including a musically challenging round with a text of “There is no such thing as a free lunch” sung – improbably - in Latin. Student minister Cynthia Kane once parodied the announcement on airplanes, “Thank you for flying First Parish Airline. We know you have a choice of airlines to fly….” Etcetera.

A free lunch there is not, but I want this to be as gimmick-free and as truthful as I possibly can.

This church is yours – ours, really, because I too need a church community and I’m a pledging member. This place is ours and what happens here is what we want to have happen here. This church will do good things if we do good things. This church will be caring if we are caring. This church will help our kids if we help our kids. This church will stand up for justice if we stand up for justice. This church will be good for our souls and the soul of the world if our attitudes and actions are good for the soul.

Lutherans (and Baptists and Congregationalists and Catholics and all the rest) give financial support to the Sierra Club and the League of Women Voters and all the other groups and causes which many of us also support. Only First Parishioners, really, support First Parish. It’s up to us. Yikes.

We go through all this annual hullabaloo because if we don’t get the attention of our own members and friends, well, game over. This year if we don’t get our members and friends attention in a major and behavior-changing way, well, things aren’t even going to stay the same. We’re looking for a good bit more money just to stay the course and a whole lot more if we’re going to do some things better.

And, of course, no amount of hullabaloo will change the fact that some people are able to give nothing or almost nothing – that is a very few people, fortunately. It is also true that some people have to stay at the same level or even cut back. I heard of someone this week who cut back their pledge from 7% of their income to 5% - and that’s good because we don’t want martyrs. Let that be a lesson to you!

There are a whole lot of people, however, for whom the decision about pledging is actually quite discretionary. Our tendency is to put some number on the card that we guess is about right but could it be a different higher number and still be well within our means? For many of us, myself included, of course it could.

There isn’t really a science to this. Some synagogues have an annual membership fee of X-thousands of dollars and that’s that. We don’t do it that way. Here’s the only instruction I’ll give you:

I hope that everyone in this congregation will contribute an amount to its support which is congruent with your resources, your other obligations, your interest, your involvement, your commitment and your hope. Not one dollar more, not one dollar less. Only you can decide for yourself what that amount is. You are answerable only to yourself for what you choose to pledge.

In his sermon, one of my UU colleagues - it was Dave Weissbard, actually, former First Parish minister – identified six ways members have of relating to their church: First, there are the unable; second, there are the takers; third, there are the clueless; then there are the purchasers; then the owners; and finally the investors. There will always be people in each of these categories, but Dave’s intent was to wake up the takers and the clueless and encourage the purchasers and the owners to consider a longer-term investment view. Investment is a long-term strategy.

The thing is that, by and large – even after this last week on Wall Street - Unitarian Universalists are quite affluent. That’s most of us, folks. Really. And, of all religious groups, we are the ones who give the least. Of those who give to their churches, we’re at the bottom, the sub-basement: 1% of income, maybe. At the top are the Mormons at 8%, Assemblies of God, Adventists, fundamentalists….Southern Baptists, the nation’s largest Protestant group, give just over 3% of their income. Three times our average.

Why is this? And, more important, what does this mean? Two reasons account for our dubious status: First of all, many of us are cheap – there I said it - (“scrimy” is the good point-of-pride New England word) and, second, many of us (not all of us; please don’t be hurt) put the church rather low on our list of financial priorities. And here’s a third reason: many Unitarian Universalists really don’t expect much more of ourselves or of one another. Maybe we don’t find that much value in church or we don’t take any religion all that seriously or we take a certain perverse and usually self-righteous pride in not being like those other churches. Did you see last week that Ted Turner got in some trouble when he dismissively called people who observe Ash Wednesday “a bunch of Jesus Freaks.”? We’re usually more polite about it, but we too are sometimes a bit dismissive of people who take church more seriously than we do. Too few of us, I’d say, spend enough time guiltily wondering whether maybe we should take our religion and this church a bit more seriously.

Fanny Holmes, wife of Oliver Wendell Holmes, was asked why she was a Unitarian. “In Boston, everyone had to be something, and Unitarian was the least we could be.” It’s a sad laugh-line.

What this all means, I believe, is that we have a problem. It is not coincidental that some of those high-giving high-expectation churches – the Mormons, the Southern Baptists and all – they are strong churches; they have a lot of power – power for good and power for mischief. Power to advance their ideals. Power to influence lives; power to influence families; power to influence governments. Power to advance their ideals.

We, contrastingly, are more than a little distrustful of strong churches. We’re individualists! We think for ourselves! And we vastly underpower the church as an agent for the advancement of our ideals.

We do great things, sometimes, with what we’ve got. UU’s generally and UU’s here in particular. We actually save a lot of lives – our kids’ lives, our own lives. Involvement in this church can be life-saving - more than we realize. I was in tears last Sunday when Sharon said she made some of the most profound promises of her life – promises to her husband, promises to herself - hard promises - here in this room.

Music, religious education, social justice (by the way, don’t underestimate the significance of what you do when you use that new Common Room to display the Love Makes a Family exhibit…that seemingly-simple thing is absolutely life-saving)…. In music, RE, social justice, and in ministry – in all the ways you and I minister, we - for a vastly underpowered institution - we do some great things, sometimes.

I’ve always loved, again, Charlie Schwerin’s characterization of First Parish as kind of a “hick Camelot” – but why do we settle for being a hick Camelot when our heart’s deepest yearnings could be so much more effective in the service of the world’s deepest needs?

This isn’t going to be easy. In order for us to maintain the same unchanged level of underpowered, overworked, under-resourced hick Camelot services – out of 174 pledge units, 95 will need to go up by about $200; 35 need to go up $400, 17 need to go up $600, 26 can just stay the same. That would produce an additional $41,000 in income - which will be treading water.

That’s why the Canvass Committee (who, as ever, deserve deep bowing) and I are here to shake something loose and start fresh – “think different.” Dave Packer would say - get all of us to at least think about doubling or better our pledges – and to get a heck of a lot of us to actually do it, or do the best we can (even if that means reducing your pledge from 7% to 5% of your income and avoiding martyrdom). To be as effective as we really think we ought to be or can be, well, that requires another $75,000 in income – a whopping 43.6% increase overall. And there’s nobody here but us hick chickens.

Enough economics; let’s try religion: Maybe a few of you remember an old Academy Award winning movie from the 60’s titled Hud. In it, Melvyn Douglas plays a seasoned old rancher who is forced to kill his entire herd of cattle because they have caught the very destructive and contagious – you guessed it - hoof and mouth disease. There is a scene in that movie in which bulldozers dig out a huge, deep trench, as wide and as long as a football field, and then cowboys ride back out and line the rim of what is about to become a mass grave, they dismount, take their rifles, and wait. At a signal from the old man, they begin shooting, picking off the steers one by one, and soon they are finished, and a vast silence settles over the scene. The old man’s grandson, played by Brandon DeWilde, has been at his side all through this, and he looks at his grandfather and says, “That didn’t take long.” And the old man, gazing out at his ruined herd, says, “Nope. It takes a mighty long time to grow somethin’, but it don’t take long to kill it.”

It has taken a mighty long time to grow this First Parish into the hick Camelot we are today, and we are a jewel of a hick Camelot. The truth, however, is that there are many things we – I among you - don’t do all that well. At a cottage meeting, Doug Muder, who’s been trying to organize our adult education courses, said that he’s come to the realization that he’s a better teacher than he is a principal. That’s true for most of us and if somebody’s going to do the principal’s job, well, probably it will cost some money. The Love Makes a Family exhibit is being paid for – oh, things like that cost money, by the way! – half from our Social Responsibility budget, half from the spare change I’ve earned from doing weddings. That’s not the right way to do it. We could have regular exhibits – significant, life-changing, beautiful exhibits – but that would take somebody’s time and somebody’s money that we don’t now have.

We don’t give our programs - our ministries, our kids, ourselves, our ideals – heck, our maintenance budget to see that this beautiful place stays clean and not too scuffed up – we don’t provide the kind of support – coordination, principalling, staffing, resources – that we truly need if this good work is to be done at a level better than that of a hick Camelot.

There are those who look beyond the operating budget that supports the present program. Their vision is not of the current balance sheet but of what they hope this place can still become. They are “paying it forward,” making an investment in the future. They are committed to Unitarian Universalism as a vital presence in their lives and our community. They aren’t too concerned about what others are giving. They look at their resources and their obligations and address support of the church as a priority, not part of what’s left over. These are people who really feel good about what they are able to give. It is not a burden; it really is a pleasure.

I hope that we will comport ourselves in such a way as will encourage more people to support a First Parish that is stronger than it is today. I hope we’ll expect more of ourselves and of one another and, therefore, of this church. I hope we’ll be – not the least – but the most we can be.

I’ll say it once more:

And, last, as Steve Allen said, “Like love and affection, gratitude may mean nothing to others unless it is expressed. When it is expressed, the effects can be miraculous.”