Dragging the Cricket Home

• Opening Words
• The Lighting of the Chalice and a Uniting Statement
• Song of Exaltation
• Litany of Dedication to Interim Ministry
• Litany of Dedication to Religious Education
• Offertory
• Sharing of Joys and Sorrows
• Meditation with Silence and With Music
• Sermon: Dragging the Cricket Home Rev. Kerry Mueller
• Closing Words

Opening Words

Come into the circle of love and justice.
Come into the community of mercy, holiness, and health.
Come and you shall know peace and joy.

Opening Hymn #360 "Here We Have Gathered"

The Lighting of the Chalice and a Uniting Statement

As we gather here for worship,
we pledge ourselves to the endless search for truth;
to the right of each to believe ans mind, heart, and conscience dictate,
to accpet the responsibility this freedom commands;
and to emplement our belief
in the essential worth and dignity of every human being.
-- from the Preamble of our Constitution

Song of Exaltation

From hand to hand the greeting flows,
From eye to eye the signals run,
From heart to heart the bright hope glows;
The seekers of the light are one.

Welcome and Announcements

Litany of Dedication to Interim Ministry

Ed Johnson, President of the Congregation: Here we stand at the beginning of a special time of ministry together. This congregation has engaged the Rev. Kerry Mueller to lead us through a time of change and renewal as we prepare to call a settled minister. This time has special challenges. We have great hopes for this year: an invigorated sense of community, a healthy shared ministry, a commitment to work towards healing and harmony, and a readiness to move toward the future with hope. Kerry, will you help guide us through this time of transition? Will you care for this congregation, will you work and play and laugh and cry and worship and pray with us? Will you keep the developmental tasks of interim ministry before us as we prepare for our future as a congregation? Kerry Mueller, Interim Minister: I will, to the best of my ability. Ed Johnson: And you, the members and friends of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Silver Spring, will you receive Kerry as your interim minister? Will you care for her, will you work and play and laugh and cry and worship and pray with her? Will you work with good heart on the developmental tasks of interim ministry before us as we prepare for our future as a congregation? Congregation: We will, to the best of our ability. All: We dedicate ourselves to a time of interim ministry. May we nurture this community of memory and hope as a home where we can live out the values of Unitarian Universalism.

Litany of Dedication to Religious Education

Parting Song for Children #413

Offertory

Sharing of Joys and Sorrows

At this time in our service we take a few moments to share what is in our hearts and on our minds. If there is an event in your life, or the life of the world, which moves you this morning to joy or sorrow hope or gratitude, I invite you to come forward and share a few words with us and move a stone into the water, letting the ripples remind us that everything that touches one of us touches all of us. If it is better for you, we will bring the microphone to you.

[Sharing]

Let us remember to hold in our hearts the joys and sorrows of the whole company of humanity, whether they are spoken and shared or silent and solitary.

Meditation with Silence and With Music

Prayer for the Days of Awe #637

This is the time of year when our Jewish friends and neighbors clear the books for the year and prepare to be written in the book of life for the coming year. We are all imperfect, of course, and all need to acknowledge our shortcomings. So here in the Days of Awe between Rosh Hashanah, the birthday of the world, and Yom Kippur, I invite you to join in a litany of atonement, #637 in the hymnal.

Reading from "Temporary Shepherds" by Roger S. Nicholson

Sermon

Dragging the Cricket Home

by the Rev. Kerry Mueller

The first thing I have to tell you is that I swiped the title for this sermon from Chris Lihou -- and then I bowdlerized it. Somehow I didn't think that "Dragging the Cockroach Home" would look good in the religion ads in the Washington Post. We want to attract visitors, after all, not put them off. But Chris gave me the metaphor. This was at my second interview here at Silver Spring, with both the Interim Search Committee and the Board. After a fruitful exchange of questions and ideas, I asked the Silver Spring people there to tell me what they hoped I could do for the church as interim minister this year. Everyone said good and true things, about helping the church to grow and thrive. But Chris' answer grabbed my attention. "You know how it is when hundreds of ants are trying to drag a dead cockroach back to the nest for dinner? They are all scurrying about, each in its own direction, and the cockroach lurches back and forth as they slowly move it more or less in the direction of the nest. What I hope you can do is help us to move together and take the cockroach home more efficiently." Wow! I was riveted by the image of intense activity, startled by the notion of cockroach as dinner, and then came that oxymoron of ants, those quintessentially social insects, acting like a bunch of rugged individualists. Talk about a group of feisty Unitarian Universalists looking for common ground to build a church. I immediately had a vision of looking deeper to find and encourage the order in the midst of apparent chaos. I was filled with a hopeful excitement, and my ministry at Silver Spring began at just that moment.

So I was not surprised a month later at Interim Training, when the Rev. David Keyes, a UU Accredited Interim Minister and one of our faculty members, asked us, "When do you begin to do interim ministry with a congregation?" The answer he expected was, "at the very first interview." "Yes," I thought, "that's how it went." And I hadn't been entirely surprised, after that interview, while I waited in the children's chapel for the board to make a decision, to hear a lot of laughter coming from the Miller Room. I couldn't hear the deliberations, but the board members were sure having a good time in there. So here we are, dedicated together to a time of interim ministry, with a year of challenge and excitement and not a little fun ahead of us. (One of the things the search team showed me was the list of characteristics of a new minister that the children here had developed. It was number 9 that worried me. The new minister should be "funny but not wacko." I keep thinking, "what if I get that one backwards?") So it should be fun. Indeed, being playful is part of our mutual job of shaking things up and finding new directions. But the question before us remains, how are we going to get that cockroach home?

Fortunately, we don't have to make it all up ourselves as we go along. The main lessons at the interim ministry training came from a book called Temporary Shepherds, from which this morning's reading came. I have two copies of it, which are currently being passed around among members of the fledgling Interim Ministry Steering Committee -- but after that, I would be happy, eager even, to lend them to anyone else who would like to learn more. The book, and the training, centered on the five developmental tasks of interim ministry. As the reading this morning suggests, the time of interim ministry is a special time, a time for getting from here to there -- from wherever a congregation has been in its history to a place of readiness for a healthy and happy relationship with the next minister. All our lives we do developmental work as individuals or as groups. At some time in our lives each of us has to get through the painful work of grieving, or making our way to a place of forgiveness, or simply moving from childhood to adulthood through that fraught territory of adolescence. We go through stages and phases, which are neatly described by experts, but which we live through in the shifting and jumbled experience of everyday life. So this morning, I would like to discuss with you the five developmental tasks before us, and lay out some of my ideas for how we may tackle them. But this work will go on all year, in formal events and informal conversations, in large chunks and small bits, in our public meetings and in our private hearts. And little by little, we will drag the cricket home, and prepare to feast.

The first developmental task of interim ministry is coming to terms with history. Every institution has history. In the nearly fifty years that this congregation has been in existence, from the days in the stable to the times in this lovely room, history has been moving forward. Good things have happened, and opportunities for learning have occurred. Some events are widely known, some seem to have been "forgotten." The excellent history written by Larry McAneny for the ministerial packet tells a great deal, but now is the time to bring out all the past and look at it explicitly.

Here's an illustrative story that came in on the UU HUUMOR line a couple of days ago. It purports to be the true story of a psycho/social experiment in which a group of monkeys were kept in a large cage, with a staircase in the middle, leading to a place with a tempting banana hanging from the ceiling. Naturally, one of the monkeys scampered up the stairs. But just as he reached for that luscious banana, the experimenters pulled it away and sprayed all of the monkeys with cold water, which dampened all their spirits. This happened again and again, until, as you can imagine, the wretched monkeys learned to prevent any of their companions from climbing the stairs. Then the diabolical experimenters did something new -- withdrew one of the monkeys from the cage, and introduced a new one. The newcomer quickly learned that the others would not allow her to climb those stairs, no matter how lovely the banana at the top. Then the experimenters took out a second monkey, and introduced a new one. Again, the social pressure taught him not to climb those stairs. Well, you know where this is going. Eventually, it was all new monkeys. And not one of the monkeys in the cage had ever even tried for the banana or been sprayed with cold water. They all just knew better. They had traditions to uphold. In this cage, we don't reach for the banana.

Now church people are smarter than monkeys, right? Well, consider this story from Temporary Shepherds.

During Ellen Stone's exit interview with Prairie Church, she noted that some members of the church seemed suspicious of her with regard to the topic of church funds. Since Ellen had given no cause for the suspicion, she suspected there was a secret in the church's history about a previous pastor and money. Longtime members who read the report of the exit interview were quick to acknowledge that a minister many years ago had indeed played fast and loose with the discretionary fund. But it was not a secret, they said, because everyone knew about it.

Stories like this one, even though everyone knows about them, still function like secrets in the life of the church. At Prairie Church the offending minister left the church without the trustees ever raising their concerns. The trustees were relieved not to have to deal with the unpleasantness, and hoping to avoid future problems, some of them quietly took on the mission t ensure that the same thing never happened again. As a result, subsequent ministers were viewed with suspicion. No one ever talked about the secret. And although the trustees were relieved to leave the past behind them, the secret prevented the minister and trustees from ever developing genuine trust. An incident from the church's history prevented the congregation from functioning at its best and would continue to get in the way until the trustees looked at their misplaced suspicions and stopped treating their ministers with distrust.

(p. 66)

The event was minor, it was long ago, it was all new monkeys, but it still had effects. Reviewing your history, getting it out where you can see it plainly, coming to terms with the past, mourning and celebrating. . . .This sounds like what people do after a death. And indeed, interim minister David Keyes says "It's a little like a death in the family, and there is grief work that has to be done." Or I think of an interview on The Diane Rehm Show that I heard this week with Anthony Sampson, friend and biographer of Nelson Mandela. Mandela had the wisdom and courage to institute a truth commission, to begin his regime with a truthful acknowledgment of the bitterness past. "You can't build a nation without people saying what they did and what happened to them," he said. [TOTN, 9/16/99] And South Africa has managed to keep from tearing itself apart despite its long and brutal history of repression and violence. No one has officially described Mandela's presidency as an interim ministry, but that is what he was doing -- bringing a whole nation through a profound change, and doing so with truth and love.

So the work of the interim period begins with looking clearly and steadily at your history, at the good times and the bad, at the successes and at the places you'd rather not look. It is my job to keep holding up the mirror. I know it will come out all right, so I can do that job, even if it gets to be uncomfortable. It is not my place to tell your history, but to hold open the space where you may name it. Telling your story, naming the truth in all its pain and glory, is the first and crucial step. So I hope many of you will come to the event on October 3: Roots and Wings, Part I, where we will tell the stories, make the history come alive, and begin to put it to rest. Every person is important, every perception is part of the whole truth. And that's where we need to begin, with truth.

But there are four more developmental tasks of interim ministry. The second is to develop a new identity. This is more difficult to articulate, and requires a more resolutely positive outlook. Who are you now as a congregation? Not many here ever worshipped by candlelight in the old stable. What has your evolution been? What are your gifts? What have you done well? Tell a story about the time when this congregation was working well. How do you take care of one another when the chips are down? I saw a crowd of people around Lucile when she announced two weeks ago that William would be going away for major surgery. What are your traditions of care? How do you connect with the community around you? What do you hope for? How do you allocate your resources -- time, money, energy? What new projects would you like to undertake? I have heard from several people that they would like to enter upon a serious, disciplined path to spiritual growth. This might be a good year to begin that process. How is this congregation different from other nearby UU congregations? How would a newcomer -- or a new minister -- decide that this is the right home? Identity, vision, mission -- these are things a congregation needs to look at every 3 to 5 years, and there is no better time than the freedom of an interim year. "Roots and Wings, Part II" will be about identity, and will use a process of appreciative inquiry.

The third task of interim ministry is facilitating new leadership. Sometimes this means that the interim minister is expected to fire the existing staff. Fortunately, that is not the case here. We are blessed with our DRE and choir director, pianist, and administrative assistant. Or I think of the story I heard from an Episcopalian priest, where the whole vestry resigned at once. "What!" he exclaimed, "how will we manage?" "That's just it," said the newly resigned president, "We just want you to run everything. Then when things go wrong, we'll know who to blame." That's not what we're doing here either. Or consider the fellowship long ago and far away where one of the founders complained about the burden being there early and staying late for every event, because he had the only set of keys. But when the consultant suggested that someone else might take over that task, he was rebuffed. "Oh, no. No one else would do it right." Or I think of a Methodist minister I know who served an interim congregation, where the long time volunteer organist had a strangle hold on the music program and would not let go. They needed a more up to date outlook on music. Someone had to pry her fingers loose from the keyboard. Fortunately, it happened that the church had to make the decision to move to a new building -- where there was no room for the old organ. They got their new music director. Again, not our issue.

But every congregation needs to develop new leadership continuously, to create entry level positions, to help a steady stream of newcomers take their rightful places as leaders, and to honor the democratic process by making sure that every person has a voice in governance and that no one's gifts are overlooked. The old guard needs to appreciate new talents, to have the chance to create new initiatives, to hand old jobs over new newer people, and to help everyone keep clearly focused on why we are here in the first place. Every church has a core of committed people who do most of the work and keep things going even under trying circumstances. These people are often perceived as a small, closed clique who keep all the power to themselves, while they usually feel like overburdened, put upon heroes, who just wish someone would help. This is a year for change and experimentation. I congratulate the board and council for their commitment to a transparently democratic process. I see people realizing that they are not required to keep the finger in the dike until they can recruit a successor. I see people prepared to encourage taking UU leadership training at different levels, on and off campus. This is a year to facilitate new leadership.

The fourth task is different. The others are all inward looking -- who are we, what shall we do? But this is also a time for a congregation to renew denominational ties. It may surprise you to know that we are not the only denomination in which congregations tend to be a little provincial. "What have they done for us lately," people often ask. What are they doing with our -- dues, apportionments, fair shares? But the interim year is a time when it becomes clear to congregations that denominational ties are invaluable. There in Boston is the Rev. John Weston, almost singlehandedly setting up a system of ministerial search that will be more transparent, and less dependent upon his shuffling papers and sending names. Your search committee has had training from him in Philadelphia. You will have the advice of a local denominationally trained compensation consultant and settlement consultant. You will be working in partnership with the Unitarian Universalist Association to search the whole denomination for the future minister of this church, a minister whose training, experience, and collegial support come through and from that same denomination. Already I have seen Silver Spring's important role in creating and sustaining UUMAC, where UU's can spend a week learning and playing together for a week in the summer. I have seen your leaders glad to meet with other local UU leaders -- you always find out that whatever the problems in my church, someone else has it worse. And you always find some way to help another congregation solve some problem, and learn a new way of doing things from yet another. And we will be doing the "Our Whole Lives" sexuality education program in conjunction with our neighbor, Paint Branch. So there is denominational linkage here already. But this is the year to get involved -- CAMPUUS ministry, perhaps, or district service. And, General Assembly is in Nashville next June -- that's within driving distance. Plan to send a couple of dozen people in addition to your official delegates.

And finally, the fifth task is Preparing for new directions in ministry. This task begins right now and goes on all year. Each of the other tasks feeds into this one, and there are some special tasks as well. While I am here, I am demonstrating week by week that there is more than one way to be a minister. My style is different from Jim's or the other half dozen minister's who have served you. We all have virtues, and we all have shortcomings. My very presence will help you to think and feel your way to a new settled ministry, with a new and again different minister. In our time together, I trust we will learn a lot from each other. I promise you I will make mistakes. I may feel rushed or not be fully in tune with your systems. I may toss out ideas, make suggestions, offer more alternatives than you want to hear. I'll keep holding up that mirror. I'll surely stumble from time to time. But you can be sure that my mistakes won't stem from not caring about you.

You may have been wondering why I processed in ceremonially this morning, and why I was wearing hiking boots and carrying a walking stick. No, this isn't some kind of weird high church liturgy that I plan to impose on you. It's a one time symbolic act, a reminder that I am here for only a time. Ed, would you come up here a moment? Will you take this walking stick, and put it in the corner of the chancel. We'll leave it here so we don't forget. I'm here for a term, to care for you and keep holding up that mirror. But when your search is successful -- and mine too, I trust -- I will be leaving. I cannot stay. This is hard, says David Keyes. Interim ministers make "heart connections." I've already done that. I am so grateful that you have called me from hospitals and let me into your lives. But despite those heart connections, a time comes when we must leave. We cannot do the important and difficult work of interim ministry if we were hoping to stay. Thanks, Ed.

They taught us three slogans of interim ministry at the training in June: 1) We're faster pastors. In and out. Do some good work and then go. 2) You should be glad we were here, and glad when we're gone. It will be a challenging time. And 3) Interim ministers come to you pre-fired. You don't have to do that. So we can get on with the difficult work. And the funny but not wacko parts. So that will be a first, bittersweet step in preparing for new directions in ministry. Saying goodbye to each other, and letting go. We'll have done good work together, and prepared you for a healthy and happy relationship with your next minister. And then come the other steps, the joyous steps of hospitality and generosity as you welcome and support your settled minister.

So, will all of this get that cockroach back to the nest in a neat, efficient straight line? I doubt it. We are not ants, after all, driven by blind instinct. We are neither obedient automatons following a script, nor lone rangers heedless of our beloved community. Perhaps we are more like sailors, tacking back and forth as the wind changes, or scientists testing hypotheses by trial and error. We are intelligent, conscious, volitional creatures. We have purposes and principles in common, and a common dedication to our Unitarian Universalist tradition. We can read, and we have a map. If we work well together using that map provided by the five tasks, you can find your way. Your future is in your hands. The path may look erratic, but there will be a thread of common purpose guiding you through the maze.

May we be inspired to work through the tasks before us.
May we be mindful of the opportunity to live out our faith in community.
And may we be caring of one another, every step along the way.

Amen, shalom, blessed be.

Hymn #1 "May Nothing Evil Cross This Door"

Closing Words

Because of those who came before, we are;
in spite of their failings, we believe;
because of, and in spite of the horizons of their vision,
we, too, dream.

Let us go, remembering to praise,
       to live in the moment,
       to love mightily,
       to bow to the mystery.