Sermons

Preacher: Rev. Dr. Duncan Newcomer

“Speech gives rise to speech” that’s what a famous German philosopher from the last century wrote: “Speech gives rise to speech.” What could he have meant?

Now the philosophy of language is a bit like diving down the rabbit hole after Alice in Wonderland, where things get “curiouser and curiouser.” So we won’t go far.

But the philosopher (Heidegger) believed that language was organic, the origin of being itself. Now we like things organic. He thought that we organically, naturally, come into the world as we speak. No additives, certainly no genetic modification. We are as we speak. We arise out of language itself. At least I think that is what he meant.

I talk and I come into a world, that world into which I have been thrown. Not only do I become a being-in-the world but you do too, as you listen and speech comes alive in you. My words seed words in you. We grow and become in this language event.

That is why live speech in public, sermons, poems and plays, political speeches, even Broadway shows, all are so important. Speech, unlike anything else, makes a world into a world. We cannot imagine Lincoln, Hitler, Pope Francis, without a speech.

But speech is not just speeches, it is our speech, our speaking with each other, our sustainable conversations. It is what makes our gardens grow, especially our church gardens.

I was in such a personal speech event on Thanksgiving, off in the hills of Massachusetts, and I want to tell you about it. There was me and this old guy. He was an old churchman and we were sharing our regrets as to what has happened to the vitality of our churches since we were young. Someone at the other end of our large and laden table took a picture of the two of us hunched over our conversation. It was strange to see it on their iphone. It looked like TWO old guys, not just him along with me!

But we didn’t just talk about church, we also talked about our spiritual lives. He told me about his heart attack and how afterwards he spiritually felt that he had been given a gift—an extension of life—and he knew he wanted to show his gratitude and live his life in a new way. So, with his Doctor’s advice as well, he transitioned out of his business– a funeral home—and became a leading volunteer person in his little town in Vermont. He has a second marriage (he had been a widower) and he doesn’t work late nights anymore, and all that was 35 years ago.

There in that modern log cabin, among 10 other people and a table of overflowing food, I felt sustained by our conversation and it reminded me of the most vital and alive church of the six that I have served—a church revitalized by its practice of sustainable conversations. It was a United Church of Christ congregation. It had been a leading church in New Haven, and was about to close its doors after a long and storied history. Instead it went from a near-death experience to new life through an intentionally designed program of talk: Talk between members during the week, talk before meetings, and talks by members—testimonials, actually—from time to time in worship. These three talking times became their sustaining conversations and in a few years the turn-around was significant, membership returned to a sustainable size, the mission projects in town and to the world were courageous and valuable, an $850,000 capital campaign redid the building, the music program continued to feed their worship, the sermons fed the people, and the study groups were a harvest of relationships and shared ideas and stories.

All this was written up into a book by the young woman minister who was the creator of this revival. The book is called “Tell It Like It Is” by Lillian Daniel.

So what is Sustainable Conversation I hope you ask?

It is engagement in live talk and listening using verbal skills to engender meaning and relationship. It conserves social institutions and re-nourishes the individual human spirit.

Let me repeat that.

And for our purposes here today, an application:

Sustainable conversation is necessary for church life. Sustainable conversation is not only necessary for church life, it is enough, it is sufficient. To bring life to a church it is all you need. That is the organic quality of speech—it makes worlds, it re-makes worlds.

The only problem with sustainable conversation is that we don’t like to do it. The reasons for our reluctance has to do with what we feel when we come to church.

My sense from several decades of church life is that about 40% of people who come to church are introverts—a bit larger than the national average. And they, we really, come to church to be quiet, to have our space, and to dwell with things inner, certainly not to talk much. The 60% or so of extroverts come to church to share and to talk, but not to have sustainable conversations, especially not about spirituality or religion.

So now we have a double problem. Most people shy away from sustainable conversations and hardly anyone, even extroverts, wants to talk about religion, the spiritual purposes of life. That’s a road block because all religion is local. Religion is local and social even as its reach is global. If we don’t talk about it we lose it, just like love, family life or national life, without talking in words they all perish.

A religion requires five things to talk about. One, an ultimate concern—but it cannot be just a private concern. Religion requires an ultimate concern, felt locally with global implications.

Two, a religion requires signs and symbols, signs and symbols that are mutually recognizable. The UU Chalice is not a private symbol it is a shared symbol, and that is part of why it is meaningful. We know it here and now, we believe also that it is meaningful to the world.

Three. A religion requires an ethic and thought. There is no ethic for the lone wolf or the island castaway. Ethics requires a community, as does a philosophy. You may love wisdom but if you cannot say something from that wisdom to someone else you have no way of knowing if it is wisdom.

Four. Religion require ritual actions—if only to stand together to sing. Singing in the shower is not a religious act.

And, five, religions require a myth, a story, a text, explanatory tales of creation, meaning, and a direction to history and life. Stories of here and now and yonder too.

All five of these religious themes for individual talking are also communal. Culture gives form to religion, like a forest does to trees. Religion is the substance of that cultural form, the wood. We are trees in a forest.

Our UU ad on the radio recently said, “Nurture your spirit. Heal the world.” This all starts in the here and the now. Just as all politics, as said Tip O’Neil, is local, so is all religion. What we do here is so important. Our speech, our conversations, their sustenance, is so important.

Now there has been a method to my madness here with you all, my four, so far, sermons. This is my where-the-rubber-hits-the-road sermon. You could say, given my culture-religion metaphor about trees and forests, this is a sermon about the noise we trees make in the forest. We are in a forest. Trees don’t fall alone even if they fall one at a time. We are communal, religious really, whether we like it or not.

I have been preaching, July, September, October and November, on the value of religion. Secular Fourth of July visionary religion, primal religion, secular and sacred religion, patriotic religion, and now local religion. All these sermons will be seen on your web site.

So now in this church in New Haven, that I was reminded of in my spiritual conversation at Thanksgiving, people set about with a new intention. They intended to talk with each other about religion, about spiritual life. They did it in three ways.

One, people picked a person they wanted to try to get to know a little better. They would contact that person and decide to meet at a certain time and place, often a coffee shop, and to talk for half an hour or so, telling each other about their views and feelings on religion, and more importantly their personal quest in life. People aimed at doing this about once a month or so with different people.

Two, they completely re-defined the culture of church meetings. It made the meetings surprisingly more efficient and abundantly more rewarding. Meetings would begin with a short sharing of something read, rotating individually each meeting, something that was spiritual or inspirational or religious. But then the topic for everyone to share, to talk about, was—in their terms—stimulated by the topic sentence: “I know that God is alive and well in life because….” It could just as well have been: “Here is something spiritually positive that I see or have experienced recently….” The point was that people all shared in a common topic of a religious or spiritual nature that was personally meaningful. I was of course suspicious when I first started there. But I soon learned that not only did people look forward to going to church meetings, they became truly nourishing and sustaining—these were sustainable conversations, putting back into the culture what was taken out for use. The business part of the meetings took half the time it usually takes because people were in a good mood, a good spirit, a good mind. All of the nasty petty ego driven “Whose-afraid-of-Virginia-Wolf” psychodrama was gone.

The positive voicing of the evening’s topic was interesting because this church also had a call board sign out front that read “seekers and skeptics welcome.” They were not “pie-in-the sky” ideologs.

They did, moreover, take the sustainable conversation recipe a nutrient-step further one year. A mission arm of the church had gotten discouraged and disorganized. Rather than give up they held a series of problem-solving meetings guided by a known format of only making positive and affirmative statements. Rather than say, “the problem with this group is that….” They would say things like, “one of the strengths of this groups is….” and lo and behold they just solved their problems with realistic but affirmative problem-solving talk. I was amazed, and also having spent decades as a psychotherapist helping people define what was wrong with this or that, including their parents, I was professionally shocked.

Along with pairs of sustainable spiritual conversations and with meetings begun with a spiritual and religious focus, the church also, three, engaged in having members volunteer to make personal statements of a ten-minute sort, in the worship service about their own spiritual and personal, intellectual and religious life. People who never thought they would ever say anything in public, much less about their personal lives, found themselves with something rich to share and a community of support rather than shame or criticism. Speech gave rise to speech, as worlds give rise to worlds. Spirit gave rise to spirit. They called these talks “testimonials” out of the tried and true black church practice.

The simple rule here is to keep bringing something to the table and to keep talking. It is what Senator George Mitchell says happened in Ireland and didn’t happen in Israel-Palestine. It means agreeing not to leave the table, and it means knowing that there will be difficult conversations. There are, of course, books written about how to hold difficult conversations. There is an institute at Harvard devoted to the task. And of course there are times when the table breaks and people move on and form new groups. When the world is big enough for that to happen that is good. As the world becomes smaller and smaller staying at the table becomes more and more needed. The opposite is often war. With things like the Iran-nuclear Deal, whatever you think of it, we can see that talking might have a future. The Paris climate conference is another example of the potential—locally and globally, of sustainable conversations. Let us not be blinded by the negative news from the global rise of sustainable conversations about war-weapons, about refugees, about climate change.

Now we’ve all been in the failure of sustainable conversations. In my first little church the ladies group had a misunderstanding with me. I didn’t know about it until we all went down to the social room after the Christmas concert to have our annual festive party put on by the ladies society. The hall was empty and dark. They simply secretly refused to do what they had always done and that silence was how they wanted to say what they thought needed to be said. At least that was how the story looked to me. No sustainable conversation.

I served another church in Connecticut that had been traumatized by sexual abuse by the minister. They had little ability for a long time to talk with each other about anything. I will never forget on the evening of the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington. We went dumbly ahead and held our monthly search committee meeting. We never said a word about what had happened a few hours away, even as the nuclear submarines were being mobilized next to us in New London harbor. We, none of us at that time, were people who knew how to talk or share much of anything. And I was supposed to be their leader.

Another church I served had forced its long time minister out and folks did not trust each other. Half would not speak to half. But they solved that when they faced another issue—whether to rent the steeple to a cell phone company. They learned in that conversation that they could talk and problem-solve with each other, again.

Good things like that can happen in difficult churches often when there is an Interim Minister, and you of course have them in the UU, who serves the church for a year or two or even three to help re-knit a torn congregation. Interim Ministers are often just what is needed. They are real ministers, not junior league. It can feel like a new idea, but a good one. In four out of my six UCC churches I was an interim.

Language is the greatest spiritual gift that there is. Silence is the marital mate to language. We use language to know life, to know each other, and to know meaning. It is our most powerful and beautiful ability. We talk to our pets. Even goats. Some of us talk to trees. Some talk even to God.

What we can do to sustain ourselves and each other is to use this gracious and beautiful gift: live language, speech, sustainable conversation. Speech does give rise to speech. Good speech drives out bad speech. Gospel, good news, drives out gossip. Sustainable conversation is our link from all things local to all things global, “all things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small.” Talk is what takes us from natural selection to collective solutions.

Let it be so.