The Reverend Dr. Lillian Daniel
September 27, 2009
Rev. Daniel’s 5th Anniversary as Senior Minister of FCCGE
First Congregational Church,
www.firstconge.org
630-469-3096
Scripture: Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-10
1Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the
conviction of things not seen. 2Indeed, by faith our ancestors received approval. 3By faith we
understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is
seen was made from things that are not visible.
8By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to set out for a place
that he was to receive as an inheritance; and he set out, not knowing where he
was going. 9By faith
he stayed for a time in the land he had been promised, as in a foreign land,
living in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same
promise. 10For he looked forward to the city that has
foundations, whose architect and builder is God.
Sermon:
Five years ago my son Calvin, then a rising 6th grader, and our dog Jake, of blessed memory, and I were packed into our minivan driving across the country, a fifteen hour drive from New Haven, Connecticut to Glen Ellyn, Illinois, to be divided between two days.
There, we had a house waiting for us, which I had picked out in an afternoon with Bill Lafontaine, where I compared the reality of twelve houses with the pictures I had seen on the internet, knowing I had one afternoon to pick one of them. I was a realtor’s dream.
Now, a few months later, driving across the country with half the family and one of our vehicles, while my husband, Lou, and seven year old, Abigail, finished up with the movers, I had no idea what I was heading into. My situation back in Connecticut had been a good one, a fabulous church, dear friends, a beautiful part of the country. What was I doing? Had I picked out the right house? Would the family like it? Would they like the town, the schools, the weather? Would Lou like his new job? Would I?
The children’s initial excitement about moving had quickly turned into anger that we had made this decision without asking them. This was a high stakes move, as all family moves are.
I had felt God’s call, but during the long drive I began to wonder, just like everybody wonders when set out for a strange and foreign land, everyone including the folks in the Bible, like Abraham, who was sent by God to a new place.
By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to set out for a place, not knowing where he was going. By faith he stayed for a time in the land he had been promised, as in a foreign land, living in tents, for he looked forward to the city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God
And that was my hope, that I was heading out to a foreign land where the architect and builder was God.
But that’s pretty grandiose for someone who was actually just driving a dog and a son in a minivan through the Midwest.
On that long drive, I remembered a few months before that when we had visited Glen Ellyn for my candidating sermon, when the congregation voted to call me as Senior Minister, it first struck me that while the people looked the same, sounded the same, and at a surface level, acted the same, that in subtle ways, the Midwest really was different.
For one thing, over that weekend, everyone asked us the same question about our move to Glen Ellyn. “Oh, do you have family in the Midwest?” “No,” I said. “Was I supposed to? Can’t anybody come to Chicago?” I’ve never lived near my family my whole life, but apparently out here people did that.
There were other clues that things would be different: When it came to food, there were larger portion sizes. And smaller portions when it came to bitterness, naval gazing, irony and sarcasm. I would miss that. More cheese. And the women seemed taller here, probably as a result of the cheese. Less black clothing, in fact very little of it, when pretty much everything I owned was black. And people were friendlier than I was used to in New England. That weekend included many social events and parties. You know, churches in New England really don’t party. It’s that whole Puritan thing.
As I thought about it on the drive, I realized that I needed to approach this with the skills I learned in my childhood when my family moved me from one country to another every couple of years. I needed to pay attention to the customs, to observe and not to assume I understood the culture before I did. I needed to step out in faith like Abraham and so many generations before me.
Predictably, if you know that route from the east coast, suddenly I hit my first cornfield – one and then another. This was strange terrain for me. An east coast urbanite, I had never really seen corn grow. I thought they made it in the back room at Trader Joe’s, but here it was. I was struck by how impressive these cornfields were. Why do people rag on Indiana? I thought. This is really beautiful.
Then, after hours and hours of driving through more and more these cornfields, I thought, “Oh, this is really awful. What have I done?” The cornfields were freaking me out, broken up only by fast-food restaurants and giant billboards that featured inspiring religious messages like the one in Indiana that said in huge capital letters, “HELL IS REAL.” No kidding. Cornfields, fundamentalist Christianity and fast-food. I’m in it.
I’m out here with the farmers and I hate the outdoors. I’m heading out to a land where everyone eats cheese, and I’m lactose intolerant. The highways out here are some kind of gigantic cornfield maze from which there is no escape and, here I almost started to cry when it hit me… “I will never eat Thai food again.”
While Calvin quietly watched DVDs, and the dog slept, I was panicking, remembering my only artistic and cultural reference for this landscape, a 1984 horror movie entitled, “Children of the Corn.” In it, a young couple (Linda Hamilton and Peter Horton) find themselves stranded in a rural Midwestern town, where they fall into the sinister hands of a mysterious religious sect of children who murder all of the town’s adults in bloody sacrifices to their cornfield-dwelling deity (known only as “He Who Walks Behind the Rows”). And guess what plans these corn-fed children had for the out-of-towners?
As night fell, the corn swayed under dark shadows, and “He Who Walks Behind the Rows” was starting to speak directly to me. But thankfully, after eleven hours of driving, we were just a few minutes away from the motel that we had carefully picked out on the internet, for the midpoint of our journey.
There was no brand to the motel, no familiar chain, other than this: an enormous Playboy Bunny sign that you could see from the highway. As we pulled up and saw this was indeed where we were booked, I quickly realized that what on the internet had been listed as the hotel’s restaurant was actually a stripper bar. And there was one more piece of familiar branding: a giant, neon Confederate flag, with a welcome sign underneath.
I pulled a three-sixty out of there, the minivan squealing as dust flew, and called my husband on the cell phone and said, “What exactly made us select this particular hotel over all the others?” “Oh that’s easy,” he said. “They’re the only ones who take dogs. So how is it?” “Can you get on the computer and try for something further out?”
By this time, little Calvin had come out of his DVD coma and was very upset to see that we were driving away. “Why are you driving away from our hotel? I’m so sick of being in this car.” Even the dog was on Calvin’s side, whining to get out. How could I explain this strange motel situation to an eleven-year-old? I needed to use utmost sensitivity to make it clear that we were definitely not staying there, but without causing him to be concerned in any way about where we were. “Honey, mama doesn’t like this hotel. I think we can do better.” “No,” he said. “This one’s fine. You have to stop here.” I was striving for non-anxious parenting and said calmly, “We are not stopping here. I think we can do better.” “But why?”
Then, eleven hours of highway driving stress and “Children-of-the-Corn” fantasies kicked in. “Why? I’ll tell you why. Because we’ve landed in the world’s creepiest town at a hotel that caters to racists who can’t meet women in the normal way. Your room would be next to someone about to get busted by the vice squad except that they don’t have that sort of thing out here, because we left police and civilization behind seven hours ago, But no, I am not willing to eat dinner at a bar with a Confederate flag, nor am I willing to take my eleven-year-old son to a strip bar, and nor am I willing to sleep in a hotel full of prostitutes and their drunken racist customers. I think we can do better.” To which he replied, “Ma, you are so high-maintenance.”
The writer of the letter of Hebrews got it right when he said, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” And not surprisingly, it’s one of my favorite verses in scripture, and it kept me company on that long cross-country drive, as it has kept thousands of people of faith company when they have had to take a new and somewhat scary path. They remember Abraham, who was sent out by God, not knowing where he was going. By faith he went to live in the land of promise, as in a foreign land.
Today, I am embarrassed at the thoughts that were running through my head on that drive, but I reveal them to you to say that I really had no idea where I was going. I had no reference point for this part of the world, but clearly I had plenty of stereotypes, most of which would turn out to be inaccurate.
But what I also had coming out here was faith and hope. Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.
I imagine that five years ago, you, as the members of the church, were on a similar journey in a way. You had to have faith that God had indeed called me and worked through the Search Committee, but you also had to trust in things hoped for, but as yet unseen. It is a delicate relationship, between Senior Minister and church, the members, the staff, the traditions, the history, the personalities. And yet, the local church is bold enough in our Congregationalist tradition to appoint a committee of trusted folk to find a minister, and then the congregation meets that minster, and votes, all along trusting in things hoped for but not yet seen.
When I accepted this call, I felt like I had hit the jackpot. A few years before that, Lou and I had explored some options out this way, and I had seen the lay of the ecclesiastical landscape at that time, but then we decided not to move. So two years later, when I wasn’t really looking, but was approached by the Search Committee here, I surprised myself by how open I was to this call, and we started a many-months-long conversation that ended with me driving through cornfields. I was called here. And I felt like I had hit the jackpot.
So I was surprised when I arrived, and after people found out I did not have family in the Midwest, there next question was, “Well, why did you come?” I wondered if this was a case of low self-esteem in the congregation, which has done through some really serious conflict, and felt sort of marked by that. But I soon found out this was not just a case of self-perception. When I told people I would meet in town where I was the pastor, they’d say, “Oh that’s the church with all the troubles.” I thought, “No, northern Ireland is the place with all the troubles. This is just a church.” But it continued, and then I realized that everyone I talked to seemed to know someone who used to be a member of this church. Note the tense, “used to be.”
Then, I started meeting actual people who used to be members here, and I really got an earful. People described congregational meetings where people yelled at one another, and a culture of distrust and suspicion, battles around worship style, divisions around fiscal policy and a long history of conflicts between senior ministers and the congregation. The church was also still collecting on a second capital campaign on a building that had already been built, and two million dollars in debt, with serious division of opinion about how to deal with that.
And they’d always ask me the same questions, some of you in fact did. “So, do you have any family in the Chicago area?” And then they’d ask, “So why’d you come?”
I went to lunch with our UCC Conference Minister, looking for a little guidance, but I knew it wasn’t going to go as I hoped when she began the lunch by saying, “So do you have family in the Midwest?”
She told me about the church’s conflicts, pointing out that we had not given one dollar to the denomination for mission and outreach, not one dollar the year before. “You could have gone anywhere,” she said. “Why’d you go to Glen Ellyn? That church is a tough nut.”
Well, the world is admirably arranged then, because I’m a pretty tough nut, too. So I looked her in eye, already feeling protective of you and angry at her and I said, “You know what, I feel like I hit the jackpot.” Because I did.
I knew there was conflict in the church. I wasn’t naïve. In fact, I think part of the reason the Search Committee wanted me to come was that I had experience in my last two churches of walking into high-conflict situations. My last church had fired or driven out their last two ministers, and my first ministry was replacing a pastor accused of, and later found guilty of, child molestation. But you know what – that is such a small piece of what and who those wonderful congregations were and are. For faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the trust in things unseen.
In five years of ministry together, I believe there are many things we can be proud of. We can point to numbers, to new members who have joined, to a remarkable increase in giving, from zero dollars to our denomination to a more appropriate number of fifty-thousand, created long-overdue staff positions, became a teaching church for seminarians and our own kids, moved an annual budget long stuck in the 600’s to more reasonable one million, even in economic hard times, and that in the middle of all that, we bore the expense for half-a-million dollars for tuckpointing and new roof. Those are not things that I accomplished, because trust me, I don’t have that much money. Those are all things that we accomplished together, to get our church into a healthy place, through generosity, hard work and faith, the assurance of things hoped for, the faith in things unseen.
When I think back over the last five years, I think about the way you used to talk about your church and the way you talk about it now. I remember my biggest task in my first year was to try to get you to see yourselves the way I saw you.
You saw a history of conflict, some accompanying membership loss, and a lot of worries about money.
I saw an amazing force of volunteers like nothing I had ever experienced in ministry. I saw incredible strong lay leadership, self-starting ministry teams and yes, strong-willed and opinionated people, but people who when asked to step up and do ministry were quite unstoppable – in a good way. I saw a church that had worked hard during the interim time between, lead by the best interim minister I know, to prepare for the future.
I saw a congregation that had a small of group of leaders who worried about money, and carried the weight of the world on their shoulders; and I saw a much larger group who had no clue about any of that. So, while you saw financial crisis, I saw tremendous opportunity. I could tell how much that larger group loved their church, and when we shared openly the financial challenges, and the goals, I knew that group would step up, and they did.
Little by little, you started talking about your church differently. You started seeing yourselves as I saw you, perhaps not exactly as we were, but as we hoped we could be, with faith in things unseen, trusting more in our hopes than in our disappointments, more in our dreams than in our fears.
We opened up some key spiritual practices to help us with that, and the first was testimony. In my first year here, I was writing a book about that subject, and so that was no surprise, you knew that was coming. But what surprised even me was the way in which testimony was exactly the spiritual practice we needed here. A church with low self-esteem got the chance to hear the members talk about their faith and what the church meant to them. And you know what, I can say it a thousand times, but when you take the risk of standing up on Sunday morning and saying it to each other, that’s a powerful force for the Holy Spirit that no demons of past history can vanquish.
Gradually the culture started to shift from a church about which people would ask, “Why did you come?” to a church culture in which the members asked, “Would you like to come?” and even “Why wouldn’t you come?”
After we took care of some internal housekeeping, we were able to want to show our house off to other people. Ministry teams sprung up all focused in one way or another on welcoming the newcomer, and then of welcoming the stranger. As people joined, I believe the spirit led us to a harder question. What about the people who are not here? What about the people who think there is no place for them in the church? What about the people who have been hurt by churches, and don’t know that we exist? And what about our call to fight for justice for those who others might exclude?
Having cleaned house, and having opened the house, we were ready to take on the world. Our open and affirming process, around welcoming people with a special focus on issues of human sexuality seemed to be on a parallel track with an increased commitment to housing the homeless year-round. But was all that easy? Both those efforts were criticized by folks on the outside of our church. Do you remember the incredibly nasty campaign against the PADS program that brought incivility to new lows?
We were also criticized for our open and affirming process in a conservative Christian culture in which ours is the minority point of view. While most teenagers can barely articulate why they go to youth group, our teenagers were articulately arguing a theology of progressive Christianity. While other churches grow with a shallow message of a prosperity gospel, we grew by asking people to study and ponder the thorniest scripture passages with the least easy answers. In a culture in which churches can seem like just another club to which the popular people belong, we remained unflinching in our welcome of the homeless. Because even in the midst of that nastiness and public attacks, we stood firm, and had faith in things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen. Faith that the world can be a fair and just place, starting with this church. Faith, that the spiritually homeless can find a soft bed upon which to lay their head. Faith, that you can have a church where you don’t have to leave your brain out on the sidewalk. Faith, that a congregation of extremely independent-minded people can still be the loving, caring, body of Christ to one another. Faith, that when you come to this church, you have come, like Abraham, to a place where indeed the architect and builder is God. Not because of what we are, but because of what, in faith, we hope to be.
Let me end today by tying up a few loose ends. First, today, when I tell people which church I serve, people are impressed. They say, “Wow, that’s an amazing church. You have incredible people there.” And we do.
Secondly, nobody refers to us any more as the place with the troubles. Instead, we are now a church that other churches come to for advice, to copy models and for leadership.
Even people who disagree with us, or are angry at us, speak about us with respect, as a force to be reckoned with.
Most importantly, is the warmth people feel when they worship here. There is a sweet and loving spirit in this place.
Lastly, nobody in the United Church of Christ ever asks me why I came to this church. It’s a ridiculous question. You know why? Because now they think I hit the jackpot.
To which I say, Amen.