God is Love; the Bible Tells Me So

Parting words from Rev. Robin Bartlett

Dear friends,

This is my last day in the office, and my last day as your Interim Director of Religious Education. You are an awesome church, and I love you all so much, Sherbornians. What an energetic, loving, spirit filled church you are, and how lucky to have each other. I have been blessed to know you and learn from you.

A lot of you have been confused about where I am going next year. Rumors have flown around that I am leaving the UUA for the “Christian Church.” No. I’m just going to serve one of our UU churches that remains Christian in practice. As a federated and theologically diverse congregation that houses UUs, Baptists, Quakers, Congregationalists, Lutherans, Christian Buddhists, atheists, agnostics, and everything in between, I will be experiencing the dream that Unitarian Universalism has for the world: unity in diversity. In this church, Christian symbols are the shared symbol-system, but there are few shared beliefs. And friends, it is going to be the hardest thing, because when we are at our best, our work is hard work. I hope you will come to visit this summer! I hear Nathan’s chartering a bus.

As my parting words to you all, I will make a small attempt to explain why I think UU Christianity is important to our tradition, and why I commit my ministry to it, because I think it is important for our shared faith development and for our children. I think it’s important for all UUs to consider and talk about and argue over and wrestle with and get mad at me about and then come back to it later when the anger turns to curiosity again. I share with you a poem.

Stephen Dunne’s “At the Smithville Methodist Church”
It was supposed to be Arts & Crafts for a week,
but when she came home
with the “Jesus Saves” button, we knew what art
was up, what ancient craft.
She liked her little friends. She liked the songs
they sang when they weren’t
twisting and folding paper into dolls.
What could be so bad?

Jesus had been a good man, and putting faith
in good men was what
we had to do to stay this side of cynicism,
that other sadness.

O.K., we said. One week. But when she came home
singing “Jesus loves me,
the Bible tells me so,” it was time to talk.
Could we say Jesus

doesn’t love you? Could I tell her the Bible
is a great book certain people use
to make you feel bad? We sent her back
without a word.

It had been so long since we believed, so long
since we needed Jesus
as our nemesis and friend, that we thought he was
sufficiently dead

that our children would think of him like Lincoln
or Thomas Jefferson.
Soon it became clear to us: you can’t teach disbelief
to a child,

only wonderful stories, and we hadn’t a story
nearly as good.
On parent’s night there were the Arts & Crafts
all spread out

like appetizers. Then we took our seats in the church
and the children sang a song about the Ark,
and Hallelujah
and one in which they had to jump up and down for Jesus.
I can’t remember ever feeling so uncertain
about what’s comic, what’s serious.

Evolution is magical but devoid of heroes.
You can’t say to your child
“Evolution loves you.” The story stinks
of extinction and nothing

exciting happens for centuries. I didn’t have
a wonderful story for my child
and she was beaming. All the way home in the car
she sang the songs,

occasionally standing up for Jesus.
There was nothing to do
but drive, ride it out, sing along
in silence.

I love this poem. As someone who has long worked as a Director of Religious Education in our UU churches, as a mom who knows this intimately and is consistently amazed by it …I love this line:

Soon it became clear to us: you can’t teach disbelief
to a child,

only wonderful stories, and we hadn’t a story
nearly as good.

Friends, this is true. You can’t teach disbelief to a child, only wonderful stories. And it is hard to teach children that “evolution loves you.” It’s our job to keep telling our wonderful stories; human stories. Stories about love and death and hurt and war and peace and cooperation and destruction.

As a people of faith, whether we are parents are not, our job is to pass down our religious story to the next generation. We can’t make up a religion from whole cloth, because human beings don’t make anything up from whole cloth. We stand on the shoulders of giants. And we should never be so arrogant as to assume that we have the whole business of being human figured out more than our ancestors.

We need to know our texts if we are to ground ourselves in a tradition; in a reason for building the world we dream about; in a reason to come together; in a reason to forgive and love our bodies and our neighbors and our God or gods or humanity or our world.

And the Bible is one of our most important texts. Wonderful stories, all, loaded with all kinds of lessons and theology and troubling stuff, and things to wrestle with. It’s hard to teach adults that evolution loves you, too. But a text about being taken back in and loved after having squandered all of your father’s riches? Or a text about loving each member of the human body as if you needed every part? Or a text about justice rolling down like waters and peace like an ever-flowing stream? We need texts like this. We need texts like these now: women being shot down on their sorority house lawns. We need texts like these now: inspiration to love the hell out of this world. We need text like these now: reminders that we are worthy and deserve dignity.

Wonderful stories, all, and we haven’t a story nearly as good.

And friends, like it or not, these stories are ours. We come from the Judeo Christian tradition; a product of the radical Protestant reformation—the reformation that claimed that regular lay people could read and interpret these texts on our own. That we didn’t need priests to have a relationship directly to these wonderful stories, or to God. This is our radical lineage. So please: let’s stop throwing our texts out as irrelevant—giving up our right to them, or distancing ourselves from our responsibility for them—letting fundamentalists have the Bible as if it was ever meant to be interpreted literally and used as a weapon. Let’s reclaim our texts for the sake of our children, at the very least.

Because we need something worthy and worthwhile to teach to our children, and it needs to contain wonder, and it needs to have something to do with love.

Of course we know that there are as many problematic, violent, misogynistic, scary texts in the Jewish and Christian Bibles as there are ones about love. And that’s what gives this book of our heritage…this giant we stand on…texture and challenge and richness. This is what makes it dangerous to ignore or throw out or refuse to interpret critically. It is a grand story, after all, of what it means to be human. And being human isn’t all about being born in original blessing and tiptoeing through tulips and marveling at sunsets and nature. Being human has more sorrow and suffering and betrayal and death and joy than that.

And because the Bible can be used as a weapon, we need a theology with which to interpret it. We can’t throw our theology out, either.

A parishioner at a congregation that I pastored for the last two summers recently asked me, “how do I explain the God I believe in to my 9 year old? The god I believe in (if I believe in God at all) is not a person, but a principle. Not a creator, but the ground of being. How do I make that God developmentally appropriate?”

My answer was: you can’t. When our children are adults, they will be more sophisticated and nuanced and intelligent about God. They will also lose so much magic and intuitive knowledge about God. They’ll likely lose God a few times; maybe for good. They will grieve the loss of God, like some of us have, too. And it may hurt.

But we—we as a church and a faith tradition–have a responsibility to say SOMETHING about God because someone else—on the playground, at a friend’s house, at a summer camp–will fill the vacuum we’ve left if we say nothing at all. I choose, therefore, to tell my young children that God loves them—that God loves all people. Everyone’s in and no one is out. Because I need to counter another message about God, which is that God picks and chooses. That some souls—not all souls—are saved.

And we need to teach our children that we stand for SOMETHING as if there is something at stake, because there is.  People are being shot because they are women. People are being killed because they believe the “wrong” religion. Our queer neighbors cannot get married in some churches and in most states. Something big is at stake here. Ceding the Bible and God to people who would use both as a weapon is irresponsible. GOD IS LOVE. God is too big to fit in any one religion. Let’s break the myth that Unitarian Universalists can “believe whatever they want.” That is a betrayal of our rich tradition, leaves our children rudderless, and makes our world more dangerous.

I love you all, and feel so fortunate to have been with you to witness these past two years of our spiritual journey together.

Be bold. You are pre-forgiven for every mistake you make on the path into the heart of God.

With great love and great respect,

Robin

[Shameless plug: This Tshirt is designed by Rev. Erik Martinez Resly, and will be on sale at the UU Christian Fellowship booth at GA 2014. COME ON BY!]

Why I Still go to Church

by Robin Bartlett

I love this blog post by Sarah Bessey so much, and I commend it to you:

http://sarahbessey.com/think-community-worth-intention-still-go-church/

There are so many things to think and talk and do about and love in this post, aren’t there?

For me, this post says a lot about why we should worship with our kids. I got chills when Sarah wrote: “I want the tinies to know what my voice sounds like when I sing Amazing Grace.” This is why I want my kids in worship, sitting next to me, the whole time. I’ll be honest. I love when the small humans get sung out to “Go Now in Peace” and leave to go to some class somewhere. That’s my peace time. I don’t want them to leave because I want them to be properly religiously educated, but because I get to be still. That’s my time to listen to the big, long sermon that they squirm through without me having to shovel pipe cleaners in my nose to entertain them.

But when I’m really being my best parent self, my best church self, my best good self, the truth is, I want them to stay. I want my tinies to sit with me, snuggled up in the peace of God. I want them to hear what my voice sounds like when I sing Amazing Grace. I want them to hear what my voice sounds like when I choke out the covenant, or the responsive reading. I want them to see that I sometimes shake when I take communion for the privilege it is to come to that open, welcoming welcome table; the gratitude I feel to be fed. I want them to see the other members of our beloved community shaking, too. I want my kids to see the adults around them cry, and I want them to see these people pray. I want them to be bored because someone else in the room needs a good, long message of hope. I want my kids to know what our tradition is and what it means in the form of worship. I want them to be able to return to that worship years from now when they feel like they are failing or falling, or when they feel like love maybe doesn’t conquer death after all. Because they are going to feel that a lot. I want them to have church because I fear the day that they know real suffering. And I’m glad that church is here for when they realize that suffering is just as present for all of us as joy is.

And the other part that stands out to me in Sarah’s blog post is this: “because my greatest wounds come from the Church, so does my greatest healing.” YES. YES. Friends, can I get an amen?

I keep choosing this small family for love and hope and joy. May you do that, too.

Don’t Go To Church for Your Children

by Robin Bartlett

Many of you know that I go to church in the late afternoons in my neighborhood, and that I bring my children there with me. It’s too long a day for them here in Sherborn, so I don’t bring them here much. I’m here from 8:30 am-2:00 pm on Sundays, and I can’t mom and work at the same time. I’ve never been good at that. (Yes, I just made the word “mom” into a verb).

The church I go to is UCC. Theologically, it is both Unitarian and Universalist, in my humble understandings of those two theologies. These are two theologies that have taught me everything I know. They rest in my bones and in my heart as a life-long UU. That’s one reason why I love my UCC church, because it reflects the best of my own faith tradition and allows me to worship from that deep well.

And folks have asked me this before: “aren’t you worried that the church you are bringing your children to isn’t UU, so you aren’t, in effect, raising your children UU? Isn’t that a problem for a UU minister?” This is a good question. The question has many answers, but the first answer is this: I don’t go to church for my children. I go to church for me. Basically, as long as my kids are safe and there is sometimes childcare for the little ones, and there aren’t any sharp objects like rusty nails jutting out of the floor, and they are made to feel loved and known, that’s all I care about. I picked my church for entirely selfish reasons. 1) Because I need to worship on Sundays, and I can’t when I’m running an RE program. 2) Because this particular church gives me what I need from church: which is to say a reminder that I am not alone, that grace is real, that I am loved just as I am and that I am expected to repay the world with my love because I have been offered that grace. I am sure my kids get the same message, but they are completely secondary in my choice of churches.

And, as a long-time religious educator, the following is a conversation I am very accustomed to. Does it sound familiar to you?

Robin: So, Jane, why did you start coming to this church? What led you here?
Jane: I came to this church originally because my children started asking me questions about God;
or
I came to this church because my child’s grandmother died, and she started to ask me about heaven, and I didn’t know what to say because I don’t believe in heaven;
or
I came to this church because I wanted my children to have a good understanding of Unitarian Universalist principles and the world’s religions in a high quality, well-run religious education program with lots of other kids in it.
or
I came to this church because I want my kid to have a religious education without being indoctrinated into a specific faith.
And so on, in different variations.

“I started going to this church because it is good for my children.” I think that’s one reason why churches like ours’ stay in business, or at least one important way we attract newcomers. And I’m not knocking it, because as parents we are accustomed to considering our children first.

A lot of what we do with our time is “for the children.” We enroll our children in private music lessons and drive them there every Wednesday after school, ensuring that we won’t be able to eat dinner at the appointed hour. We stand in the freezing cold on the soccer field clutching our coffee and yelling enthusiastically for our not- particularly-sporty 8 year old. We bring our children to the doctor to get shots, to school to gain knowledge, to our parents’ houses so that they might know and love their extended family. We even go to the germ factory that is Chuck E. Cheese to kindergarten birthday parties on the weekends, and God knows that’s not good for us. These things are all “good for our children”, and so we do them regardless of whether we’d rather be doing something else.

Therefore, it makes sense that we go to church simply because it will be good for our children, too. We want our children, after all, to know themselves beloved, to know themselves as part of a community in which their doubts will be cherished, their questions will be encouraged, their mind will be broadened, their spiritual explorations will be nurtured, and their friendships will be predicated on shared principles and a deep sense of purpose. Church is good for them, and so we take them with dogged determination, regardless of whether we’d rather be home reading the Sunday paper. I admire that determination.

But I’m going to say something I think is important. I don’t want you to come to church if you are only coming for your children. That’s a fine reason to come in the first place, to get in the door, but I don’t want it to be the reason you stay. Go to church for you. Go to church because of your own needs: for community, for learning, for solidarity, for a good word, for love, for hope, for comfort, even for salvation. Go to church because you can’t imagine not going. Go to church because your church claims you and demands of you. Go to church because you cry in the worship service at least once a month. Go to church because you look forward to seeing the people. Go to church because your church forces you to put your money where your mouth is–to use your financial resources to make a statement about what has worth. Go to church because you are known here. Go to church because you want to be known. Go to church because you pray for this same imperfect, rag-tag group of people all week until you meet again. Go to church because you need to in order to get through your week. Go to church because if you miss a week, you feel like something was really missing in your life. Go to church because your church community helps you to go deeper; to risk transformation; to yank you further down a path–to ultimate reality, to truth, to God–kicking and screaming. Go to church because it is a statement to yourself and your children about what has value and meaning. Go to church to find your purpose and live it. Give yourself the gift of church.

If church is not a gift for you, it won’t be a gift for your children. You know that old trope that we borrow from plane instructions we hear read by flight attendants–that you have to apply your own oxygen mask first before you apply your child’s, right? Well, you are your child’s religious educator and oxygen mask. Not me. Not our UUA’s religious education curricula. Not our volunteer teachers. Not even our minister. You. That’s a big responsibility, and I know you don’t feel up to the task because none of us do. But if we aren’t getting our spiritual needs met–our religious yearnings satiated; our deepest cries in the night soothed; our need to serve and be served; our God-sized hole occasionally filled, emptied and then filled up again– then we are never going to be up to the task of helping our children do the same.

Don’t go to church for your children; go to church for you.

You deserve it. Your children deserve it. And this brutal and beautiful world needs you to.

Charge to the Minister by the Children

by Rev. Robin Bartlett

The children wrote this charge for the Reverend Nathan Detering on the occasion of the ten year anniversary of his installation at the UU Area Church at First Parish in Sherborn, MA. I think all of my colleagues should read it, because it is a charge to all of us. I think all congregations should read it, because it is likewise a charge to congregations.

Children and youth of the congregation, please stand up. Please stand proud. These are the children and youth of this church. Nathan and congregation: these are all of our children. We share the task of caring for them with one another, don’t we? Ten years ago, they were entrusted into Nathan’s, and the congregation’s shared spiritual care. This is a big responsibility, to tend to the spiritual lives of children and youth. Helping these children grow spiritually demands that all of us grow spiritually, am I right, Nathan and congregation? Children and youth, I want you to raise your hand if Nathan is the only minister you have ever had. I want you to keep your hands raised if this is the only church you have ever had. You may sit down.

I asked the children to charge you, Nathan. Kids and adults, if you don’t know what a “charge” is, it’s a fancy church word that means you get to tell Nathan what to do. This is the only charge that you will hear today, in fact. I think that’s appropriate, since it probably matters most what our children see and know. And as we look ahead to the next ten years, we stand poised on the brink of expanding our children and youth ministry here at First Parish, making room in your shared ministry with the congregation–for a new minister dedicated to these kids. We are able to explore this new frontier because of the ministry you have built here with the congregation in the past ten years, Nathan. So this is what the children of all ages of this congregation have to say to you, and about you.

About “Mr. Nathan”, the kids had this to say:

Mr. Nathan is…
caring,
nice,
a friend,
good,
“I love you.”
“Nathan is like Merry Christmas.”
“When I picture God, I picture Nathan.” (I’m definitely adding a class on “idolatry” to the RE rotation in the coming weeks).
He’s the minister of our church and a good one at that.
He loves to rejoice.
He loves to come to our church; it’s like his second home. He loves church.

The children are grateful for your ministry; for who you are, and who you are to them. So here is your charge from the children:

The kids think that in the next ten years, you should do more stuff with them; and interact with them more. Come downstairs and play with us, they say. We have lots of cool art activities, and we have fun. We think you should reference things we understand in the sermons more, because we love when you do that, and we listen to your sermons. We would also charge you to use more technology stuff. We think you should take care of yourself: get more sleep, and make schedules. In particular, we charge you to stop rooting for the St. Louis Cardinals.

Most of the children who wrote this charge with me know you as the only minister they have ever had. You have been here for ten years, and for almost all of them, that’s a lifetime. They know what a good minister looks like because they’ve been watching you. Here’s what the children think are the qualities of a good minister—what a minister is–based on what they’ve learned from you, and they want you to continue to embody these qualities for them:

A good minister is generous and kind.
A good minister is funny.
A good minister knows what they’re talking about and believes it.
A good minister doesn’t have a monotonous voice (that’s from your son).
A good minister has a good heart.

This is what the kids know a good minister does, and they want you to continue to do these things well, along with the congregation:

A good minister teaches the people.
A good minister makes sure everyone is safe.
A good minister is a good neighbor just like in the story of the Good Samaritan.
A good minister says goodbye to people before they die.
A good minister helps people with their problems.
A good minister helps people.
A good minister helps people create peace.
A good minister breathes, just like all people.
A good minister uses big words.
A good minister preaches to the people.
A good minister guides people like the northern star.
A good minister teaches life lessons and laughs and always forgives.

So, Nathan: may you continue to guide us like the northern star, helping us and forgiving us while you guide. May you continue to minister, rejoicing, like “Merry Christmas.” May you continue to teach us, and preach to us about things we understand and don’t yet understand, and may you continue to keep us safe. May you continue to know what you are talking about, and more importantly, may you always believe it. May you continue to be a good neighbor. May you continue to take care of yourself, breathe, and laugh. Nathan and congregation, you have been charged by the children.

Amen.