While not abandoning those purposes entirely, I must use the pulpit in somewhat a more utilitarian way this morning. This is the easiest way for me to connect with the largest number of you, to impart some important information, and to begin a conversation that will culminate on Sunday, February 12.

On that date, the congregation will come together to name our passions and our commitments and begin to intentionally shape our future endeavors. I will say more about what will happen on February 12 in a moment.

If you are visiting Theodore Parker church for the first time, or the second or third time, and you are not sure what may be your future relationship to this church, I hope you can take in this discourse with curiosity, understanding that such is part of the work of an intentional community.

For in the free-church tradition, of which this community is an expression, congregations are self-governing and self-directed. Significant change and new undertakings should arise from the people and be deeply owned by the people. They might be inspired or given a voice by a particular individual, and they might be brought to fruition by an individual in leadership, but an endeavor will not have energy unless it has really come organically from the heartfelt desires of the people. And so this morning I hope you will each begin to tune into those desires and get ready to bring them into dialogue with each other.

Let me provide you with some background...

In March of last year, I was at an annual retreat with about 30 other UU minister's from the Mass Bay district. We were doing a "check in," sitting in a circle, sharing where we were at in our lives and how things were going in our parishes.

When it was my turn, I described my sense of where Theodore Parker Church was in its unfolding journey as a community. Some of my colleagues only knew of this church as a place of historical interest for its connection with Parker himself. Some who had been around for a while imagined it still as it was 15 or so years ago. Some recognized that this church was a sleeper, a once-tiny but revitalized community that had really begun to wake up and feel it's strength and potential. All listened with interest. I shared with my colleagues the story, the parable, that so many of us have become familiar with. It is only a story, because reality is infinitely more subtle and cannot be described so easily. But our stories indicate how we understand ourselves. So the story goes something like this:

Once upon a time, there was a tiny congregation in a very old but lovely building. That small and loving band of people was struggling to stay alive as a congregation and keep the lights on and roof patched. It was a very spirited tiny church, and it was able to pull itself back from that precarious brink and reach one milestone of achievement after another until after many years, it had come to a stage, not only of viability, but of real vitality.

And now that congregation had begun to look beyond its own survival toward another horizon of possibility and relationship to the world. An influx of many new people who had not experienced the hard history meant that there was even more forward-looking energy and a lot of questions about what this place is about: "It feels good here, but what is our purpose?"

There was a need for some of the old ways to change, and there was a rising interest in fresh endeavors and clearer purposes. The time had come in which we needed to ask ourselves, ok, now what? What do we want to become? What do we want to be when we grow up? It was time for the next big chapter in the story. Perhaps it was time for a new story, time for the congregation to re-imagine itself.

But, it seemed to me-as I shared with my colleagues-it seemed that we remained suspended in a tentative waiting, a place of in-between. The page was only half turned, the next chapter not clear. We were not quite ready to move forward, not sure about what we should be moving toward. I feared a prolonged period of floundering.

After the check-in was over, I was approached by one of my senior colleagues. She told me that she had helped several congregations through a particular process that enabled them to clarify their goals and commitments and to shape their future. The idea was to bring greater intentionality to the congregation's values by articulating some achievable goals.

This idea piqued my interest. The process she described felt congruent with our situation. It seemed an answer to the Standing Committee's need to hear from the congregation what its desires were for its future. We needed to create a map together, because if you have no idea where you're going, you're probably not going to get there.

We had begun some values clarification work with the "Wall of Democracy" exercise that took place last spring. That helped us to surface our many hopes, dreams, needs and concerns, but as rich and informative as that process was, the outcome was not focused enough to provide clear direction.

So in the weeks that followed our Minister's Retreat I had further conversations with my colleague about this process she had designed, and I began to talk about it with the Standing Committee, the Program Council, Ministerial Relations Committee and others groups. With the encouragement of the Standing Committee, a small team came forward to plan how we would adapt this idea to the TPC community. That team was comprised of Ben Fox, Jeremy Schumm, Michelle Schumm, Dave Newbold, and myself. We developed a more streamlined, but hopefully, just as effective process for our goal setting.

Here is what will happen on February 12:
We will meet for an abbreviated service, during which we will engage our imaginations and evoke our personal visions. We will hear from each other some of the aspirations that members of this community hold for the church--some prepared statements, some spontaneous, but along the lines of what Dave Newbold shared today.

We will break to the Parish Hall briefly, get some snacks (always very important), and then break into small groups of about 8 people each. The groups will be lightly facilitated and the conversation will be recorded. The work of the small groups will be to get everyone's values and commitments on paper, and then to look for common themes and threads, and begin striving for a shorter, more-focused list of shared priorities.

We will then all come together again into a large group in the Parish Hall, each group bearing its short lists-and then, again, we will work to distill from them all one short list of shared priorities.

It could prove to be total chaos, it could be a complete disaster, but let's have fun doing it anyway!

There will be some of us who will think very big, and have ambitious goals for the community. There will be others who simply want to do a better job at what we do already. We need both those voices in the conversation. We need to be called out beyond our safety zone to a greater sense of ourselves, and we also need to stay grounded, so that the intentions we establish are real and achievable.

I once took a personal growth seminar in which, in a moment of passionate conviction, I announced to the entire group of one hundred and fifty people a very idealistic, very ambitious and heartfelt goal for how I intended to change the world.

The presenter challenged me in the following way: he drew a small stick figure on the black board and said, "This is Lilli now". Then he drew a giant stick figure and said, "This is the Lilli that will be able to live that vision. This is the very big person you will need to become to do that work."

I knew he was right, and I sat down feeling very confronted. But his teaching was ambiguous to me, then and now.

I have taken two learnings from that moment, which I continue to carry with me: First, was the challenge to come out beyond my small sense of self. The leader invoked a much more fearless, passionate and determined person that I long to be so that I could make the difference I wanted to make with my life. He presented me with a dare to break open, break out of my safe and familiar identity and become more.

So that was my first lesson, to be forever confronted by that giant stick figure, that greater self with a fiery sense of mission and connection to the world, the self I sometimes glimpse and know I could be.

The second lesson I got from that picture on the black board was along the lines of Parker Palmer's words, which we heard in the reading1. He talks about how he tried to live out the great, inspired ideals that he saw expressed in the lives of his heroes-Martin Luther King, Ghandi, Dorothy Day and other activists.

But he found that the results of his efforts were demoralizing and led him to feel that he was failing. He was trying to live from the outside in, imposing a heroic standard upon himself that never felt real or true to who he actually was.

It's like the story about the Hasidic master, Rabbi Zussye of Hanipol:

When he was very old and his time on earth was coming to an end, his disciples were called to gather around him. One of them asked him if he feared anything in dying, and he said, "I'm frightened of the question I will be asked when I come before the Heavenly Court." "What question?" they asked.

And he said, "If they ask me, 'Zusheh why were you not like Moses?' I shall respond, 'Because you did not grant me the powers you granted Moses'. If they will ask me: 'Zusheh, why were you not like Rabbi Akiva?' I shall respond, 'Because you did not grant me the powers you granted Rabbi Akiva'. But they will not ask me why I was not like Moses, or why I was not like Rabbi Akiva.

They will ask me: 'Zusheh, why were you not like Zusheh? Why did you not fulfill the potential which was Zusheh?'

For this I have no answer. It is for this that I tremble.

Our true calling is to authenticity, to congruity, integrity, to be passionately who we are.

Maybe the larger self on the blackboard wasn't supposed to be "Mahatma Lilli," or "Dr. Lilli Luther King Jr." Maybe it described what I become when I really listen to what my life wants to be about and it is already about-what I become when I fulfill the very particular potential that is mine to fulfill.

As Parker Palmer writes:

There is an insight hidden in the word for vocation itself, which is rooted in the Latin word for "voice." Vocation does not mean a goal that I pursue. It means a calling that I hear. Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am. I must listen for the truths and values at the heart of my identity, and the standards by which I cannot help but live if I am living my own life.

If we take this metaphor and shift from the level of a personal life to the level of a shared, collective life, our shared life as a community, the same learnings might apply.

We will have a picture of a little Theodore Parker Church and a picture of a big Theodore Parker Church. What do these two drawings mean?

They might mean the difference between a very safe, small and familiar congregational identity on the one hand, and a bolder and more passionate congregational identity on the other. What we are now, and what we can and will have to become in order to fulfill a clearer vision and mission for ourselves. It's good to be confronted by that larger potential self.

Or, that large picture might represent an unrealistic, inflated sense of our capability-if we placed goals before ourselves that were not organic or authentic or doable in terms of our available energy.

The small church could be a sort of unfocused, uncommitted TPC, and the large church the TPC that has become intentional about fulfilling its very unique potential.

This work of clarification that we will be doing will ask us to really listen, to listen to our lives, and our shared life, and let them speak.

We must listen to the personal needs, longings and interests that urge us back here into this company again and again. Those needs may not be perfectly met now. But they tell us what we are seeking. Unless we are quite honest about what we ourselves are seeking and needing, we will not be able to give our hearts to goals that call us out.

We will need to listen to each other with patience and interest, listen past the surface differences and try to hear the common tones of desire that vibrate under those differences. I believe if we listen like that we will begin to hear a harmony emerge out of the differences.

We are drawn here in some intuitive way. Folks make a decision to be part of a church community not because it fits an intellectual idea of what they want, but because it feels right at some visceral or intuitive level. Trusting that there is some deeper spirit that draws us together, I believe we will begin to hear what is kindred and harmonious underneath our diverse concerns.

Sufi saint and teacher Hazrat Inayat Khan was a musician, and often used the metaphors of sound and music to describe spiritual ideas.

He said that every individual has a particular tone that sounds in us and vibrates out from us. That tone us our deep nature, our soul qualities. If we are not attuned to that tone, if we don't know it, or if we are confused, then our tone becomes diffused and can be drowned out by every other sound. But if we are attuned to that tone of the true self, it becomes stronger and more resonant and has the capacity to effect the atmosphere around us.

I believe we have a tone, a sound, a voice as a congregation, which is the soul of this community. We need to listen to it, sing it, strengthen it, and enable it to ring out.

We need to let our life speak, because there is a message here that can heal lives, that can empower lives, that can save lives, and that can inspire lives.

May it be so. Closing Hymn: Fire of Commitment
Closing Words (by Rev. Bill Gardener)
We all have two religions:
the religion we talk about
and the religion we live.
It is our work --
and may it be inspired and joyful work --
to make the difference between the two
as small as possible.

The reading was drawn from Parker J. Palmer's book "Let Your Life Speak."

"I was in my early thirties when I began, literally, to wake up to the questions about my vocation. By all appearances, things were going well, but the soul does not put much stock in appearances...I had started to understand that it is indeed possible to live a life other than one's own. Fearful that I was doing just that-but uncertain about the deeper, truer life I sensed hidden inside me, uncertain whether it was real or trustworthy or within reach-I would snap awake in the middle of the night and stare for long hours at the ceiling.

Then I ran across the old Quaker saying, "Let your life speak." I found those words encouraging, and I thought I understood what they meant: "Let the highest truths and values guide you. Live up to those demanding standards in everything you do." Because I had heroes at the time who seemed to be doing exactly that, this exhortation had incarnate meaning for me-it meant living a life like that of Martin Luther King, Jr. or Rosa Parks or Mahatma Gandhi or Dorothy Day, a life of high purpose.

So I lined up the loftiest of ideals I could find and set out to achieve them. The results were rarely admirable, often laughable, and sometimes grotesque. But always they were unreal, a distortion of my true self-as must be the case when one lives from the outside in, not the inside out. I had simply found a noble way to live a life that was not my own, a life spent imitating heroes instead of listening to my heart.

Today, some thirty years later, "Let your life speak" means something else to me, its meaning faithful both to the ambiguities of those words and to the complexity of my own experience: "Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent."

My youthful understanding of "Let you life speak" led me to conjure up the highest values I could imagine and then try to conform my life to them, whether they were mine or not. If that sounds like what we are supposed to do with values, it is because that is what we are too often taught...

Vocation, the way I was seeking it, becomes an act of will, a determination that one's life will go this way or that, whether it wants to or not...But if the self seeks wholeness, as I believe it does, then the willful pursuit of vocation is a kind of violence toward ourselves in the name of vision-vision that, however lofty, is imposed on the self from without rather than grown from within. True self, when violated, will always resist...holding our lives in check until we honor its truth.

Vocation comes not from will. It comes from listening. I must listen to my life and try to understand what it is truly about-quite apart from what I would like it to be about-or my life will not represent anything real in the world, no matter how earnest my intentions.

That insight is hidden in the word for vocation itself, which is rooted in the Latin word for "voice." Vocation does not mean a goal that I pursue. It means a calling that I hear. Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am. I must listen for the truths and values at the heart of my identity, and the standards by which I cannot help but live if I am living my own life."

1 The reading for the worship service was drawn from Let Your Life Speak: Listening For The Voice of Vocation by Parker Palmer. The full text of the reading can be found at the end of the sermon on page 6.