"Leaving Room for Hope"

I'm about to leave this pulpit - and all my work here - for a four month sabbatical. It seems only right to take the time to talk to you about what I will be doing while I'm away. My main project will be to put together a collection of my sermons. I'll also be taking a trip to Morocco. I'm sure I'll have something to say about visiting a Muslim country when I come back. But the main product of my time off will be a book.

As Donald Hall notes, writers work alone, and so do I - at least when I'm sitting at my desk. But I am never really alone when I write sermons. You are always with me. I think of sermons as letters to my congregation, often imagining how you might respond to what I have to say.

I won't be working alone on this book either. Church member Felicity Nussbaum, who also happens to be a professor of English at UCLA, is helping me. Actually, this book was her idea. She offered to edit - and publish - my work. All I have to do is select forty-seven sermons. At first she said forty, but somewhere along the line she raised my quota. So far I have sent her twenty-one.

Last June, our church archivist, Rob Briner, dropped off at my home two large file boxes of my sermons. Between what's in these boxes and what is stored on my hard drive is work that spans twelve years now. I have been going back through the years and reading all of it.

I'm not as prolific or talented a writer as Donald Hall, but I do understand how it feels to read my own work many years later. "Then I remember," Hall writes, "sagging suddenly, heavy as mud, black, and hopeless . . . when I have come later to realize that the words I wrote with such excitement were nothing, nothing at all . . ." My writing makes me cringe. Oh, I might finish off a sermon on a Saturday afternoon, and carried away by my own rhetoric, feel pretty good; even excited. Depending on how it goes over Sunday morning, I might be able to keep that feeling up for a while. But the shelf life of sermons is miserably short. Especially if they're mine. "Did I really say that?" I ask myself, ten years later.

And the titles are of two kinds: the grim, existentialist ones like "Leaving Room for Hope," or to reprise a couple of my greatest hits, "Blessed are the Depressed" and "The Illusion of a Future." They don't promise much of an uplift; I'm sorry. All the rest have either the word "spirit" or "faith" in them, so that you know you are in church.

Try taking this material and organizing it into something coherent. That's Felicity's job. I just churn it out.

You can see why I've never thought about writing a book before. I don't like working with my own words once I've spoken them. I love writing sermons, and I've learned to enjoy preaching them. But I'm a harsh critic. I rarely look back. Mercifully I forget what I've preached by the Monday after.

But you don't. Some of you remember my sermons better than I do. I am touched by that.

Getting started on this project has renewed my awareness of just how interactive sermon-writing is. Yes, I sit alone at my desk for one day each week, undergoing my own personal creative panic, and delivering, by Sunday morning, something I have fashioned just for you. I can't imagine writing for strangers. I want you to know that.

So this project is a collaborative one, and you and Felicity and I are all involved, along with a couple of my demons, and we'll see how far we go in four months. This book is also a once in a lifetime experience for me. It is an honor to work with Felicity, who is an author and distinguished scholar. And it is an opportunity to create something for which there is virtually no market. Except for all of you, of course. We're going to mark up the price, sell the books to church members, and give the money to the building program.

Books of sermons represent the life work of a minister and congregation. They are a glimpse of the relationship and the time we have shared together. In this sense they are specific and precious. I feel some pressure to make this collection my very best, because it is probably all that will remain of my work after I am gone. Well, there will also be the archives, which have been so carefully organized and tended by Rob.

No book can capture a life work, especially work that is as varied and challenging as ministry. Only part of what I do involves writing. I want my book to be a testament to ministry, not just a sample of my writing.

I want to create something that says, "here I stand; this is what I have to give." I want to do this just as we all do. Every one of us has life work. And it means the same thing, whatever that work is.

I keep a tattered index card in the hymn book I use at my desk. Written on the card are words by Ernest Becker, a mid-twentieth century writer most famous for his great work, "The Denial of Death." He wrote, "Who knows what form the forward momentum of life will take or what use it will make of our anguished searching. The most any of us can seem to do is to fashion something - an object or ourselves - and drop it into the confusion, make an offering of it, so to speak, to the life force."

This is our life work: to make an offering of ourselves, to give back to the force that made us. This offering is unlimited in its variety. Whether you are a teacher or parent, an artist, musician, or craftsperson, a scholar or an activist, a healer or caregiver, whether you support or lead, serve or direct, you have something to give back. If you don't find that something on the job, you find it at home, or here, or somewhere only you know - but you find it. As Ernest Becker admits, it may involve some anguished searching. Yet it is what is ultimately powerful and life-affirming about this human condition we share. We can make something of ourselves and give it back.

These things we make do not last long. It's a rare work of art that doesn't get lost in the onward rush of time. But in a way, that is why we feel the need to make something. We need to make a gesture towards transcendence, even if it lasts only a little longer than we do.

While Donald Hall was writing his book "Life Work," he learned that he had a recurrence of cancer. "When I went into the hospital," he writes, "I brought work with me, and in the last two days before I went home I started writing again. When I began to recover," he continues, "still anxious about recurrence, I worked with a manic prolixity - not well - and knew in my heart that I worked against death. What's more, I realized that I had always worked - the real thing, the absorbedness - in defiance of death."

Our life work - the thing we fashion out of ourselves - is not only a gift to the life force. It is the only thing we have to face down death. It is how we overcome oblivion: with the full force of our being we generate our own moment of transcendence while we can.

I decided to call this book of mine "Leaving Room for Hope," because ministry has taught me that despite everything - death and oblivion, failure and disappointment, and the futility of holding on to anything or anyone, there is something we can - and should - do. There is always a way we can take the full force of our being, and "drop it into the confusion," as Becker sees it. And we can trust that this tiny gesture is how we prevail, in the face of all that dooms us; our small but powerful testament to the life force and our token of gratitude for its gift.

Thank you for this gift of time, for your presence in my life work, and for the faith we share.

Resources used to prepare this sermon include "Life Work," by Donald Hall (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993).