IF I HAD ONLY ONE SERMON TO PREACH
A Sermon by Kenneth W. Phifer
Delivered at First UU Congregation of Ann Arbor
July 31, 2005


“What if I had only one sermon to preach” is a question working preachers 
often think about. It is a way of focusing our minds on what really matters. If 
we had only one sermon to preach, we would want every word to be a pearl 
of wisdom, a gem of moral insight and inspiration, and a comfort to those 
suffering from the travails of life on that day. 

Of course, today I really do have only one sermon to preach, that is, only 
one sermon to preach as your senior minister before retiring. 

For some time now, knowing this day was coming, I have been collecting 
various tidbits about valedictory sermons. Before offering some of that 
homiletical potpourri to you, let me share with you a comment about 
preaching made by Anthony Trollope in his novel BARCHESTER 
TOWERS. 

“There is,” Trollope wrote, “perhaps, no greater hardship on mankind in 
civilized and free countries than the necessity of listening to sermons. No 
one but a preaching clergyman has, in these realms, the power of compelling 
an audience to sit silent, and be tormented.”

I, of course, have no power to compel you to do anything, but I shall strive 
not to torment you. If I fail in this, I do hope that you will choose to be 
silent. I also hope that you will stay, as on one memorable Sunday several 
years ago well over a dozen people chose not to. They left in the middle of 
the sermon.

As part of a fund-raising campaign, I had included in my remarks some 
thoughts about the importance of money and of our being generous in our 
pledges to the congregation. As I drew near the close of these pecuniary 
observations, people from different places in the sanctuary began to stand up 
and walk out.

I assumed that talk of money was too uncomfortable for these people. Still, 
more than a dozen people removing themselves seemed a bit excessive. I 
promised myself a thorough review of what I had said and a serious 
discussion with the board about whether I should ever talk about money 
again.

It was only at the coffee hour that one of the people who had left apologized 
to me for her departure, explaining that her child’s religious education class 
was having a special presentation and the teachers had asked that the parents 
come for that part of the class! They all did!

As regards wisdom about last sermons, one preacher of my acquaintance 
preached his last sermon, though the congregation did not know it was his 
last, announced at the close of the sermon that he was retiring effective 
immediately, walked out of the sanctuary, and never returned.

As you know, I chose a somewhat longer time line of giving notice of my 
retirement.

Another colleague, Tom Goldsmith, a good many years away from 
retirement, observed in one of his newsletter columns how impressed he was 
with the retirement ritual of Rulon Gardner, an Olympic medallist in 
Graeco-Roman wrestling. When Gardner finished his last match in the 
Olympics, he removed his shoes and left them in the center of the mat. 

Goldsmith suggests preachers could remove their shoes and leave them in 
the pulpit. For me, it might be more appropriate to leave my socks or my tie 
behind!

David Bumbaugh, retiring from the Summit, New Jersey UU congregation, 
wrote about a preacher’s last sermon that “we sometimes imagine ourselves 
delivering the definitive sermon—an apostolic summing up of all our 
passions and convictions in one twenty minute masterpiece. But confronted 
with the necessity of offering that final sermon, I find that what I have to say 
is not the masterpiece I had hoped for. Indeed, it’s rather ordinary and 
unimaginative.”

So it is with me. I wanted a sermon full of phrases that would echo down the 
years in your minds and hearts. What I have actually done is nothing 
extraordinary. It really is just more of the same that I have been doing for 25 
years, trying with at best limited success to find words to express deep 
truths, ethical wisdom, spiritual understanding, practical helpfulness. Week 
after week, not really succeeding, I’ve had to try again.

The work of the preacher, my work, reminds me of a story told by Saul 
Bellow of a young opera singer making her debut at La Scala. After a 
particularly beautiful but difficult aria, the applause was thunderous and 
there were cries of encore, do it again. After the fourth such encore, worn 
out from the challenging music sung again and yet again, she asked her 
audience how many more times she must sing. A voice cried out, “Until you 
get it right!”

There’s a sense in which every preacher, certainly this one, really only has 
one sermon. Each week we ring the changes on it, but it’s the same 
fundamental message. Each week, we hope, I hope, we’ll get it right.

This is my last chance to get it right. I suspect I will not succeed any more 
than I have in the past. 

At least in part, that is a reflection of the profound and noble themes with 
which we as a congregation and we UU’s as a movement attempt to deal. 
When we struggle with the really big ideas, the great virtues, the complex 
and troubling issues, no one individual, no one group can ever get it 
completely right. Life is a constant process of learning. 

In that spirit, I offer these thoughts. Of course, there are three of them.

The first thought is the importance of history.

I majored in history in college because I saw history as an academic 
discipline within which I could study virtually anything. My doctoral work 
in Christian antisemitism continued this interest in the historical as the 
human arena within which all subjects could be studied.

As I began the process of moving into Unitarian Universalism, one of the 
most attractive features of the movement was its attitude towards history. In 
UU understanding, history, human experience, is where we find authority for 
our theologies and our moral values.

UU’s see past, present, and future linked together without thinking that one 
part of history is more important than another. All three matter. All are 
intertwined. All affect the other.

What we know and think about the past helps us to live in the present and 
plan for the future.

How we live in the present helps us to redeem the past and shape the future.

How we dream of and work for the future helps us to live meaningfully 
today and to accept the past.

This is in contrast to an orthodox understanding of history where some 
person, event, or revelation in the past is determinative. In the past is all the 
truth that matters, says the orthodox believer.

The radical says that the most important moment is yet to be. Despise the 
past and present and look to the future, says the radical.

Christopher Buice, a UU minister in Knoxville, Tennessee, captures the 
spirit of the UU approach to history when he writes of bowling as a spiritual 
discipline. Bowl a ball too far to the right and you end up in the gutter of 
orthodoxy, trapped in the past. Bowl too far to the left and you end up in the 
gutter of radicalism, postponing a good life to a never-to-arrive future. To 
knock down the pins, you must strive to roll your ball in the lane between 
the gutters.

The Buddha taught that same wisdom: seek the Middle Way between the 
extremes that seem so tempting.  Aristotle called it the Golden Mean.

UU’s respect the past, knowing in what measure it affects our lives. Our 
genetic inheritance, the social history of our species, and the environmental 
developments of the ages that have produced our present earth all have 
significance for us.

Historian Donald Kagan says that writers of history have “the responsibility 
of preserving the great, important and instructive actions of human beings.”  
By knowing what has happened, we can see what good and evil are, what 
actions help human beings and what actions harm us.

History shows us clearly the wickedness of slavery and the oppression of 
women, the folly of war and of designing societies that are unjust so a few 
get rich and the many live in misery. Our moral values emerge out of seeing 
what actions and systems do good and which ones hurt people. 

Then we build a vision of what might be and begin working to realize it. We 
understand the truth of Reinhold Niebuhr’s words: “Nothing worth doing is 
completed in our lifetime.”  Worthy goals are not easily accomplished. The 
time to start working on them is now. We must do what we can, even if we 
do not see the completion of the task, and trust that others will carry on the 
work to make real the vision of a peaceable and just community.

What this congregation has done over the past decade and more in moving to 
this vast land site and putting up our building in two stages is grounded in 
our appreciation of our past and the vision of what we can become and offer 
to the world in the future. We did not complete the task. We are still working 
on the master site plan. There is money owed, a lot of money. But we have a 
facility and a staff that can serve a much large number of people and have a 
much greater influence for good in the world. This congregation has lived 
the power of history.

History is about two things: remembering and dreaming. We remember so 
that we can overcome the mistakes of the past and carry forward the noblest 
aspirations of humanity. We dream so that we never become complacent 
about who and what we are, always striving to be better and help the world 
to be better.

History is the first point. 

Humility is the second.

Humility is an impossible virtue. How on earth can we ever know if we are 
properly humble? If I go on a diet, I have something to measure how well I 
am doing. How many times do I succumb and have that blueberry pie or 
reuben sandwich?  How many days do I not exercise?  I can keep a chart of 
how I am doing and give myself pep talks about doing better. 

How do we tell if we are improving in humility? How do we know if our 
humble demeanor is not really a mask for vanity and arrogance? 

I have never thought of myself as a particularly humble person, and I am not 
sure if that means that I am or that I am not humble! I just do not know.  

I am persuaded that humility is a great virtue. I like what Max Ehrmann said 
about humility in DESIDERATA, though he did not use the word.  He wrote 
that “If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain and bitter; 
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.”

That’s excellent advice for staying on course—the middle way!—but hard as 
the dickens to do. Most of us at one time or another do compare ourselves 
and find ourselves desperately wanting or wallowing in self-admiration. 
Ehrmann was right to caution against it.

The trick is to appreciate ourselves, respect others, and enjoy life. Several 
things can be helpful in doing this.

First, I cannot imagine anyone who is not humbled by an awareness of the 
sheer vastness of the universe. Hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy 
which is one of hundreds of billions of galaxies. In the microscopic world, 
we seem to keep discovering teeny, tiny, minuscule little things that count as 
fundamental pieces of the make-up of physical reality. The last count I saw 
was 64 such elemental pieces.

There is vastness in time also, billions and billions of years of time that the 
earth has been around, billions and billions of years since the universe 
started, and who knows what came before that point of singularity.

My goodness! How could anybody be uppity in the face of that knowledge!

The world of which we are a part is also strange. Beetles seem to be the most 
prolific life form with 400,000 species. Cockroaches seem to be the most 
durable form of life, said to be capable of surviving and prospering in a 
nuclear war. Giraffes! Hippopotamuses! Duck-billed platypuses! Monkey 
pod trees! Roses and thorns! Mountains! Water! The human being!

Life is strange and beautiful, full of mystery.

One last element of humility is the limits that constrain us. The first and 
most painful of these limits is our mortality. Religions may propose faith 
commitments about living beyond this life, but there is not one scrap of 
evidence that we do. Even if we survive for another go-round—and I would 
welcome that, as most people would—that does not make this life any 
easier.

Here’s the truth about our mortality, told in two statements a quipster 
thought up in the heyday of the God Is Dead movement of the 1960’s. First 
came these words, “God is dead—Nietzsche.” Then came these words, 
“Nietzsche is dead—God.”

Whatever we consider the ultimate force of the universe to be, whatever our 
God is, it will long outlast our very short existence.

There are limits as well in what we can do. Like it or not, and no matter how 
hard I might apply myself, I will never be able to play the piano as well as 
Fats Waller or Van Cliburn. For that matter, I can’t play as well as Fats 
Cliburn or Van Waller either!

Very few are those gifted in all aspects of life. Some of us can cook and 
some of us cannot. Some of us are comfortable and capable with technology 
and others of us are not. Some of us are good with numbers and others of us 
are not. Some of us can hit a curve ball and others cannot.

Nobody does everything well.

Humility is an attitude firmly rooted in the reality of our situation, an 
infinitesimal part of life in a vast space-time universe in which our mortal 
days are few and our talents limited. 

Accepting our real condition frees us to enjoy life, to appreciate what we 
have rather than long for what we do not have, to respect others and take 
delight in their accomplishments.

In the UU movement, humility is part of the reason why we have no binding 
dogmas, no required creeds to believe, no rituals one must perform on pain 
of eternal loss. Humility teaches us that no one of us has the truth, no 
individual, no religion. At best, we may each have a little bit of the truth. 
Sharing humbly we can enlarge our understanding. 

Humility is the reason we celebrate diversity.

Humility is the second point. 

The third is this: learning to distinguish between that which endures and that 
which is of passing value. 

One of the watershed moments in UU history was the occasion of the 
installation of the Rev. Charles C. Shackford on May 19, 1841. At that 
ceremony, Theodore Parker preached a sermon called “The Transient and 
Permanent in Christianity.” 

Parker made the point that the authority of Christianity or of any religion 
rests on the truth of its words and deeds, not on who said the words nor on 
any doctrines of the faith. Doctrines are transient. So are rituals. So are 
people.

The permanent is found in love and morality and divine living, acting on the 
goodness that is part of every one of us. Parker said that what is demanded 
of us is “a divine life; doing the best thing, in the best way, from the highest 
motives.”

He went on to note that living in this way does not “demand that all 
men…(and women) think alike, but to think uprightly, and get as near as 
possible to truth; not all men…(and women) to live alike, but to live holy, 
and get as near as possible to a life perfectly divine.”

There are many ways of speaking the wisdom found in Parker’s words. You 
have often heard me quote Micah, that what is required of us is not rituals or 
doctrines, but “to do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with 
your God.” 

Jesus said that we should love our enemies and the Koran instructs us in the 
many ways Allah’s voice can be heard, different voices in different places to 
different people.

The permanent is about love and morality, not about transient things.

We live in an age that celebrates the transient. A cartoon in this week’s New 
Yorker underscores this. It shows a man being held up on the street, and the 
hold-up man saying, “Hand over your most recently acquired technology.”

Not even the thieves can keep up with the passing array of technological 
gimcrackery that crowds our lives and demands our attention. It’s all very 
exciting and all very lucrative for the sellers and all very temporary. 

What religions do is to remind us of what we need, remind us of the things 
that endure, the things that really matter, like love and morality, like justice 
and compassion, like laughter and learning, like sharing and hope, like 
respect and thoughtfulness.

At the recent commencement exercises at my alma mater, the actor John 
Lithgow, a member of the class of 1967, spoke of what he had learned from 
some of the recipients of the Harvard Arts Medal, awarded each year at the 
springtime Arts First festival that Lithgow founded. “I began to see, “ he 
said, “ that many of the qualities that made them great artists were the same 
qualities that made them good people.” He then referred to folksinger Pete 
Seeger, who spearheaded efforts to clean up the Hudson River, to blues 
guitarist and singer Bonnie Raitt, who donated funds for guitar lessons for 
inner-city kids, and filmmaker Mira Nair, who started a film school in 
Uganda.

He then suggested very briefly four qualities these and others who have 
contributed to the welfare of humanity have. He urged his audience—he 
urged us all—to “be creative, to be useful, to be practical, and to be 
generous.”

That is wisdom that fits any age, truth that endures.

So is the kind of celebration of life that the poet Mary Oliver expresses in 
her poems, like this one,
“Some things, say the wise ones who know everything,
are not living. I say,
You live your life your way and leave me alone.

I have talked with the faint clouds in the sky when they
are afraid of being left behind; I have said, Hurry, hurry!
and they have said, Thank you, we are hurrying.

About cows, and starfish, and roses there is no
argument. They die, after all.

But water is a question, so many living things in it,
but what is it in itself, living or not? Oh, gleaming

generosity, how can they write you out?

As I think this I am sitting on the sand beside
the harbor.  I am holding in my hand
small pieces of granite, pyrite, schist.
Each one, just now, so thoroughly asleep.
                                       Some Things Say the Wise Ones
                                       Mary Oliver

To see the sacredness in every part of life, to really live the truth of being 
part of the “interdependent web of all existence,” is to be in tune with the 
universe, with that which goes on, with that which endures.

The third point is that we should seek out and hold on to the permanent 
values of life and take lightly the transient things. Hold fast to love, 
morality, life.

The humorist Art Buchwald once delivered a commencement address in 
these words: “Graduates, we the older generation are leaving you a perfect 
world. Don’t louse it up.” Then he sat down. 

I’ve not been as brief as Mr. Buchwald, but, like him, I probably should sit 
down, or at least shut up. Unlike him, I cannot say that I am leaving a perfect 
world or even a perfect congregation. There is work to be done. There will 
always be work to be done. Only in fantasies and occasional magical 
moments do we see perfection. Our responsibility is nevertheless to keep 
working for it.

Henri Nouwen, in an afterword to one of his books, expressed what I feel as 
I end my ministry with you: “Do not stop here. Continue on your own. My 
words were only to encourage you to find your own words, and my thoughts 
were only to help you discover your own thoughts.”

My thoughts two weeks ago were about the stories we tell, and last week 
about the principles by which we live. Today I have tried to suggest that we 
live best by living in history, by living humbly, and by living with 
permanent values like love and morality.

That is really all I have been saying for 25 years, my one sermon.

In that time, if I may be so bold, we have had a good relationship. I believe 
that is because we have both loved and challenged each other. If we did not 
love each other, our challenges would become harsh and judgmental. If we 
did not challenge each other, our love would become sentimental and lazy. I 
believe that by both loving and challenging each other, we have done good 
for each other and for the world.

Thank you for all that you have done, for all that you are, for all that you 
have given, for all that you do to make the world a better place. Know that 
you will be in my heart and my mind forever. 

Thank you!

Thank you very much!


Copyright 2005, Kenneth W. Phifer, All Rights Reserved