I will be 70 years and about 9 months old (that’s 7149 months) at 6:10 this evening.

In choosing my birthday for this installation as a member of the Inclusive Community’s clergy team pastoral leader and teacher,
I am recalling the memorable and striking words of the great depth psychologist and prophet Otto Rank, who proclaimed that everyone is a hero at birth.

     1. To have biologically developed through the life stages of evolution in 9 months,
     2. To have emerged from a womb of warm water into a cold atmosphere of air,
     3. To have moved through the narrowest of passages with a round, flexibly hemispheric head as wide as our bony shoulders, to smooth the ride,
     4. To finally seek rest, only to be turned upside down and slapped by a stranger,

               …all this is heroic, from the word eros, love,
               and sets the pattern for living, for everyone.
               Born of love,
               embraced by love,
               destined to love,
               a hero is birthed to be born again and again.

In theological terms, it is called Birth (Baptism), Death and Resurrection to new life.
In scientific terms, it is referred to as the labor pains of a dynamic, evolving cosmos.

     1. Like the cosmos itself, we are destined to be born and reborn,
     to follow the call to new possibilities,
     to eventually leave the very warmth of the womb which sustained us,
     knowing that to remain too long will smother us or cause us to drown.
     2. So each of us is born to move on,

               to seek fresh air,
               to move through the narrowest of passages,
               to put the head of what Buddha calls mindfulness forward,
               rather than the brutal shoulders of resentment,
               to be slapped, even turned upside down, by a stranger
               or, even worse, by someone called friend.

This is what Meister Eckhart, 14th century Rhineland mystic, called “the terrible beauty”,

     1. this labor pain of moving on,
     2. what Matthew refers to, in his gospel, as being perfected ,
     3. but what Luke, in a parallel passage, calls compassion,
     i.e., to suffer with, even to die for, only to rise or be transformed into the newness of life.
     The Congregationalist tradition at its best does not allow an overhead authority to impose a pastor.
     In the truest sense of church, qahal, a people called, it invites or calls its own.

I feel that we have found hope in the renewal of my service in the Inclusive Community, with Anthony and Theresa, with Randy and Ron, with getting to know each of you and your families.

Beyond this, as a United Church of Christ congregation, we are part of a denomination whose forebears, as Anthony has listed in the July/August Point:

     1. were the first mainline church to take a public stand against slavery (1700),
     2. were the church that initiated the defense of the Amistad captives, supporting their Supreme Court case
     and their freedom (1839),
     3. ordained the first woman to ministry, Antoinette Brown (1853),
     4. were the first denomination to ordain a Native American in the 1700s,
     5. were the first to ordain an African American in the 1800s.

     UCC ordained the first openly gay person, William Johnson (1972).

     UCC was the first Protestant church to appoint a Catholic pastor, with full standing, to one of its own     
     churches, our own Inclusive Community (1986), Anthony Padovano.

We have been taught for so many years to follow Jesus, male, celibate, savior of our sins, who founded a church patriarchy, a church of exclusion, whose defining discipline was obedience. Now we challenge that.

We have entered, by contrast, the age of the Spirit, of liberation and creativity, of prophecy and transformation, indeed of the feminine face of God, (Sofia), Wisdom.

Today is our response. Mary and I have been married as soulmates for 172 months. Befitting a renewed calling after so many years, and an anointing with so precious an oil from The Inclusive Community,
we are filled with gratitude,
and our answer is Yes, 70 x 7.



                                                                                          Rev. Dr. Richard W. Scaine
                                                                                         (Installation address, Inclusive Community, 10/23/04)