Ironicschmoozer’s Weblog

Sermon

            What is the theological center of this faith tradition?  A number of Unitarian Universalist ministers and laypersons devote a lot of time asking that question, answering it, and even arguing about it.  A few doubt that it even has a center.  It’s too inclusive, too open to new beliefs, stories, and practices to keep its own theological center.  Some outside observers, critical ones that is, even doubt that this tradition of ours is a religion to begin with!

            If we are not a religion, when did we stop being one?  What was the tipping point?

Let’s take a few glimpses of our history.  In the late 1700s the untrained Christian preacher Hosea Ballou preached the gospel of universal salvation instead of a divine lottery of damnation. A loving God, like a loving parent, would not bring forth human lives only to torment some of them forever.  Hosea Ballou established new churches on this faith and converted many existing congregations, wholesale!  That was the beginning of Universalism in America.  Or was it the beginning of the end?  After great growth in numbers of churches and members during the nineteenth century, Universalism declined in size and influence in society.  It may have been a victim of its own success—or the success of its gospel.  Universalism lost uniqueness as other Mainline denominations held off the hellfire and preached less judgment and more love.  By the 1950s, less than two hundred years after its emergence, Universalism had become small and weak; what was left of it merged with the Unitarians in 1961.

In 1819 the educated liberal Christian minister William Ellery Channing preached a sermon entitled “Unitarian Christianity.”  He advocated using our God-given ability to reason when reading the Holy Bible.  He preached on the inspiring humanity of Jesus, not his divinity, and promoted the dignity of all human beings.  Many traditional Christians, however would say then and say it now that you are not a Christian if you believe that Jesus was only a man.  Maybe Channing was the one who opened the way for us to jettison a religious identity.   But we point to that 1819 sermon as the pivotal event in starting the Unitarian movement in America!  Was it our beginning, or was it the top of a slippery slope? 

Perhaps it’s Ralph Waldo Emerson’s fault!  In the 1830s he left the Unitarian ministry. With his Transcendentalist friends he wrote and spoke about a spirituality beyond words and institutions.  They opened us to the wisdom to be found in religions other than Christianity and Judaism.   Emerson wrote that a divine Spirit weaves through the natural world and through every person.  It is a spirit to which we can open ourselves whether or not we go to a church service.  He dared also to say that ministers should preach about real life, not really old books, and preach about our own lives, not lives long departed!  If we lost our center, maybe he’s the reason.  Maybe he threw it away—160 years ago!

But Unitarian Universalism is still here, and we are proud of Emerson.  He had a major influence on American literature, philosophy, education, religion, and politics.  A few weeks ago I heard a National Public Radio interview with U. S. Representative Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, who is running again for the Democratic presidential nomination.  He is proud of his populist economics, his plan for universal health care, and his pro-gay, pro-conservation and anti-war positions.  

The interviewer challenged him with some tough questions:  “Do you think you can get enough money to attract the attention you need to be credible?” 

In fact, Kucinich has drawn large and enthusiastic crowds when speaking around the country; so he told the journalist that all he needs is for the media to cover those events.  

“But don’t you need to make your message less liberal to gain popularity” the reporter asked.  “Don’t your advisors tell you to soften the message?”  Kucinich said [as I recall], “Well, one of my political advisors is Ralph Waldo Emerson.  And in his essay ‘Self Reliance,’ Emerson says:  “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.”  Kucinich went on to say he trusts his message and he trusts the values of the American people.  He sees no reason to be someone he is not.  Given the shortage of political courage in these times, that’s remarkable! Listening to him brought tears to my eyes.  If a politician who is not a UU can find in Emerson the inspiration to say what he thinks, then I want to keep claiming Emerson as part of this movement.  I don’t think he took out our center, I think he enriched it.

By the 20^th century, some Unitarians were promoting the movement of religious humanism.  In 1933 many ministers signed on to the first Humanist Manifesto, which called on religion to embrace reason, science, and ethics.  Humanism promoted an optimistic view of human nature and confidence in our potential for progress through science and education. 

Many Christian Unitarians resisted humanism.  They argued that the core of Unitarianism came from the Bible and the example of Jesus, and feared that humanism would cut out that core.  Outside our congregations, the humanist movement became antagonistic toward religion over the decades.  Inside our faith, many humanists suppressed or disparaged mentions of God, the Bible, prayer and the use of spiritual language.  In fact, the word humanist came to be another term for an atheist or agnostic.  Earlier, the dominant Christian Unitarians had been the inhospitable ones—they fought to keep the humanists out of the movement.  Their hostility was repaid once humanist ministers and congregations became the dominant ones, outnumbering the Christian one.  Most ministers took sides in the so called “humanist-theist controversy.”  I’m not sure when the controversy ended, but I experienced very little of it myself, and I’m glad. 

Did humanism take our center away from us?  I don’t think so.  The humanist-theist controversy was a fight not about our center but about our boundaries.  How big is the circle we draw to distinguish our faith?  Whom shall we let inside?  Those were the real questions.

These days our ministers make free and frequent use of theological metaphors and religious language, and many newcomers tell us they believe in God or they long to experience the spirit of the divine.  At the same time, in many UU congregations, our self-proclaimed atheists, agnostics and other humanists are pillars of the church.  Our circle has expanded again and again.  It has not weakened the core of our faith; it has enriched it.

Other challenges to prevailing notions of UU identity came from feminist theology and Neo-Pagan theology in the 1970s, 80s and 90s.  After some resistance and debate, we embraced these approaches and integrated them into the UU movement. Now our seminarians study and wrestle with theologies from African Americans and other people of color, and from other parts of the world.  So many diverse ideas about the nature of God and humanity had been kept invisible or off to the margins; then our ministers became open to learning about them.

When people in a religious community have strong disagreements with one another about their community’s rituals, beliefs, values or structure they are validating that it has a religious identity.  It has a core.  And UUs have always disagreed about these aspects of our identity.  Identity matters…even if we don’t agree on what it is.  Such disagreements have taken place within most of the world religions—disputes can turn into scisms, provoke reformations, and generate new schools of thought and practice.  Denominations divide over disagreements, or new denominations form with new approaches.   

In my understanding of Unitarian Universalist history, when our people develop new theologies, or bring into our UU circle an unfamiliar approach or style, there has been resistance and controversy.  We UUs wrestle over the boundaries of our faith—we’ve wrestled over Transcendentalism, Humanism, Buddhism, Judaism, Neo-Paganism, and a recent resurgence of liberal Christianity among us—these paths have joined our faith tradition and communities, but not without with some struggles.  We may at first resist an unfamiliar religion’s claim to be included, we often end up including it.  We don’t split off into new denominations, we make room in this one.

What is a religion anyway, and how do you know you’ve spotted one?  

I’ve heard a variety of definitions and opinions about this—from people who claim to be religious and those who say they’re not.  Sometimes their definitions have a judgmental tone–about another’s religion or religion in general. In the nineteenth century some western scholars of religion looked at indigenous tribal cultures and said they had no religion at all.  That’s because the scholars didn’t see anything that looked like their idea of a religion!  By now the concept of religion and the study of it have become much larger, and more complicated.

I would say that a religion is a set of beliefs, rituals, and institutions. In some religious traditions, all three of these elements are powerful, but in other traditions at least one may have a subtle presence, and they are loosely held together.  But even in a loose relationship, the beliefs, rituals and institution structure depend on one another.  In the relationships among beliefs, rituals and structure, each of these elements carries the others along and is borne by them in return.

We do have rituals in this faith.  The structure of a worship service is a ritual in any tradition.  Even a Quaker meeting, when people spend most of the time sitting in silence, is a ritual.  In a UU church, a leader of worship might change the order of a service now and then, but not without care and thought.  Ritual patterns convey depths of meaning which words can fail to express.  (In the words of one religious encyclopedia, “Ritual is a language for saying things which are felt to be true and important but which are not [easily put in] scientific terms.”

                        If I left the lighting of the chalice candle out of the order of worship, or if we skipped it, a number of people would notice, and some would say something.  If we omitted the weekly offering, people would notice.  They might not say anything, but they’d notice.  Imagine if we had neglected to schedule the Christmas Eve Candlelight service.  We’d probably hear about it. Some people might show up anyway, out of habit.

Some of you may recall an October Sunday afternoon in 2005, when the Reverend William “Scotty” McLennan led a forum here.  (He’s a UU minister serving as Stanford University’s Dean for Religious Life and the author of Finding Your Religion.) 

The title of his talk was, “Is Unitarian Universalism a Spiritual Path?”  He compares the world’s various spiritual traditions to various paths going up the sides of a mountain, all heading for the same point of fulfillment or discovery.  To choose a particular religious tradition in which we can immerse ourselves is like choosing one of those paths and walking it.  He asserts that making this choice is necessary to achieve spiritual depth.  He discourages “hiking alone,” wandering and weaving rather than taking one path.  It is a path blazed by generations of seekers and kept for us to find.  So, is Unitarian Universalism one of those spiritual paths?  Scotty says it’s not.  A path is a well-worn tradition, not an intersection of them.  What a UU church can offer is a place where seekers can bring their insights and spiritual practices together for mutual understanding and support.  We are not a spiritual path, he said, we are “a crossroads religion,” where Buddhist, Humanist, Neo-Pagan, Jewish and Christian seekers might meet one another.   Hearing his thesis, a number of us wanted to pursue this further, and asked about ways we can deepen in faith.  A few of us, however, were quite satisfied to remain at the crossroads and see who comes by.

These days it can be nearly impossible to find the time to give to such a path–to study, practice and deepen in one tradition.  This is a challenge even for some who were born on one of those paths, let alone for a newcomer to it. I know many people in Christian churches who have only basic knowledge of their tradition and its scriptures, and those who don’t even pray on a regular basis.  To find yourself born on an already-blazed path with a name like Christianity, Buddhism, et cetera, is not a guarantee that you will have an intimate knowledge of the path or understand how it was made and what you belong on the path.  Usually, to gain such knowledge takes intention, practice, and the support of a community—a religious infrastructure.

Several years ago I took a local civic organization’s walking tour of downtown San Jose. As our crowd walked from place to place I began talking with a woman a bit older than I am.  When I told her my line of work, she said that she was Jewish but non-practicing, more or less, and she had visited the downtown UU church on and off. Some years earlier she and her two children had lived in Dallas, Texas.  She took her two kids to the First Unitarian Church of Dallas nearly every week. 

Then, one day driving in the car with her teenage daughter and son present, she remarked at something clever her son said.  She joked:  “What do you expect from a smart Unitarian kid!”  He barked he shouted:  “I am not a Unitarian kid.  I am a Jewish kid who goes to a Unitarian church!”  Before that, she had not realized the importance to him of his Jewish heritage.  She decided she should do something about it.  She began taking her kids to a synagogue in Dallas for Jewish services.  By the time of this conversation, her kids had grown up.  I don’t remember whether her son was continuing to practice as an adult, but she told me that her daughter is a Rabbi!  Whether Unitarian Universalism is its own spiritual path, or whether we maintain the religious crossroads, one of our gifts has been to help others relocate their own paths, or find a new one, even if it’s not the same as our path.

So, what is the center of this UU faith?  Though we have a theological history, as a movement we no longer have one theology, one historical narrative, or one set of spiritual practices—if we ever did.  It’s true that you do not have to subscribe to a creed to join a UU church.  Nevertheless we do have a religious center. 

At the center of our tradition is a faith in the interdependent individual.  This, I believe, is the core from which our aspirations and actions flow.  It is our starting point of our faith, not its boundary.  The circle of our tradition is not so rigid that it will not embrace people with new ideas and beliefs. 

The interdependent individual.  Every person is unique and unrepeatable, with dignity and worth.  Each one has a measure of freedom, or should have it. To have a faith in the individual is to affirm the worth and dignity of every person. 

At the same time, everyone is held by a network of relationships.  We are each embedded in the web of creation, not separate from it.  For our existence and enrichment, we depend on other people, other beings, the natural world, the cosmos, and on a holy mystery that exists beyond our naming.  We are dependent on generations of people before us who prepared the way.  Each of us is responsible for using our freedom with mindfulness.  Our actions affect the world—the world close by us, and the distant lands and people that seem a world away.

We have a basic faith in the interdependent individual—everyone with dignity–every one, every being, connected to the rest of creation. 

The center of this tradition holds many ways of speaking about it as a religion, so at times it may be a challenge to describe Unitarian Universalism in its fullness.  The center is always changing, growing.  It changes as we enlarge the circle to embrace those who bring to us unfamiliar words and new ways of being religious. 

This religious tradition of ours is an embracing faith.

 So may it always be, and so may we live.  Amen.