Who do we come from? Preached 10/16/16 By Rev. Caitlin S. Cotter Thank you for that beautiful song- I think it s so appropriate, today, to have rested for a moment in the beauty of a song about gratitude. Because we have so much we can thank our ancestors for, those who have helped form us into the people who we are today, the people who came before. And as Mindy brought up a good point earlier- our ancestry is more than just our genetics. As individuals we are formed before and after our birth by so many more people than those whose genes we carry. We live into the legacy of so very many people. So who do we come from? We in this room? That s my question today. We are Unitarian Universalists. Who we come from is a question of history, of theology, of the movement of ideas and ideals through the ages. There s a lot of answers to the question of who we come from. There are a lot of different stories I could tell you, and you could tell me. Our history, like all histories, is complicated. We can trace the ideas of Unitarianism and Universalism back really far. The concept that God is one, after all, goes back to Judaism and early Christianity. The idea that no one ends up in hell, or that there is no hell is even older, really. So we can say, if we want to, that we come from Arius, who argued against the deification of Jesus at the Council of Nicea way back in 325. We can trace our roots back to European monarchs and English heretics and Polish thinkers. The Ottomans influenced us, and the Quakers, and of course our Jewish neighbors. There are Unitarian Universalists in India and the Philippines and Uganda. We are a global phenomenon. When we start talking about who our spiritual ancestors are, though, it s the history in this country, the history of Universalists and Unitarians and Unitarian Universalists in the United States of America that is most pertinent. That s why our own Megan Moyer and I are doing that reading discussion group on Rev. John Beurhen s People s History of Universalists and Unitarians in American. We re excited about those urban Unitarians who created so much social change, those farmer Universalists who were the first to ordain women and challenged the hellfire narrative of American Calvinists. History isn t just what happened long ago and far away. It s what s happening now, here, in each unfolding moment. We have history here, just as we are part of this unfolding moment. The question of who we come from gets emotional for me when I start looking at our history in this land.
This is my country, and the history of Unitarians and Universalists here feels like MY history, like OUR history, in a very particular way. It s why I love visiting historic sites relevant to our history as a faith tradition. One summer when I was younger I went to see Plymouth Rock, in Plymouth Massachusetts. I remember it was a chilly day, remember the salt wind hitting my cheek and the feel of the viewing platform railing in my hand. Plymouth Rock itself isn t that impressive, really. I mean, it s a rock. A broken rock. With a plaque on it. But standing there with the Atlantic Ocean so close and the replica of the Mayflower tied to a dock nearby, you can almost feel in your toes what happened hundreds of years ago, when those Pilgrims seeking to organize religion in a new way landed in New England. See there s something they don t often mention about the Puritans, the Pilgrims on the Mayflower. Their theology wasn t all that different from a lot of the other Calvinists in Europe, who were a plenty powerful group at the time. They didn t leave England and then Holland because no one there believed the same things about hell and who was saved that they did. They left because they wanted a place where they could come together around covenant, because they believed that individual congregations should have power and autonomy and because they were deeply opposed to the way those we now call Presbyterians wanted to organize churches. They came here, fleeing Presbyterianism, because they cared about covenant and autonomous congregations. Does that sound familiar to any of you, who know how we organize ourselves as a religious tradition today? Covenant. And autonomous congregations? It should. We re the direct descendants, as Unitarian Universalists, of the Pilgrims in the Mayflower. The oldest operating church in the country, the one the Puritans put up after they landed at Plymouth Rock, it s now a Unitarian Universalist church. We re the weird bleeding heart liberal great great great great great grandchildren of those folk, and we ve got the building to prove it. I mention this because I want to be clear. Not everyone we came from was on what we often think of as the correct- the warm fuzzy justice oriented- side of history. Some of our spiritual ancestors were abolitionists, and some of them owned enslaved people, or profited from the trade of kidnapped and enslaved people.
Thomas Jefferson, for whom our Jefferson Hall was named, had some interesting ideas and he sure wrote pretty but he wasn t just a slave owner who slipped some atrociously racist language into the declaration of independence, he openly advocated for some things that made slavery in this country even more horrific. He didn t just own enslaved, kidnapped African folk, he bred them, he bred people like they were livestock, that s how he made his money, and some of the people he owned were his own biological children. Our hands are not clean, my people, our history is not all glory and righteous rebellion against evil. Some of our spiritual ancestors did evil themselves. The Puritans, after all, did not arrive on an empty shore. They weren t heroic explorers in a wilderness. They almost wiped out the Pequot tribe, of what is now Mystic Connecticut, and even their allies the Wampanoag (WAHMP-ah-nog )weren t really their friends, no matter what you learned in kindergarten about the first thanksgiving. (We ll be talking more about the story of Thanksgiving next month, so stay tuned.) When we start talking about our spiritual ancestors, it s important to remember... No historical figure is perfect. Even the great Rev. Thomas Starr King, the minister and nature writer and orator and abolitionist who did so much to keep California in the Union during the civil war and who spoke so movingly for the rights of African Americans, wrote some awfully racist stuff about the Chinese immigrants he encountered in San Francisco. I wish I could reach back into history and say DUDE, not cool! to Starr king about that, because I d like to think he d be the sort of person who would have listened and tried to do better. Sadly, I can t go back in time to sit down with Rev. Starr King, or Thomas Jefferson, or any of our beloved dead. I can t retroactively change the awful racist things they will never apologize for. I just have to live with that. We just have to live with that. Still. Still. Looking at who we came from, about who our spiritual ancestors were, doesn t have to be disheartening. I am not telling you to feel guilty, though I do believe we have responsibility as the spiritual descendants of people like Thomas Jefferson to work against the legacy of racism and injustice he left us just like we try to live into his inspiring rhetoric, those pretty words about freedom.
Unitarians and Universalists and Unitarian Universalists have done wonderful things, things we can emulate, and the fact that our ancestors were flawed human beings just makes it all the clearer that we not only should live into the legacies they left us, we CAN live into the legacies of those who came before us. And there are plenty of amazing folk to look back to. We can look to Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, the only child of free African American parents who pledged her life's service to the causes of abolitionism and racial justice. We can be proud that in addition to her journalism and speeches she broke new ground when in 1859 she was the first Black American woman to publish a short story, and in 1859 the first to publish a novel. We can look to Laura Wolfe, who was so inspired by the abolitionist sermons at her Unitarian congregation that she went to South Carolina to establish the first school for those who had been recently freed from slavery during the civil war. We can look to Rachel Carson, who essentially founded the modern Environmental Movement with her heroic work to end the use of DDT. We can look to a rich lineage of reformers, educators, scientists, artists, poets, journalists, activists and organizers. This is why you were given a Unitarian Universalist spiritual ancestor trading card or polaroid of the past, if you prefer- in your order of service today. I invite you to take that trading card home with you and reflect on the legacy of the person depicted on your card. I invite you after the service to look at the cards other people got (You can trade your card for a different one if you want to, it s cool). If you re like me and you love to research things, look more into the story of the person on your trading card. Who were they working with? How did their religious identity as a Unitarian, or a Universalist, or a Unitarian Universalist, inform the choices they made? If you are making a Dia de los Muertos altar at home, think about what it would mean to put this card on that altar. Reflect on how you could live into this person s legacy. Who do we come from? We come from Thomas Potter, the itinerant farmer who built a chapel on his own land, and from Murray who sailed to the United States and found himself preaching again after he d given that up in despair. We come from Olympia Brown, the first woman ordained by a denomination in the United States, and from a hundred suffragists like her.
We come from the Transcendentalists who got us thinking about wisdom from the world religions and nature, from reformers who made us think about what we could do to make the world a better place. We come from people who lived a thousand different lives. We strive to live into their ideals and face courageously into the harm they caused. We look into the potential of this moment, and wonder how we can shift the tide of history in this day, and tomorrow, and into the future. May we be agents of hope, and love, and courage. May we create legacies for our children that inspire them through the ages. May it be so, may we make it so. Benediction: Go out into the world, dear ones, go out and do what you can to add to the legacy of Unitarian Universalism. Be kind, be brave, be thoughtful, be the extraordinary folk I know you are. Who knowsmaybe someday some will put your face on a trading card. Go in peace. And remember, you are enough, just exactly as you are, and you are not alone.