Unitarian Universalism and the Holy Spirit By Rev. Dr. Todd F. Eklof January 10, 2016 Although it has continued to evolve over the centuries, the Unitarian side of our faith has always emphasized human agency. Since Jesus was Jewish, as were his original followers, he had a Unitarian theology, believing in only one god. He also often seems to have emphasized human agency, the importance of establishing Heaven on Earth by treating our neighbors as our equals and caring for those in need, the poor, the sick, the foreigner, and anyone else who is left out or cast out. After his execution, his first followers, as Jews, maintained their Unitarian theology while putting into practice their late rabbi s humanitarian, communitarian teachings. But when the Apostle Paul came along, just a few decades after Jesus death, and decided to take advantage of the popularity ignited by Jesus martyrdom as the basis of a new religion, everything began to change. Paul claims to have been Jewish, but if he was, he was so only through some link in his ancestry. As a Jew, he was not culturally proficient. Paul was a Roman citizen, enjoyed the full rights of his citizenship, and consistently demonstrated the common Hellenistic and dualistic mindset of his non-jewish society and upbringing. As such, it would have been nothing for Paul to believe a man could ascend to become a god, something that would have been anathema to a Jew. Greek and Roman mythology is replete with these god-men, and in his own time it was believed that Roman Emperor Augustus, a name that means, the August One, or Great One, revered as Rome s greatest leader, had been born of a virgin, walked on water, performed miracles, and, upon his death, ascended into the heavens to dwell with the gods as a god. Jesus Jewish followers and Paul s Gentile Christians initially argued over whether or not it was necessary for those claiming to be Christian to first convert to Judaism, but, before long, the Jewish followers all but vanished, while the new Hellenistic Christianity took off among other Greek and Roman citizens. Good thing because, for Paul, Christianity begins with Jesus death. As he told the Corinthians, I decided to know nothing among you except Christ and him crucified. 1 He never met or saw Jesus, nor ever refers to his life or any of his teachings. So Jesus Jewish followers, who, as such, could never have worshipped a man as a god, were eventually overwhelmed by the misappropriation of their particular Jewish sect by Greco- Roman Paul and his Gentile followers, and all but disappeared, along with the Unitarian theology that had once been central to the teachings of their deceased Rabbi. 1 I Corinthians 2:2.
You probably know the rest of the story. Hellenistic Christianity grew to become so popular among the dominant culture of the day that it was eventually adopted as the official State religion, under Emperor Constantine. Until that time, however, the debate between whether or not Jesus was a man or a god persisted. So, in 325 CE, the Emperor called the Council of Nicaea together to settle the matter once and for all, instructing the Church officials to use the word, homoousias, meaning one substance, to describe the relationship between Jesus and God, or, between the Father and Son, as they d come to be called. The Nicene Creed the council came up with put the final nail in the coffin of Christianity s initial Unitarian theology, and paved the way for the invention of its opposite Trinitarianism. Whereas the Unitarians argued Jesus was human and came into existence upon his birth, the Nicene Creed determined he was begotten of the Father before all worlds; God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God; begotten, not made, being of one substance [homoousias] with the Father. So the idea that Jesus and God are one and the same became the official doctrine in 325 CE. Although the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit had been referenced together by Christian theologians since at least as early as the 2 nd century, it wasn t until 381 CE, 50 years after the Nicene Creed, that the Council of Constantinople explicitly defined the Holy Spirit as the third person of the Trinity. So there you have it, it wasn t until 350 years after the death of Jewish Jesus that the Trinitarian Doctrine was fully established, making his original Unitarian theology officially illegal. With this history in mind, it would seem the notion of a Holy Spirit, then, has as little influence on or place among Unitarian Universalists as anything. For, in addition to being the apex of Trinitarian doctrine, the very antithesis of Unitarianism, the notion of a Spirit or Ghost, also goes against the grain of our commitment to rational thought, and our 2000-year-old emphasis on human agency. Why pray to a Holy Ghost when we ought to be putting our faith into action by getting to work in ways that are real and tangible? And, on a personal note, as I ve said before, I don t like using the world spiritual very often. No matter how often I explain my reasons for this, some can t help but take this to mean I m such a rationalist that I don t believe in anything I can t see or explain. I ve even heard a few people over the years say I m not a very spiritual person, which I take great exception to. My problem with the word, rather, is that it is too vague to convey one precise meaning without a great deal of explanation or some kind of qualifier, like team-spirit, or school-spirit, or angry spirit, or spirit of the Age. Spirit shares the same root as words like spire and spear. It s a very masculine, phallic word that can refer to anything that inspires us, whether it s a philosophy or a football team. To be inspired, is to be speared or penetrated by anything that carries us away, or, as we would say in today s vernacular, anything we get carried away with, or, literally, spirited away. 2
So to say someone is spiritual doesn t say much of anything unless we qualify it by talking about the specific spirit one has been penetrated or possessed by. For some, watching a Seahawks games is as spiritual an experience as going to church or climbing a mountain might be for someone else. As a noun, spirit shares the same root as respiration, meaning breath. To the ancients, breath and spirit were synonymous. Spirit moved us and gave us life and anything that moved was spiritual. This points to another issue I have with using the word spiritual. It s often used to suggest some otherworldly experience, a pointer to something other or better than the world we re in, to something heavenly rather than earthly, to something divine rather than human, to something spiritual rather than something mundane. So football games and flies are considered earthly, human, and mundane compared to some lofty spiritual idea meant to transcend such ordinary things. But I have to ask myself, whenever I hear the word, what on Earth isn t spiritual? For I believe, like our ancestors, there are many spirits and every creature is spiritual, and to say someone or something is or isn t spiritual is only to make a judgment based upon one s own spirituality. It s really just to say someone or something is or isn t moved by the same spirit that moves me, which is a lot different than saying someone is or isn t spiritual. Not long ago, for example, I gave a sermon about Creation Spirituality in which I referred to myself as a Creation Spiritualist. That s because I ve been inspired by it. It has penetrated my life, my thinking, and my behavior. It moves me. But to qualify my spirituality by calling it an Earth centered Creation Spirituality, by implication suggests there are other kinds of spirituality too. Just because you might not be a Creation Spiritualist doesn t mean you re not spiritual. The same is true of Unitarian Universalism. A few weeks ago a minister from another faith asked me if we don t have a specific belief about God, why even bother referring to ours as a church at all? Why not just call it a club or a society, she asked. She also suggested that to qualify as a religion it must include something transcendent, something more than just human. Just human! I exclaimed. Just human! For I believe that if we didn t spend so much effort trying to transcend this world, and learned, instead, to appreciate its wonder and rarity, we might very well realize that nothing is just human, nothing is mundane, that the sheer existence of every amoeba, ever living cell is extraordinary! I further explained that Unitarian Universalism is among the many kinds of religions that, throughout human history, have been nontheistic, meaning they are more about how we live and treat each other and our world, than about a theological belief. True, western religion is defined by its theology, by what each group, Catholic or Protestant, Shiite or Sunni, Reform or Orthodox, believes, in particular, about God. But there are 2.5 billion people in the world today, Buddhist, Hindus, Taoists, Indigenous peoples, who, like Unitarian Universalists, have religions that are not defined by what they believe about God. 3
So, yes, Unitarian Universalism is a religion that has been penetrated by the Spirit of Reason and the Spirit of Inclusion and the Spirit of Life a spirituality so broad that it s large enough to hold space for a variety of individuals who come with additional spirits all their own. And today I will go a step further by claiming our unique Unitarian Universalist Spirit and the Holy Spirit are one and the same; that we are the original Holy Rollers. For, like team spirit, or Creation Spirituality, Holy helps qualify a specific kind of spirit. When taken as something literal, like so much else in the Bible, the Holy Spirit is objectified to the point it s thought to be an actual thing, an actual person, a personified god. But if viewed through the lens of our more rational, humanistic Unitarian tradition, the Holy Spirit becomes something so much more wonderful and meaningful. So let s begin by taking a look at the ancient myth about the Holy Spirit. In the Christian Book of Acts, an account of what happened to Jesus followers after his death, we are told that just before his Ascension to Heaven, resurrected Jesus told his disciples not to go anywhere until they have been baptized by the Holy Spirit. So they all remained in one place until the day of Pentecost, upon which the sound of a violent wind filled the house they were in and they saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them. 2 Some people, as you are aware, take this story so literally that they believe speaking in tongues is a sure sign one has been Baptized by the Holy Spirit. Many years ago, for example, when I was still a teenager and still a Southern Baptist, I emerged from the San Francisco subway where a street preacher was ranting at the passersby. Most people just ignored him, largely because he mumbled so much that it was difficult to understand anything he said, except for one phrase he repeated often enough to say at least once to everyone who passed, You re going to go to Hell. It was clear to me that, whatever else he was saying, he was angry and hostile. Being the troublemaker I was, I approached him and asked why he felt shouting angrily at people is going to convince anyone to listen. You re going to go to Hell! He responded. I m not going to Hell, I said, I m a Christian. He paused and gave me a questioning gaze. You are? He asked. Have you confessed all your sins and asked the Lord Jesus into your heart? Yes I have, I said. Have you been baptized by the Holy Spirit? Yes I have, I repeated. Do you speak in tongues? 2 Acts 2:3-4 4
rant. No, no I don t, I said. You re going to go to hell! He shouted before moving on to continue his Today speaking in tongues, or glossolalia, as it is called, refers to a kind of babbling that lacks any understandable meaning. But if we return, again, to the original story, we find that only a few who heard the disciples speaking in this way were confused by it. As the story goes, there were people from many foreign places present, and they were bewildered, not because they couldn t understand, but because each could understand what was being said in their own language. Parthians, Medes and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene; visitors from Rome (both Jews and converts to Judaism); Cretans and Arabs we hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues! Amazed and perplexed, they asked one another, What does this mean? 3 What it means, as far as I can tell, is that speaking in tongues isn t about babbling unintelligibly, but about speaking in a way that is inclusive of everyone, in a way that most everyone can understand, no matter who they are, where their from, or what they believe. This interpretation makes a lot more sense as a sign or gift of the Holy Spirit when we consider the etymology of the word, holy. It shares the same root as the words, healthy and whole. Holiness simply means wholeness. So one way to better translate the phrase Holy Spirit, so that it s less likely to be taken literally, is just to say, Spirit of Wholeness, or Spirit of Inclusion. In this way the Holy Spirit isn t personified but becomes a way of being with each other. We come together in this kind of spirit, in the spirit of Wholeness and Inclusion. Both Unitarianism and Universalism also connote this same spirit, this same meaning, of Wholeness and Inclusion. And, like the day of Pentecost, there are many who are confused by what we have to say. Isn t yours that weird religion that claims to believe everything? They ask. Why even call it a church? It doesn t make any sense. The answer is, no, ours is not a religion that believes everything. Some of us, in fact, don t believe much of anything. Ours is the religion, rather, that tries to accept everyone regardless of what they believe, or where they are from, or what language they speak. The principles and values we share and uplift as a faith community respect, equality, openness, freedom, democracy, justice, and solidarity are universal human values, and, therefore, can be understood by everyone; Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Atheists, Humanists, scientists, as well as straights, gays, transgenders, children, seniors, browns, whites, wealthy, poor, and so many others. It is a language of justice that demands equality for everyone. 3 Acts 2:9-12 5
So if I could travel back in my imaginary time machine, I d come up out of that San Francisco subway and change my answer to, Yes, absolutely! For now I am part of a Spirit-filled church; a church possessed by the Spirit of Wholeness. How do we know this? What sign, what proof is there that the Holy Spirit has descended upon us? We know it is so because we have the gift of speaking in tongues. When we march together in a Pride Parade, we are speaking in tongues. When we show up to a City Council meeting to advocate for workers rights, we are speaking in tongues. When we stand with the Lummi people to demand their right to clean water, fresh air, and healthy salmon, we are speaking in tongues. When we join hands, encircling temples and mosques and NAACP and Planned Parenthood offices that have been desecrated by hate, we are speaking in tongues. When we call upon our government to welcome refugees seeking asylum, we are speaking in tongues. When we demand they embrace the children of those refugees already among us, we are speaking in tongues. When we take up a special collection to help pay for the life saving surgery of a minister in Felsorakos, Romania, we are speaking in tongues. When we demand economic equality, healthcare for all, a healthy environment, good schools, affordable education, safe neighborhoods and a world without war for everyone and everything on the planet, we are speaking in tongues. For all these reasons, and so many more, we know ours is a Spirit-filled church, a church possessed by the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Wholeness. Amen! 6