Love, Interdependence and Action Unitarian Universalist Church of the Desert Rev. Suzanne M. Marsh October 19, 2014 My mother is still fairly befuddled by we Unitarian Universalists and our beliefs. She was raised in the Assemblies of God and isn t really sure what good our religion does us, it holds out no rules, nor punishments, nor promises of reward in the next life. She tries to understand, but for all of her 80 plus years, any church she has come in contact with has all those things, plus an ironclad faith in a unseen, supernatural being. She s is not really sure how we get along without all those things! Proud of my accomplishments, she often tells people that I am a minister. When they ask what denomination, sometimes they ask: Can you really believe anything and be a Unitarian Universalist or they say: "That s not REALLY a church. In the greatest of ironies, one of the members of her current Methodist church, whom my mother says is VERY Christian said to her: Isn t that the church that welcomes and accepts anyone? I suggested that if anyone ever said that to her again she simply reply: Yes, like Jesus did. I must admit to you that these things bother me That people think we are not really a church and that we can believe anything, which means they think we aren t really a religion and that we have no theology. And though some argue with me when I say this: you cannot believe anything you want and belong to our community. But that is probably best left for another day, or perhaps a conversation at coffee hour. Unitarian Universalism is a religion, we have a long and distinguished history and yes, we have a theology. What we do not have is creed or dogma. For those who have grown up in more traditional faiths, like my mother, it does not seem possible that people can freely gather, holding such a wide array of beliefs and still form a cohesive beloved community for worship and support; fellowship and fun; good works in our communities and our world. We do that here. Now often, it s not easy, because even though we have our 7 principles, we each have our own slant on the divine, we have different names or no name for that which others call God. And we have no threat of eternal damnation to hold over people s heads if they get out of line. It can and does get very messy. Seeking the truth together, even though we agree that each is free to arrive at a different truth than ours, can be really hard and tiring work. True religious freedom is very complicated, but it is also a way to be with each other authentically. And for me it is worth the trouble and the mess, because it is in UU churches that I have most often witnessed the movement of the holy in the world. Our free faith has a long history of heresy and courage and we have many religious ancestors who gave their lives for that freedom. A few particularly compelling historic figures: King John Sigismund of Transylvania (now Romania) was a Unitarian King who in 1568 issued the first edict of religious freedom, The Edict of Torda. Elsewhere in Europe at this time, people were routinely being tortured and executed by the Inquisitors. After King Sigismund's death his spiritual advisor Francis David, became a champion of the cause of religious tolerance, for which he eventually died in prison. David is a very important figure in Unitarianism as he believed and preached the simple idea that at the center of Unitarian faith was not a state of belief, but a state of love. You may remember his most famous saying: "We need not think alike to love alike." I have spoken to you before about Michael Servetus, a Unitarian scholar who published a book On the Errors of the Trinity and for his efforts was burned in effigy by the Catholic Inquisition and then actually burned by John Calvin in Geneva. In 1841, Abolitionist Unitarian minister Theodore Parker continued the practice of heresy in a sermon titled A Discourse on the Transient and Permanent in Christianity, in which he espoused his belief that the 1
scriptures of historic Christianity did not reflect the truth. His was a radical theological position in which he argued for a type of Christian belief and worship in which the essence of Jesus s teachings remained permanent but the words, traditions, and other ritual did not. He rejected all miracles and revelation and saw the Bible as full of contradictions and mistakes. He retained his faith in God but suggested that people experience God intuitively and personally, and that they should center their religious beliefs on individual experience. For much of its history Unitarianism, Universalism and then UUism, have had at their core not a strict set of beliefs but instead the values of freedom, a personal search for truth and love. Unitarianism and Universalism both arose from a pushing against the painful dogma of more orthodox religions they rose out of a fervent belief that people have free will, that we are not predestined by God to be saved or unsaved, that we are not tainted with original sin. On this foundation we have evolved a theology that can be shared by people who believe many different things about the divine and about the nature of humanity. Our theology has evolved, rising from a long and abiding belief in each other, of divinity found in all rather than one and with respect for our separate and shared search for truth and meaning. And always on the abiding power of love. Why are we having this conversation, why does our theology matter? It matters profoundly, because the world is full of people who have been hurt and remain deeply wounded by the theology of many religious traditions. In the words of my colleague Nancy McDonald Ladd: Religion matters in the world. Our church matters, has mattered so profoundly to so many. Precisely because we wouldn t impose our faith on anyone, precisely because we refuse to place our institution overtop of our morality, our church matters. Organized religion as we often understand it has been guilty of placing its institutions overtop of its morality in ways that often frighten us and hold us back from selfidentifying as a religious movement. We look at the crimes and the hatred that arise because of the religious impulse, and we wonder if we even want to be included in the mess of religion in the first place. We try to dissociate ourselves, to say, I m not really all that religious. I m a Unitarian Universalist, and because of this it has been said that ours are institutions full of anti-institutionalists and religious groups that distrust religion 1 We need our theology to remind us what we are all doing here on Sunday mornings: why we volunteer, why we devote our time and money to this institution. Our theology is reflected in our shared principles, which are the things that tie us together in Beloved Community. That s why. Nancy and I often listen to books on cd as we drive long distances and one of our favorite authors has been Nevada Barr, who has written lots of novels about a Park Ranger, with each story set in a different National Park. A few years ago I stumbled across a book by Nevada Barr that was not a mystery novel, but instead about her search for meaning in her life, when it was in a fairly sorry state. As Nevada Barr s book begins, she is living in her own personal hell of loneliness, depression, failure, frustration, and uncertainty. Having been brought up to believe that religion was strictly for the simpleminded and weak-willed, seeking comfort in a church was not an option that she was willing to consider. As she took a walk one night in the unfamiliar town in Mississippi where she had recently come to live, she stopped in front of a small church located near her apartment. There were lights on, so she went in to find a small group of women meeting in the sanctuary, who invited her to come in. It was just as churchy as hell, she writes. I felt self-conscious, superior, intrusive, unwanted and out of place. But she did accept their invitation to step inside and even stayed for a while. The next Sunday, she got up in time to get dressed and go to church. She says this: I had not been saved. I had no job, no friends. Church was just something to do, a reason to get dressed. I didn t come to worship. I came because I was lonely, frightened 1 McDonald Ladd 2
and desperately unhappy. I was invited to Wednesday Bible Study class. There was a free meal and people to eat it with. I began to go. I felt like a fake and a fraud, as if someone might leap up at any moment and denounce me as an unbeliever. But I was warm, fed, and with people. For that, I was grateful enough to hold my tongue and act civil. 2 She goes on: Every Wednesday and Sunday I went. I listened and ate spaghetti off paper plates and wondered what I was doing there. The church seemed as good a place as any not to be alone till my life took a turn for the better. Had the Elks been meeting on the block that night and accidentally left the door ajar, I expect my life would have taken a very different direction. 3 In that church she did not encounter instant enlightenment or answers to all her problems. On Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights she just kept going back to church, not because of the preaching, not because of the ideas, or the doctrines, or the beliefs, or the hymns, or the Bible lessons but because she needed something. I tell you this story because it encapsulates why I am here, why I believe this church is here. We can get so caught up in the business of this institution, in the necessary tasks of maintaining our building, raising money, recruiting volunteers and endlessly meeting and debating and discussing issues, that we can easily start to imagine that any one of these things is the main thing that we are all about as a church. We can get distracted by these things for a while and forget that we are in the business of being here to save folks like Nevada Barr. We are here to be a place of refuge for all who come on Sunday, not just us, not just people who are looking for Unitarian Universalism, but those who come in lost and lonely, heartsick and heartbroken. We are here for those who come in that door with no idea why they are here or what they are looking for. We are here to offer salvation to all, friend or stranger. Salvation. Hmmm. What a sticky word. We cringe, but the truth is that the original meaning has been lost in Christian dogma. The Hebrew word for salvation means literally to make wide or to make sufficient. The Oxford Companion to the Bible [says] that the primary meaning of the Hebrew and Greek words translated as salvation is non-religious. The Hebrew word is usually used in a military context, and refers to victory over evil or rescue from danger, in this life. And in the Christisn gospels it is most often used to denote the physical healing that people seek from Jesus, relief from blindness, paralysis or leprosy. 4 People are in need of, in search for, that sort of salvation. Many folks walk around barely alive, when their internal wellspring of joy, their very soul, has dried up and they have lost their reason for being. Here s what Nevada Barr says: Salvation? Salvation from what?... When I joined a church, I never expected to be saved. I was painfully aware that I needed saving, but from what I wasn t sure. From despair, I expect... Because I had nothing better to do and no other pathways happened to be open to me at the time, I learned to share, to be in community, to have faith if not in [G]od, at least in some of his people, some of the time. I learned to have faith in myself. I learned gratitude, forgiveness, sacrifice, turning the other cheek those annoying things much touted by grandmothers and nuns. And I ll be damned if I wasn t eventually saved. Saved in the sense that I began to live my life instead of scripting it, trying to manipulate it, rewrite it, drown it, sleep through it, or abandon it altogether by attempting to live someone else s life for them... Even when our 2 Barr 3 Barr 4 Norris 3
lives are at their most fractured, our days pushed through a tangle of fears so thick that we can scarcely draw breath, most of us know with some tiny part of our hearts that there is something else 5 This religion, our shared religion, frees us from the dogmatic, judgmental and closed off communities that so often pass as religion today. It tells us that we don t have believe in God to be alive with spirit and engaged with the sacred. We know that you don t have to share a creed to be walking together in search for truth and meaning or to gather in love. It is in our religious expression that we are invited to let go of our egos and our intellects long enough to feel the presence of the sacred, not just in church, but anywhere. Our theology is all those things and yet, for me, it boils down to love. A love which knows all of humanity is worthy. A love which compels us to seek and embrace those who are hurting or broken or searching for us, even though they do not yet know what they are seeking. 6 A theology of love, our theology is as simple and as complex as the things that we know: That there is no need to live in fear of what might happen in the afterlife when there is so much to do in our living. That there should be no place for religion that shames those who refuse to be constrained by dogma and that threatens eternal torment. We know that kind of religion is not holy and that it is part of the brokenness we see in our world. We know that there are so many out there hurting who each day feel more fearful and alone. We know that it doesn t have to be that way. We know that whatever name you may use: God, the One, the Source and Spirit of Life or Love, is larger than we could ever imagine, and speaks in every language, to all people, whether it is the language of metaphor, of reason, of poetry and discourse, of art and science, of music and technology, of the wind and the rain and the stars and the embrace of one we love. We know that we have the power, together, to build the Beloved Community, the world as it should be, right here and now. Most of all we know that no one need be alone. All are welcome. All are saved. All are worthy. All are loved May it be so 5 Barr 6 McDonald Ladd 4
Sources and Inspirations Nevada Barr. Seeking Enlightenment... Hat by Hat. Berkeley Books; New York, 2003 Best of UU. In the blog of Jess Cullinan Rev. Nancy McDonald Ladd. Why Church Matters, a sermon. November 27, 2005 Kathleen Norris. Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith. Riverhead Books, 1998 Rev. Marilyn Sewell. The Theology of Unitarian Universalists in the Huffington Post online. 6/5/11 5