I wanted God
On heaven and earth I sought
And lo!
I found him in my inmost thought
The Universalist believes that God is too good to condemn any human being to damnation; Unitarians believe that they are too good for God....After the merger meeting a Universalist called up a friend and said: "we won. Unitarian is just an adjective."
The following sermon may be offensive to some listeners; listener discretion is advised. The opinions expressed are those of the speaker and do not necessarily reflect the views of any other individual or collective member of the UUA.
At age 65 I was feeling pretty isolated; aside from professional relationships and occasional lovers, as well as family members scattered over the globe, I belonged to no close stable group. I felt the need to "belong," the need for fellowship with a small "f." When I heard that there was a "church for atheists" I eagerly checked it out in the Britannica and then sought out our Fellowship where I met Isabel. Everybody meets Isabel the very first time they come here, but not everybody has the luck to marry her. But everybody finds here the fellowship that I was seeking.
At the time, in 1986, the standing joke was that "Unitarians believe in at most one god." The evolution of our denomination over the past ten years is illustrated by the new form of that joke: "any number except three."
Just as for me the defining characteristic was welcome for a non-believer, an atheist, so for many others of us the defining characteristic is the absence of creed, of dogma, especially the one their parents stuck them with.
A lifelong unchurched man suddenly developed a vague religious urge and decided to join a church any church. So he set out to find one.His first stop was a Roman Catholic church where he asked what he had to do to join. The priest mentioned diligent study and the affirmation of the Nicene and Apostles' Creeds, then--just to see how much the man knows--asked him where Jesus was born. "Pittsburgh," he answered. "Get out!" cries the shocked priest.
Next stop is Southern Baptist where the seeker was told he would have to learn Bible verses, swear belief in the Nicene and Apostles' creeds, swear off booze, and be baptized ("By immersion, not just some sissy sprinklin'"). The Baptist preacher then, to see how much this man knows, asked him where Jesus was born. "Philadelphia?" he asks tentatively "Get out, you heathen!" yelled the preacher.
Our perplexed protagonist finally walked into a Unitarian church where he was told all he had to do was sign a membership card. "You mean I don't have to renounce anything, swear to anything, or be dunked in anything?" "That's right. We have no special tests for membership, no dogma. We support total individual freedom of belief." "Then I'll join! But tell me--where was Jesus born?" "Why, Bethlehem, of course." The man's face lit up. "I knew it was some place in Pennsylvania!"
This absence of creed is illustrated by two more examples of Uumor:
The KKK burns gigantic question marks on our lawnsand
A UU walks into a fabric store and asks the clerk for 9 yards of material. The clerk asks: "What are you going to make?" and the UU says "I'm making a nightgown for myself as a present for my husband." The clerk says "But 9 yards is way too much material for a nightgown." The UU answers: "I know, but my husband would rather seek than find."
When I joined, the congregation and the denomination had been fairly static for many years, with a rather purely secular, intellectual form of service, a form that has been described as "a talk, a discussion, and a clarinet solo."
What are the Holy Books?
For Judaism
The Torah
For Islam
The Koran
For Christianity
The Bible
and for Unitarian Universalism
Roberts' Rules of Order
The four UU sacraments are:
Dedication,
Marriage,
Memorial Service,
and Argument
We were very comfortable in our intellectualism.
Little Sally came home from Sunday school and her mother asked her what she learned. "The teacher told us the story of Moses leading his people out of Egypt", Sally said.Her mother asked Sally to tell her the story.
"Well", said Sally, "Moses led his people away from Egypt and the Pharaoh starting chasing them. When they got to this big lake, Moses called up his engineers and they built this pontoon bridge over the lake and Moses and his people started across. When they got to the other side, they waited until Pharaoh's army was on the bridge and then Moses called in his helicopters and artillery and they bombed the bridge and blew up the Pharaoh's army and they all drowned and Moses and his people got away."
Sally's mother was horrified. "That can't be the way your teacher told the story!"
"Well, no" said Sally, "but you would never believe it the way she told it."
But times have changed, almost imperceptibly. We have a thriving pagan subcommunity. Many of our newer members, and not only they, want something more than intellectual stimulation on Sunday morning. Indeed, what does it mean to be a UU? We know why we came here the first time. But what is the glue that continues to hold us? It certainly isn't the greater glory of god!
The conservative Christian will tell us that without God and Christ there cannot be any morality. "You could do anything." Of course, as the members of my Bible study circle know, even with God popping in all the time, people did do anything.
Still, Unitarian Universalism is not what it's not. We too have a covenant, not a covenant with God, but a covenant with one another.
"We, the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association covenant to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person."
This is a very powerful statement. Do we really mean every person do we include the ghetto dweller of the inner city, the welfare mother, the undocumented alien, the death row inmate, O.J. or the Unabomber, yes, even the member of the Christian coalition?
If we can really make this our own, then there follows the next affirmation,
"Justice, equity and compassion in human relations."
Think on it. These two statements are a basis for a totally secular golden rule: "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you." But they go far beyond that. In past times they meant fighting slavery as abolitionists; fighting the festering relics of slavery one hundred years later with the civil rights movement and what was for many an unjust war on the other side of the Earth.
Today, as then, we find it difficult to agree on the implications of this affirmation we must each find its meaning for ourselves and then act on that meaning.
The next three statements in our covenant form the basis for our own community:
"Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations."
"A free and responsible search for truth and meaning."
"The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large."
When I first joined, I confused the concept of liberal religion with that of liberal politics. It took me quite a while before I found the true meaning of "acceptance of one another." Many of our veteran members are having trouble with the directions spiritual growth have taken. But we are not relativists, as we have been accused of being by the religious right. Our quest for "truth and meaning" does not take us just anywhere.
The last part of the fifth statement, "society at large," leads right into the final two, our goals for humanity and the environment:
"The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all."
and
"Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part."
I know one of our members is going to object that we give less than lip service to this last statement. We "respect" our environment but we exploit it none the less.
This covenant, then, defines what it means to be a Unitarian Universalist.
We each understand these statements in our own way. For example, I have trouble with the "every person" in the very first one. Did Hitler, did Stalin have "inherent worth and dignity?" It was an Anglican friend of mine who pointed out that in his theology, "God's gift" of free will is itself the element of worth and dignity, even of those totally evil figures.
One of the sources of the greatest diversity in our membership is in our individual conceptions of "spiritual growth." And it is here that the greatest changes have taken place in the Association and in our Fellowship over the past ten years.
One philosopher speculated that religious feeling originated in the awe we feel in the presence of the great spectacle of nature:
The great vault of heaven, the sun in its daily course, the blush of the dawn, the moon, the stars, the winds, the clouds, the lightning, the bounteous rain falling upon the earth, the flame that rises heavenward from the homely hearth, all, in short, that the eye sees in its simplest lines, is the foundation, the whole foundation, of the rich myths that we meet in the Rig-Veda. .... Nature is identical with man, man identical with nature, Any thought of a distinction does not yet exist. Such was the prayer which the old Aryan herdsman addressed to the gods of the dawn, in the days when he dwelt in the highlands and possessed nothing resembling an abstract philosophy: not only did he pray for help against the dangers of the night, but also for knowledge, for wisdom; how would it be possible that the conqueror of the dangers of the night, the morning herald of the Sun, should not also be a conqueror of the night of ignorance, a giver of spiritual enlightenment. Not only does such a prayer say, "awaken the joy of courage in us," a thing which the least imaginative of mankind might expect from the fresh breath of morning, but it says at the same time "and bring us knowledge." In the same way to the Sun-god Savitar is addressed the prayer, not only that he may bestow upon mankind the light which is the object of his desire, but also that he may "give furtherance to thought." When the sun rises I become wise: I have but to open my eyes and to perceive everything; I find myself illuminated in surrounding nature, and nature illuminated in me. As the Rig-Veda says, "In the heart Varuna created Will, in Heaven the Sun." Of the same nature are both.
Did you catch that reference to the "Aryan" herdsman? This quote is from an essay by Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the Germanized Englishman whose racist ideology is considered by many to have been the philosophical basis for Hitler's Aryan racism.
Chamberlain traced the origin of religious awe to the wonders of nature. He is speaking about what we call "earth-based" religion nature worship, pre-literate religion.
My personal spirituality is bound up with that same awe of natural phenomena described by Chamberlain, but based on the great discoveries of 20th century science. The great cosmological mysteries unveiled for us by the Hubble telescope, the unraveling of the fantastic nature and life cycle of the AIDS virus, and the "wonders still [that] the world shall witness" in the words of my favorite hymn, these are the components of my personal spirituality. And I stand in awe before the human brain, that is at home in the infinitesimally small and the infinitely great, and in the remotest past of the universe when only bare energy existed.
The knowledge that every chemical element beyond hydrogen and helium was created in gigantic stars and spewed out into the cosmos when those stars exploded, long before our own local star formed, means to me that "we are indeed the stuff that stars are made of." Every living thing, nay, every stone, everything material object that we know is made of the same star-born stuff. This is indeed an "interdependent web."
There is a story I heard many years ago in communist Prague, when imitation of everything Soviet was their form of PC. I present it here as a parable.
Shortly after liberation a trade union delegation from Prague was invited to visit the Soviet Union. On their return they told what they had learned. "And one of the nicest customs was to hold weddings in the trade union halls" they said; "this brought members so much closer to the unions." So they decided to do the same.Some years later there was a return visit. Before their departure they told about their impressions. "And you hold your weddings in the trade union halls," they said. "We're curious about the reasons. During the war the Germans destroyed most of our town halls, so we had to have weddings wherever we could. You didn't have such destruction, so what's your reason for this?"
Just so, we cannot go back to the direct, simple nature worship of the Aryan herdsman or the native American of the plains or mountains, but must encompass in our nature worship all that we have learned and know. The golden age is before us.
The essence of religion is to address fundamental human questions that science cannot address by its very nature. Science can tell us how we got here. Science can predict the dire consequences of carrying certain defective pregnancies to term; it cannot defend or deny the right to "partial-birth abortion." Science certainly cannot tell us whether or not to abort an unexpected and unwanted one. Science can predict the time and manner of our death in the case of terminal illness; Science cannot inform us in a decision to choose not to die that way. If Unitarian Universalism is a religion, I do not see belief in anything super- or supra-natural as essential to our concept of religion. Is it an oxymoron to declare that ours is a secular religion? The great theologian, Paul Tillich, had this to say:
Religion is the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern, a concern which qualifies all other concerns as preliminary and which itself contains the answer to the question of a meaning of our life.[Paul Tillich (1886 1965), German-born U.S. theologian. Christianity and the Encounter of the World Religions, ch. 1 (1963).]
I invite each of you to reflect on your own UU identity. Why did you come here? What did you find? How have you shed the negatives of your past identity to find a new, positive meaning in your joining with us in our secular humanist covenant? We shall be returning to these questions in the near future.
There are two kinds of truth; the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart.Raymond Chandler