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 humanbeing to damnation; Unitarians believe that they are too good forGod....After the merger meeting a Universalist called up a friend and said: "wewon. Unitarian is just an adjective."
The following sermon may be offensive to some listeners; listenerdiscretion is advised. The opinions expressed are those of the speakerand do not necessarily reflect the views of any other individual orcollective member of the UUA.
At age 65 I was feeling pretty isolated; aside from professionalrelationships and occasional lovers, as well as family members scatteredover 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 thatthere was a "church for atheists" I eagerly checked it out in theBritannica and then sought out our Fellowship where I met Isabel.Everybody meets Isabel the very first time they come here, but noteverybody has the luck to marry her. But everybody finds here thefellowship that I was seeking.
At the time, in 1986, the standing joke was that "Unitarians believe inat most one god." The evolution of our denomination over the past tenyears is illustrated by the new form of that joke: "any number exceptthree."
Just as for me the defining characteristic was welcome for anon-believer, an atheist, so for many others of us the definingcharacteristic is the absence of creed, of dogma, especially the onetheir parents stuck them with.
A lifelong unchurched man suddenly developed a vague religious urgeand 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 todo 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 tolearn Bible verses, swear belief in the Nicene and Apostles' creeds,swear off booze, and be baptized ("By immersion, not just some sissysprinklin'"). 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 wherehe 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." Theman'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 ofmaterial. 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." Theclerk says "But 9 yards is way too much material for a nightgown." TheUU answers: "I know, but my husband would rather seek than find."
When I joined, the congregation and the denomination had been fairlystatic for many years, with a rather purely secular, intellectual formof service, a form that has been described as "a talk, a discussion, anda 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 herwhat she learned. "The teacher told us the story of Moses leading hispeople 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 thePharaoh starting chasing them. When they got to this big lake, Mosescalled up his engineers and they built this pontoon bridge over the lakeand Moses and his people started across. When they got to the otherside, they waited until Pharaoh's army was on the bridge and then Mosescalled in his helicopters and artillery and they bombed the bridge andblew up the Pharaoh's army and they all drowned and Moses and his peoplegot away."
Sally's mother was horrified. "That can't be the way your teacher toldthe story!"
"Well, no" said Sally, "but you would never believe it the way she toldit."
But times have changed, almost imperceptibly. We have a thriving pagansubcommunity. Many of our newer members, and not only they, wantsomething 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 thegreater glory of god!
The conservative Christian will tell us that without God andChrist there cannot be any morality. "You could do anything." Of course,as the members of my Bible study circle know, even with God popping inall the time, people did do anything.
Still, Unitarian Universalism is not what it's not. We too have acovenant, not a covenant with God, but a covenant with one another.
"We, the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Associationcovenant to affirm and promotethe inherent worth and dignity of every person."
This is a very powerful statement. Do we really mean every person do weinclude the ghetto dweller of the inner city, the welfare mother, theundocumented 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 nextaffirmation,
"Justice, equity and compassion in human relations."
Think on it. These two statements are a basis for a totally seculargolden rule: "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you." Butthey go far beyond that. In past times they meant fighting slavery asabolitionists; fighting the festering relics of slavery one hundredyears later with the civil rights movement and what was for many anunjust war on the other side of the Earth.
Today, as then, we find it difficult to agree on the implications ofthis affirmation we must each find its meaning for ourselves and thenact on that meaning.
The next three statements in our covenant form the basis for our owncommunity:
"Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in ourcongregations."
"A free and responsible search for truth and meaning."
"The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process withinour congregations and in society at large."
When I first joined, I confused the concept of liberal religion withthat of liberal politics. It took me quite a while before I found thetrue meaning of "acceptance of one another." Many of our veteran membersare having trouble with the directions spiritual growth have taken. Butwe are not relativists, as we have been accused of being by thereligious right. Our quest for "truth and meaning" does not take us justanywhere.
The last part of the fifth statement, "society at large," leadsright 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 apart."
I know one of our members is going to object that we give less than lipservice to this last statement. We "respect" our environment but weexploit it none the less.
This covenant, then, defines what it means to be a UnitarianUniversalist.
We each understand these statements in our own way. For example, I havetrouble with the "every person" in the very first one. Did Hitler, didStalin have "inherent worth and dignity?" It was an Anglican friend ofmine who pointed out that in his theology, "God's gift" of free will isitself the element of worth and dignity, even of those totally evilfigures.
One of the sources of the greatest diversity in our membership is in ourindividual conceptions of "spiritual growth." And it is here that thegreatest changes have taken place in the Association and in ourFellowship over the past ten years.
One philosopher speculated that religious feeling originated in the awewe feel in the presence of the great spectacle of nature:
The great vault of heaven, the sun in its daily course, the blush of thedawn, the moon, the stars, the winds, the clouds, the lightning, thebounteous rain falling upon the earth, the flame that rises heavenwardfrom the homely hearth, all, in short, that the eye sees in its simplestlines, is the foundation, the whole foundation, of the rich myths that wemeet in the Rig-Veda. .... Nature is identical with man, man identicalwith nature, Any thought of a distinction does not yet exist. Such wasthe prayer which the old Aryan herdsman addressed to the gods of thedawn, in the days when he dwelt in the highlands and possessed nothingresembling an abstract philosophy: not only did he pray for help againstthe dangers of the night, but also for knowledge, for wisdom; how wouldit be possible that the conqueror of the dangers of the night, themorning herald of the Sun, should not also be a conqueror of the nightof ignorance, a giver of spiritual enlightenment. Not only does such aprayer say, "awaken the joy of courage in us," a thing which the leastimaginative of mankind might expect from the fresh breath of morning,but it says at the same time "and bring us knowledge." In the same wayto the Sun-god Savitar is addressed the prayer, not only that he maybestow upon mankind the light which is the object of his desire, butalso that he may "give furtherance to thought." When the sun rises Ibecome wise: I have but to open my eyes and to perceive everything; Ifind myself illuminated in surrounding nature, and nature illuminated inme. As the Rig-Veda says, "In the heart Varuna created Will, in Heaventhe Sun." Of the same nature are both.
Did you catch that reference to the "Aryan" herdsman? This quote is froman essay by Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the Germanized Englishman whoseracist ideology is considered by many to have been the philosophicalbasis 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 naturalphenomena described by Chamberlain, but based on the great discoveriesof 20th century science. The great cosmological mysteries unveiled forus by the Hubble telescope, the unraveling of the fantastic nature andlife cycle of the AIDS virus, and the "wonders still [that] the worldshall witness" in the words of my favorite hymn, these are thecomponents of my personal spirituality. And I stand in awe before thehuman brain, that is at home in the infinitesimally small and theinfinitely great, and in the remotest past of the universe when onlybare energy existed.
The knowledge that every chemical element beyond hydrogen and helium wascreated in gigantic stars and spewed out into the cosmos when thosestars 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 thesame star-born stuff. This is indeed an "interdependent web."
There is a story I heard many years ago in communist Prague, whenimitation of everything Soviet was their form of PC. I present it hereas a parable.
Shortly after liberation a trade union delegation from Prague wasinvited to visit the Soviet Union. On their return they told what theyhad learned. "And one of the nicest customs was to hold weddings in thetrade union halls" they said; "this brought members so much closer tothe unions." So they decided to do the same.Some years later there was a return visit. Before their departure theytold about their impressions. "And you hold your weddings in the tradeunion halls," they said. "We're curious about the reasons. During thewar the Germans destroyed most of our town halls, so we had to haveweddings wherever we could. You didn't have such destruction, so what'syour reason for this?"
Just so, we cannot go back to the direct, simple nature worship of theAryan herdsman or the native American of the plains or mountains, butmust 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 thatscience cannot address by its very nature. Science can tell us how wegot here. Science can predict the dire consequences of carrying certaindefective pregnancies to term; it cannot defend or deny the right to"partial-birth abortion." Science certainly cannot tell us whether ornot to abort an unexpected and unwanted one. Science can predict thetime and manner of our death in the case of terminal illness; Sciencecannot inform us in a decision to choose not to die that way. IfUnitarian Universalism is a religion, I do not see belief in anythingsuper- or supra-natural as essential to our concept of religion. Is itan oxymoron to declare that ours is a secular religion? The greattheologian, Paul Tillich, had this to say:
Religion is the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern, a concernwhich qualifies all other concerns as preliminary and which itselfcontains the answer to the question of a meaning of our life.[Paul Tillich (1886 1965), German-born U.S. theologian. Christianity andthe Encounter of the World Religions, ch. 1 (1963).]
I invite each of you to reflect on your own UU identity. Why did youcome here? What did you find? How have you shed the negatives of yourpast identity to find a new, positive meaning in your joining with us inour secular humanist covenant? We shall be returning to these questionsin the near future.
There are two kinds of truth; the truth that lights the way and thetruth that warms the heart.Raymond Chandler