THE EPIC OF UNITARIANISM

A Sermon by James Ishmael Ford

4 August 2002

We all are on journeys of faith, exploring meaning and purpose in our lives. Some of us come here seeking ways of engaging the world from a healthy perspective, seeking an ethical religion. Others among us are looking for our own direct understanding of God, distrusting the mediation of others, wanting to know directly for ourselves. Others come here hoping perhaps for some help in raising our children.

However we might frame it, all of us coming here into this community are seeking ways to engage this mysterious terrible and beautiful reality within which we find ourselves, in which we find our living and our dying. Now the very idea of this seeking is worth noting. Throughout most of human history, nearly all of human history, the only option for our spiritual quest was through the delivered faith of our ancestors.

So, if we were born in France a hundred years ago we would almost certainly be Catholic, and if not we’d belong to one of the tiny Protestant communities. If we were born in Japan a thousand years ago, we would be registered in our village temple likely as some form of Shinto or Buddhist. If we were born in the Congo two thousand years ago, the very air we breathed probably would be named by our ancestral religion, a shamanic faith belonging only to the few thousand people who spoke our language.

But today, for the good and the ill of it, we have choices in our religions. We start somewhere, of course. I was raised a fundamentalist Baptist. Other people in this room were raised Catholic. Many of us were raised Jewish of one flavor or another. Others here were raised one kind of Protestant or another. A few come out of other religious traditions or none at all. And of those in this room only a fairly small percentage of us started out as Unitarian Universalists.

Also being a Unitarian Universalist doesn’t necessarily mean rejecting all of our faith of origin, or crucial aspects of the faiths we’ve encountered on our way to this place. So, within this mix, in a culture of wild possibilities, of free choice we find ourselves also within a religious community that is open to even more choices. One definitely must have a high tolerance for ambiguity to be happy among us.

Here we are wildly, deliciously, confusingly free. There is no test at the door. You are welcome here as you are. Now the fairest question out of this might be, "So, who are we?" Or, "What, then, is a Unitarian Universalist?" What makes us something different than a club for the liberal-minded or just a baby-sitting co-op? Well, that brings us to the subject for today’s reflection.

I want to tell, just a little, just briefly, some of what the epic of Unitarianism might be. Epic means a word, a speech, a tale. But it also implies something surpassing the ordinary. Well, I think as we consider what it means to be a Unitarian Universalist, we truly are exploring an epic. I want to suggest within Unitarian Universalism we find a way of life, a path through the confusions and hurts we encounter, a door through which we can walk toward meaning and peace and joy.

Now in my studies I’ve observed there are two basic kinds of religions. Of course any division of a complex subject like religion into something so simple teeters at the edge of being simplistic. With that caution, broadly speaking, I find these two kinds of religions. The one is about revelation. The other is about awakening or wisdom. The first is given to us from the gods or God. The second we find for ourselves.

Most religions in the west, the great faiths of the Book, Judaism and Christianity and Islam, are the quintessential religions of revelation. God dictates through human agency what is needed for our happiness in this world and felicity in the next. The work of humans is interpretation, understanding the words, which are often given obliquely, and acting out of those reflections.

Most characteristic religions of awakening or wisdom have arisen in the East. Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism are grand examples of living faiths that put their emphasis on wisdom. The work of the human in these religions is directly understanding the world, and how it functions. Here we try to bring our actions into harmony with the way things are.

Now back to the caution. Of course anyone who is familiar with any of these faiths sees the cracks in my distinctions. Every one of these religions demonstrates aspects that I ascribe to the other category. Religions are complicated, not easily put into boxes. And nowhere is this truer than with Unitarian Universalism.
If one applies the duck principle to Unitarian Universalism: does it look like a duck? Walk like a duck? Quack like a duck? One would say we were some kind of Protestants. Certainly we look like Protestants, more so than most of us would like. Look at our buildings. Look at the way we organize our worship services. Whether we like it or not it is fairly obvious our style, our ethos, is very much informed by our ancestors who had no doubt they were Protestant Christians.

But appearances can be deceiving. Something happened along the way. And we became something quite different than our cousins the Congregationalists. Many of us today are Christians, and proudly so. But most of us are not. Certainly in our Society here in the suburbs of Boston gathering at the dawn of the twenty-first century a very small percentage of us would call ourselves Christian in any but the most general and cultural sense.

And this has to do with the epic of our faith, Unitarian Universalism. In a few weeks I’ll address the beautiful path that is Universalism. This week I will try to hold myself to that current we call Unitarianism, and what this can mean.

Now there are two great divisions of Unitarians, one is English speaking and the other Hungarian speaking. Because of time constraints, for today I am simply going to address one facet of English speaking Unitarianism. And that is what one is going to encounter here within this Society, as well as in the thousand other congregations joined together across the North American continent as the Unitarian Universalist Association.

One very old joke about the Unitarians is that if we were to have a creed, a test of faith, it would have three points. First, we believe in the fatherhood of God (actually we would not likely use such gender specific terms for the divine anymore, but this is as the joke was presented originally in its nineteenth century form). Second, we believe in the brotherhood of Man (again we would use somewhat different terms today). And, third, we believe in the neighborhood of Boston. (And, that hasn’t changed a whole lot.)

Of the thousand congregations I mentioned comprising the Unitarian Universalist Association, nearly half are still in New England. Our roots run deep in the rocky soil just outside this building. If you go to the original Puritan churches, the ones founded before seventeen hundred, nearly all are now Unitarian. For instance if you drive down to Plymouth and walk up the square, there at the top, is the First Parish in Plymouth, Unitarian Universalist. The First and Second church of Boston the real first and second churches established in Boston, now joined together as one congregation is Unitarian.

So how did this happen? How did New England Puritan Calvinism produce the most liberal religion in North America? Well, one way to consider the origins of our living faith took place during the first parts of the eighteenth century. This was the time of the first Great Awakening. The fiery Methodist preacher George Whitefield was attracting gigantic crowds to his gatherings, which were filled with emotional fervor, and even talking in tongues something that does not appear to have been seen since New Testament times.
Ministers of the established order were not pleased. And they denounced the new enthusiasm as ungodly. When quite reasonably they were called upon to say what then is godly, out of their responses the first hint of our way emerged. These grand conservatives, like Charles Chauncy minister of the First Parish in Boston, declared, "Why the human mind is godly." In fact, they would passionately assert, the human mind is very image of the divine described in scripture.

And here we first find the possibility of awakening; not the emotional awakening George Whitefield called people to, but another awakening, to the fiery mind, to wisdom. The fiery mind, if you’ll allow a shift in metaphor, opened a door through which our ancestor’s walked to a faith of freedom. Now they were not yet Unitarians. These first dissenters from the revealed and established Calvinism of the day mostly embraced Arminianism, which was essentially an assertion we human beings have free will, we can choose good or ill.

But over the next hundred years the shifting continued and something vital happened. What informed that initial impulse was reason, our natural ability to weigh, to reflect, and to choose. This is the eighteenth century, after all. This is the time of which Alexander Pope sang: "Nature, and Nature’s laws lay hid in Night:/God said, Let Newton be! and all was Light."

Here was perhaps another kind of enthusiasm, for the mind itself. During these, if you will, heady times, people saw a divine order in nature itself. And those who we in this room count as our ancestors believed fervently that the clockwork universe was knowable, and if you will, in good time would be known by human beings.

Much good and much ill would birth out of this embracing of rationalism. The good of human dignity, and the horrors of seemingly endless tyrannies all claim the same mother in reason. But, I suggest, at its very best, this rationalism that goes to the root of our religious movement is something good and precious.

It is in fact about something more than the accumulation of facts or knowledge. Not that such endeavors are bad. Would that our national leaders were a little more dedicated to the accumulation of information before acting on many of the terrible concerns facing us today. But in matters spiritual the accumulation of facts just isn’t enough. We’ve long since learned the universe is not a Newtonian watch that simply needs to be taken apart to be understood.

And with this knowing, here we find the new humanism and the great rationality, the authentic way of wisdom. Here in the universe within which we actually live, meaning and purpose always seems just beyond the horizon. Indeed the madness of our times echoes the uncertainty that seems to make up the cosmos we actually live in. And sadly we’ve found simply adding fact upon fact does not seem to bind the wounds, or heal the hurts of our human lives.

But, then there is wisdom. This is the awakening to which we are called in our living liberal faith. Here we are poked and prodded, until we stir from our slumbers and awaken. And this is a very important point. Anyone may come into this Society believing what they will, what you will. In fact, we need you to come here among us holding honestly to what you’ve found to be true so far.

But then there will be questioning. Our faith demands we engage. We do this both formally and informally. Maybe half the people in this community are engaged in practices of presence, most notably our small group ministries, offering deep conversations around the great issues of life and death, of meaning and direction.
The other half among us would never belong to a group so formally structured. Here the necessary work takes place during coffee hour, while sharing in the teaching of our children, or marching together in support of our Gay community. But stay here and it happens. You will be as we all are; challenged in what you think is so. You will be as we all are, poked and prodded along the way.

And with just a little luck, from this prodding and poking, each of us can stir from our slumbers, can awaken. Here we find the waking world is not something otherworldly, something someplace else. But rather it is all about being here. Wisdom is discovering a world of noticing, of engaging, of not turning away. What we discover as we do this is not all that different than what our Unitarian spiritual ancestor’s noticed as they stirred and awakened.

The way of Unitarianism has always been a way of seeking a sense of harmony with the cosmos, and acting from that sense. And, of course, this is ongoing. Our understanding continues to deepen. So, we’ve given up our understanding of the world as a watch. Instead we have found it to be a great lumbering grizzly bear. It is big. It is alive and animal. And it is dangerous. But, knowing this cosmos within which we live is dangerous and big and alive we can also understand its harmonies. We just have to be careful.

So here is the epic for us today. It is to find our way to wake to the world, to see suffering where it is, and to know joy where it is, and never turning away from anything. It is about learning the arts of being careful. Out of this what you and I choose to do with our lives, how we choose to treat children and each other determines much. Out of this how we choose to act in the world determines much.

And so this is the challenge of our living faith. Here is the call. Do we follow the ways of sleep, simply allowing our appetites and whims to rule the day? Or do we struggle to wake from our slumber and learn the dance of the grizzly bear?

If one avoids the teeth and claws, it can be something mysterious and good. It is the way of a full life. It is the way of peace and justice and love and care. And if we choose this path, then here we are, people on the way of wisdom. And should we choose this way, here we find how we are joined in the great saving epic of Unitarianism.

You and me.

Isn’t it wonderful?

Amen.