BEYOND TOLERANCE
Chris Bell
20 March 2005

Two stories lie behind this sermon.

First. The summer before last I attended a workshop at General Assembly sponsored by the Commission on Appraisal, the U.U.A. body charged with assessing the state of our movement. They are currently at work on answering the question, “Where is the unity in our theological diversity?”

During the workshop we engaged in a remarkable activity that is often done by a UU congregation only when they are seeking a new minister. We sat down and talked with one another about our faith. We dared to say what we really thought and felt about matters of ultimate importance. What is the center of my life? What is the meaning of my life? What is my ultimate source of strength and energy and hope? It was more than an interesting conversation; it was deeply moving. The act itself felt religious.

The Commission then concluded the session by asking, what has prevented you from having these wonderful conversations in your congregations? The most common answer was very simple. We’re basically afraid of offending anyone. We are afraid that the act of striving to agree on anything at all will somehow exclude something else, and exclusivity is one of the few real sins for this welcoming, creedless faith.

Second story. After a sermon about finding our “language of reverence” that I gave at First Parish some time ago, a member of the congregation approached me during the coffee hour. The sermon had had a good amount of talk about God or the Ultimate or the GREAT BIG THING as I variously call it, and this person wanted to discuss such matters. He had clearly been thinking very deeply about his spiritual life, and was struggling to find language to express an inner core of faith. What struck me was not the substance of the conversation but the apologetic, almost embarrassed tone that it was offered in. “Do you mind talking about this?” “Do I sound crazy?”

If someone could be that reluctant about talking about religion, even with a person who so loves talking about religion that he wants to preach for a living, then I found myself wondering if there was something about the culture of our community that was flawed or incomplete in some way. Something that had held this person back. I think I know what it is.

That “something” that holds us back, keeps us from talking, that keeps us living in fear of offending one another, that keeps us from growing into the fullness of our own and our common faith is, I submit, surprisingly and counter-intuitively, one of our highest principles: tolerance.

Of the many efforts to name what is at the heart of liberal religion one of the most authoritative is that of our great historian Earl Morse Wilbur. Writing the history of Unitarianism in 1945, Wilbur argued that our story was not that of a doctrinal sect but of a movement “fundamentally characterized by its steadfast and increasing devotion to three leading principles: first, complete mental freedom in religion rather than bondage to creeds or confessions; second, the unrestricted use of reason in religion rather than reliance upon external authority or past tradition; third, generous tolerance of differing religious views and usages rather than insistence upon uniformity in doctrine, worship or polity.”

Freedom, Reason and Tolerance. A different trinity, as a recent UU bumper sticker has it.

Our commitment to religious tolerance dates back to the first guarantee of Christian religious freedom in Europe, issued in 1568 by the Transylvanian King John Sigismund, a Unitarian. Among our greatest virtues, our three highest principles is this willingness to recognize and respect the beliefs or practices of others, a disposition to allow freedom of choice and behavior, some sense of permissible difference; of allowing some freedom to move within limits.

Of course, tolerance does also refer to the capacity to endure hardship or pain. When you go home today and say “today’s sermon was Beyond Tolerance”, I hope you will not be using this last sense of the word!
The more religious sense is from Act of Toleration, statute granting freedom of religious worship (with conditions) to dissenting Protestants in England, 1689, and it should come as no surprise that we uphold this principle, since a major stream of the dissenting Protestants turned into us.

Tolerance arose as a political ideal during the Enlightenment and was a direct response to the religious wars of the Reformation, particularly the awful, bloody, interminable Thirty Years War. It is arguable that the memory of the Thirty Years War shaped western political liberalism all the way into the last century.

After all, religion had not been on its best behavior during the Reformation, nor during the Crusades before that, and the principles of toleration that were most notably manifested in this country in the First Amendment were not just noble, but necessary. Something had to restrain those people who would kill over the meaning of communion or the authority of the pope and that was the privatization of religion, its removal from the public sphere under a broad and disengaged umbrella of toleration.

That strategy is being increasingly called into question. Ironically, these days in the field of political science and social ethics “tolerance” and its limitations is the hottest topic.

There is a sense of oppression involved. Someone gets to decide what is and isn’t acceptable as discourse. Many people, and not just conservatives feel like real talk of values gets pushed out of the public realm. A sense that they method of tolerance is unable to craft a vision of the public good, so we end up tolerating (enduring) poverty, and racism and oppression.

The questioning of tolerance is being done not by ideologues or bigoted folk, but from a diverse group including the deeply religious, post-modern philosophers, feminists, and social radicals. I know a bunch of deeply religious post-modernist feminists and social radicals – I go to church with many of them. So let me read from a 1999 Statement of Conscience drafted at General Assembly called “Beyond Religious Tolerance: The Challenges of Interfaith Cooperation Begin with Us”:

“Contemporary Unitarian Universalism is a pluralistic faith, drawing its strength from its openness to many different sources. While religious interdependence is an integral characteristic of our living tradition, we are not immune to religious intolerance. There is still hard work to be done within our ranks to ensure that Unitarian Universalists with different theological and philosophical beliefs feel equally at home in our congregations. We need to grow beyond the stereotypes, symbols, and semantic barriers that divide Unitarian Universalists from one another.”

How are we going to do that? By going beyond tolerance, and moving toward what religious educator Ronald Cram has called “Radical Dialogue” and what James has often referred to in his sermons as “Radical Engagement.”

I like this word, “engagement”, with its senses of pledging oneself, of beginning or continuing some enterprise or activity, of taking part, of coming together, interlocking like a gear. I also like it because it carries a little risk: we engage in conflict, too.

Engagement isn’t hands off, it’s hands on. It doesn’t leave quietly over there, it enters into here. It’s muddier, its scarier. Sometimes it might even get us into trouble: [Palm Sunday]. Engagement its also more fun. Releasing our tightly held views a little bit, opening ourselves to the possibility of change through dialogue and contact, we enter a more playful realm, bringing our selves, our views, our dreams, into a common area as offerings for a common good that is bigger and more mysterious than our allegedly individual, allegedly autonomous selves can grasp. In theology we call this “liminality” to use a $10 Harvard word that means “the in between.” Actually, at Harvard, that word costs $100.

Can people of diverse theological perspectives really live together in this liminal realm? Can go beyond tolerance into a realm of celebration of diversity, of engagement with the differences that every community has. You know my answer is yes, but I say so not just because I say so, but because there are so many theological and philosophical perspectives that affirm this mode of radical dialogue as the very ground of our being. I throw these out briefly like scatter-shot just to show how we might allow a chorus of voices, rather than a tolerating silence to be our way of communicating our faith to ourselves and to others.

From a theistic perspective, the great Jewish theologian and scholar Martin Buber taught that we are only truly alive when our relationship with the world and with one another was what he called “I and Thou” as opposed to “I and It.” When we objectify and limit other people we are treating them as “It”, when we really open and engaging, or we might say loving, we are treating them as “Thou” and in so doing we can a taste of the supremely engaged and open relationship which is known as God.

Buber said when we are truly alive, truly living in right relationship with one another and God, “we live in the currents of universal reciprocity.” Isn’t that a lovely phrase?

That phrase also captures the essence of a theory from philosophy, particularly 20th century existentialist philosophy, and echoed in the field of anthropology, which I’ll offer a humanist perspective, known as Intersubjectivity. The theory of Intersubjectivity, argues that our whole beings, our sense of self, our awareness and embrace of culture and knowledge, only arises and exists in the field between, between be me and you, between me and the world. It’s not easy to live here, you can’t grasp hold, but Intersubjectivity is what our lives really are. As anthropologist Michael Jackson says “Intersubjectivity is steeped in paradox and ambiguity.”

I don’t know about you, but my life certainly has its share of paradox and ambiguity, no matter how much I might wish otherwise.

Buddhists know the ambiguity and paradox inherent in the co-creation of reality as Co-dependent Origination, which teaches that any given thing can only exist because of all the other things that exist around it, supporting it, making up its parts, arising for a time and then falling away. With this understanding the whole universe is “in-between.”

Finally, some examples from our tradition.

Covenants
“We covenant with the Lord and with one another; and do bind ourselves in the presence of God to walk together in all his ways, according as he is pleased to reveal himself unto us in his blessed word of truth.” – The Salem Covenant of 1629
“The spirit of persuasion” – Alice Blair Wesley

FUSN’s mission statement:
“We come together in an open community that honors freedom of belief, to encourage spiritual growth in ourselves and our children [and] to share the wisdom of the many religious traditions, with reverence for the earth and in service to humanity.”

Tolerance takes care of the honoring of freedom of belief. Encouraging spiritual growth in ourselves and our children [and] sharing the wisdom of the many religious traditions is engagement. And that’s not just engagement with whoever is up here offering their thoughts. That’s not to say that your preachers aren’t very wise and that you shouldn’t listen to them. But there is a reservoir of encouragement and wisdom that exists in a congregation that is more powerful and available than a whole library of books, and that’s you. That’s us. All of us, cultivating real Love. Recall the words of the great Unitarian martyr Francis David “We need not think alike to love alike.” Now we are at the heart of engagement, a heart that tolerance alone cannot muster. A heart we find in small group ministry, in religious education, and ideally in ongoing and regular conversation with one another without fear of offense or of being found silly. Our highest calling is to make this space safe for one another that through the hearing of all our voices a higher, common good might be found. We want intimate relationships with one another, that’s why we bind ourselves together in community.

Consider a best friendship or a marriage…

Perhaps the most powerful image for we UUs lies in our most sacred ritual. I am speaking, of course, of the potluck. Bringing what we have. Bringing what we love. Open to tasting new things, even risking the possibility that we might develop new preferences. What if someone else also brings squash soup and it’s better than mine. And in learning to feed one another, and to be fed, we learn how to feed a world that is hungry for what we have to offer here.

Conclusion
Back to the Statement of witness:
“Interfaith cooperation sets a high standard of thought, feeling, and action for each individual and for each community that by its nature goes beyond the boundaries of self. It invites us to reach beyond ourselves into the world to confront fear, ignorance, and hatred wherever we find them. It also invites us to reach deep within ourselves to assess our own prejudices. This work begins with living our principles, thereby modeling what is possible in the broader community.”

Modeling this engagement, enacting this engagment, we draw forth and discover and live in a field of energetic and magnetic power that some of us rightly name God, and some of us rightly name the Spirit of Life, and that some of us rightly name the essence of our shared humanity, and that some of us rightly give no name at all. It doesn’t matter. We all know it as love, growing out of our circle of sharing and learning and testing, shifting, stretching, embracing, uplifting, engaging. This is the “formless field of benefaction” that binds us all together. This is the power that unites all, that unites universally in body, mind and heart, and my friends, isn’t uniting univers