Richard E. Benner Sermon Feb 2, 2003

There was a woman living in mid-America who hadn’t been to church in years. She’d heard some interesting things about these Unitarians and thought she’d give the church in her city a try. She had to locate it. She didn’t know where it was, so she looked up the address in the phone book, and since she didn’t know where it was and wasn’t familiar with that part of the city, she allowed herself plenty of time on that Sunday morning to find it. So she got in her car, and she drove, and then she drove some more, and she drove some more. She couldn’t find it. Well, sometimes we do that to people. We make it difficult for them to find us. So fearing that she had driven past, she spotted a taxi pulled alongside the curb and pulled up to the taxi, rolled down her window and asked innocently, "Excuse me, cabbie, but can you tell me if I’m too far out for the Unitarians?" to which the cabbie blithely replied, "Lady, that’s impossible."

Well, because our free faith does not have a creedal test or a binding dogma or a required set of beliefs, and because our religion is not like "theirs," some do see Unitarian Universalism as too far out. "What, you don’t all believe in a god? How can you have a religion?" One wag even quipped that UUs were atheists who had not yet successfully kicked the churchgoing habit.

I, however, prefer Alfred North Whitehead’s statement that Unitarians believe in at most one god. Come to think of it, Unitarian Universalism is something like the psychology of C.G. Jung: Difficult to understand, at least at first engagement, but easily misunderstood. Unitarian Universalism, as we very well know, is not the easiest approach to religion, and in that sense it is difficult to understand, but to those out there it is easily misunderstood.

"How can some of you believe in a god and others not? I mean, what kind of a religion is that?" Ours is a religion that believes revelation is not sealed, to use the traditional terminology. The truth does not lie only between the covers of a particular book or collection of books, but the truth has many potential sources. And, because revelation is not sealed, because new occasions teach new duties, and because change is inevitable — in fact, that’s all there is, is change, our free faith over the years has experienced an ongoing evolution, an evolution which continues and will continue.

Channing’s Unitarian Christianity was enlarged by Emerson’s transcendentalism, which in turn was enlarged by humanism, which is being enlarged today by our current spiritual diversity. How much have we changed? In 1967 a scientific opinion poll was sent out to a number of UUs. The results indicate that 2.9% of those who responded said they believe in God as a supernatural being, that’s 3%, roughly. At that time, 30 years ago, 28% regarded God as an irrelevant concept. And, 44% said "God" could be appropriately used as the name of some natural process such as evolution or love, and 52% of those who responded thought that Unitarian Universalism was a distinctive humanistic religion.

We had another survey just a few years ago as part of the Fulfilling the Promise campaign. It was not a scientific survey, so I won’t quote you the percentages because you want to compare them, and they are not really comparable, but it indicates that we have become more than humanists. We also identify ourselves, respondents did, as having earth-centered or nature-centered religion, theists, Christians, mystics, with scattered votes for Buddhism and Judaism as well. In today’s UU world, it would appear that every theological point of view is a minority position. That there is no longer one dominant position led me to wonder and question: Are we expanding like the universe, headed toward an uncertain future? Will the day come when we will all pack our bags and just go separate ways? And, at that point, will Unitarian Universalism be relegated to a museum instead of a church? Will it no longer become a living faith? Will the center hold? Is there a center, for that matter?

In the late 1990s, the same survey asked that very question: "What is the glue that binds individual Unitarian Universalists and congregations together?" The glue is our shared values and principals, indicated 52.1% of the respondents. And another 42.5% said the acceptance, respect, and support for each other as individuals is the glue that holds us together. Now, if you add those together, that comes to about 96.6%, but if you add the other three responses, it’s over 100%, so I suppose some voted for more than one. Now, the remarkable thing is that the people who voted for those two choices cut across all theological lines: Humanist, earth-centered, nature-centered, theists, Christian, Buddhists, Jewish and mystic. All of those respondents ranked these two responses either first or second, every one of them. And, Bill Sinkford, who is today our president and back then was in charge of the survey process, commented that, although we struggle with it, there is a center to Unitarian Universalism. Although there were differences, the consistency and coherence are really stunning.

There was also a question, "What tickles your spiritual funny-bone," and there was quite a bit of coherence and consistency in the answer chosen to that one too, which I think you will enjoy. Thirty-three percent answered the question, "What tickles your spiritual funny-bone," this way: That UUs claim to be seekers at the same time we act like we have the answers. Part of our glue?

And of our democratically arrived at seven principles that Rev. Lex Crane wrote, it is worth pointing out that the principles embrace the entire range of human experience: From the individual to the interdependent web of all existence. The lifelong search for truth and meaning lies at the midpoint of the seven principles. Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part is seventh. So at the midpoint we have this search for truth, suggesting that the search is a central value in our lives and that it must take place in the tension between our affirmation of the worth of the individual person and our recognition of the high importance of the interdependent web of which each is a part. And, Crane points out that by accepting the principles, we are in agreement about the underpinnings of the principles. There is a tacit assumption that the principles, tentative though they are, provide a working hypothesis for promoting the creative cultural evolution of humanity for ensuring the survival of our species.

There are other ingredients in addition to our principles, in our glue, that make us members, one of another, as the apostle Paul wrote. They include our common history from the mountains of Transylvania to the shores of our new world. It is actually a very uncommon history. Countless inspiring stories of adventuring and adventurous souls who indeed went far out, far, far beyond the confines of the conformity of their day, at times at great personal cost and sacrifice.

Yes, we have our lonely prophets. We have our martyrs. Francis David, who proclaimed that we do not have to think alike to love alike, dying in his cell carved into a mountainside. Joseph Priestley, the discoverer of oxygen, the English Unitarian, running from a mob that had just torched his house and laboratory in Birmingham, England. And Dorothea Dix, from my native state of Maine, going far out where proper women of her day would never dream of going, bringing the light of love and reform to prisoners in jails and to the mentally ill in the asylums. And Clara Barton, who went far, far beyond, choosing not one side to serve in the Civil War but being an angel of the battlefield, ministering to both blue and gray. And closer to our time, the Rev. James Reeb, dying in a pool of his own blood, bludgeoned to death on the streets of Selma. He came from far away Boston heeding Dr. King’s call and the call of his own conscience.

I like Ron Knapp’s idea -- Ron is our minister emeritus -- about the church being a communion of saints, not in the traditional orthodox sense in which we can pray to a saint and he or she will be our intermediary, but of the church as comprised of the dead as well as the living, not just those of us who are here today. We join hands with those who have gone before to form a great stream of living souls. There is our uncommon history. There are the principles and the assumptions underlying those principles and the commitments. There is our intellectual tradition, our literary tradition, our great spiritual tradition, which is a wide and deep tradition. There is our sense of community. Every Unitarian church or fellowship I have ever visited, and you may have had this experience as well, you will almost immediately sense a certain feeling of at-home-ness when you are there. It can be in the venerable King’s Chapel in Boston, which was gathered in 1686 as an Anglican church and later transformed, or it can be in a small rural fellowship. There is that sense of at-home-ness, being among kindred spirits. And for those of us here who are members of this congregation, there is another part of the glue which may be so obvious that we overlook it.

And I talk about this precious gift that was given unto us by those who have gone before. "We drink from wells we did not dig. We are warmed by fires we did not build." Each one of us is truly blessed by the continuing and vital ministry of this space, this building; in its spiritual symmetry and classical elegance, it speaks not only to us but sounds a grace note in the vast world beyond our doors, which can now be heard even better and louder since the removal of the building next door. Our grace note is louder.

Warren Ross, author of the book The Premise and the Promise, the story of the UUA since its founding in 1961, when asked about the glue, said perhaps there is a clue in our memorial services, which we seem to do so well, and we do. That is one of the things we do very well, and, if you have never attended one, you will just have to take my word for it or ask anyone else here who has attended one. And Ross asked, Why are memorial services especially appreciated? And he answered, It may well be not anything we do but what we don’t do. We don’t offer false comfort of reunion in the hereafter. We don’t recite rote prayers. We don’t follow empty rituals. I like to say it’s not a fill-in-the-blank-with-the-name kind of service.

What we do instead, he said, is to strive for honesty. We are honest about the person we are commemorating, or we try to be. We are honest about our grief and our sense of loss. We are honest about our confusion in the face of death. We know we can’t peer beyond the veil. We are honest about yearning to know our purpose without claiming to have a monopoly on the answers. And therein, he concludes, may lie the irreducible core that remains after all the temporal fashions in terminology and practice are stripped away. Our adamant refusal to believe or pretend to believe anything, that reason, or experience, or our communal search for truth tells us is not believable.

As so often, Ralph Waldo Emerson said it best, "All that is clear today is not to lie." What sets us apart, he concludes, from those who claim to be indifferent to religion is that we want answers. What sets us apart from virtually every other faith is that we will not accept easy answers. That holds true whether we call ourselves humanists or theists, agnostics or atheists, pagans or mystics. It holds true for the certain and the uncertain, for those who put primacy on intuition or on the intellect or give equal attention to both. From time to time, we may even change our minds. Rubber cement permits that. But one thing is forever clear to us: If religion is to be taken seriously, it is necessary not to lie. From that fierce commitment flows the values that we cling to and from which in turn comes our devotion to our free faith.