sermon14Sep03

The second anniversary of September 11th was accompanied by many demonstrations of patriotism and a lot of talk about patriotism, but personally speaking I don’t consider the President’s proposed further erosion of constitutional rights as patriotic. I can think of other adjectives I might use, but “patriotic” is not among them.

I do consider our Unitarian Universalist faith to be a most patriotic religion, for we have given no fewer than five presidents – five! – to this great nation of ours. Two members of the Adams family, John Adams and his son John Quincy. They were not the only other father and son presidential combination in the history of our country. In this particular case the son was not a very good president. He was not great, he was not even good. He was an excellent diplomat before he became president, he was a force as a congressman after he had been president, but as a president he was ineffective, and probably would rank in the annals of history only slightly ahead of another Unitarian president whose name is seldom mentioned by me or us, Millard Fillmore.

William Howard Taft was the most recent Unitarian occupant of the White House, so you see we’re well overdue (almost as overdue as the Boston Red Sox!). You know that President Taft, following his presidential days, made a trip to Omaha, and he was here in this building and outside at the laying of the cornerstone. Not the dedication; that happened some time later; he was here at the laying of the cornerstone. And the Omaha Bee, a newspaper back then, said, “The former president appeared hale and fit, and with his ruddy complexion he didn’t look a day over 50.” Well, that’s not my remembrance of William Howard Taft, and in fact when Taft witnessed a parachute demonstration, a parachutist jumped out of a balloon, he demonstrated his youthful vigor by saying, “Perhaps I’d like to have a go at that myself!” Apparently that’s as far as it went.

Of course I saved the best for last, and what did JFK say about “the greatest amount of intelligence gathered at the White House was when Thomas Jefferson dined alone”? Jefferson was not only a great president, he was a great patriot in the best and truest sense of the word. In 1776 he drafted the Declaration of Independence, in 1777 he drafted the Virginia statute for religious freedom, which became the basis for our freedom of religion and the first amendment. He called the Constitution, as amended with the Bill of Rights, “unquestionably the wisest yet presented to man.”

He was also a great Unitarian, and not everybody knows that, especially those Fundamentalists who say, “Well, the founding fathers all believed thus and so.” He was a religious revolutionary. His spiritual notions were so radical for the time that he kept his theological writings locked up in a cabinet, and his Jefferson Bible, his version of the Bible with all the objectionable stuff, objectionable to him, edited out. He did this with scissors and paste, working for two weeks at night alone in the White House – there was not as much to do during those days for the president, so he had extra time. Some years later he wrote to Dr Benjamin Waterhouse of Cambridge, Massachusetts, which was the heart of Unitarian country, lamenting the fact that he would not be able to attend a Unitarian church because there weren’t any in his neighborhood near Monticello. He wrote, “The population of my neighborhood is too slender and too much divided into other sects to maintain any one preacher well. I must be contented to be a Unitarian by myself.”

In an earlier epistle to the same correspondent, he wrote, “I rejoice that in this blessed country of free inquiry and belief, which has surrendered its conscience to neither kings nor priests, the genuine doctrine of only one God is reviving, and I trust that there is not a young man now living in the United States who will not die a Unitarian.” Well, Jefferson was a talented individual, but he was no Jeanne Dixon! He made the mistake of thinking that everybody else was like him, and of course we’re not.

And the reason that we didn’t grow into a denomination of Jeffersonian proportions was articulated at this year’s General Assembly in Boston by Rabbi Harold Kushner, who is best known as the author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Rabbi Kushner addressed one of our meetings there, and he said, “I feel very much at home with you. The greatest strength, and the greatest limitation, of Unitarian Universalism is that you are a thinking person’s faith.” The greatest strength and the greatest limitation. And he pointed out that fundamental religions and orthodox religions are growing because some people are uncomfortable with ambivalence. They want certitude. That’s certainly true, as President Clinton said (not yesterday, but some other time), “Some people follow someone who is confident but wrong, rather than someone who is tentative but right.”

Carl Jung, the great Swiss psychiatrist and psychologist, called creeds “ substitutes for religious experience.” He believed that, while they provide certitude, or seeming certitude, they actually stand in the way of spiritual development; you will go no further. This is what you believe, this is what you have to believe, if you want to go to the great hereafter. The Baroness Avera Vonderheit, who was a disciple of Jung’s, wrote, “A creed can act as a protection against the onslaughts of immediate experience for those whose ego position,” and she was English, so she would have said “eggo” position, “is too weak to tolerate loss of certainties, or against the despair and confusion generated by feelings of isolation.”

And isn’t that how you and I felt before we discovered Unitarian Universalism? Isolated? Remember the joy that each of us felt upon this great discovery? We discovered that we weren’t alone! We weren’t crazy just because we marched to a different drummer; there were others out there like us, who thought like us, who questioned, who quested. And when we came out of the cold of isolation, we found a home and companionship for the journey.

Because ours is a thinking person’s faith, it seems quite natural to me that it has been and is a changing faith, an evolving faith. In prior centuries, witness the development of three major philosophies in our free faith. But the distinctive Unitarian Universalist stamp was that as each new development came forth it did not displace its predecessor, but simply gave it company. That’s a very important point to remember as we course the uncharted waters of the 21st century, and I’ll review those very, very briefly.

The first religious philosophy of Channing’s day was called “Unitarian Christianity” or “liberal Christianity,” or “rational Christianity.” It was not Trinitarian, but you know the Jesus miracles were still seen as validation of the authenticity of his person and scripture. Seems a stretch to call that “rational” Christianity, but it was.

And then Transcendentalism, a kind of universal theism, did away with an anthropological God. God was no longer out there, but in here, within nature and the human soul. And because we are part and parcel of God, Emerson, after he left the ministry, said that all ministers and churches were superfluous. You didn't need an intermediary, you could have a direct experience, “the doors of the temple stand open night and day.” Well, this didn’t win him any friends among his fellow Unitarians, and was an anathema at Harvard Divinity School for several decades.

And then in the early days of the last century, our religion broadened to include religious humanism. While religious matters are of importance, religious humanists believe that the starting point for the exploration of religious issues, theological issues, is the human being and not speculation about a supreme being. That’s the fundamental difference. I refer to myself as a religious humanist and an awestruck agnostic. I believe that the starting point for religious inquiry should be humankind and not heavenly kind, if you will.

The Greek word for “knowledge” is “gnosis,” and if you put an “a” in front of it, it becomes “lack of knowledge” or “no knowledge” or “incomplete knowledge.” When Carl Jung was an old man, someone asked him, “How does it feel to be so full of years and wisdom and knowledge that you have acquired?” And Jung, who I think was in his 80’s then, said, “I feel as if I have gained enough knowledge to cover one fingernail on one little finger.” Now if Jung can say that, it feels correct to call myself an agnostic. An awestruck one, struck at the miraculous events that occur every day of our lives.

So you see, our free faith has broadened over the centuries, and I think it will continue and is continuing to broaden. This is how a Boston Globe reporter began his description of this year’s General Assembly in Boston, our historical home: “They’re all here this weekend – the Christians and the Jews, the Buddhists and the Wiccans, the theists and the atheists, and the agnostics and the humanists – all members of one religious denomination not sure how it feels about God.” You see, there’s no certitude there!

The last part of that sentence really refers to a controversy of whatever proportion, some say big and some not so big, that began last January of this year when the Fort Worth Star Telegram erroneously, erroneously (I’ll say it three times), erroneously reported that the president of the UUA, the Reverend Dr. William Sinkford, wanted to add the word “God” to our Unitarian Universalist principles. For some people, them’s fightin’ words! Well, the paper publicly clarified, saying that Sinkford spoke not of the term “God,” but of what he calls “a language of reverence” that acknowledges the presence of the holy in our lives. Sinkford does not think we have an adequate language of reverence, and without it we’re missing the boat. Now he’s not trying to push God or theism down our throats. He is a Unitarian Universalist theist, he hasn’t always been one, and the two terms are not mutually exclusive. We have many points of view under our roof. But I learned from this article, what I didn’t know, that he underwent a conversion experience in a hospital room six years ago when a son nearly died of a drug overdose. And he has prayed on a regular basis ever since.

Well I think we all have our own ways of praying, even though we may not call it that, or think of it as that, or look upon it as that. We have lots more company under the umbrella today than ever before. We are told that every theological point of view, every religious philosophy held in our movement is a minority point of view. There is no longer a majority of theists or religious humanists or liberal Christians, but every Unitarian is in a minority group. Now the UUA Commission on Appraisal tackles an important project within our religion every four years, and now they’re halfway through a search in hopes of answering the question, “Where is the unity in our theological diversity?” Or as one of my ministerial colleagues puts it, “What is the handle of the umbrella under which all our theologies shelter?”

There’s been a fair amount of discussion on the UU ministers’ chat room about our elusive core. Certainly an important part of our core, what I take our core to be, would be our principles. Our seven principles cover the gamut from the inherent belief in “the inherent worth and dignity of every individual” to “respect for the interdependent web of all existence, of which we are a part.” Regardless of our individual religious philosophies, and we never tell each other how to believe or how to believe or not to believe, we can all rally around our seven principles. So it seems to me.

Professor Marvin Shaw, recently retired following a distinguished career in Religious Studies at Montana State University, speaks of a source of unity that is deeper than intellectual agreement. He believes that a religious community can be united in its life together without an agreement as to beliefs. “The basis for the unity,” he contends, “in our churches and fellowships is not shared beliefs, but a common quest and the affirmation of the values necessary to its furtherance. Our church is not based on agreement as to belief, but on agreement as to method.” That resonates with me.

So we have our principles, we have our methods, and we have our story. We have our Universalist story, our Unitarian story, our Unitarian Universalist story, and those are important.

My late aunt Helen Frances Benner Nichols provided the Benner family with a great boon by not only researching genealogy (she was in the D.A.R.), but also writing a family history, stories of individuals. So I can go back and read about Silas Benner and what he did, and John Henry Benner who came over on the boat. Tracing some of our ancestors wasn’t easy because apparently in those perilous days, we’re talking about mid-18th century, John Henry’s wife died on the voyage, and he remarried before they hit shore! Now I know that. Now, on my mother’s side, there’s nothing. I knew my grandmother; I never met my grandfather, he’d long since taken off for the wherever. But nothing was written down, nothing was recorded. There were no pictures or very, very few, and it’s all gone! My mother’s gone, my aunt’s gone, and there’s no one to ask anymore. What a tremendous gift that family history is! It gives us a sense of rootedness, a sense of stability, if you will.

Our Unitarian and Universalist story is a great treasure. We are united by what we hold in common. Their story becomes our story, and we too become part of the story. Our free faith provides us with roots, as well as wings. You can feel it in the words of the hymn that evokes the power of those who have gone before in that great stream of loving souls.
Bring, O Past, your honor;bring, O Time, your harvest,golden sheaves of hallowed lives and minds by Truth made free;come, you faithful spirits,builders of this temple:"To Holiness, to Love, and Liberty."

I would offer our principles, our method, and our history as our handle of an umbrella under which all our theologies can shelter.