PRAYER June 29, 2008

We pray from a place that knows there is much beauty in the world to behold.
We pray from a place that knows there is endless love that has the power to connect us all.
We pray from a place that knows that it matters what we believe.
The Angels of our Better Nature call us to notice the beauty.
The voices of our Higher Selves call us to remember love.
Let us listen to them.
There are voices that would have us judge someone else’s worth to be less because their approach is different than our own.
There are voices that would make us feel “less” because we don’t match someone else’s set of ideas.
There are voices that would focus us only on ugliness, and disconnection and tearing down.
But we know there is more love somewhere.
Let us listen to the Higher Voices.
The ones that add life to life; the ones that encourage us to come alive, and allow for everyone and everything around us to do the same.
Let us listen to those voices.

SERMON June 29, 2008

This sermon started over breakfast one morning. I sat across the table from my husband and saw a man who looked like he had something exciting to tell. “What,” I asked. Well, he had spent the morning brainstorming things he tells himself that he should or shouldn’t do/ be/think/feel. Several pages later, he felt quite light.

That’s when we sat down to breakfast.

“I should like cats!” He said. “ I always thought that I should like cat’s because my sister liked cats and not dogs.”

When we were first married 8 years ago, there was some discussion about whether we’d get a cat or a dog. He was a cat person. I was a dog person. I’d grown up with dogs. Beyond that, when I was very young, my dad developed severe asthma and cats were one of the triggers. So in a very serious way, I learned that we should not have cats and that stayed with me into adulthood.

I had to laugh at David’s revelation because sometime during our college years, my sister Mary announced that all dogs, as pets, should be big and black. She had read that somewhere and seemed to put stock in it, so I adopted the idea.

In 38 years, Mary has never had a large black dog. In 36 years, neither have I. But for some reason the idea had weight and for years I thought that if I got a dog, it should at least be big, if not dark. But that didn’t appeal to me and I wondered if something was wrong with me because of it. It’s likely that Mary forgot about this “should” shortly after our conversation, but I held onto it because it came from my wiser older sister. It’s funny how that can happen.

David and I now have two cuddly 12-pound miniature dachshunds. One is red, and one has white, brown, and black spots. Getting them was his idea, and I happily obliged.

My dad now lives happily in the same house as a cat. His allergies are under control.

Each one of us let go of a “should” and we are all happy for it.

The funny thing about “shoulds” is that they often originate as an appropriate response to a specific situation. And then they turn into absolutes inside of us so even when a situation changes, the “should” stays. It may or may not be relevant or even helpful anymore. And it can hold us back from some really great experiences.

My resistance to cats well beyond the years I lived with someone who was allergic (and apparently beyond the years they were detrimental to his health) to them is a light-hearted example.

There is a story about a woman who always cut the front and back ends off of a ham before putting it into the oven to bake. Her husband asked her one day why she always did that. She didn’t know precisely, but that’s how her mom had always done it so it must be the way to cook a ham. She called her mom to find out why. Her mother laughed and explained that her baking pan was too small to fit the entire ham so she had to make it fit somehow.

The behavior was a relevant response to having a small pan. It wasn’t so relevant in the daughter’s life. And she had thrown away a lot until she examined the “should.”

From the time we’re born we take in messages. Messages about how we should behave, what we should like, how we should act, who we should be, and how to apply these standards to other people or situations. These “shoulds” affect our lives and they affect our souls, often in profound ways.

What might our lives be like if we consciously examined our “shoulds”; if we figured out where they came from, who they belong to, and whether or not they are helpful in our lives now; if we looked at what choices are presented to us by our “shoulds”, and what choices are denied.

What might our lives look like?

That’s what I’d like to consider this morning.

So dogs and cats were the lighter side of the breakfast conversation that David and I had one morning. It turns out that I needed to give the church a sermon topic that day and now I had one.

Of course the next thing to do was to have a party. I invited my girlfriends over for good food and drink and thoughts.

Only some of the time did we directly talk about “shoulds.”

But we talked about them all night.

We told stories about growing up. We talked about motherhood a lot – either about our own mothers or the newness of being a mother that many of my friends are now experiencing.

We gathered to talk about “shoulds” … and talked about motherhood.

Interesting.

I don’t think that is a coincidence.

As girls, we often try to emulate our mothers, or be the opposite. Either way, we define ourselves by them for at least a while. Then we become the age our mothers were when we first tried to emulate them, maybe we become mothers ourselves, and we try to figure out what womanhood means in light of her. There is bound to be a lot of “shoulds” there.

The same could be said of a man’s experience.

It is from our parents that we learned that we shouldn’t run out into the street, or touch a hot stovetop, or pull the ears of a dog. It is from our parents that we learn we should say “please” and “thank you,” brush our teeth, and get a good night’s sleep.

And things much more profound.

Things like self-respect, or shame. Things like self-care, or denial. Things like trust, or fear.

And so on.

We learn these things from countless other places too. But they start at home.

The “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts” that we learn build the essential framework for the codes we live by. I don’t think our experience of life can be separated from these codes, or even (should) be. After all, it’s these codes that make groups of people able to function together. They give us identity. They give is direction. They keep us safe.

But they can also do the opposite. And then they’re detrimental.

And then, of course, there are the “shoulds” that start out as appropriate responses to a certain situation, and stay with us long after the situation has changed and the should is no longer helpful.

So much of what we believe we should or shouldn’t do comes from layers of indirect conditioning. Then we are compelled to live by a code that we’re not fully conscious of or can’t really articulate. We just know somewhere deep in our fibers certain do’s and don’ts.

We tend to assume others live by the same do’s and don’ts

And we get surprised when we discover that they don’t.

And we even get offended when someone doesn’t live up to our unspoken ideas about what should and should not be.

Then we set ourselves up for a lot of struggle and a lot of trouble and a lot of missing out on neat things.

Examining our “shoulds” – and choosing our “shoulds” – is a helpful thing to do.

There is a saying that goes, “We give ourselves away one inch at a time.” How far can you go before there’s nothing of You left?

I think it’s also true that we can chip away at another person one inch at a time. How much can we chip before there’s nothing of that person left?

I think so much of what allows us to give ourselves away one inch at a time is to believe that another person’s “shoulds” are more legitimate for our own lives than what our own soul tells us.

And I think so much of what allows us to chip away at someone else is the belief that our own set of “shoulds” is more valid than his or hers.

Jim Hightower spoke here about a month ago and he quoted someone – I can’t remember whom, and I may not even accurately remember the quote, but it went something like, “Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.”

That’s a little hard to do without consciously examining what should messages we live by, who they really belong to, and then choosing the ones that work for us now.

We formulate our “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts” one inch at a time, too. And we rarely notice.

But it’s helpful to notice.

It is helpful to notice because then we can actually decide which ones add life to life; which ones make us come alive; and which ones allow us to be wholly ourselves.

This has everything to do with the soul. It’s really no different than examining and consciously choosing one’s religion – both are about what we fundamentally believe, and how we intend to live, and what we want to pass on.

Becoming conscious of the “shoulds” we live by allows us to discern which ones belong to the voice of our Better Nature, our Higher Selves, or something more squashing.

How many people choose a profession, or a partner, or make other major life choices that kill their spirit a bit more each day because of an adopted should?

And then how many other people suffer because of that person’s frustration?

Becoming conscious of our “shoulds” is not about navel-gazing. It is about coming alive.

It is an essential part of being able to find the path that makes us come alive, because we can only do it if we shed someone else’s idea for us.

What might our lives look like if we examined the choices presented to us by our “shoulds”?

A few stories came to mind as I was thinking about this theme.

One is a story about Gandhi. It may be true, it may be legend, it may be a bit of both. But it’s good…

A woman came to Gandhi and asked him to please tell her son to stop eating sugar. It was ruining his teeth and hurting his health. Gandhi thought about this for a minute, then asked her to come back in a week.

A week later she returned and made the same request, and Gandhi thought again, and again asked her to come back in a week.

This happened a couple more times before Gandhi finally advised the son to stop eating sugar.

The mother was both relieved and exasperated. If that’s all Gandhi was going to do, why did he make her wait so long and come back so many times?!

Well, he had to successfully stop eating sugar himself first, and it was much harder to do than he had expected.

There is a “should” in that story. A big one – and it’s not about sugar. One that makes us go, “Ahhhh…yesss.” The “should” has something to do with integrity – and the Angels of our Better Nature recognize a kindred voice here.

There is another story about Lance Armstrong in the 2001 Tour de France. Lance and his strongest competitor, Jan Ullrich, were neck and neck. Then Ullrich crashed. Armstrong pulled over and waited until his rival could return to the race. He said that he couldn’t imagine taking advantage of the situation.

There is a “should” in that story. A big one. One that makes us go, “Ahhhh…wow.” The “should” has something to do with humanity, or respect – and our Higher Selves recognize a kindred voice.

So please don’t hear me saying that “shoulds” are bad and we need to throw them out the window. They can be very life giving. They are even necessary for life. It’s just helpful to think about the ones we’ve got and the ones we want, and how that affects our lives and those around us.

I’ve been reading a book by Renee Peterson Trudeau called The Mother’s Guide to Self-Renewal. I’m not a mother, but my neighbor, who is a new mother, discovered it and invited a group of friends – new mothers and non-mothers alike – to join her in reading a chapter a month and then getting together to discuss it.

Last month’s chapter observed a “should” that is alive and well in our culture – the “should” that says we must be strong and independent and not need to ask for help if we’re going to be worth much. The author observed how demoralizing this can be, especially when one is trying to figure out how to be a new parent while keeping the rest of life functioning.

Then she shared the story of a woman whose husband travels often for work. When he goes out of town for a week or more, Sarah, mom of two toddlers, has her sister babysit one night so that she can go out to dinner with a girlfriend. She also has a high-school neighbor come over a few evenings to help with dinner, baths and bedtime, and she makes sure she has easy-to-prepare food going into the week. Sarah says, “I used to dread these business trips and would want to dump the kids on my husband the minute he returned from his trip. Now I have learned that I just have to build in extras support when he’s away on a trip. Not only is the week more peaceful and enjoyable, but my husband returns to a family that’s happy to see him. Rather than being resentful that he’s been gone.”

She examined a should – the one that told her she should be independent and able to take care of everything in her life herself. She challenged it and found a way to invite others in. What she came up with has added life to her life, and to the lives of the ones she loves the most.

What might our lives look like if we examined the choices presented to us by our “shoulds”? And then found the courage to choose a better path?

Here’s a different kind of story. One with weighty consequences.

I knew a woman when I lived in Chicago who had a very strong Christian faith. Her particular understanding of the faith was that, when someone dies, one should celebrate and only be glad because that person was now experiencing the ultimate eternal life. This is not every Christian’s understanding of an appropriate response to death by a long shot, but it was hers, and she is not alone in it.

Penny was very close with her mother, and during the last years of her mother’s life, her mother lived with Penny. One of the things that brought mother and daughter together so strongly was their shared faith. Her mom told Penny that when she, the mother, died, Penny should not feel sad. She should only feel happiness and rejoice that her mother was in heaven.

Her mother probably meant these words to be comfort.

And Penny expected to only feel happiness and rejoicing.

But that’s not how she felt when her mother died. Penny felt the awful aching hole that gets wrenched in us when someone we dearly love dies.

And it scared her.

It made her feel very ashamed.

Grief naturally brings crisis of it’s own. Penny’s was layered with a confusion and self-doubt that made her feel worthless, and it was all because of a “should.”

What kind of faith did she actually have if she felt sadness at the loss of her mother, instead of joy? Did it mean that she didn’t believe strongly enough? Would God reject her because of her unfaithfulness? Could she show her grief and still be acceptable to other people? How selfish must she be to feel pain for her own loss, and not exuberance at her mother’s gain? Did she not love her mother enough to be happy for her? And her list went on.

Her beliefs about what she should feel and “shouldn’t” feel, how she should and “shouldn’t” respond were so ingrained in her that when she was confronted by her actual experience, her “shoulds” shredded her.

It’s helpful to take notice of what should and “shouldn’t” messages we live by. It’s helpful to ask ourselves whose voice they belong to. Is it a voice that builds up, or beats down?

Only when we ask ourselves these questions can we actually decide which “should” messages add life to life; which ones make us come alive; which ones allow us to be wholly ourselves and present with others. And which ones would be better given back to their source.

We would choose to keep many “shoulds,” but now they would belong to our own voice and that kind of should feels very different. We would choose to let go of other “shoulds” and while that wouldn’t always be easy or pain-free, it would ultimately feel good and be a step toward gaining our own lives back.

What might our lives look like if we examined the choices presented to us by our “shoulds”?

A couple of weeks after my party, I sat with one my friends on her front porch well into the night.

At the party, she seemed to redirect the topic anytime a “should” came up. “I figured out why I didn’t want to talk about “shoulds”,” she announced. “I feel so bad anytime I think of them. They’re just a weight hanging over my head or a finger waiving at me. I think of all the things I’m not getting to, or the person I’m not being with my son or my husband or at work, and I feel overwhelmed and like I’m falling short. And I feel stuck.”

Exactly.

She shared that she was trying something new. Anytime she thought she should be doing something, she changed the “should” to a “could” to see how that felt. It always felt freeing. It gave her choices.

This has everything to do with the soul. Not just our own souls, but those around us. We give ourselves away one inch at a time. We chip away at another’s soul one inch at a time. We also affect people around us by the well-being of our own soul.

I don’t think it’s accidental that all religions end up with a list of them. We recognize that there are certain codes that make life meaningful and full and larger than our own meiopic world and these codes deserve the qualification of “holy”

As we spoke together in this morning’s reading:
“It matters what we believe.

Some beliefs are like walled gardens. They encourage exclusiveness, and the feeling of being especially privileged.
Other beliefs are expansive and lead the way into wider and deeper sympathies.

Some are like shadows, clouding children’s days with fears of unknown calamities.
Others are like sunshine, blessing children with the warmth of happiness.

Some beliefs are divisive, separating the saved from the unsaved, friends from enemies.
Other beliefs are bonds in a world community, where sincere differences beautify the pattern.

Some beliefs are like blinders shutting off the power to choose one’s own direction.
Other beliefs are like gateways opening wide vistas for exploration.

Some beliefs weaken a person’s selfhood. They blight the growth of resourcefulness.
Other beliefs nurture self-confidence and enrich the feeling of personal worth.

Some beliefs are rigid, like the body of death, impotent in a changing world.
Other beliefs are pliable, like the young sapling, ever growing with the upward thrust of life.”

It matters what we believe. And our “shoulds” have everything to do with that.

Eric Hepburn
Sunday, May 25, 2008

Invocation:

A wise person once said to me, you get to choose how to live, and there are basically two choices, you can choose to be right or you can choose to be peaceful.

The more I have reflected on this the more clear it has become that choosing to be right is about ego, while choosing to be peaceful is about wisdom.

Peace be with you.

Let us join together in song.

Prayer

How can we become more compassionate?

It is helpful to think of a generic situation where you are engaged with another person.

You perceive their actions, and from this perception you normally confer onto them motives and thoughts.

It is by these motives and thoughts, which we have imagined, that we determine how we will react to their action.

One form of compassion happens when we are clear and honest about the actions of others, but kind and generous when we infer thought and motive.

There is an expression for this in English, it is called ‘giving the benefit of the doubt.’

One way to cultivate our capacity for giving the benefit of the doubt is to keep in mind that we do not know what others are thinking.

Another way is to confer to others a range of possible thoughts or motives, and to be intentional when we treat them as if their motives are the noblest ones.

One of the side effects of this practice, is the way that it helps and encourages others to live up to the generosity of your interpretations.

Let us pray this morning that we can learn to become masters at giving others the benefit of the doubt.

Sermon: Understanding Evangelical Christianity

My first chosen religion was evangelical Christianity, I was a holy roller, I sang and danced and spoke in tongues, and I shouted Amen, whenever I was moved. My second chosen religion was Atheism, I was a professional skeptic and debunker, proud in my claims not to believe in anything that hadn’t been proven. And now my chosen religion, they say the third times a charm, well my chosen religion now doesn’t have a name, I attend this Unitarian Universalist church and I stand in this pulpit from time to time, I search for the truth, and I am honored that you have agreed to spend this morning with me so that I can share some thoughts with you about this journey.

In the home where I grew up religion was not a serious issue. We subscribed to the pedestrian mainstream American view that Christianity was true, but that you didn’t have to go to Church to be a good person, and good people go to heaven, which is important, because hell is not a very nice place.

During my childhood I spent summers with my maternal grandparents. When I was twelve they moved back to rural Illinois where our extended family lived. My Great-Uncle Web was a preacher at a Free-Will Pentecostal Church there, and since all my cousins who were my age went to Church three times a week, I wanted to go with them.

Now, I had been to Church before, but I had never seen a Church like this. I don’t think I will ever forget the first time that I saw someone speak in tongues. I didn’t have to wait long, it was about seven minutes into my first service when my Great-Aunt Rose got to her feet and began making noises not unlike ululation at first, and then transforming into a kind of wailing string of syllables. It was eerie and a little frightening, but by the end of that service, I knew that this wasn’t just an eccentricity of my Aunt Rose, but a normal part of how these people, many of them my family, worshiped.

Three weeks later I was saved, the next week I received the spirit of the Holy Ghost and spoke in tongues for the first time, later that summer I received the gift of healing and performed a faith healing on my great-grandmother’s chronic headaches, which she swore lasted a whole week. I also participated in casting out my first demon that summer, it was a spirit of man-hating in a young woman in the congregation who had been abandoned by her father, and who later went on to marry one of my cousins. As the summer drew to a close, I became concerned about how I was going to continue ‘walking in the light’ when I returned home. My uncle’s Church didn’t have any affiliates in my area, but he assured me that if I prayed and searched, God would find me a home congregation.

I returned home, filled with hope, not only of finding a spiritual community, but of rescuing my family from their religious malaise and bringing them once more under the direct protection of Jesus Christ. Both of these quests were disastrous. My family rejected my evangelical advances and my search for a local congregation was even worse, I was told by many ministers and preachers that speaking in tongues was wrong, that it was a misinterpretation of scripture, that it was even the work of the devil. This practice of Speaking in tongues had become central to my way of worship, as had dancing in the spirit, and raising my hands in the air, and shouting Amen when something the preacher said really resonated with me. Sitting quietly and listening to someone talk, standing still with a hymnal in hand singing dirges, I couldn’t reconcile these methods with my desire to worship and glorify God. I searched, and after a while I stopped searching, I read my Bible, and after a while I stopped reading, I worried about my salvation, and after a while, I stopped worrying.

My life became much as it had always been and when I returned to my Grandparents’ home the summer of my 14th year, I inititialy refused the invitations to go to Church, I didn’t want to repeat the cycle, I preferred to forgo the ecstatic experiences of church to avoid the pain of losing them again. And I also felt let-down by God because I believed that he had not helped me to find a home congregation.

But it didn’t last long, a month maybe, and I was back at Church, on my knees weeping, asking forgiveness for my failure to stay on the path. So I sang, and I danced, and I shouted Amen, and I spoke in tongues. And this time when I went home, I didn’t struggle. I rendered unto Caesar the things which were Caesar’s, and unto God the things that were God’s. In this case, the God that I worshiped was in rural Illinois and my normal life; school, immediate family, friends, these things belonged to the secular world of Caesar. That was my last summer in the Church.

Religion once again became a non-issue in my daily world, but that all changed during my first semester at college. I was taking a philosophy course on contemporary moral issues, and when the topic of homosexuality came up, the quiet (or sometimes not so quiet) bigotry of rural Christianity was waiting there in the back of my brain, ready to argue the point of why homosexuality was wrong. I bolstered my claims with biology, with logic, with everything but the kitchen sink. But when the professor asked me what was wrong with two people loving each other, with two people wanting to be each others’ best friends and helpmates, I had no answer. Like most people who had never actually known or been friends with any gay people, I was all focused on the sex act. Once I was forced to step beyond the bedroom into the world of life, where people love each other, where people care for each other, and where sex is simply a physical expression of that love, I was left without a leg to stand on. On that day, in that class period, I abandoned the God of rural Illinois, I publicly changed my position on homosexuality, apologized if I had offended anyone, and began to self-identify as an atheist. Because my professor was right, hate and intolerance are incompatible with love. And I knew then that Love and justice were more important to me than the God of the Bible, than the God of rural Illinois.

I spent the next few months reading psychology texts and talking with people, trying to reframe my religious experiences into this new atheistic framework. I rewrote my narrative of those years using terms like: social pressure, group think, and brainwashing. I researched the Bible critically, embracing a deconstruction of both the text and the life of Jesus. I believed that I had been duped, that I had been sold a Santa Claus type lie, the only consolation was that the people who sold it had believed it to be true. In reality, this simply increased my feelings of condescension toward grown-ups who had failed to realize that the Jesus story was just another myth. I patted myself on the back for being smarter than they were.

Luckily for me, my journey was not over. It took two other mentors to help me find a deeper and more honest view of the truths of those years. The first one was a Sociology professor named Lonn Lanza-Kaduce. He issued a challenge at the beginning of his Sociology of Law course. He said that anyone can read a theory and tear it apart and find all of its weak points; deconstruction is easy. What is hard, he said, and more rewarding, is to give each author their strongest possible reading. What problems or issues is the author most concerned with? What truth or truths are they trying to deal with? As a reader, can you give the author the benefit of the doubt and confront him on his strongest ground, instead of searching for his weaknesses. It was a serious challenge and it had a profound impact on the tenor of the class, every week we had serious discussions about the merits and strengths of different theories and we looked at how different theories actually addressed different domains of problems, and how much of the criticism that was written about them was really missing the point. We learned how to build better theories.

The second influence was Dr. David Hackett, a religion professor, I took the Sociology of Religion course primarily as a way to improve my background knowledge and debating skill when I challenged the evangelical literalist Christian missionaries who regularly visit college campuses with their confrontational style of ministry. It had become a favorite pastime of mine to spend hours in the middle of the day debating them, challenging them, winning over the crowd. I wish I could say that I had done it with love, I wish I could say that it had meant more to me at the time than winning the debate, in the background was always this justification of keeping them from preying on students’ insecurities and feeding them lies, but, in reality I knew that I was preaching to the choir. My sparring with them was about my own ego, my need to show my superiority, so I got what I deserved when I took this Sociology of Religion course.

When I found out that the professor was a practicing church-goer, I almost dropped the course, luckily for me, my ego was too big for that. Just like the philosophy professor had pulled the rug out from under my homophobia by asking the larger question about love, this professor pulled the rug out from under my sense of atheistic superiority by asking if there was value in the story. He claimed that one didn’t have to believe that the Bible was the literal word of God in order to be a Christian, that one did not have to subscribe to the divinity of Christ, or the resurrection, or miracles, or any of the things I had spent the last two years lambasting. If the Roman myths served Roman culture, and the Greek myths served Greek culture, why couldn’t the Christian myths in the Bible serve as a moral framework for Western Christian culture.

Well, he had me there. If we had permission to view the Bible as a collection of stories, a collection of myths, then we could apply the same ’strongest-reading’ approach that I had learned in the context of social theory. I became a fan of Jesus, of Buddha, and of Mohammed in that class. I read their words, and the words from other world religions in that class, I looked for the passages where they saw the truth most clearly and didn’t worry about the parts where their culture, or their fear, or their greed, or their other human frailties got in the way. I began to believe in the universality of truth, in the idea that we are all seeking this truth, that it is a fundamental part of our nature, that it is this truth that unites us and makes us whole.

In graduate school I began to integrate my love of the prophets with my own narrative. I began to critically evaluate both my early religious experiences, my atheism, and my atheistic contention that those early experiences had been meaningless. Ultimately, I was able to reconcile my understanding with my history and reclaim the genuine aspects of those early religious experiences.

I no longer find it surprising in retrospect that one of the most socially bizarre and controversial aspects of my early practice, speaking in tongues, has ended up being one of the most important to me. When I was an atheist I was ashamed of this part of my past, ashamed because I believed that I had been socially pressured into faking a religious experience. But the more I reflected on the experience, the more I realized that I had been wrong. The social pressure theory wasn’t true to the story, it wasn’t true to my experience. The pressure I felt was not pressure to fit in, it was not pressure to please my family or the church, it was the pressure of what to say when you believe you are face to face with God. When you are in that moment of prayer and you feel yourself in communion with God, with the Universe, what do you say? What can you say? Such immense beauty, such immense pain, such immense love… That is what speaking in tongues taps into. When you want to shout your feelings to God, but you can’t put them into words, you just let those raw feelings out in the form of sound. And in that church, you were allowed that freedom and I experienced it, and I cherish it still.

Now, I’m not suggesting that UU’s should start speaking in tongues, it wouldn’t be genuine, and it wouldn’t produce the desired result. What I am suggesting is that we start thinking, individually and collectively, about how we can foster an environment, how we can produce a spiritual haven here in this sanctuary every Sunday, where people leave their self-criticism and their criticisms of others at the door. A space where people can clap, sing, dance, meditate, sit quietly, hum, think, pray, do whatever they do, but do it without worrying about being judged or without spending any energy judging or thinking about what others are doing. Can we, the distracted intellectuals that we are, find a way to experience communal peace and joy here together every Sunday? I think that we can.

I think it starts with looking inward, with using this time we have here together with the unconditional love and support of our community to bask in the light, love, and joy of the truth. Because the truth is joyful. Let me reiterate that for all of us intellectual doubting Thomases who have a much easier time seeing everything that is wrong with the world, and I include myself. The truth is joyful. This didn’t sink in for me until I went to see the Dalai Lama when he came to town, and I tell you friends, the truth has set that man free. And that freedom radiates from him like a warm light of love and joyfulness. He is not joyful because he has comforting illusions, he is joyful because he has spent his life smashing the illusions that separate us from the truth. There is ever-present in his life the radiance of God, the radiance of an interconnected and interdependent universe, the radiance of the power of life and love.

That radiance, the radiance of the truth, is the light that has inspired all religion. It is the same light that the Evangelical Christians are seeking to capture when they go to church, the same light they are trying to share when they come knocking at your door, the same light that you were searching for this morning when you made your way to this sanctuary. The truth is not fractured, but we are often fractured. The truth is not exclusive, but we are all too often exclusive.

The next time you are confronted with someone who has a religious symbol system that you don’t share, I want you to try and translate. You don’t have to subscribe to God language in order to use God language. Maybe internally, you prefer to use the word Universe instead of God, or maybe you don’t like to assign a word to that concept at all. That’s OK. You can translate into their language, and if your heart and intentions are in the right place, your translation into their symbol system will work out.

This doesn’t only apply to Evangelical Christians, it can apply to anyone. If you remember that the differences are often differences in religious language, differences in symbols and not differences in ultimate truth, then you come to realize the possibility of breaking spiritual bread with any of your brothers and sisters. This does not negate the reality of differences in belief, those differences are real, they exist. What I am suggesting is that when we focus on our differences in opinion, we create divisiveness and discord. When we focus on what we agree on, on the magnificence of the universe, the beauty and the pain of living, the importance of love and compassion, the comfort of human companionship, when we focus on these core truths of religion, we create peace and joy. The choice is up to you, you can choose to be right, or you can choose to be peaceful.

Benediction

I would like to close today with a greeting, because today’s sermon, if given its strongest reading, was about changing the way we meet people, it was about conferring the greatest benefit of the doubt to all of our brothers and sisters, without any reason to do so but faith, without any reason but love.

The greeting is Namaste and it means “I see the light in you that is also in me.”

Namaste.

KEYNOTE ADDRESS - SWUU DISTRICT ANNUAL MEETING
AUSTIN, TEXAS
APRIL 26, 2008

“What the world needs from Liberal Religion.” That is a sweeping topic and one that is daunting to say the least. Who among us is qualified to speak for theworld? For that matter, who among us is qualified to speak for liberal religion? Unitarians and Universalists have long been part of what is generally known as liberal religion, but the scope of liberal religion is far larger than our movement.
Liberal Religion is a context in which we exist, but it is neither defined by nor exhausted by our particular history, institutional structures and visions. Nonetheless, that is the topic we have been called to address, and a long career as a preacher has equipped me fully to speak with great authority on vast subjects about which I know precious little.

In May of 1961, I stood on the floor of the General Assembly, waiting for the Moderator to announce the result of the vote that would bring the Unitarian Universalist Association into formal existence, a vote that would end the separate histories of the American Unitarian Association and the Universalist
Church of America. When the formal announcement came, it was a surprise to no one. The assembly had reaffirmed the will of the constituent congregations–an overwhelming vote for consolidation. The delegates responded with a standing ovation.

This was a moment I had worked for since I began my ministry to Universalist congregations in April of 1957. I had preached, written editorials, and debated about the promise inherent in the consolidation of the American Unitarian Association and the Universalist Church of America. I had attended the meeting in Syracuse that had hammered out the details of the consolidation process. The congregation I was serving had voted for consolidation, even though the members of that small rural church confessed to feeling profoundly outclassed by and inferior to every Unitarian they had ever met. I should have been among those applauding. Instead, I stood off to one side of the hall, weeping.

I was overwhelmed by the sense that something important had just died, that I had just voted away my religious home, that I had just witnessed the end of the Universalist movement, in the words of the historian, Whitney Cross, a church whose impact

…on reform movements and upon the growth of modern religious attitudes might prove to be greater than that of either the Unitarians or the freethinkers. [A movement whose] warfare upon the forces fettering the American mind might be demonstrated to have equaled the influence of the transcendentalist philosophers.

Over the nearly half century that has passed, I have devoted my life to the movement we brought into being in Boston on that day in May of 1961. In parish ministry, and now, teaching in one of our two remaining seminaries, my life has been trammelled up in Unitarian Universalism. But, truth be told, I have never felt quite at home in this movement. I have felt like an orphan who has been taken in by a kindly family, but who never has mastered the skills necessary to be fully a part of that family. Somewhere, deep in my soul, there is a sense of loss that never quite goes away. In odd moments, I have tried to plumb that deep loss.

Over time, it has occurred to me that the loss, which often seemed so personal, is, in truth, much more corporate and institutional. Somewhere, over the years following consolidation, we have lost an important insight into the essential nature of religion, and the role it plays in the life of the human community. The process by which that loss occurred, is rooted deep in the history of the two
movements that came together in May of 1961.

In the first third of the twentieth century, Unitarianism and Universalism both were confronting serious losses. The catastrophe of the Great War, that war to end all wars, had made a mockery of the easy optimism that had characterized much of liberal religion. The debacle of the Great Depression had only deepened the sense of pessimism and despair. By the middle of the 1930’s the condition of the Unitarian movement was so desperate that the American Unitarian
Association was forced to appoint a Commission of Appraisal.

The central charge given that Commission consisted of a series of questions:

Has Unitarianism any real function in the modern world?…How far does Unitarianism in America measure up to the requirements of the new age? What must be done to bring it reasonably close to that ideal? Is the expenditure of effort necessary to bring about that
change justified by the promise of success?

The report of that commission addressed a number of topics, ranging from a sketchy effort to define areas of doctrinal agreement and disagreement to a concern for restructuring religious education and providing adequate training for leaders. But the elements in the report that received most of the attention, centered upon restructuring and reorganizing and streamlining the institutional
processes of the Association itself. The effect of the report was to give short shrift to questions of faith, and to focus much more attention on questions of structure and process.

The Commission of Appraisal is widely believed to have saved the American Unitarian Association and to have ushered in a period of renewal and growth. In my reading of the history, it did so by simply assuming Unitarianism has a function in the modern world, even if that function is difficult to define, by finessing any serious conversation about theological concerns and by focusing instead on the question of how to reorganize the national Association so it might be more effective in attracting and retaining members. Out of the work of the commission came a series of initiatives, ranging from the New Beacon Series in Religious Education, to the famous Laymen’s League advertising
initiatives based on the question, “Are You a Unitarian Without Knowing It?”, and ultimately the Fellowship Movement.

During this same, period, Universalism was experiencing an even more catastrophic decline in numbers. Once having been described as “the reigning heresy of the day” and credited with being the sixth largest denomination in the country, Universalism had declined to fewer than 50,000 adherents, was closing one rural or small town church after another all over the country, and was
watching as one urban church after another either went out of business or merged with its Unitarian counterpart. Universalism responded to that challenge in quite a different way.

Universalists sought to confront the loss of members and the threat to their continued existence by theological exploration. Under the leadership of men like Robert Cummins and Brainard Gibbons, Universalists began to explore their relationship to the Christian tradition out of which they had come. They asked, “What is the essential message of Universalism, given the fact that mainline
Protestants are no longer proclaiming doctrines of hellfire and damnation?” They asked, “Does Universalism have anything distinctive to offer to the larger theological conversation?” They asked, “What does Universal Salvation mean in a pluralistic world grown ever more integrated and ever more interconnected?”

Cummins, General Superintendent of the Universalist Church, began to address those questions when he told a Universalist General Assembly that:

Universalism cannot be limited either to Protestantism or to Christianity, not without denying its very name. Ours is a world fellowship, not just a Christian sect…..A circumscribed Universalism
is unthinkable.

Subsequently, Tracy Pullman of Detroit called for a new understanding of Universalism that would be greater than Christianity. Cummin’s successor as General Superintendent, Brainard Gibbons insisted that Christianity and the larger Universalism were simply incompatible.

These observations led a group of younger ministers to engage the challenge to define a new theological base for the Universalist Church. They advocated what they called a New Universalism–one that sought to define a religion adequate to a global community. They did not seek to create a new world religion, but they dreamed of creating a religion that would be adequate to one world. This led them to engage virtually all the theological categories that had structured their
tradition, and seek to determine how to reform that tradition for a new time and a new context. This process continued throughout the years leading up to consolidation.

The point to this long excursion into history is to suggest that Unitarians and Universalists brought quite different agendas to the consolidation. Those differences were reflected in much of the debate surrounding the proposal to consolidate. As I remember those years, I am struck by the fact that much of the Universalist opposition to consolidation was theological in nature– traditionalists like Ellsworth Reamon fearing that the new movement would strengthen the hands of those who sought to move Universalism to an enlarged and non-Christian theological base. On the other hand, much of the Unitarian opposition was institutionally focused–a fear, as A. Powell Davies suggested, that consolidation with the Universalists would slow or halt the numerical growth that had allowed Unitarians to claim to be the fastest growing denomination in American in the 1950’s. I have sometimes summarized the two agendas by suggesting that Universalists brought to merger an important, but unfinished theological concern, while Unitarians brought to merger a set of
highly questionable marketing plans.

I would suggest to you that in the years after consolidation, the concern for marketing has triumphed. The overriding concerns have centered upon the need to identify our market niche, and to devise programs and strategies that will attract and keep the clients. Increasingly, much of our social justice effort can be defined as expressionist politics, less intended to change the world than
to serve our own egos, to present a profile to the world and attract and expand the client base. Our efforts at self-definition–notably the all-but-deified purposes and principles–are grounded in no deep confession of faith, no significant meta-narrative. They simply hang there as unanchored assertion– not a covenant, but a temporal agreement–and because that is so, they betray
the fact that a primary motivating force in their construction was to offend none of our stake holders, while being so general that likely recruits will not find us too challenging.

Our programmatic focus has been upon growth, both in the size and the number of churches. At all levels, programs are initiated and justified on the basis that they will produce numerical growth. Congregations and individuals who question whether growth is an adequate mission are regarded as bordering on the heretical. Education programs are designed specifically to counter and inhibit
the essential developmental tasks of young people and to bind them effectively to the church. We have toyed with creating mega-churches by offering something called “theology light seeker services.” We have devised advertising programs structured around slogans like “The Uncommon Denomination” and “The Church That Puts Its Faith In You,” slogans that pretend to communicate
but that avoid any careful definition. Most recently, the triumph of marketing can be seen in the process by which the flaming chalice has been transformed from religious symbol into marketing logo.
Missing in all of this is any coherent theological foundation. Over and over, we hear each other and officials of the Association proclaim the conviction that we have a moral obligation to grow, to spread our word because we possess a vital message, one that is of central importance to the world and to the crises in which the world is entangled. When, however, we are challenged to say what
that message is, what our faith consists of, what defines us as a religious people, often we are driven to an embarrassed silence, or we smile smuggly and confess that no one can speak for all Unitarian Universalists, or we stutter and stammer and mutter some half digested truisms about the worth of every person or the importance of embracing each person’s freedom to follow his or
her own spiritual path. Those are not wrong affirmations but they provide an incredibly weak foundation for a religious movement and a wholly inadequate program for saving the world. They offer an unexamined piety rather than a solid faith. The unfinished task Universalists brought to consolidation–the effort to redefine the faith tradition in light of contemporary challenges–has
been swept away by the fear that if we define ourselves too clearly, someone may be offended.

Nor are we the only example of Liberal Religion trying to survive by fudging uncomfortable self-definitions. In Chicago, and perhaps elsewhere across the country, the United Methodist Church observed Lent, this year, by broadcasting a series of television spots in which people who are lonely, people who are burdened with grief, people who are engulfed by sorrow, are told that they do not have to walk this painful path alone. They will find support and companionship at the United Methodist Church. Except for that last word, “church,” it is hard to tell that the welcome is from a religious community. It sounds very much like an institution offering therapy rather than faith, comfort rather than challenge, sanctuary rather than adventure.

In his book, American Religious Traditions, Richard Wentz suggests that religion “is the dialectic of the sacred and profane,” the way in which the sacred and the mundane are held in “dynamic tension.” He claims that religion “provides the ideas and actions that enable us to maintain the significance of the sacred in circumstances that deny it.” This suggests that a movement that is unwilling or unable to define what it holds sacred has surrendered both its claim to religious significance and its ability to respond meaningfully to the larger world.

If we are to respond to the needs of the world from a liberal religious basis, it is critical that we be able to address and answer three central questions: What do we believe? Whom do we serve? To whom or what are we responsible?

Several years ago, I was asked to deliver a lecture on the title “Beyond the Seven Principles: The Core of Our Faith.” In that lecture, I suggested that the question of what do we believe cannot be answered adequately until we have struggled with the question, “Whom do we serve?” I am increasingly convinced, now, however, that given the make up of our movement–a movement
comprised of people who value education, a movement that reflects a tradition of accommodation to science and embraces concern for creating a tolerant, moral society, a movement that is socially located with access to the levers of power, it is important that the question of what it is we believe, what it is that provides a foundation for a vital religious vision be given priority over the other two.

That first and foundational question, “What do we believe?” is simple, but profoundly challenging for a post modern people. It drives us to consider what are the boundaries of our religious community? What is so central to our identity that we must proclaim it, even at the risk of offending someone?

This is the question Universalists were struggling to answer in the years prior to consolidation–the question we have struggled ever since to evade in the interests of more effective marketing. It is in answering that first question that we may discover effective responses to the other two: “Whom do we serve and to whom or what are we responsible?” Ignoring that first question, our institutions are easily seduced by the consumerist imperatives that dominate our times and our response to the world tends to be shallow-rooted, short-lived, self-serving and episodic.

Strange as it may seem to us, the fear of defining ourselves has not always dominated Unitarianism or Universalism. The founding document of American Unitarianism was Channing’s 1819 Baltimore Sermon, “Unitarian Christianity” in which he laid out a clear platform that not only rallied Unitarians, but influenced large numbers of non-Unitarians as well. Later in the same century, when Unitarianism was grappling with the dissent generated by the radicalism of Theodore Parker and his followers, William Channing Gannett offered a statement of “Things Commonly Believed Among Us.” Gannett boldly began his statement by affirming “We believe.” That statement of a central faith helped to heal the divisions within Unitarianism. In 1935 the Universalists, struggling to redefine the movement, adopted a statement that, while not a creed, unashamedly began with these words: “We Avow our Faith.”

Let me suggest to you that what the world needs from Liberal Religion, or at least from our version of Liberal Religion is clarity about who we are and what matters to us; clarity about what vision has called us into being, and what promise we serve. Nor is this such an impossible challenge. While we proudly proclaim the great diversity among us, every study I have seen of Unitarian Universalists suggests that our diversity rests in a powerfully homogeneous core of shared beliefs and attitudes. Indeed, the studies suggest that at the core we are far less diverse than many other religious groups. Let me suggest to you some of the content of that core:

We believe that the universe in which we live and move and have our being is the expression of an inexorable process that began in eons past, ages beyond our comprehension and has evolved from singularity to multiplicity, from simplicity to complexity, from disorder to order.

We believe that the earth and all who live upon the earth are products of the same process that swirled the galaxies into being, that ignited the stars and orbited the planets through the night sky, that we are expressions of that universal process which has created and formed us out of recycled star dust.

We believe that all living things are members of a single community, all expressions of a planetary process that produced life and sustains it in intricate ways beyond our knowing. We hold the life process itself to be sacred.

We believe that the health of the human venture is inextricably dependent upon the integrity of the rest of the community of living things and upon the integrity of those processes by which life is bodied forth and sustained. Therefore we affirm that we are called to serve the planetary process upon which life depends.

We believe that in this interconnected existence the well-being of one cannot be separated from the well-being of the whole, that ultimately we all spring from the same source and all journey to the same ultimate destiny.

We believe that the universe outside of us and the universe within us is one universe. Because that is so, our efforts, our dreams, our hopes, our ambitions are the dreams, hopes and ambitions of the universe itself. In us, and perhaps elsewhere, the Universe is reaching toward self-awareness, toward self consciousness. We believe that our efforts to understand the world and our place within it are an expression of the universe’s deep drive toward meaning. In us, and perhaps elsewhere, the Universe dreams dreams and reaches toward unknown possibilities. We hold as
sacred the unquenchable drive to know and to understand.

We believe that the moral impulse that weaves its way through our lives, luring us to practices of justice and mercy and compassion, is threaded through the universe itself and it is this universal longing that finds outlet in our best moments.

We believe that our location within the community of living things places upon us inescapable responsibilities. Life is more than our understanding of it, but the level of our comprehension demands that we act out of conscious concern for the broadest vision of community of we can command and that we seek not our welfare alone, but the welfare of the whole. We are commanded to serve life and serve it to the seven times seventieth generation.

We believe that those least like us, those located on the margins have important contributions to make the rest of the community of life and that in some curious way, we are all located on the margins.

We believe that all that functions to divide us from each other and from the community of living things is to be resisted in the name of that larger vision of a world everywhere alive, everywhere seeking to incarnate a deep, implicate process that called us into being, that sustains us in being, that transforms us as we cannot transform ourselves, that receives us back to itself when life has used us up. Not knowing the end of that process, nonetheless we trust it, we rest in it, and we serve it.

This faith statement is not a creed. (Perhaps we might attach to it the historic Universalist Freedom Clause: Neither this nor any other form of words will be used among us as a creedal test.) Nor can it be easily reduced to an elevator speech. Nonetheless this faith statement attempts to achieve several things. First of all, it seeks to avoid the morass of hyphenated Unitarian Universalism.
Secondly, it seeks to avoid the dreary debate between humanists and theists, between spirituality and rationality, by offering a kind of godless theism–an affirmation that we are not sui generis, that we are products of a natural process we did not create, cannot command and do not understand, but a process to which we are responsible, a process that is grounded in a vision of a dynamic
universe, constantly incarnating emergent possibilities and larger alternatives. It offers a vision that is consistent with our history, our tradition, responsive to the people we serve and to the challenges of our time–a vision grounded in three central enlightment commitments, defined by Susan Neiman as reason, reverence and hope. And, most importantly, it seeks to define a religious position that provides us a distinct location within the spectrum of religious alternatives available to the world.

Perhaps this statement will not prove adequate or acceptable to most of us, but the times demand some kind of formulation of the basis of our faith if we are to be serious about the world and if we are to be taken seriously by the world. Out of this kind of faith statement, imperatives for action emerge that are deeper than a political program or a class or ethnic loyalty. Such a faith statement reminds us that we are called to serve the largest vision of community we can imagine and that all our lesser loyalties stand under the judgment of that great affirmation. In serving the party, the cause, the national or ethnic identity, am I serving the largest community I can envision? In failing
the weak, the lost, the marginalized, have I failed my deepest defining obligations? Such a faith statement allows us to recognize that ultimately we are responsible to the larger, sacred context out of which we have come and in terms of which we live. It provides a compass by which to steer amidst the uncertainties of a chaotic world.

This particular statement may not capture adequately the immagination of Unitarian Universalists. I am quite certain that some statement of faith is required if our brand of liberal religion is to address the needs of our world. Why we prefer to focus on our disagreements rather than on a core faith that might define us and might offer a religious alternative, I am not certain. Perhaps it is something deep in our institutional DNA that is at work here.

In his two volume history of Unitarianism, Earl Morse Wilbur argued that for most of our history, Unitarians have resisted any real theological definition. Only when faced with some great threat to the continued existence of the movement could Unitarians could brought to define who they were and what vision they served.

I would suggest to you that we face such a threat at this moment in our history. To be sure, the threat does not seem to take the form of repression, persecution, or proscription. Despite the occasional thrust from religious extremists, we are scarcely important enough to justify the effort that repression and persecution would require. The threat to our existence is more subtle and therefore more dangerous. Liberal Religion faces the possibility that it may be overwhelmed by a kind of ambient spirituality that resists definition or institutional form, but functions to use the human longing for meaning to serve other purposes, an ambient spirituality that has no outward focus but slides easily into the therapeutic mode, offering an endless journey of infinite regression into the self. Look around you and you will see everywhere evidence of the manner in which spiritual longing has been commodified, offered on the open market, used to sell everything from soap, to self improvement, to political platforms. Over and over, and over again, the sacred is stripped of its
deepest meanings and chained to the chariot wheels of a triumphant consumerism.

By refusing to define itself, Liberal Religion surrenders its ability to stand in judgment on the idolatries of our time. Worse than that, fearing that it will not be taken seriously, Liberal Religion is tempted to try to turn the commercial spirit of the age to its own uses. Oz Guiness has remarked that it used to be the case that religion looked for an audience for its message, but more recently, he suggests, religion looks for a message that will hold the audience. There is a world of difference between those two approaches. To the degree that Liberal Religion in general, and Unitarian Universalism, in particular, have succumbed to this kind of marketing ploy they have betrayed their own traditions, they have failed the world, they have become captive to the very processes that threaten to destroy our best hope for the future.

If we are to serve our people, and the world in which we find ourselves, it is critical that we now take up the unfinished project that Universalism brought to the consolidation in 1961, that we have the courage to define ourselves in ways that offer a clear alternative both to the dangerous and divisive orthodoxies that seem to have capture the religious venture, and the refusal to embrace a clear identity, that threatens to sweep liberal religion into commodified, thumbsucking irrelevance. It is time for liberal religion to declare clearly the faith we hold. The world has a right to expect that of us.

Rev. David E. Bumbaugh
Professor of Ministry
Meadville Lombard Theological School
Chicago, Illinois