First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin

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© Davidson Loehr
 SWUUD Spring Conference
 27 April 2008
 First UU Church of Austin
 4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
 www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

STORY:

Once there was a girl who had an amazing dream. She dreamed that she could see a house in the next village, see into its back yard, and see a big tree there. And she knew – she just knew that buried beneath the tree there was great treasure! The village was separated from hers by a river, so it wasn’t a great walk there, but still she had never visited the village in her life.And yet she saw this house so clearly, and felt that she knew just where it was – and then the tree and the buried treasure. It was a very odd dream, she told herself the next day – she’d never had anything like that before!

But the next night, she had it again – the same exact dream! Same house, same tree, same treasure. This time she could see a little more of the village, a little more of where the house was. The next night, she had the same dream, and the night afterwards. She dreamed that same dream for five nights in a row – nothing like this had ever happened to her before. Monday through Friday, every night, the same dream of buried treasure.

On Saturday when she got up, she was determined to go see that house. She took a shovel with her. She crossed over the bridge, and had seen so much of the village in her dream, she felt she knew just where the house would be – and it was! She even looked around the side into the back yard, and sure enough, there was that same big tree she had dreamed about. Now you can’t just go digging a really big hole in somebody”s back yard without their seeing you do it, so she decided to be honest. She knocked on the door, and when a woman answered, she explained about the dreams she had had for five nights, and how she wondered if it would be all right if she dug up the treasure, and split it with the woman.

The woman was very kind to her.”Oh my dear,” she said,” I’m afraid there is no treasure buried here! But this is so very strange, because my son had exactly the same dream for the last five nights! Except he dreamed that his treasure was buried in the village across the river, behind a red garage. He left to walk over there this morning.”

“My gosh,” the girl thought, “that sounds like my house!” The girl thanked the woman, took her shovel and headed for home.

In the meantime, the boy had found her house. He had also taken a shovel, and also decided that he might as well just tell the truth, because he’s surely get caught digging a big treasure hole behind their garage. So he went to the door, and when the woman answered, he told her his story.

Again, the woman was surprised, and said, “Oh, my boy, I’m afraid there is no buried treasure here, but my daughter had the same dream, and went off to find a house across the river.” She wished him a good walk back home.

But it made the boy mad. “How foolish I feel!” he muttered. There must be some kind of silly epidemic going around, where kids are all dreaming these ridiculous dreams! How foolish!” He went home, was tired and felt foolish, didn’t talk to his mother about it (he said he couldn’t find any such house), went to bed, read a Batman comic book, went to sleep, and by morning he had forgotten most of the story about his dreams. Within a few weeks he’d forgotten it all together.

But the girl thought about it in bed that night, and thought about it all the next day, too. Maybe the boy didn’t have buried treasure – though she wasn’t sure of this – but that didn’t mean there wasn’t real treasure behind her garage, where he had seen it! The more she thought about it, the more certain she was, until finally she talked with her parents about it. After some arguing, they agreed to let her dig, on the condition that she would have to fill in the hole when she was done.

It was a lot of digging! She dug and dug, until she had dug a hole about five feet deep. Then she struck something hard. As she cleaned it off, she found it was a large heavy wooden box buried under ground behind her garage. She dug more dirt out to expose the whole box – it was almost five feel wide – and then she opened it.

And inside of the box was – more gold, jewelry, diamonds and rubies and emeralds than she had ever seen in her life! It was a huge treasure, big enough to last her for her whole life. Soon her father got another job in another state, and they moved – after she had filled in the treasure hole.

After they were settled in their new city, she sometimes wondered about the boy, and whether or not he ever found the treasure buried in his yard – she was positive he must have some too. But the boy never wondered about it again, and within a few years they too sold their house and moved away. Would anyone ever find it? One thing was for sure – they wouldn’t find it if they didn’t dig for it!

READINGS: THREE BIG STORIES

1. “On Size”

The first big story is really a fairly scholarly definition of the kind of “bigness” that matters most in life. You’ll hear more about this later, but here’s what this man wrote:

By “size” I mean the stature of one’s soul, the range and depth of one’s love, one’s capacity for relationships. I mean the volume of life you can take into your being and still maintain your integrity and individuality, the intensity and variety of outlook you can entertain in the unity of your being without feeling defensive or insecure. I mean the strength of your spirit to encourage others to become freer in the development of their diversity and uniqueness. I mean the power to sustain more complex and enriching tensions. I mean the magnanimity of concern to provide conditions that enable others to increase in stature. To me, this is the fundamental category, this is the essential principle. This is the size that matters.

That’s a lot of big words. The second story is easier.

2. “The Little Tin Fiddle”

This is a story about the world-famous violinist Yehudi Menuhin, who died a few years back. When he was only three years old, he heard a solo violinist at a concert and found his calling. He asked for a violin for his fourth birthday. His father bought him a toy violin made of metal with metal strings. Young Menuhin burst into sobs, threw it on the ground and would have nothing more to do with it. (James Hillman, The Soul”s Code, p. 17)

There was something in him even at age four that was insulted by being offered a toy instrument, as though he had no better music in him than that. The little tin fiddle didn’t have the range, the depth or the nuance, and nobody would want to listen to it for long even if it could be played well.

3. “A Magnificent Calling”

In the 12th century, when the great cathedrals were being built in France, a visitor went into one of these huge buildings. Over to the right were carpenters, and he said to them, “What are you doing?” They looked at him like he was an idiot, and said “Can’t you see? we’re carpenters. we’re building pews!” Then he went to some stone masons. Again he asked, “What are you doing?” They laughed, and said they were members of the masons’ guild, the finest of all the guilds. They acted like just belonging to that group meant they didn’t need to be doing anything at all.

On the other side of the room there was a peasant woman with a broom, cleaning up after the carpenters, the masons and the others. Of her too, he asked, “What are you doing?” This woman stopped sweeping, stood up to her full height, and announced proudly to him, “Me? Why I am building a magnificent cathedral to the greater glory of God!”

PRAYER:

If we must fail, let us fail at high endeavors. Let us not fail to be mediocre when we could instead fail to be absolutely brilliant. Let us not fall short of being moderately compassionate. Let us rather fall short of being wellsprings of love.

Of all our failures in life, perhaps the saddest are those in which we failed even to try and serve the highest and noblest ideals.

It is a sin to fail at low aims. Not because we failed, but because we aimed so low.

But it is not a sin to fail at very high aims, like aiming for truth, justice, compassion and character. Because even our failure puts us into the company of the saints, the company of those who also believe that rising to our full humanity and rising to our full divinity may be the same rising.

Striving after low and paltry ends is a boring sin, not worthy of us. Let us have greater ambition for our shortcomings. Let us vow never to fail at anything that wasn’t noble and proud, never to accept lower aspirations for ourselves, our lives, our country or our world.

We confess that we will all fail. But let it not be a failure of vision, or a failure of aspiration. If we must fail, let us fail at high endeavors, and then let those failures bless us – for they will.

Amen.

SERMON: Salvation

This word “salvation” may make some of you want to run screaming out of here, reminded of a religious upbringing you”d rather forget. And I know it’s a scary word. But actually, it is a very down-to-earth word, completely at home among religious liberals. It came from the Latin meaning “to save,” but it also has the same root as our word “salve,” and has the meaning of health or wholeness. It’s about serving and being defined by big ideals rather than small ones. I did this in yesterday morning”s sermon by quoting from some ancient religious writings. But since most of you weren’t there yesterday morning, today we’ll do it through other stories that make this special kind of “bigness” more clear.

That first Big Story, “On Size,” was written over thirty years ago by a liberal theologian named Bernard Loomer. He was the Dean of the University of Chicago Divinity School for a decade, then finished his career teaching religion in California, where he also began attending, and joined, a Unitarian church. Some may think he was one of us because he once joined a Unitarian church. I don’t care what church he joined; I think he was one of us because he understood just what kind of size matters, and why it must be a commanding presence in our lives.

And the touching story of young Yehudi Menuhin. If he’d been given an 18th century Guarneri violin for his fourth birthday – like the one he played later in his life – he wouldn’t have done justice to it. An instrument like that really takes your measure. To pick up a first-rate violin then just fiddle around with it can mark you as some sort of a tourist, or a fool. But that violin would have been good enough that he could have spent years growing into it, and even someone with his gifts would never be likely to outgrow a first-rate instrument.

Then that peasant woman in the cathedral! Her job was bigger than the jobs of the carpenters and stone masons. Not “bigger” in the sense that it was more important to the cathedral, but in the sense that it was more important to her. She lived in a world where her simple role was part of a calling that transcended even her time and place. And living within a perspective that big absolutely blesses us.

The treasure is buried within and among us, which is also where Jesus said the Kingdom of God was located. But it’s usually buried fairly deep, and requires some honest and often hard personal work.

It doesn’t require great talent, only a great soul. The carpenters and stonemasons were connected, in their imaginations, only to petty causes: building pews or just feeling smug because they belonged to a cool club. And whatever satisfactions or gifts of life they got from that would have to be equally shallow. We need more.

All three of these stories are metaphors, and I want to add a fourth story, to bring them together and tie them to religion, and to us. Fifteen to twenty years ago I belonged to an ecumenical ministers” group of about forty ministers. Every Thursday, we had lunch together, and the different churches took turns hosting and preparing it. One Thursday I arrived fairly early at the small rural Presbyterian church that would serve us, and got to overhear a remarkable conversation between three Presbyterian woman who were setting the tables.

I entered in the middle of it, and pretended to ignore them, so that they would keep talking and I could eavesdrop. They had been trashing some religion – either Baptist or Catholic – and finally one woman exclaimed, “Well, thank God we’re Presbyterians!” There was a silence. After a few seconds, the second woman said, “I don’t think we’re supposed to be Presbyterians. I think we’re supposed to be Christians.” Another awkward silence, and after a few more seconds the third woman spoke. “No,” she said, “even that’s too small. we’re supposed to love one another, that’s all.”

In this story, you have both first- and second-rate instruments. Actually, the first woman, the mere Presbyterian, was clutching about a third-rate fiddle. If she had a religion, it didn’t show. She treated the church as a club – like the stonemasons in the other story – where just being around people like her made her superior to those damned Baptists or Catholics. If you asked her what these Presbyterians of hers believed, she may have done no better than giving you a half-memorized list of third-hand beliefs she had learned the way you learn the rules of a sorority or an Elks” Club.

Like the little tin fiddle, there’s no moral range here, there’s a bad tone to it, and it couldn’t even sound good if it were played well. If all she has is that self-important hand-me-down identity of being a Presbyterian, you have to hope she’ll be led around by somebody using a far better instrument in the service of a much bigger vision.

The second woman was also holding a toy instrument, though a larger one. Her second-hand identity was called “Christian.” If you asked her what she meant by that, she too would probably have recited a tattered list of other people’s beliefs. Maybe that list would include a set of prescribed chants on things like Jesus, God, the Bible and two or three favorite teachings. But the odds are they’d be someone else’s beliefs, especially if she expressed them in the same words as everyone else in the club: she would just be chanting. So she might have picked up the instrument, but had never actually practiced it. Once more, you”d hope she’ll be led around by somebody coming from a much bigger and richer place.

But that third woman – she made music. You assume she also belongs to the Presbyterian club and the Christian club. But she would not settle for such a paltry calling, any more than the four-year-old Yehudi Menuhin would pick up the tin fiddle. She made music because she was the only one who seemed to know that religion was about behavior, not belief – it’s about being, not saying: deeds, not creeds. After all, only members of our club or some rival club care what we believe. Those are only turf battles. And doesn’t conformity of belief prove that we haven’t thought any more deeply than the other club members? In any tradition, that’s just the second-hand religion for their masses – whether it’s called Presbyterianism or Unitarian-Universalism. It’s exalting our group because they’re Our Kind of People. But this is a definition of narcissism, isn’t it? Those outside our club don’t care what we believe; they only want to know whether we can sing them a song of active caring rather than a self-righteous little ditty.

Now you see how this mixed metaphor of finding salvation by making big music on first-rate instruments can work in religion. It works pretty well. But it’s more complex, because religion adds a dimension that must command us. Honest religion isn’t about anything as shallow as belief. It’s about who we most deeply are and how we should live. You can prove it within yourselves, right now. And if you can do that, then you can be saved, be made bigger and more whole. And you can, because you knew when you heard the story of those three women that only that third woman even got it. And I suspect you may also have felt that there is something very wrong about posing as a religious person but not getting it. You know this. You’re built this way. Almost all of us are. It is built into who we are and must be if we are to come into our full humanity.

Salvation is about that kind of size and that quality of spiritual vision that can make us useful and content rather than merely decorative. In liberal religion it is about digging deep enough to find the treasure, the spirit, rather than staying on the self-satisfied surface. You know what I mean, I’m sure.

The spirit of liberal religion – which is opposed to the spirit of literal religion – is between about two and four thousand years old. It’s not new at all, and it had multiple births. It was born in the Hindu Upanishads, where they saw that Brahman, the creative and sustaining force of the universe, is present in each of us just as the taste of salt is present throughout the oceans.

It was born in the Buddha, who saw that the secret of life isn’t about gods or supernatural end-runs. It’s available to all of us here and now, if only we will wake up to life’s less dramatic but more authentic possibilities – and if, once awakened, we will understand that compassion is the only appropriate and life-enhancing response to all other creatures.

The spirit of liberal religion was born at about the same time in some of the ancient Hebrew prophets, who attacked the self-important rituals of the priests, and said God was not interested in what we believed or how we bowed and scraped, but only in how we treated one another, especially the most vulnerable among us.

It was also born at least twice in China. First, in Confucius, who was concerned not with gods but with our selves here and now. And he saw that our mistake was that we conceived of ourselves as far too small, whereas our biggest and most necessary self only exists as part of the larger society around us. So our job, he believed, is to learn the care and respect that make our relationships with others flow smoothly.

Lao Tzu also gave birth to the spirit of liberal religion, the spirit of deeds not creeds in Taoism, when he wrote one of the finest moral teachings in history:

What is a good man but a bad man’s teacher?

What is a bad man but a good man’s job?

If you don’t understand this, you will get lost,

However intelligent you are.

It is the great secret.

(Stephen Mitchell translation)

The spirit of honest religion, of being human religiously, was born at the deepest and most nuanced levels of all great religions and philosophies.

And then, more than a thousand years before any of these others, the spirit of liberal religion was born in the world’s oldest story, the still-magnificently modern story of Gilgamesh. He ruled over 4700 years ago, and the earliest texts of the story are from 4100 years ago – before any of today”s great religions, gods or philosophies had been born. They saw themselves as living in the “modern age,” because writing had just been invented there a hundred years earlier. And they asked of what use were the old gods to modern people. They decided the gods had become impotent ornaments, but that the meaning and purpose of life – now up to us – were still immeasurably rich, and close at hand: through the deeds we do, the positive differences we make, the art and music we create, the love and joy we can share with families and friends, and the influence we can have on those who will come after us. There in that most ancient story was a religious vision more courageous and unfettered than that of any Western religion.

You can feel how big all of these ancient liberal visions are – a bigness that doesn’t insult the human spirit by offering the religious equivalent of little tin fiddles.

All of these were among the births of the multiple spirits of liberal religion. Any one of them, or any good combination of them, can offer a commanding vision big enough to let us feel that we are building a magnificent cathedral to the greater glory of God – or the legitimate heir to what was once called God, as Gilgamesh, the Chinese, the Buddha, the Greeks and many moderns would put it.

That rich and ancient history is the tradition I stand within and try to serve as a religious liberal. I’m not a “Unitarian-Universalist,” and I hope you’re not either. Understand that I don’t mean that in a cheap way. I mean it in an expensive way, a demanding way. Denominational identities like the banalities of creeds or official “principles” are just too paltry to do justice to the human spirit. they’re little toy instruments on which no interesting music is ever going to be played, and which will drive the more aware and gifted people away, as it did the four-year-old Yehudi Menuhin. I suspect that tin-fiddle spirituality is the chief reason why we have lost almost 70% of our market share in the U.S. since 1961, and still don’t have many more members than we did then.

We owe ourselves and our people this kind of spiritual and intellectual bigness – not something to let us think we’re smarter or more special than others, but something character-based and commanding. We each need to offer our people and our communities deep and nuanced spiritual instruments that can challenge even the most gifted among them, and an understanding of the human condition big enough both to contain our spirits and to command them. If what we offer can’t take its place proudly among the world’s most profound religions, we should be ashamed to offer it.

In the end, it doesn’t matter whether we call our spiritual center God or something else. What matters is whether we can call it forth, and invite it into our lives, our churches, and our world. The people who trust us need to feel that their best efforts are helping to build a magnificent cathedral to God – or the legitimate heir to what was once called God. That kind of a vision, that kind of an instrument, is big. And that kind of size matters.

Salvation is about a healthy kind of wholeness that is buried within and among us – not on the surface, but deeper. As in the children’s story, we first have to get beyond ourselves, because it isn’t about us. But always, after the road that leads us outward, there needs to be another that leads us back home – as T. S. Eliot put it,

“We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.”

As a religious movement, we also need to get beyond our comfortable biases as social or political liberals, because it isn’t about us either. It’s about finding an avenue to a deep and true perspective on our life and on life itself – a perspective that can not only empower us but can also command us. And if it is an honest and profound kind of liberal religion, what it commands us to do is to dig, to find that treasure buried within us, to arrive where we started, and perhaps to know the place for the first time.

And then to do something – to come alive, to recognize that we are children of God, the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself, and the hope of our world. Then the transformation and miracle of salvation has occurred. We have been born again, born of the Holy Spirit, born of the joy of life that has found us at last. And with that, a whole new world has begun. A whole, new, world has begun.Hallelujah!

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© Davidson Loehr
 SWUUD Spring Conference
 26 April 2008
 First UU Church of Austin
 4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
 www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:
(Adapted from “Prayer Before Birth” by Louis MacNeice)

I am not yet born; O hear me.

I am your tomorrows, but I am not yet born.

I am not yet born, console me.

Protect me from the doubts that strangle, the fears that stifle,

the friends who drain and demean.

I am not yet born; give me dreams of what we may yet become,

and nourish me, that I do not starve before I gain the strength to walk,

and to fly, and perhaps even to soar with the eagles.

I am not yet born; O hear me,

Protect me from those who can remain big only by keeping those around them small, for I am yet a fragile thing.

I am not yet born; O fill me with strength

against those who would freeze my humanity,

who would make me into a thing, a mere thing,

who would dissuade and drain me until I lose my spirit,

and then my soul, and then my hope,

and your hope as well.

For I am the greater you who is not yet born,

And together we must strive, must strive with the gods if necessary,

for so much is at stake, there is so much to be gained.

I am the you who is yet to become,

and I am not yet born.

Help me.

SERMON: The Ancient Roots of the Liberal Spirit

The soul of liberal religion is not a new thing. Even professors of religion often speak as though it had been born in the late 18th century, in the work of the great German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher. But Schleiermacher – as he knew – was a late-comer.

The spirit of liberal religion – which is opposed to the spirit of literal religion – is at least four thousand years old. It’s not new at all. It had multiple births, and I want to talk about some of those births this morning.

First, it was born in the world’s oldest story, the still-magnificently modern story of Gilgamesh. He ruled over 4700 years ago, and the earliest texts of the story are from 4100 years ago – before any of today’s great religions or philosophies had been born. They saw themselves as living in the “modern age,” because writing had just been invented there a hundred years earlier. And they asked of what use were the old gods to modern people. They decided the gods had become impotent ornaments, but that the meaning and purpose of life – which were now up to us – were still immeasurably rich, and close at hand: through the deeds we do, the positive differences we make, the art and music we create, the love and joy we can share with families and friends, and the influence we can have on those who will come after us. There in that most ancient story was a religious vision more courageous and unfettered than that of any Western religion.

But as writing both evolved and spread, others saw themselves as living in modern times. If they traveled enough to learn about other cultures, they could now reflect not only on the day’s gossip, their era’s guesses at enduring truths, but could also see that people in other times and places saw things quite differently, and lived with comfort and passion over quite different assumptions.

You know how the liberal spirit of deeds not creeds was born in the Hebrew prophets, but I want to talk about some traditions you may not know as well, because we tend to be quite provincial and think that our religious spirit originated in 16th century Transylvania or 19th century New England.

That liberal spirit was born at least twice in China.

First, in Confucius, who was concerned not with gods but with our selves here and now. And he saw that our mistake was that we conceived of ourselves as far too small, whereas our biggest and most necessary self only exists as part of the larger society around us. So our job, he believed, is to learn the care and respect that make our relationships with others flow smoothly.

There is a story from 13th century Neo-Confucianism about this kind of transcendence. Confucians were very determined not to have any supernaturalism in their practice, so they were quite upset when their Master said that today he would be talking about magic. Angry but polite, one of them raised his hand to ask what the Master might mean by that objectionable word, “magic.” The Master sighed. “Oh,” he said, “I can go into that, but it will take some time.” Then he leaned toward a student in front, and asked if he’d get him a glass of water. When the student returned, the Master took a sip of water, then said, “That was magic. He did my bidding, without threats or bribes, simply because I asked him to and he wanted to do it. That is the kind of magic that makes our interactions with others flow smoothly, and it is the magic we need to learn.” Why is this liberal? Because like all good religion, it’s about behavior, not belief. Nobody cares what we believe.

Lao Tzu also gave birth to the spirit of liberal religion, the spirit of deeds not creeds, in Taoism, when he wrote one of the finest moral teachings in history:

What is a good man but a bad man’s teacher?

What is a bad man but a good man’s job?

If you don’t understand this, you will get lost,

However intelligent you are.

It is the great secret.

(Stephen Mitchell translation)

Why is this the spirit of liberal religion – or simply the spirit of honest religion? Because it links us to something eternal, without insulting our intelligence or confining us to the teachings and biases of any one religion. Its insights transcend theology and resonate in the hearts and heads of all people. Here are some other quotations from Lao Tzu’s book, the Tao te Ching. See how liberal, and how modern, they sound and feel:

“Must you value what others value, and avoid what others avoid? How ridiculous!

“The great Way is easy, yet people prefer the side paths. Be aware when things are out of balance. Stay centered within the Tao. When rich speculators prosper while farmers lose their land; when government officials spend money on weapons instead of cures; when the upper class is extravagant and irresponsible while the poor have nowhere to turn – all this is robbery and chaos.

“Let the Tao be present in your life and you will become genuine. Let it be present in your family and your family will flourish. Let it be present in your country and your country will be an example to all countries in the world. Let it be present in the universe and the universe will sing. How do I know this is true? By looking inside myself.” This is very close to the Hindu notion of how our atman, or individual soul, is part of Brahman, or the creative forces of the universe.

I think, page for page, the Tao te Ching is probably the wisest book ever written.

Then we can go to the Greeks, who also had a non-theistic approach.

Xenophanes (570 – 480 BC), criticized the religious literalism of his day in words that still ring true. He had traveled a lot, seen a lot of cultures and religions, and noticed the psychological projection in all religions. Here’s some of what he said, over 2500 years ago:

“Mortals suppose that gods are born, wear their own clothes and have a voice and body. Ethiopians say that their gods are snub-nosed and black; Thracians say that theirs are blue-eyed and red-haired.”

And he added that if horses and oxen had hands and could draw pictures, their gods would look remarkably like horses and oxen.

And then there’s Socrates, still generally regarded as the greatest of all Western sages. It’s hard to imagine the effect Socrates had on people, though we know that he was finally condemned to death for asking his disturbing questions that were more profound than his society’s answers. But we have the eyewitness testimony of a man named Alcibiades, who was shaken to his core.

According to Alcibiades, Socrates” questions bite the heart like a viper, and provoke in the soul a state of philosophical possession, delirium, and drunkenness.

“I was in such a state that it did not seem possible to live while behaving as I was behaving…. He forces me to admit to myself that I do not take care for myself.” That’s what religious prophets do, though few in history have done it as well as Socrates.

Socrates believed that an innate desire for the good exists in all human beings. Here was a profound and specific assertion about why we have inherent worth and dignity, at least if we’ll let that deep awareness command us.

Socrates described himself not as a philosopher or teacher, but as a midwife, helping to give birth to the greater possibilities he believed dwelled within us, waiting to be called forth.

For all the Greeks, humans suffer because they are ignorant of the way to live. Ignorance – as in Buddhism – is the fundamental human sin.

Even for the Epicureans, those who are seen as affirming the joy of pleasure, but who really believed that we should be equally happy with simple pleasures as with expensive ones. Even the Epicureans were taught always to act as though Epicurus were watching them.

This was echoed a few centuries later by the Romans, who taught that we should live “under the gaze of eternity,” which meant to live as though all the noblest people, the greatest souls, were watching us, then to do only what we would be proud to do under that gaze. It’s hard to improve on that as a one-sentence guide to living ethically and morally.

Another liberal thinker named Plotinus (204-270) used the metaphor of sculpture to talk about how we should form ourselves. “If you do not see your own beauty yet, do as the sculptor does with a statue which must become beautiful: he pares away this part, scratches that other part, makes one place smooth, and cleans another, until he causes a beautiful face to appear in the statue. In the same way, you too must pare away what is superfluous, straighten what is crooked, purify all that is dark, in order to make it gleam. And never cease sculpting your own statue, until the divine light of virtue shines within you.”

Probably my own favorite spiritual and psychological center came through the Paideia culture of ancient Greece. You may not know the odd word “paideia,” but you know its ideals. The Greeks believed that the best kind of humans were both born and made. Breeding mattered – after all, all their mythic heroes were imagined as the offspring of a human parent and a god. But the noblest humans were also made, by shaping them in the image of the highest ideals the culture could articulate. That meant the most sacred treasures in ancient Greek culture were those collective ideals so high and commanding that they bestowed a dignity of character on both gods and humans. The collective noun for these highest ideals was paideia. It was in the root of their words for both children and education, as it still is for us (e.g., pediatrics and pedagogy). Mortimer Adler started a “Paideia Project,” and there are still a few Paideia Schools around, including one in Austin. But mostly, we know of this ancient project of “salvation by character” through the Romans.

When Cicero read of the Paideia culture, he realized that the Romans had neither the word nor the concept for these noblest forms of humans that could be made through shaping their character in the image of transcendent ideals. The word he coined to translate “paideia” into Latin was perfect: humanitas, which means the essence of being most fully human. It was the root of all our liberal Humanities education, those courses now fading from our schools, designed to bring us near the intersection of that place where our full humanity and our full divinity merged, like the ancient mythic breeding of the human and the divine. All of these ancient teachings so far were done without using any gods, yet they are among the most profound in human history. they’re timeless and inclusive, and beyond theology or the limits of any one religion in ways that Western religions” Yahweh, Jesus and Mohammad are not.

The spirit of liberal religion, of that greater self to which we should try to give birth, was also born twice in India, in Hinduism and Buddhism.

Here are just a few quotes from the Upanishads, written about 2200 to 2500 years ago:

“Know that [the creative power of the universe] is forever a part of you, and there is nothing higher to be known. It is found in the soul when sought with truth and self-sacrifice, as fire is found in wood, water in hidden springs, and cream in milk.

“If you deny this power, you deny yourself. If you affirm it, you affirm yourself.” This is almost identical to the teaching attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas, where he says, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth with destroy you.” It is profoundly liberal. And though it doesn’t require any gods, it does require great integrity and personal courage.

Then a final thought from the Upanishads, which may strike you, as it has struck many others, as profoundly happier than most religious teachings:

“[The creative power of the universe] is joy: for from joy all beings have come, by joy they all live, and unto joy they all return.”

The Hindu and Buddhist notion of karma is a lot like Socrates” notion of how our lives take the shape of the quality of ideals we are serving. As the Upanishads say, As we act and behave in life, so we become. If we do good, we become good; if we do evil, we become evil. By pure actions we becomes pure; by evil actions we becomes evil. You can feel how close this is to Greek thought – some scholars believe the Greeks got it from the Hindus – by remembering one of the most famous of Greek sayings, attributed to Aristotle but perhaps being much older: “Plant a thought, reap a deed; plant a deed, reap a habit; plant a habit, reap a character; plant a character, reap a destiny.” Hear how modern this is: it’s existential religion, like Buddhists talking about our duty to nurture the Buddha-seed within us, or the Christian Meister Eckhart talking about the God-seed within us, and how we should help it come alive and define us.

Now a paragraph or two about Buddhism. This terribly quick romp through some of the world’s great, deep and complex religions is not meant to be flippant; it’s trying to fly over a lot of territory to show that the patterns are profoundly liberal to the core, and profoundly empowering and commanding, as all honest religion must be.

The Buddha grew out of, and away from, Hinduism. He taught that we just need to wake up from the illusions we create for ourselves through our ways of talking and thinking. When we wake up, the world won’t be perfect or ideal, but it will be real, and we can find our real place in it.

Every one of these ancient religions and philosophies is concerned with how to live, how to become the person we can be most proud of having been. And every one of them finds the power to do this within us, rather than through pleading with an external deity for it. All believed we must tune ourselves to a higher frequency, align ourselves with an enduring or eternal order, serve others, see ourselves as small parts of a much larger reality. But the power to do this was always within us. We were not missing pieces, not missing parts. We were born as a mix of good and evil, but basically good, though we’re ignorant of the thing we need to know, which is that we have the power to become the kind of people we can be most proud of. We also have the responsibility. The gods won’t do it for us. we’re not saved, not made whole, through believing this or that – only through being.

Perhaps the best that preachers and churches can do is aspire to the role of Socrates, to be midwives and help us give birth to the greater possibilities within us, and to do it – as Alciabiades testified – whether we like it or not.

The soul of the liberal spirit is about waking up – waking from dogmatic slumbers, but also waking from lethargic slumbers that don’t or won’t look beneath the surface of life into its more complex – and darker – depths. That waking up is an individual calling, challenge, task and achievement. It’s the birth of our individual soul from the globular mass of our class, our social identity, our political or sexual or racial identity, to ask who we are – individually, personally, really, beneath all those other important but secondary influences that help to shape and mis-shape us.

You can feel the depth, presence and power of these questions, can’t you? They have always had that power of birthing our better selves, once they grab hold of us enough to wake us up.

We await and yearn for that kind of birth, that level of being “born again, born of the Holy Spirit.” How can it happen? “We can only hope,” some say. But Socrates and the rest of our liberal predecessors wouldn’t buy that, and neither should we. Perhaps we can only hope, but not only only hope – not only only hope.

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KEYNOTE ADDRESS – SWUU DISTRICT ANNUAL MEETING
AUSTIN, TEXAS

David Bumbaugh
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 the world? 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.

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© Davidson Loehr
 SWUUD Spring Conference
 Friday 25 April 2008
 First UU Church of Austin
 4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
 www.austinuu.org

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READING: Who are you?

A woman in a coma was dying. She suddenly had a feeling that she was taken up to heaven and stood before the Judgment Seat.

“Who are you?” a Voice said to her.

“I’m the wife of the mayor,” she replied.

“I did not ask whose wife you are but who you are.”

“I’m the mother of four children.”

“I did not ask whose mother you are, but who you are.”

“I’m a schoolteacher.”

“I did not ask what your profession is but who you are.”

And so it went. No matter what she replied, she did not seem to give a satisfactory answer to the question, “Who are you?”

“I’m a Christian.”

“I did not ask what your religion is but who you are.”

“I’m the one who went to church every day and always helped the poor and needy.”

“I did not ask what you did but who you are.”

She evidently failed the examination, for she was sent back to life. When she recovered from her illness, she was determined to find out who she was. And that made all the difference. (Anthony de Mello, Taking Flight, p. 140)

PRAYER

We pray not to something, but from something, to which we must give voice; not to escape from our life, but to focus it; not to relinquish our mind, but to replenish our soul.

We pray that we may live with honesty: that we can accept who we are, and admit who we are not; that we don’t become so deafened by pride and fear that we ignore the still small voices within us, that could lead us out of darkness.

We pray that we can live with trust and openness: to those people, those experiences, and those transformations that can save us from narrowness and despair.

And we pray on behalf of these hopes with an open heart, an honest soul, and a grateful reverence for the life which has been given to us.

Amen.

HOMILY: Who Are We?

That parable about the woman who didn’t know who she was beyond all the secondary identities she’d worn raises the most basic question of liberal religion, perhaps the most basic question of all religion: who are you, beyond the hand-me-down identity of your sex, race, social and economic class and political biases? These are add-ons. Who is inside? Who are you?

This is an especially good question for us, because you know that most people have heard of us – if they’ve heard of us at all – through Garrison Keillor’s jokes about us. Before I was called to Austin in 2000, I served a year as the interim minister at Unity-Unitarian Church in St. Paul, about five blocks from Garrison Keillor’s mansion, and I heard a slew of those jokes from church members, some of whom knew him.

It seems a shame to start a conference like with without some humor, so I’ll share two of those with you. The first was when I heard him tell of the Unitarian missionaries of the 1960s and 1970s, who came to Minnesota and tried to convert the Ojibway Indians through interpretive dance.

The second one is by far the better known, and is my very favorite. It’s the one about what you get when you cross a Unitarian with a Jehovah’s Witness. You get someone who knocks on your door for no apparent reason.

The reason the jokes work is because it isn’t easy saying who we are, or what we believe that has the depth and power to be a gift either to our people or to the world around us, beyond our second-hand identities of social class and political biases – or, on a much more local scale, the Seven Principles, also known as the Seven Dwarfs or the Seven Banalities. Some of you may know the history of how these came to be born, but I suspect many of you don’t know the history. The first church I served played a part in that history, so it’s a story I was made aware of as soon as I entered the ministry in 1986 – the year after those Principles were adopted at General Assembly.

In the late 1970s, some people began saying – and I usually heard it in these words – that “The problem is that our children don’t know what to tell their friends they believe.” I had just started graduate school in 1979 when I heard this, and remember thinking, “No, the problem is that neither our members nor ministers know what they believe that matters any more.”

It was – at least in an ideal sort of world – time to ask very hard religious questions. These would have included questions like, “What’s worth believing? What beliefs are necessary for forming people of high character? What gods (where “gods” means “ideals or beliefs”) are worth serving, and can lead us toward lives worth living?” To be fair, I don’t know of any denomination that asked such questions – and at least all the liberal denominations needed to be asking them by at least thirty years ago. But we didn’t either.

Instead, we took a poll. The UUA asked some churches – I don’t know how many, whether it was more like thirty or a hundred – to hold discussion groups. The purpose of these discussion groups was to find out what people who happened to come to our churches, and happened to like discussion groups, happened to believe. The first church I served was one of these churches.

What the results showed – and when you think about it, all they could show – was the generic biases of America’s cultural liberals in the early 1980s. That’s not useless. It does show – still pretty accurately, I think – the demographic slice from which our people (including me) come. It’s a sociological and semi-political sort of orthodoxy, though of course not any sort of a religious orthodoxy. We”ve always been against that.

However, the social and political biases of liberals became our real orthodoxy, as it pretty much is to this day.

Taken together and framed and hung on pink posters throughout our churches – including this one – they have the look and feel of a kind of de facto creed, a religion manufactured for our masses, and while the UUA is clear that they do not speak for the beliefs of our masses, they’re still there, and many think they look like they must. No one, I hope, would suggest that they belong alongside some of the timeless teachings of the world’s great religions – the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, The Eightfold Noble Path of Buddhism, the insights of the Hindu Upanishads and Bhagavad-Gita or the rest. But if these aren’t high, noble, first-rate timeless beliefs, are there any that can and should command all decent people? If so, from where? Under what authority? Who says? Is that all there is? Who are we? The principles are a good guide to the general demographic from which our members come, meaning the generic beliefs of America’s cultural liberals. So their creedal feel is kind of a rough sketch of America’s social and political liberals, at least from the early 1980s. In most of our churches – to our credit, I think – we’re not terribly judgmental about what a person’s individual religious beliefs are. You can believe in a god, a goddess, a whole slew of deities or none at all, and you’ll fit right in unless you’re too evangelical about your beliefs. But if you step very far outside of our social and political orthodoxy, you might have trouble getting many people wanting to engage you in serious and respectful conversation at coffee hour. Here are a few of the ways I’ve thought of that you could do it:

- By wearing a pro-life button

- By wearing a pro-Bush button (in at least the vast majority of our churches)

- By wearing one that says “I’ll give up my gun when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers.”

- Or one that says “Evolution is wrong” or “Science is only a bad guess.”

You get the idea, and you can amuse yourself this weekend when you get bored by thinking of other buttons or signs that would mark your visitors as among the Unclean, the Untouchables, the Damned.

All these are examples of people exercising free choice of both belief and expression, but they would make you as unwelcome here as signs with the opposite message might make you at your local megachurch. The difference is that at the megachurch, they would be able to give you some specifically religious beliefs they said they regarded as sacred and commanding – something beyond the generic biases of social and political conservatives. In my experience, that would be much, much harder to do in nearly all of our churches.

But if the current assigned ideology of the social and political left doesn’t speak for our beliefs, or for the mission and purpose of this little non-moving movement, what does? Because we’re in trouble.

We have about the same number of members we had in 1961, while the country’s population has increased by about 70%. Any business consultant would say that a business that’s lost 70% of its market share is in dire straits. Are we simply doomed, is it time to pass out the razor blades and poisoned Kool-Aid, or is there hope? If there’s an answer, is it a really easy one, that wouldn’t require us to do anything, like, hard? And if there is an answer but it’s hard, are we really interested in it?

The basic assumption that has helped to frame this weekend’s programs is that there is an answer, it will take work, some re-definition and digging beneath merely superficial understandings of religion, but it is exciting work that can reconnect us with the ancient and life-giving spirit of liberal religion – a spirit which, as I’ll show you in tomorrow morning’s worship service, goes back to the very oldest story we have, a story from before the beginning of recorded human history or the appearance of any of the world’s current religions. It isn’t limited to the biases of Democrats, the Green Party, or whatever the current Politically Correct habits are. It is not about walking in intellectual or actual lock-step to some agenda that’s really just about us – whether it’s an official creed or seven “principles” created by a few hundred people over a quarter century ago – people who meant for them to be a snapshot of their times, not a prescription for ours.

It’s about becoming more aware of that spirit of liberal religion that has been with us, and has been whispering in our ears, since the dawn of written history. It’s about learning about more of the forms that spirit has taken through the world’s great religions and philosophies and lives. Then it’s about nurturing the spark of that spirit until it becomes a flame in our own lives that can illuminate and enlighten us – two of the key prayers of all religion – and which can finally command and transform us.

You may know much of the story, but I hope those guiding religious, intellectual and emotional spirits that have always characterized the soul of liberal religion – I hope those spirits will be present within and among us this weekend. Because they are the spirits – spirits probably older than our human species – best able to help us answer some of those questions more profound than answers: like “Who are you? Why does it matter? What do you offer to the world?” or “What does the world need from religious liberals?” The spirits that answer these questions have given life abundant to millions and millions of people for thousands of years, all over the world. They can do the same for us, if we will let them in. This weekend together, let’s let them in.