During a sermon competition at one of our theological schools, a student described the ideal church as one where she knew if something happened to her the congregation would step in and raise her children. The professor told her that was a nice ideal, but would never actually exist. I’m sorry that professor had such a low opinion, and such a limited experience of Unitarian Universalists. For I know of more than one occasion when the unfortunate circumstance of a family breaking up or parents becoming unable to care for their children where our congregations have stepped in and raised the children. Raised them in terms of providing shelter and food and clothing and paying for their college education, but more, raised them in terms of love and nurture and providing a community to hold them in the absence of their parents. This is a saving faith.
Yes, this is a saving faith, but life will never be boring here for this is, equally, a challenging faith. Challenging because we do not tell you what to believe in terms of doctrine and dogma. We have no creed to which we ask you to adhere, but we do have seven guiding principles.
We, the member congregations of the UUA, covenant to affirm and promote:
The inherent worth and dignity of every person
Justice, equity, and compassion in human relations
Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations
A free and responsible search for truth and meaning
The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large
The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all
Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part
Even those you need not swear allegiance to in order to be a member of this or any other Unitarian Universalist church, but they do serve as general guidelines for our ways of being together. And they are challenging to live by.
First because they uphold a lofty vision that if we are to live by and fulfill takes attention and care and selflessness and lots of those things that can sometimes be hard to come by when you’re just trying live from day to day. They ask you to believe that which is life-affirming. They ask you to act as a part of sacred creation.
But they are also challenging because they don’t spell out all the rules. The principles uphold multiple values that can live in tension with each other and they leave it up to us to define where the boundary is between individuality and community. They leave it up to us for find that skinny little line between rights and responsibility, between freedom and structure. They leave it up to us to decide which basket we will bring – the full one from which we will give or the empty one which we bring to have filled. They are challenging because they tell us it’s up to us, and the use of our individual reason and conscience, to figure out how to define and implement justice, equity and compassion for all.
And how we do that is by using our individual reason and conscience in community – by using our own resources, but also by making connections with others who can help us make the choices. And, by doing it within the framework of this tradition. Because when you join a Unitarian Universalist church you join yourself to both an organization and a tradition. This organization of First Parish reaches back to the seventeenth century, but the tradition stretches back to the first century. It includes customs and principles and a range of theologies. It includes a consensus expressed every now and then in words, but more often in values. And it includes most emphatically freedom of conscience, which means that no central denominational body can tell any single church how to be a church, nor can any church tell any member what to believe.
So what does it mean to be a member of this faith? What does it mean to be a Unitarian Universalist and what does it mean to be a member of First Parish?
Membership is a journey, both for the individual and for the congregation. It is not just a technical or legal state, nor is it only a numerical measurement of how many members we have. It is a process that engages human beings and takes us from a starting place to a new place. Membership issues don’t end when someone decides to join and signs their name in the book. That is only the beginning. That is when a congregation has to take seriously its responsibilities and commitment to membership to know and to nurture members. That is when members have to take seriously their commitment to the congregation to participate in the life of the church. It means being willing to be part of a faith tradition that is both challenging and saving.
Confession: Good for the Soul
From a sermon preached during the High Holy Days of Judaism
Hosea Ballou was one of the greatest figures of early Universalism. As early as 1790 he was a preacher and circuit rider spreading the word of God’s eternal love that would save all people; not only those who were elected or lived a spotless life, but all people. Universal salvation was a new idea at the time, a radical idea, and as it is with many new and radical ideas it was a pretty hard sell, especially in Puritan New England. Universalists were barred from serving on juries in several states since it was believed that without the threat of eternal damnation they could not be trusted to tell the truth.
One day, a Baptist circuit rider challenged Ballou’s belief in universal salvation. “Why, if I was a Universalist,” he said, “I could knock you over the head and steal your wallet and horse, and have nothing to fear.”
“If you were a Universalist,” Ballou rejoined, “the thought would never enter your mind.”
Hosea Ballou might have held an overly optimistic view of Universalists, but his faith points to a major tenet of early Universalism that has never disappeared—the idea that we human beings are driven by conscience, not by promises or threats of a future and unknown existence. As those early Universalists wrote in the 1803 Winchester Profession, “We believe that holiness and happiness are inseparably connected.” In other words, we are good because it is a surer path to happiness than not being good. We are, at our best and holiest, ruled by our conscience and what we know to be right rather than by base desire.
The Unitarians, no less than the Universalists, arose in response to a Puritan Calvinism that centered on the downfallen, depraved nature of humanity and the wrathful nature of God. The Unitarians, no less than the Universalists, were a mighty optimistic bunch of folks.
So what is more natural than that two denominations ruled by the slogans “God is love” and “the progress of man onward and upward forever” should end up joining forces to become the Unitarian Universalists that we are today? We come from a mighty optimistic, if not downright utopian heritage, and that has made us rather resistant to personal attribution of theological concepts of sin and confession. But as Hosea Ballou so succinctly pointed out what drives us as a religious people is conscience, the idea of personal responsibility, even when it is uncomfortable to acknowledge our personal role in the brokenness of the world.
In the Jewish tradition, the Days of Awe, falling at the New Year, are a time of taking personal responsibility. It is a time of confession and reconciliation. During the ten days beginning at Rosh Hashanah, Jews throughout the world seek reconciliation through repentance, through asking forgiveness of those they have harmed and righting the wrongs where possible, through making a turn (teshuvah) toward doing better. It is a time of introspection and reflection. At the end of the ten Days of Awe comes Yom Kippur, which starts at sundown tonight. Yom Kippur is the last chance to seek forgiveness for sins, not against fellow human beings, but sins against God. It is the very holiest of days in the Jewish calendar, and there are several reasons why I love this holiest of days.
One is that in my theology of interconnectedness there is room for knowing that while our actions may not have hurt someone else, they may have hurt ourselves. Since I believe we are all connected and carry the divine spark within us, actions that hurt ourselves are as worthy of atonement as sinning against any other person. The second reason I like this day is that the confessions of sin are communal. All prayers of confession are said in the plural – we are guilty, we have fallen short, we have lost our way. Even though one particular person may not have committed the sin, they pray the prayer because the community has been hurt, because there is communal, as well as personal, responsibility. Even if it is not their sin, Jews pray that God will forgive others who may have sinned.
This, confession creates compassion. While it is true that we often hate in others what we see in ourselves, there are times when we can see beyond our own armor to recognize that the ill actions, the sins and transgressions of others, are founded in the same hurts and insecurities and weaknesses we all have. In Tibetan Buddhism there is a practice, called tonglen, specifically meant to help us get to this realization, that through recognition of our own shortcomings we can extend compassion to others (and I’ll throw in that it’s not such a bad idea to cultivate a little compassion for ourselves while we’re about it). In tonglen meditation you breathe in the pain, suffering, brokenness, limitation of the other and you breathe out your own joy or strength or peace or whatever would help the other person. That’s it; as simple as breathing in and breathing out.
And not simple at all, for the tonglen practice brings us face to face with suffering, not only our own but also the suffering that we find around us. It’s really a practice that goes against the grain, and perhaps especially in American culture where we are trained to want everything on our own terms. This practice of tonglen pushes us to dissolve our own self-protective armor to the point where we are willing to take on another’s pain and offer them our joy, even for those people we don’t actually like. Kind of like that first Unitarian Universalist principle of affirming the inherent worth and dignity of all people – there’s no escape clause that says I only have to do it for the people I like.
And more than a connection with suffering, tonglen is a way for us to overcome our natural fear of suffering and to dissolve the tightness of our own hearts, awakening the compassion that is inherent in all of us. One of the great benefits of tonglen, even though it is not the ultimate goal, is that it cannot be practiced until we come face to face with our own fear, our own resistance, anger, loss, whatever is keeping us stuck in pain. It is the same process as confession. In order to enter into it you must first face up to your own “stuff.” And then you offer yourself compassion. And when you have learned to offer yourself compassion you take the next step toward offering compassion to the world.
And that’s what it’s all about, whether we seek it through the Buddhist practice of tonglen or the Jewish practice of teshuvah or the Christian practice confession – to free ourselves from a very ancient prison of selfishness and feel love for ourselves and others.
The Unities and the Universals
…the fight for freedom is never won. Inherited liberty is not liberty but tradition. Each generation must win for itself the right to emancipate itself from its own tyrannies, which are ever unprecedented and peculiar. Therefore those who have been reared in freedom, bear a tremendous responsibility to the world to win an ever larger and more important liberty…”
This was the charge Clarence Skinner laid for Universalists in 1915. A charge that I think holds today as it did then. The turn of the twentieth century, as was the turn of the twenty-first century, was a time when mainstream churches were losing membership at a rapid rate. This included Universalism, which was losing membership, losing its unique identity as its once radical theology became mainstream, and losing focus. This was the atmosphere into which Clarence Skinner was ordained. But rather than give up on the dream, Skinner sought to enlarge the dream, to make Universalism once more relevant to people’s lives, to revitalize their faith.
Skinner was deeply influenced by the Social Gospel movement that called Christians to expand their notion of the religious life to the wider world, and to find in their faith the impetus to take on the social ills of their time. Skinner embraced the idea that the church was theologically bound not just to the work of the heavens but to the work of the earth, work meant to realize the kingdom of God, or as he termed it, the Beloved Community, here on earth. But Skinner wanted to move beyond even that idea of a church working to alleviate social ills. He saw Universalism as something larger, something bolder, something more universal. He saw it as the religion for all people, what he called “the largest thought the world has ever known... the most revolutionary doctrine ever proclaimed… the most expansive hope ever dreamed.”
In his call to a new universal greatness and liberty, Skinner spoke of the underlying foundation as the unities and the universals. The unities, he said, were the underlying and fundamental connections of all aspects of reality, the coherence of what might at first seem to be separate into a oneness. The universals were what applied to all things, “the antithesis,” as he wrote, “of the limited, or fragmentary… The opposite of the partial.” The universal viewpoint meant the very widest worldview possible; a view wherein one recognizes that there is no individual destiny or salvation, but only the destiny and salvation of all things, all being. As Einstein wrote, it is where one sees the concept of “individual destiny as an imprisonment and seeks to experience the totality of existence as a unity full of significance.”
Before the 20th century had reached its mid-point, Skinner saw that the world had become one physical neighborhood into which all the nations, races and classes had been thrown, that trade and civilization had become unified and universal. What would he say today of our global economy and 24-7 news coverage I wonder? I think he would say the same now as he said then – that the crisis of society lies in the fact that we bring to this one world not a greatness and unity of spirit, but a narrow provincialism wherein our minds are filled with partialisms. Meanwhile the problems of the world demand universalism.
Walter Rauschenbusch, the man who literally wrote the book on the Social Gospel, offered as warning the image of a bird with one clipped wing, because a bird with only one whole wing can fly only in circles and never advance. If we, like that bird, are handicapped with partialisms, we can, no more than the bird, move forward.
By the time Skinner came along Universalists already had long history of social involvement. It was the Universalists of Gloucester that won the abolition of compulsory religious taxation by the state. And the Universalists were among the first religious groups to act to oppose slavery. They were among the earliest champions of women’s rights, prison reform, world peace and the care of neglected children.
“Such has been the prophetic vision of Universalism,” Skinner wrote. “Such deeds it has contributed to the freedom of the world. The record of Universalism is emblazoned with mighty accomplishments. It has made bold the voices of clarion prophets; it has filled the eyes of humble men with imperishable visions; it has caused pulpits to thunder the larger good and the vaster hope; it has quickened the heartbeat of the common life.”
Today, just as in Skinner’s day, there remains two paths before us. One is to unscramble the interdependence of modern civilization and have everyone return to their village to continue a separate existence. It is a possibility, though you may agree a highly unlikely one. The other alternative is to do as Clarence Skinner urged almost a century ago and make our spirits great, expand our range of sympathy and understanding until the whole world is encompassed. This is the greatness to which the unities and the universals call us.
Involvement in political and social movements is in our denominational DNA. But we do not continue our own efforts for justice and peacemaking simply because of tradition. We continue out of our recognition of the unities and the universals. We do it because we have been encountered the eternal truth that contributing to those around us and to humanity at large is more profoundly satisfying and fulfilling than any amount of self-serving. We seek justice because we know that individual destiny is an illusion. We continue the work grounded in a worldview that calls us to a wider spiritual greatness and in order that we might make real that larger liberty and vaster hope.
