Soul Force

Standing on the Side of Love

Rev. Paul Sprecher

Second Parish in Hingham, www.secondparish.org

October 11, 2009

Readings Amos 5:6-7, 10-15

“The Gospel of Inclusion,” Kimberly French, UU World

Most of you are aware that my wife Deedee and I took the train to the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly late last June. This has been an annual practice of ours for about a decade now. The most remarkable discovery for me this past year was the story of the extraordinary changes at All Souls in Tulsa that I began presenting in our second reading this morning. It happens that the senior minister at All Souls, Marlin Lavanhar, grew up in our home congregation in Ridgewood, NJ, so the story struck particularly close to home. Here’s how Carlton Pearson, the leader of the Pentecostal congregation that joined All Souls a year ago, came to be a Universalist Pentecostal:

Pearson—an African American Pentecostal—had founded one of Tulsa’s most prominent megachurches. He had risen rapidly through the national power structure of evangelical Christendom, in league with the Rev. Oral Roberts, the Rev. Jerry Falwell, and the Rev. Pat Robertson. In his early forties, he was at the pinnacle of his career.

Then Pearson got a divine revelation, as he tells it. Watching a news report one night in the spring of 1996, he was getting worked up about the genocide in Rwanda. His assumption was that the victims were bound for hell, persecuted yet unsaved. Feeling angry at God, and guilty that he himself wasn’t doing anything about it, he recalls, he fell into a sort of reproachful prayer: “God, I don’t know how you can sit on your throne there in heaven and let those poor people drop to the ground hungry, heartbroken, and lost, and just randomly suck them into hell.”

He heard God answer, “We’re not sucking those dear people into hell. Can’t you see they’re already there—in the hell you have created for them and continue to create for yourselves and others all over the planet? We redeemed and reconciled all of humanity at Calvary.”

Everything Pearson thought he knew was true started unraveling, as he began to realize: The whole world is already saved, whether they know it or not—not just professed Christians in good standing, but Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, atheists, gay people. There is no hell after you die. And he didn’t have the good sense to keep it to himself.[i]

You may have heard Bishop Pearson’s story on “This American Life” or from some the the interviews he has done with other national media. Despite his prominent position in the evangelical movement, he was disavowed and denounced after he began sharing this revelation with his congregation and others. Marlin Lavanhar at All Souls immediately recognized that Pearson was preaching the same doctrine of Universalism our own forebears preached two centuries ago, when they proclaimed loudly despite the scandal it caused then that all would be saved, not only an elect few. That’s why Marlin was so willing to welcome this very different congregation to join his own, because in the end, despite their cultural differences, their theology was in fact very similar.

This story is particularly compelling to me because I grew up in a Pentecostal church and I left when I was 16 precisely because the theology was the opposite of Universalism; our ministers told us that most of the human race was at risk of hellfire because they didn’t believe the same doctrines we did. The seminary I attended, New York Theological Seminary, included a preponderance of African-American and Hispanic students, with the result that when we worshiped together, we sounded a lot like All Souls in Tulsa during the singing part of the service, though we didn’t have quite as good a rhythm section. Ironically, this gave me the opportunity to get over some of the allergies to certain types of religious music I had acquired growing up.

Not everyone at All Souls is happy about the change in the second service. Some have a hard time with the drums (and I think we here would, too) but others have more theological concerns, especially those who had been raised in conservative Christian churches. Kimberly French in the UU World continues the story this way:

Since last September, every week, a steady stream of men and women have come to talk with [Marlin] about being abused—emotionally, sexually, or spiritually—as children in a Christian church. When they heard praise music sung, and saw the upraised hands, the trauma was reignited.

Over and over, he has heard his members say, “I came to All Souls to get away from all that.”

Each time he asks: What is the “that”?

“In most cases,” Lavanhar wrote in a recent issue of the church newsletter Simple Gifts, “people tell me it was authoritarian leadership, the dogma, the anti-intellectualism, the superstitious and magical thinking, the way women were treated, the homophobia, the guilt, the shame, the judgmentalism, the proselytizing, and the sense that their community was especially privileged with righteousness and truth, and the way that other traditions and ways of thinking were demonized. None of which, I point out, has been brought into All Souls.”

Unitarian Universalist churches do not have a test of belief. There is no creed, but a covenant, a way we behave toward one another.

“There is an African American experience of God,” Lavanhar has challenged members, “that has been molded and shaped by slavery, lynching, Jim Crow, and persistent racism. Many have an experience of God that involves Jesus. They don’t say it’s the only way. If we can’t accept that experience in our church, then we’re not living by what we say.

“Our history is filled with people rejected for their religious beliefs. That is something we share with them. We’re on this ship together. It’s full of excitement and possibility and also danger and risk. By living out our covenant and statement of purpose, it has forced us to change. It’s not forsaking Unitarian Universalism. It’s being Unitarian Universalist.”[ii]

So that was one exciting and puzzling set of events at General Assembly. Because of my own background, I have done extensive research on Pentecostalism and offered to send Marlin two papers I had written; he was most grateful for the background, because this was all completely new to him.

The other event at General Assembly I wanted to mention today was this year’s Berry Street Essay by Paul Razor entitled “Ironic Provincialism.” This essay was the latest in the longest-running lecture series in the United states, the Ministerial Conference in Berry Street, founded by William Ellery Channing in 1820 at his vestry on Berry Street in downtown Boston, a street long since swallowed by the financial district but still remembered each year at this conference. I have the honor to be the scribe of the conference, a minor role whose tasks consist primarily of upholding the somewhat arcane rituals of the conference and then standing before six or seven hundred of my colleagues in ministry and gavelling them to order. I was asked to take on this responsibility mainly because in the year before I came to Second Parish I became obsessed with locating and posting on the web as many of the previous essays as I could find.

This year’s essay held a mirror up to us as a denomination and made a strong case for why we as a religious movement must become more diverse. Here’s how Paul Razor begins to make that case:

Does it sometimes seem that Unitarian Universalists are always in the middle of an identity crisis? That at some level, we are forever trying to figure out who we are?

Liberalism will do this to you. Our commitment to religious freedom, our openness to new ideas, our insistence that religion should live in the present and not in the past, our healthy theological pluralism – all of these, the very things that make us liberal, mean that our collective religious identity will inevitably be difficult to pin down at any particular moment in our history.… We seem to be afflicted with a kind of theological ADD. I recognize this, because I also struggle with this annoying affliction.

Our peripatetic progressivism means that we are often ahead of the cultural curve in responding to the realities of the world around us. Yet there are times when the opposite is true, when the realities are so daunting that we freeze up.... Not to be overly dramatic, I believe we face a major turning point in Unitarian Universalism, and our decision whether to stand or move will shape the identity and set the course of our religious movement for the twenty-first century. In a word, our turning point can be summed up in the term multiculturalism.

The context of our challenge is familiar but worth saying. Our society is right now, in our generation, undergoing the most radical demographic shift in its history. We see this every day in our cities and towns, in our neighborhoods and schools and workplaces, and in our congregations. These changes are forcing us to reexamine everything we thought we knew about ourselves, both as a society and as a religious movement....

If we fail to respond to this new multicultural reality … we not only fail to honor this core liberal principle, we will simply become irrelevant. We could devolve into a quaint relic of a once-vital tradition, holding fast to our good liberal ideas (while continuing to bicker about them), protecting an increasingly insular identity, ironically slipping into the kind of safe and unchallenging provincialism we have always resisted.[iii]

Rosemary Bray McNatt, minister at 4^th Universalist in New York, herself African-American, responded to Paul’s essay by highlighting the cultural issues that can raise barriers to newcomers in our congregations:

It would be great if those of us who are ministers of color, or Latino/Latina ministers, or Asian/Pacific Island ministers, or multiracial ministers, were automatic magnets for diversity in our congregations....

We underestimate, ... I think, the reality of resistance in our congregations, a resistance rooted not so much in racism as in matters of class and culture. We forget that when we talk about cultural competence in ministry, or cultural change in ministry, that is not just those other people who have a culture. Unitarian Universalist congregations have a culture. Consider who many of us are, and who we are pretty proud about being, no matter what our race or ethnicity. Many of us are the people who brag about not owning televisions because there is nothing worth watching, unless it is PBS. Many of us are the people who refuse to listen to popular music because it is misogynistic and violent, and more than a few of us regard rap music as nothing more than noise and confusion. Many of us change the channel, and listen to NPR and love Garrison Keillor and Prairie Home Companion, and laugh when Keillor makes fun of us. Many of us are unapologetic nature lovers, and the only thing we might love more than hiking in the woods is building our congregations in the woods, complete with tiny elegant signs that blend in well with the natural environment, but cannot possibly be seen by a seeker on the highway. Many of us eat locally, and we shop at farmer’s markets, and we would never be caught in Wal-Mart, unless it was a dire emergency. Many of us do look ahead in our hymnal to see whether we agree with the words, and forget that the person sitting next to us may need exactly the words we are refusing to sing. Most of all, many of us love our UU congregations because they represent for us places of respite and peace and sanctuary.[iv]

We here at Second Parish have some unique challenges and some unique strengths. The Town of Hingham is 97.5% white according to the 2000 census, so we don’t have a great deal of cultural and racial diversity around us to start with. That will undoubtedly change, and we need to be prepared for a future in which it is changing. On the plus side, we as a congregation have remained more closely tied to our Christian and Jewish heritage than many other congregations, and we are not afraid to speak of God or the Bible or the spirit of Jesus here. We understand that spiritual growth for some of us includes coming to terms with some of the less fortunate parts of our own religious upbringing, and we continue to preach a generous Universalism. As our reading from Amos this morning reminds us, seeking good and not evil – doing justice – is at the heart of the religious enterprise and the ultimate point of what we do here. We could also make some changes to be more welcoming. We have been singing more gospel hymns, as have other congregations in the Unitarian Universalist Association. We would like to acquire a spinet piano for our choir loft so that Mark can more easily use a piano when appropriate to the music we’re singing. We can continue to cherish our wonderful organ and we can add more diversity to our music.

Today we are celebrating Unitarian Universalist Association Sunday, an opportunity for all of our 1,000 congregations to focus attention and funding on a particular set of objectives. This year the theme is “Growing Our Diversity,” and the projects chosen for support are the following:

· Expand the “Building the World We Dream About” curriculum and associated resources and training to enable Unitarian Universalist congregations to become more welcoming of racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity, and to dismantle racism in congregations and the larger community.

· Support congregations that are working to create a Unitarian Universalism that is racially, culturally, and economically diverse; a part of this support will be in the form of grants. A grant like this enabled All Souls in Tulsa to hire the music director for their second service each Sunday.

· Enable UU congregations and districts to minister effectively to youth and young adults who identify as people of color or multiracial, and to their families, in the areas of spiritual development, racial/cultural identity development, and leadership development.

As a congregation, we are small – that is true. We are living in a relatively mono-cultural enclave – that is true. But what we can do is to invite and welcome everyone to join us on an exciting spiritual journey. We can reach out to our neighbors with a renewed sense of mission, and begin more focused volunteering along the lines we discussed in our announcements this morning. We can join together in giving generously to the Unitarian Universalist Association this morning. We can all do our part.

In this way we can choose to side on the side of the good. In this way we can do justice. In this way we can stand on the side of love.

Amen