Soul Force

Walking Together

Rev. Paul Sprecher

Second Parish in Hingham, www.secondparish.org

June 6, 2010

^Reading

Conrad Wright, Walking Together, pp. 32-35 passim.

Every denomination must have some way of understanding itself, some notion of what gives it its special identity. For Presbyterians it has been the Westminster Confession; for Episcopalians it was, at least until recent revisions, the Book of Common Prayer. For churches like ours, it is the covenant – not the words of any particular covenant, but the covenant relationship of mutual obligation. But unlike the Westminster Confession, which is an historic document, or the prayer book, which does not get revised very often, the congregational covenant must be renewed continuously. That means inevitably that there is a special intensity in the search for consensus….

Between the extremes of stultifying conformity on the one hand, and of disintegrative diversity on the other, we labor to find a place. Let us consider three suggestions as to how some kind of balance may be found.

The first is: to avoid making trivial matters a part of the binding consensus. This is not as simple as it may sound, since one person's trivia may be another's fundamentals. But one of the easiest ways of getting hung up in trivia is to insist on our own way as the only proper way to state a principle that all actually agree with…. We need to discipline ourselves to penetrate beyond the language to see if there may not be genuine agreement at some deeper level….

A second reminder is that part of our consensus is, paradoxically, what we have agreed to disagree about. That is, there are some questions, and not trivial ones only, that recur generation after generation, but which never find a resolution. An obvious one, which has been with us for 150 years, is the relationship of Unitarianism to the Christian tradition and explicitly to the Christian churches. Is there a minister in the denomination who has not preached a sermon entitled: "Are Unitarian Universalists Christians?" ….

The final reminder is that the consensus we share is created, sustained, and developed by persons who have chosen to walk together. We long ago rejected creedal tests for membership as a way to exclude those whose views are not quite in line with the doctrinal position prevailing among those already members. … The boundary lines of our churches are drawn by individual choice, not by official judgment. There are risks involved, to be sure: King's Chapel ends up being somewhat different from a fellowship in California. Some people who join us find that they are in the wrong pew, and move on somewhere else – perhaps they go to the Quakers if we are too liturgical for their tastes, perhaps to the Episcopalians if we are not liturgical enough. But there are others who find at last a place where they belong. They are the ones whose individual perspectives may be added to enrich the consensus that helps to make a community out of a collection of unrelated individuals.

^Sermon

There’s an old joke my Jewish friends tell to illustrate their occasional fractiousness. Many years ago, a Jewish man was washed up on an island. There was enough food to live on growing there, but as time went by and no rescue came, he decided that he would recreate the place from which he came. As the years went by, he built up more and more the structures he was accustomed to in his own town. Finally, after seemingly endless years, a group of sailors looking for a place to relax on land found him. He very excitedly offered to show them his handiwork, and they readily agreed. They marveled at the fidelity with which he had reproduced the home town of which he could only dream. He showed them the houses, the shops, the blacksmith’s forge, the barn. Finally, he said, “And here are my proudest accomplishments – the synagogues!” “But why are there two synagogues?” asked one of the sailors. “Ah,” said the man. “That’s the one I attend. The other is the one I would never set foot in.”

I hope there are not many Unitarian Universalists churches which any of you would never set foot in. I wanted today, as we gather for our annual meeting after the service, to consider what it means to walk together in this beloved community of memory and hope. We need to ask periodically, “What kind of people are we?” as a congregation and also as an association of congregations in this movement we call Unitarian Universalism.

The Centering Thought today, “Can two walk together, except they be agreed?” [Amos 3:3] comes from a time in the history of Israel when there was a great deal of fractiousness among the people. Some wanted to follow the instructions in how to live righteously which they had received at Mt. Sinai as they began their journey out of slavery in Egypt to a Promised Land where they could live freely and prosper. Others were self-interested and chose to ignore those instructions and to exploit and oppress one another. Most importantly, they were ignoring the very simple requirements of righteousness summarized by the prophet Micah in the words, “What does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” [Micah 6:8] Here there is no requirement for a particular belief or doctrine, only justice, kindness, and walking humbly before the Eternal.

In the Standing Order churches – those congregations all across New England that were established when our towns were founded (many of which retain the name “First Parish”) or, like Second Parish, as they grew – the quotation from Amos in our centering thought was used during the early 1800’s by the orthodox Calvinists in those congregations to insist that the Liberal Christians among them were to be shunned and thrown out of the congregations. They refused to continue exchanging pulpits with liberal ministers in order to ensure that their congregations would not be exposed to teachings from the Bible which did not promote their particular dogmas of the Trinity, predestination, salvation, and eternal damnation for the unregenerate. They withdrew from Harvard College, where all ministers had been trained up to that point, and created their own Andover Seminary. They agitated within their own congregations to cast out those who differed in their beliefs from a narrow orthodoxy. They insisted they could not walk together with those who did not wholly accept their theology.

We are a people who empower our members as they determine exactly how they will express their own understanding of righteousness and reverence for the sacred and in particular how they understand their obligations to each other, to their families, their neighbors, and this good earth all around us. We are a people who understand, as we say in our Second Parish Covenant, that we must “respect each person’s search for truth.” It is comforting to believe that truth can be found in some dogmatic formulation or creed, but it is a false comfort. We are a people who trust each other to examine ourselves and find what expression of truth speaks most surely to each of us.

From this we then conclude that only self-governance at the level of each of our congregations can provide the means to work out our own salvation, as the Apostle Paul puts it, “with fear and trembling.” [Phil. 2:12] We each have that work to do, and no one – not the minister, not a creed, not a center of authority – can do that work for us. In this way we walk together as companions on the journey which is our life. Walking togeher in peace does not mean refusing to talk about and share our specific understanding of the truth – indeed, that is a key part of walking together and learning from each other.

We as a religious movement have not always managed to walk peaceably together. During World War I, the Annual Meeting of the American Unitarian Association insisted that any congregation whose minister did not wholeheartedly support that war would receive no funding from the Association, thereby forcing some of their most prophetic ministers out of their pulpits. Twenty years later, the Association repented, welcomed those ministers back, and vowed never again to force conformity on such issues. In the early 1960s, a young minister offered a resolution to deny support to any congregation which supported racial segregation, surely a righteous cause. The president of the association rose to remind the General Assembly that such conformity had been demanded at an earlier time with disastrous results, and the motion was withdrawn. So we walk together, even in bitter disagreement, as each of us seeks the truth as we understand it. We walk together because we have found at last a place where we belong.

We walk together with our ancestors, those who built institutions like Second Parish, the Unitarian and Universalist churches, as well as our great heroes: Jefferson, Channing, Emerson, Thoreau, Olympia Brown. We would probably not all agree with the exact words of the original covenant of those who gathered this congregation in 1746. Their covenant said:

We promise to walk together in all ways of holy communion, as brethren in the family of Christ, and children of Our father, who is in heaven; to keep the faith and observe the order of the gospel, cheerfully to support and conscientiously to attend the public worship of God, in all the instituted duties thereof; and to submit to the discipline of his kingdom; to watch over one another with christian tenderness and circumspection, to avoid sinful stumbling blocks and contentions, and to endeavor our mutual edification in holiness and comfort.[i]

Even if we cannot affirm the exact words of that covenant, we continue to walk together, “and to endeavor our mutual edification in holiness and comfort.”

We must be careful not to dilute each other’s understanding of the truth. We recall the great doctrinal disputes in the early 300’s prior to the adoption of the Trinitarian Nicean Creed between those who held that Jesus was of the same substance as God and those who believed he was of the same person of God. The dispute ran so deeply that it was the excited talk of the markets and the shops; barbershops were a gathering place caught up and divided over this fine point of theology.

We are a people who have agreed that such disputes over the finest points of theology are not productive and do not contribute to our ability to walk together as we “endeavor our mutual edification in holiness and comfort.” We have agreed to look always for the heart of the matter and not be distracted by the words as we express our desire to “do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with [our] our God.” Our Second Parish Covenant expresses this succinctly and beautifully, calling upon us to love, respect, unite, worship, and serve. The other covenant we share in our unison reading this morning expresses the same commitment in different words: to love, seek truth, give service, dwell together in peace, seek knowledge in freedom, serve human need, and grow into harmony with the divine.

We walk together with brothers and sisters around the world – Unitarians of Transylvania, the first to declare themselves Unitarian some 350 years ago; with the Unitarians of the Khasi Hills in India, who have long stood for tolerance and freedom in a land suffering from sometimes violent religious conflicts; with Unitarian Universalists in the Philippines, who struggle mightily against poverty and intolerance; with Unitarian Universalists in Uganda, who have been raising their voices against the barbaric proposal in their country to execute homosexuals, and with many other allies and friends around the world.

We are not free to believe whatever we want. There are destructive belief systems in the world: Nazism, sectarian religions of hatred and violence, cults which deny freedom to their members, materialism, personal religions which insist that the world revolves around me and my needs alone. There’s a joke about that: How many alcoholics does it take to change a light bulb? Just one; they hold the bulb and the world revolves around them.

We are not free to force everyone to believe as we do. It can’t be done, and the finer we chop the distinctions among our beliefs, the more fractious and biased we become. That way we cannot walk together.

We are not free to pretend that we have no religious beliefs, that we do not worship anything. As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it:

A person will worship something – have no doubt about that. We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts – but it will out. That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and our character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.[ii]

Here at Second Parish we walk together in the tension between our own needs, respecting the dignity of every person and the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. Here we work out our own salvation with fear and trembling. Here we govern ourselves because each of us separately and collectively are responsible.

There exist constraints on each of our lives. Some are given – we were born to particular parents, in a particular place and nation, with certain inherent privileges and burdens to bear. Some we have chosen – life partners, having children, education, choosing careers, worshipping as we do. We walk together despite these constraints. We are called to this place and this covenant not only out of choice but out of the need to have a place where we can love one another as we walk together, as we worship and serve. We choose, but we are also chosen.

Conrad Wright summarizes how and why we walk together this way:

Can two walk together except they be agreed? Yes and no. How much diversity a church can tolerate without losing its sense of direction is a delicate question, not to be decided by abstract analysis. But consensus does not have to mean conformity; diversity need not mean surrender to the arrogance of those who insist that tolerance means that others must tolerate them, no matter how rigid and dogmatic they may be. There is much ground between these extremes. That is where we belong, seeking a straight way for ourselves, our children, and our children's children.[iii]

May we continue to walk together in our commitment, our covenant to love, respect, unite, worship, and serve.

May it be so, and Amen. www.secondparish.org