Soul Force

We Are Unitarian Universalists

Rev. Paul Sprecher

Second Parish in Hingham, www.secondparish.org

October 9, 2011

Reading: “Ministry” -Robert W. Karnan

What makes my experience in the ministry so hopeful for me is that I am not alone in this careful hearing of both pain and excitement. This is not something reserved for only one ordained and robed. It is something we all do for and with one another.

Ours is a shared ministry, a giving and receiving. We tell one another our stories, our myths, our innermost thoughts—and we seek to listen (if we can) with sensitivity and purpose and love.

We live lives. We do not live creeds or theologies or even values. We are engaged with real events and people, and we are related, torn, and isolated together. We are at odds and we are sometimes very close.

The spiritual center of our lives is not to be found in [beliefs], no matter how cherished or revered. It comes, rather, out of the openness and honest engagement, the courage and pain, and the love we experience with one another. Sometimes that openness is searching and doubting, confused or serene, ambivalent or empowered. But it is an openness nonetheless.

And out of it comes a vision of a world made new by the reality of our lives, lived in the service of love and justice, of gentle goodness and forgiveness.

A minister seeks to live in the struggle of each and every one of us as we seek to come to an understanding of who we are, where we are, how we are. A minister seeks to help us raise up the vision of where we must go as a people, and invites us if we need the invitation to join hands and hearts with one another to get there.

Sermon: We Are Unitarian Universalists -Rev. Paul Sprecher

Once upon a time, a UU kid was walking down the street pulling a wagon full of newborn puppies. As he passed the Catholic church, a pair of nuns emerged and began fawning over the boy and his adorable cargo.

"What kind of puppies are they?" one of the nuns asked. "They're Catholic!" the boy replied.

The nuns beamed. They were instantly impressed by the boy, and they thought his cute little puppies were irresistible.

A few weeks later, the same kid was going down the street pulling his wagonload of puppies, and he passed the Catholic church again. The same two nuns saw him going by, and they ran to the priest and said, "Oh, Father, go out and ask that boy what religion his puppies are! It's too cute!"

The priest went up to the boy and, in a stern voice barely covering his amusement, asked what religion the puppies were.

"They're Unitarians," the boy smiled.

"What?!" The priest was shocked.

"Yeah," said the boy. "They're Unitarians. They opened their eyes.[i]

There are at least two problems with this story. First of all, is seems a little anti-Catholic. We are a religious tradition in which respect for each person’s search for truth and meaning is one of our seven principles; so mocking other religions – though popular among us and indeed characteristic – is actually a weakness. It’s also just a tiny bit arrogant. We Unitarian Universalists aren’t at our best when we mock and boast, when we deny those who follow other religious traditions their right to their own search for truth. Of course, this sort of self-mocking is part of how we distinguish our own traditions and practices from other paths, so perhaps – while dodgy – a little self-mocking is occasionally in order.

We can in fact be proud of our intellectual accomplishments as a denomination. We have long believed in having well-educated ministers, and here in New England ministers often wear a robe, as I do – symbolizing academic preparation for our ministries.

As a religious tradition, we are also famously tolerant – anecdotes about puppies opening their eyes to the contrary notwithstanding. The very earliest appearance of Unitarianism in Transylvania illustrates the point:

During the Protestant Reformation, religious doctrinal debates became major life-and-death events. In the kingdom of Transylvania, in1568, the sovereign declared that the people of his kingdom would adopt the religion of whichever combatant won the debate. Unitarian bishop Francis David and Calvinist bishop Peter Melius prepared to address the question of the trinity, with the king in attendance. Naturally, each man had strong reason to succeed.

Melius was in little doubt that he would triumph. "If I win this debate," he told David, "you will be executed."

David responded, "If I win this debate, you and everyone else in this country will be given complete religious freedom, and the tolerance due to every child of Man."[ii]

Fortunately, David won the debate and King John Sigismund – the only Unitarian king in history, by the way – declared an edict of toleration that allowed everyone to worship according to their own conscience – including not only all the varieties of Christians but Muslims as well. If such a policy of tolerance had been adopted across Europe, the bloody religious disputes that eventuated in the immensely destructive Hundred Years War could have been avoided – or at least could have been less destructive of life and property.

By the way, it’s not only our clergy who are educated; we Unitarian Universalists are the among the best-educated religious traditions in the United States. Our members are typically smart, and we have more than our share of teachers, librarians, professors, and eggheads. That also means that – especially from the Unitarian side of our tradition – we can be a little too heady, too intellectual, and – on occasion, too ready to argue. One wag has it that a Unitarian Universalist approaches every subject with an open mouth. Another suggests that we are Quakers who talk too much.

Our tendency to argue illustrates one of our great virtues as well, our respect for each person’s search for truth and meaning. This is one of the reasons we are a creedless religious tradition – we could never agree on a creed that we could all, in conscience, support!

In the throes of one such doctrinal rift in our Unitarian history in 1887, when the Western Conference wanted to de-emphasize the centrality of our Christian roots, William Channing Gannett struggled mightily to come up with a platform all Unitarians could agree on; the best he could come up with was what was titled “Things Commonly Believed Among Us;” it says in part:

We believe that to love the Good and to live the Good is the supreme thing in religion;

We hold reason and conscience to be final authorities in matters of religious belief…. We worship … that Love with which ours souls commune.[iii]

We like to make sure that we agree with anything we say or sing together, which is why it is said that Unitarian Universalist congregations are notably abysmal at singing our hymns – we have to read ahead to make sure we agree with the words.

Much our intellectual stuffiness is an inheritance from our Unitarian traditions. When the Unitarians and the Universalists merged their denominations in 1961 to create our Unitarian Universalist Association – whose fiftieth anniversary we are celebrating this year – the Universalist side of the marriage added a new depth of spirit to the Unitarian Universalist tradition we are continuing to forge.

Unitarianism insisted on the importance of the use of reason in religion – rejecting on those grounds the Trinity, which they regarded as irrational – while Universalism’s distinctive doctrine was the insistence that no one will be condemned to eternal damnation – that salvation is universal. This compassion for all was characterized by Robert Ingersoll as a religion where “They believe in a God who leaves the latchstring out until the last child comes home.”[iv]

Thomas Starr King served both Unitarian and Universalist congregations and was credited by Abraham Lincoln with keeping California from seceding from the Union with his tireless preaching and speaking up and down the state at the start of the Civil War. He summarized the difference between our two ancestral traditions by saying that Unitarians believe that they are too good for God to condemn them to hell, while the Universalists believe that God is too good to condemn anyone to hell. Ambrose Bierce in his Devil’s Dictionary offered these definitions of our traditions:

Unitarian: One who denies the divinity of a Trinitarian.

Universalist: One who foregoes the advantage of a Hell for persons of another faith.[v]

William Sinkford, a past president of our Unitarian Universalist association, took as his personal credo this expression of our twin traditions: “One God, no one left behind.” Together, we are stronger. Together, our combined religious traditions call on us to respect both head and heart, to listen to reason but also to listen to the spirit, whose expansiveness can never be captured in words no matter how sophisticated.

Our unity is expressed in the seven principles that we shared this morning in the responsive reading, using both the formal language and the version we teach our children. In summary, we affirm and promote a commitment to the dignity and worth of every person everywhere, and to the web of all life of which we are only a part; to justice, equity and compassion in human relations and to a world community with peace, liberty and justice for all; to the acceptance of one another and encouragement in each others’ spiritual growth, while respecting the right of conscience and the democratic process; we call on everyone to embark on a free and responsible search for truth and meaning or, as our Second Parish covenant puts it, we unite “with respect for each person’s search for truth.”

We have a proud history in both of our traditions, and we can point to a series of eminent Unitarians and Universalists from our past – UU Superheroes, as one of our Religious Education courses calls them. We look back with admiration to William Ellery Channing, the first who took the name “Unitarian” to describe this religious tradition; to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller and the other transcendentalists who helped to bring the spirit back to a Unitarianism that had become too formal; to John and John Quincy Adams, Thomas Jefferson and William Howard Taft, among those who have served as presidents; and to Martin Luther King, who attended but did not join any of the Unitarian Churches in Boston while earning his doctorate at BU. He and Coretta preferred our rational approach to religion but concluded, as Coretta put it, that they would need to remain in their Baptist tradition in order to be positioned to lead a movement fighting for the freedom and equality of African Americans. In that struggle we had Unitarian Universalist martyrs including James Reeb and Viola Liuzo, both killed during the 1965 struggle for voting rights in Selma, Alabama, a struggle that also drew 1/3 of our clergy and the entire board of our Unitarian Universalist Association to Selma. Together we are stronger.

Our belief in the democratic process leads us to place authority in the congregations in which we gather; our congregational polity holds that no authority outside the congregation can dictate who we will call as minister, what we must believe or what we must do. We believe that real religion requires each of us to work out our own salvation, and to rely on one another as we travel along life’s journey.

Despite our famous – and slightly cantankerous – independence as congregations, we also join together in association with other congregations for mutual help and enlightenment; we join together to help grow all of our congregations, and to help each of us grow into maturity in our faith. The congregations in this area came together in 1648, just twenty-eight years after the first congregation in Plymouth was established. They adopted the Cambridge Platform by which they committed all of these congregations to help and support one another, to gather in fellowship with one another on occasion, and to offer help to one another when help was needed. That tradition of mutual aid and shared effort continues today under the umbrella of our Unitarian Universalist Association.

Together we are stronger; together we support our Unitarian Universalist Service Committee which helps us to translate our commitments into action by helping others around the world to gain freedom and to gain their rights as human beings. The Service Committee also enables us to join together in providing resources when disaster strikes anywhere in the world. We have already given our September Second Sunday offering to the Service Committee in support of their struggle for water justice around the world, and we support them each year with the Guest At Your Table program during the holiday season. As part of our Unitarian Universalist Association we are able to develop Religious Education curricula and hymnals, to join struggles for justice and civil rights throughout our land, and especially to foster the growth of a thriving ministry that is growing increasingly diverse. Our commitment to inclusiveness in ministry led to our encouraging women to enter our ministry going back to the mid-1800’s, and we are proud to be the first denomination in which women constitute the majority of our ministers. We have welcomed gay and lesbian clergy longer than most denominations, and we are now in the process of developing and supporting ministers of color in our pulpits as we prepare for a future that will be far more diverse and far more multicultural.

Together we are stronger, and that’s why we are today dedicating our Second Sunday offering in special support of our Association. The offering today will be given to supporting excellence in our ministries, including our parish, religious education and musical ministries.

We are all ministers to one another; we all serve to strengthen our congregations, to help and care for one another; to visit and strengthen the friendship among us. But we also need professional leaders dedicated to providing both religious and institutional guidance and growth. As Robert Karnan put it in our reading this morning, “A minister seeks to help us raise up the vision of where we must go as a people, and invites us if we need the invitation to join hands and hearts with one another to get there.”

We are stronger together. Let us honor our ministry and our Association with our generous gifts this morning.

May it be so, and Amen.