Reading

Our reading this morning comes from an essay written by Unitarian Universalist historian and minister Carl Seaburg, Bring them Hope, Not Hell. Universalists believed in universal salvation for all people that a loving God would not throw any of creation into hell that God loved all souls on earth and all souls after death. This was not a well received message among orthodox Christian believers As Seaburg writes: “Universalism began as an evangelistic movement. It had a mission, bringing a liberating concept (that God would save all humans) to a dried up Calvinistic world that held to a stern belief that most of humanity had been doomed to everlasting hell before they were even born. Universalist ministers were constantly challenged on their beliefs. John Murray’s and Hosea Ballou’s biographies are full of such “educational opportunities,” as the following anecdote about Hosea Ballou shows. In 1799 Ballou came to Reading, Vermont, to preach and was confronted before the service by a deacon from the Baptist church, who wanted to ask him a question. “Are you,” he said, “the Mr. Ballou who is to preach here this afternoon?” “I am.” “Well I understand you are in a great hurry, but I must take the time to ask you one question. Mr. Ballou, what do you think of the case of a man who should go out of the world cursing and swearing, and calling on God to damn his soul?” Hosea Ballou had but a moment that he could devote to the man, and he said, “Why, deacon, a profane swearer is a very, very wicked man, no doubt; and do you think God will answer the prayer of so wicked a man as that?” “No,” said the deacon, “I am sure God will not.” “Well, deacon, you have answered your own question.” And Hosea passed into the house where the people were waiting for him to preach.” So ends the reading.

Meditation

In the stillness, we hear the wind that carries the whisper of all that has gone before. Through ageless time, many creatures have come and gone, many suns have risen and set, many moons have waxed and waned, the earth has spun round on its axis time and time again. Through all the flow of time, the world has slowly changed. Canyons have been forged by rivers, mountains have been carved by glaciers, the oceans have held and washed the sands of a thousand rivers. Our hearts are held today in the gentle, passionate movement of life, the quiet inevitable flow of time. Let us be washed with gratitude that we live and breathe within this time. Let us seek the courage of the spirit that can move mountains, the spirit that has moved through generations, the spirit that teaches small and large truths and brings the vision of a world filled with peace and freedom and fairness. Within every rock and every blade of grass and every movement of the wind we find this spirit. Within every heart there is possibility.

Sermon

A friend clipped a cartoon panel for me from the newspaper. Two cave men are in their cave. The cartoon is captioned, “The Dawn of Civilized Man.” In the cartoon, one cave man is drawing on the wall he has drawn a little stick figure who is carrying a large stick which he has used to strike another little guy over the head, little stars are drawn above the injured figure. The second cave man stands behind, gesturing at his artist friend, “No, no, no .... First we invent religion to justify our actions, THEN we invent war.”

It does seem that religion came first and that all of history followed. It does seem that religion can be used to justify anything. In the name of God, anything can be justified. The question is always whose god? For this reason, many Unitarians and Universalists of the early 20th Century, after World Wars I and II, abandoned the Christian religion of their predecessors and tried to start again with a religion based on the possibilities of the human mind and spirit without the Christian God. These religious atheists are with us still today, along with a myriad of other modern day seekers for ours is a religion that allows for the individual journey.

One of the best and hardest things about our way of religion is that we have no creed. We do not make anyone say they believe in a certain formula for eternal salvation the father, the son and the Holy Ghost. We generally don’t believe, and our Universalist forefathers and foremothers didn’t believe, as our reading indicated this morning, that God works in that way. It may seem like a great freedom not to have a creed, and it is, but, like all freedoms, our way of religion also carries a great responsibility: we must define in every time who we are, what our religion is and what our religion means. We have our past to build upon, to be sure, but we must also layer on our generation’s understandings, our generation’s learnings and our generation’s reasonings.
You may ask, why bother? Why claim ourselves as a religion even in the first place? First, we are a religion or at least a way of religion, so we can’t get off the hook so easily. But second, and most importantly, thinking it doesn’t matter, means to have seriously underestimated, I believe, the power of religion. The cartoon I mentioned earlier is funny because it has the ring of truth. Religion probably came first. Anthropologist Clifford Goertz speculates that this is not necessarily bad that, in fact, without our complex, intertangled, interconnected religious systems of thought, ethics, morals, stories, beliefs, myths and models for behavior, that humanity probably would have never risen to be more than a head-hitting caveman like species. Religions have created a supporting web for culture and civilization, giving us meanings, ideas about where we came from and where we are going, ideas about the beginnings of the world, the nature of the universe, the nature and purpose of life.

And they, of course, can be wrong as time always tells. Most religions have creation stories like the one I read this morning, the creation story of Judaism and Christianity given in the first two chapters of Genesis. You may not believe a word of it.. But you cannot live in our culture and not be influenced by it especially the idea that man and woman were created in God’s image, and perhaps, even more importantly, that one little word “dominion” that man was given dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth ... As a culture, we certainly act sometimes as if we are all little gods and goddesses, and we certainly act as if we have dominion over all the earth.

Questioning this creation story should be about more than evolution and Darwinian science verses the creationists. We should question where we got our notions of superiority and how much we need to regain the idea that god flows in all things and that we must care for our earth, that this would be the responsibility of dominion. If we never deeply question these things, we simply live them out no matter what our professed beliefs may be. Religion is too powerful to ignore, and I, for one, am not ready to throw out the word religion, either, and claim, as some do, that we Unitarian Universalists are something different than religious that ours is something different than a religion. We need this religion; we need our faith I believe many others need to hear what we have to say, no matter how hard it may be to explain to someone else.

So what is our Unitarian Universalist religion? In answering that question today, I will cover these areas our theology, our definition of church, what I believe our religious method is, and finally, what I believe our religious vision is, what our mandate is and what our challenge is. Our creedless belief system does have a theology it starts with God is love, the message of the early Universalists, and it starts with God is one, the message of the early Unitarians, who preached the unity of God, instead of God’s division into three father, son and Holy Spirit.

I mentioned already that we have historically embraced the idea that God at least the Christian God needed to be purged or at least questioned and that we as human beings needed to take responsibility for our religion. I am not here today to define God or to tell you that you must believe about God I would suggest that we Unitarian Universalists have greatly helped redefine God. God, for most of us, no longer sits up high on a mountain top issuing orders and judgments, breathing wrath and only sometimes giving pure love to the creatures. If you believe in god today, you probably think of god as love or compassion or creativity or the flow of life or the spirit within the human heart, or the goodness of nature and creation. Since we won’t tell you what god is, or even tell you that you must believe in god in a certain way, or that you even must believe in god, I hope you, nevertheless, are picking up the strand of what’s important about our theology whatever god is, Love is real. Whatever god is, compassion is the way to act. Whatever god is, unity and harmony and peace are the possibility. Whatever god is, life is good, and it is our job to make the best of it, seek the best in ourselves and strive for the best in our world.

Ours is not a static theology it is a questioning theology that has helped redefine and redefine again god and the meaning of god in different times. 19th Century Unitarian minister Theodore Parker wrote an important sermon about the transient and the permanent in Christianity. The transient are our ideas and definitions about god and Jesus and Spirit today, but definitions don’t matter over time. But the permanent never changes, and our job is to try to get closer and closer to what these things are the permanent includes the ideals of love, compassion, justice, peace, freedom, beauty and creativity our theology strives for the permanent. We are seekers of the permanent. What is our church?

We are nothing if we cannot live out our love and experience our beauty in relationship. We need community, a place to practice, and a place to belong, just like any other religion. We try to build our church, our community, on our theological ideals. We try to practice love and compassion. But maybe, even more important, in this church we try to live out the religious ideal of true tolerance. It is a religious practice to sit next to someone, Sunday after Sunday, who is different from yourself, at least different in belief. We do not pretend that we are all in lock-step together we admit to our diversity, the intricacy of our stories, the differences of our visions, our different religious and spiritual approaches to finding meaning. We respect one another’s journeys, we hope for understanding for ourselves, we also hope to teach our children to value difference, diversity and complexity to learn to be moral and ethical in the face of the fact that we all start from a different place, but in the end we are all one in the same human soup and whatever your vision of God, we are all loved just the same and we are all to love one another just the same.

Our church respects differences and allows for human diversity, not only of thought and belief, but of culture and background and lifestyle. We are gay and straight together; we are young and old together; we are a land of many colors. Our church, if it achieves our dream, would provide loving community to all seekers, would give respect to all religious beliefs, offer sanctuary to all who strive for justice to all who would make our world a better place. What is our method? In Christianity and Judaism, the Bible is the primary method the sacred text, the rule book. Many other religions have similar sacred texts from which they draw their beliefs and re-draw their beliefs. We respect all these traditions and we are part of the Judeo-Christian heritage. The Bible may not necessarily be viewed as sacred to all of us, but it is at least one source for inspiration, and it provides, as I’ve mentioned, the undergirding upon which our culture rests. What’s important to us, though, is not so much the text, but the mind that examines the text.

Reason is our method. We practice the expansion of the human mind and spirit this means that humanity, through its reason, will perhaps gain more wisdom over time. We are not afraid to apply science and thought to the Bible or any other text. We are seekers of truth if even small truths. We believe our minds give us our best tool for making a difference.
God, we reckon, is not afraid of or put off by human reason, for it is a gift, we reason. If we cannot reason, we cannot learn and re-learn what it means to have dominion, for example, what it means to be responsible, what it means to be a caretaker, not just a user. If we do not use our reason and our minds we cannot learn what it truly means to love our neighbor as ourselves, what it means to love our enemies, what it means to turn the other cheek, that we are more courageous and strong, not less, when we stand for peace. Reason gives us a more realistic view of the human condition we can recognize our potential for evil, understand how we have misused our religions, understand how the best intentions can still turn out wrong, know that we will live and our children will live to see another day to try again. If we cannot use our reason than the ideas of compassion and wisdom stay locked inside Buddhist or Christian scripture. If we cannot use our reason then we cannot learn the conundrums and paradoxes of Ecclesiastes and Proverbs, or Taoism or Zen Buddhism or the parables of Jesus.
Reason the mind is our universal gift. We are meant to learn from our history, learn from our sacred texts and stories, question old values and beliefs, all human devised, and find the best path for today employ our reason so that our hearts may act wisely. From our theology, our idea of community or church and our method, we can perhaps see our vision, understand our mandate and accept our challenge. Our vision, I believe, is no different than the vision of most people everywhere in every time: a vision of a more peaceful and loving and just world, the lion laying down the lamb. We accept that this vision is imbedded in history and changes with time, that every generation must rise to reclaim the vision and do its part to paint a few more strokes. We have learned that morals and courage and ethics are imbedded in the thoughts and mythological systems provided by our religions. Each decade, century and generation, we try to understand for ourselves once again what is most important, where we have failed, where we can begin again. Every act of courage begins with an individual acting upon this vision, a universal vision of peace or justice or love, or as it says on the back of our order of service, the goal of world community with peace, liberty and justice for all.

When we gather together, as a church, we expand beyond our individual effort to a group effort the desire to accomplish this vision, for as Margaret Mead said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world, indeed it’s the only thing that ever has.”
And this is our mandate: to have faith in the vision, faith in our religion, to draw hope from our way of being together. Our mandate is to never cease to believe in the possibility of the vision, the possibility of real peace, real human love and compassion, true justice and freedom for every soul we must never succumb to the cynicism and fear which could rule us instead, especially in the face of failures, which will come and have always come. We must never succumb to cynicism or despair in the face of only incremental change, all that we might see in our life times.

Our challenge is to take this message of hope beyond our own doors, to not keep our light hidden beneath a bush. We always have been the heretics and religious gadflies of Christianity. In our history, we have asked where the Bible says Jesus was both god and human, where the Bible says we must subscribe to a formula, a creed, to be saved. We have asked how we can believe in a god of love that would condemn any wrong believer to hell, we have questioned belief systems based upon miracles instead of reason.
Today, we question beliefs that don’t recognize the interdependence of all creatures, humans and animals, and all living things, including plants, how all of these make up our planet down to the air we breathe. Today, we question beliefs that would exclude others because of their sexuality or their way of loving, systems that maintain racism or classism. We look at the world with a large magnifying glass and we wonder what we still don’t understand or know about peoples and cultures that are truly different from our own, and we care about those differences, how our biases keep us from seeing these others as our brothers and sisters. If we truly believe that we each have something to offer, that we do each have inherent worth and dignity; if we believe in the worshiping community that practices the free exploration of the individual journey, the freedom to develop our own spiritual hearts and religious minds; if we truly believe, in a universal and unifying way, that all cultures and religions have and hold some wisdom; if we can imagine that god is love or one, that Spirit flows through everything or that unity, harmony, peace and compassion are permanent values, that we are all connected in the interdependent web of existence, then we must share this with others, we must develop our wisdom, provide hope and offer healing to our world. And we must never cease. AMEN