Reading

Our reading this morning comes from Unitarian Universalist Theologian and minister, Paul Rasor’s book called, Faith Without Certainty, Liberal Theology in the 21st Century. He writes:

”Liberals tend to hold religious ideas with a kind of open-endedness. They realize, for example, that experience can always be reinterpreted, that ideas and actions that seem good today may turn out to be misguided, and that particular religious doctrines are likely to change over time.

“One of the benefits of this stance has been to reduce the importance of doctrinal
disputes among liberals. It can also make us reluctant to state with conviction who we are, which may be reflected in ambiguities around membership, among other things.

”Many liberal churches welcome long-term attendees as readily as official members, perhaps excluding them only from voting on by-law changes or the annual budget. This practice is not necessarily a weakness. Among other things, it reflects a deep commitment to inclusivity, also a mark of religious liberalism.

“Yet this open-mindedness can also make us reluctant to commit our selves too deeply to anything, whether a belief or a plan of action, leading to a reluctance to commit to the liberal religious movement itself.

“Unfortunately, for many liberals depth is wrongly equated with narrowness.
This brings to mind the warning offered by liberal Theological ethicist James Luther Adams many years ago that the liberal commitment to openness ‘can produce the mind that is simply open at both ends.’”

So ends the reading.

We search for what is best and true and wish to make ourselves willing and compassionate helpmates to all those we know and love.

We ask that we be better friends, lovers, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters.

We strive here to build a community that will support us on our journeys and provide us inspiration and leadership to make a difference in our world.

We are grateful for all that we have.

Let that gratitude fill our hearts with love as we continue through the week ahead.

May we feel the bonds of love that bind us each to each. Let us sit together for a few minutes of silent meditation.

Sermon

From the time I was five years old I knew that God existed. I grew up in west Texas, which has a very humble landscape, very little to get in the way of viewing the sky from one end of the horizon to the other, a giant blue bowl over head.

I would walk for hours around my grandmother’s yard, noticing her carefully tended rose bushes, the giant willow tree, the three peach trees out back. I would sit for hours under the willow or beneath the peach trees and sense my aloneness and also that I wasn’t alone -- that there was something more, beating within the wind, the earth, and the trees. Something that carried your spirit up into the clearness of the sky and set it free.

I was an independent thinker. Being an independent thinker is both a blessing and a curse. Independence is not simply a western trait, it is at the heart of Buddhism, as well, which explains why so many Unitarian Universalists have affection for that religion. The Buddha said to his followers, do not trust anything I say or take what I say for truth unless you experience it for yourself as truly true. Only what we can know for ourselves is real.

This also is the heart of modern, western liberal religion -- independent reason and study to form independent minds, with independent mystical experiences. We rely upon the individual, his or her reason and experience to define and explain what makes a religious experience. And, in the end, we have created a way of religion that doesn’t require religion. We don’t believe we really need a religious community, a religious denomination, or a religious doctrine.

What do UUs believe? We are stuck by our own independence, coupled with our profound openness to all ideas, with the old running joke that we believe in nothing and in everything, all at the same time. But we know that this is not true. We know that we believe in something, and it certainly isn’t everything. What we believe in is very deep, very real, and very precious. The reason we have so much trouble articulating our beliefs, however, is that we are still living by an old modern myth.

Unitarian Universalist theologian Paul Rasor says, “We think we are completely independent, autonomous beings that sprung out of nothing, a wild tumbleweed on the west Texas plain. When, in fact, we are really social beings deeply embedded within our own particular culture and social institutions.” Like many post-modern philosophers, Rasor makes the case that we are sprung from our culture, completely formed by it, and not truly the independent free spirits that we claim to be.

There is, in fact, no such thing as a completely independent person. All of our ideas, thoughts, and words come from ideas, thoughts, and definitions within our particular culture. And they have formed us, not the other way around. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz makes the point starkly in his studies, he concludes: “A human being without culture and society to shape it would be a monster, a formless nothing.”

The importance of this perspective on independence is that we are wrong if we think of ourselves as completely self-made, lone rangers -- for we are not alone. We need our families, our friends, and our communities. They form us and we add back to them, and we would literally be lost without them.

Independence is a myth. While it has brought us many things -- autonomy, inclusiveness, openness, rational religion -- all the things that define our Unitarian Universalist heritage, it has also tricked us into thinking that we don’t need our religion, our churches, our community. When, in fact, we do.

Our independent attitude also, I believe, has contributed to the loss of our “liberal” voice. Claiming our liberal values in the public square, we have become loud, independent, lone voices, signifying, in the end, nothing. We, as a religious people, need to get our voice back.

We need our churches to stand for the best and strongest actions, the strongest witness that we can possibly muster for our sick and hurting world. We need to stand, for example, against violence -- the real religion of America. according to theologian Walter Wink. We need to stand for justice and freedom, civil rights, the inherent worth and dignity of every person.

And we can’t do it alone. It is time that we grew up within our broad and inclusive faith and let our faith stand for something in the outside world. "Ours,” as Rasor says, “is a faith without certainty, which is not the same thing as a faith without commitment."

But our faith can be strong if we can risk believing in it. Or, as theologian Dorothy Solle has said, “Faith without doubt is not stronger, it is simply more ideological.” I am certainly not suggesting that we have a strong ideological faith this morning, but I am making a case for a faith that is uncertain, tentative, and plagued with our doubts -- for a questioning faith can make us strong, not weak.

In the world we are faced with today, we cannot prove the existence of the things we believe in, intangibles like love, decency, integrity, justice, fairness, and certainly not spirit and mystery. But that doesn’t mean we should let our values and ethics slip out of our too-open minds simply because we can’t prove them beyond any doubt.

And it’s also good to continuously question and analyze, as long as it doesn’t keep us from acting. Theology is about the lived experience of your religion. It is based upon your fundamental beliefs, those things you know in your head. Then, when they have fermented, your beliefs become part of who you are and you feel them in your gut. And, finally, you know you are living out your beliefs when you take action in the world.

Actions speak louder than words, as they say. In the end, how you choose to live and act is your theology, your why. And, as Emerson told us, “We will believe in something, and anyone can see what that something is by the way we live.”

We have within this congregation, just as would be true in almost any congregation (even a more religiously orthodox congregation), people who have very different world views. Some of you believe in a God of love. Some of you believe in the creative Spirit and goodness of nature. Some of you believe that all of life is random and is moving toward chaos, and some of you believe that life is creative and complex and ever moving toward greater complexity. Some of you believe in an ultimate reality beyond what we can know, and others believe there is nothing more than that which we see and experience in our short lives.

I cannot promise that all of you will agree with me today on what I think our church stands for and what our religion means. But I will take a stand any way on what I think our Unitarian Universalist beliefs are -- what my faith without certainty is -- and I believe a good number of you will agree with me, at least in part. I will tell you what I think, what I know in my gut, and what causes me to want take action and make a difference.

What do we have faith in? What do we believe? What calls us into religious community? I believe there are three things, all interconnected, that define our Unitarian Universalist religion today. One, we live by an ethic of love. Two, life has meaning and that life bends us toward positive acceptance of our lived experience, not negative or cynical rejection. And three, we must operate in the here and now. Our religious community, this church, supports us as we strive to live up to these values.

First, Love. For me, love is the foundation of all justice and striving toward freedom and happiness. We love one another and we love one another radically. No matter who are, where we live, the color of our skin, our occupations, our religious beliefs, our personal preferences, we are called to love one another. If we always started from here, we would work much better at understanding and resolving differences. Everyone would be given the presumption of good will, a by-product of loving all people.

I know that in our world there are many things we fear and that we are often more prepared to hate than to love. Love is a choice, and it’s not one that everyone makes. But an ethic of love asks us to at least try to do the least invasive thing, try the least horrible alternative first, strive to understand before going to war, work to cause no harm or at least no more harm. We fail at this every day, but that’s why we need religious community. We need to always be brought back to our better selves, reminded of what we are capable, encouraged to grow our hearts and minds, and extend ourselves beyond the limitations of our current understandings.

For the early Unitarians and Universalists, this love was symbolized by God and even Jesus. God and Christ embodied the ideal of love that we all should strive toward. We are even commanded to love. We can argue forever about the failings of Christianity and Judaism, but can we really replace this idea with a better one? What else could drive us to care for one another and help each of us live transformed and meaningful lives?

Second, life has meaning. I am forever intrigued by the scientific nature of life and I do not know if, in the end, we are moving toward greater chaos or entropy. But life itself seems to me to be a gift, no matter how painful, no matter how much suffering, no matter how much heartbreak. To live is itself an opportunity.

We need to be reminded of this almost on a daily basis. When we see the children and the new babies, the smiles of the elderly, the pride of parents, the hopefulness of new friends, we see all over again, the meaning and purpose of living, and not just living by oneself, but living together, supporting one another, caring for one another, guiding one another on our journeys.

This gratitude towards life is from where hope and inspiration spring. By admitting to ourselves that life is inherently worth living, we always have a resource from within for hope, even in the direst and most tragic circumstances. Every person, no matter how misguided or evil in their actions, possesses this same potential, this same inherent worth.

This, by the way, is a true ethic, an ethic of hope and possibility, because, as we all know, real life seldom seems so positive. But the ethic of inherent worth is what brings with it hope in every life and circumstance. It can be squandered, but for us as religious people, the ethics of hope and worth are fundamental to our pursuit of living a good life.

Third and finally, especially for our humanists, this life of love and hope and meaning must be lived now. It is all we truly know -- that we are living now and whatever difference we have to make must be made now. It is now that we strive for justice and freedom and compassion. This fresh every-new-day approach to life, which includes the awareness that things change, is part of our liberal religious heritage. Our forebears believed that revelation was always open and that what happens today is what matters. We can maintain respect for our tradition, hold onto what we have learned, while also balancing the newness that comes every generation.

So, we don’t have to reinvent everything in our lifetime. We can hold onto what is good while reaching out to make a difference in the world we see. This is where our beliefs become lived, not just ideas floating in our minds.

Right now, you can make a difference by being part of this community. You can help support our work with the refugee family from Somalia. You can support our work with Habitat for Humanity and by attending next month’s benefit soup supper. You can join with our fellow Unitarian Universalists who will be fighting for the passage of the referendum that would grant civil rights for our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters in civil unions. I hope we will join with the Columbine UU Church to adopt a homeless family, as well, an initiative recently begun by the city of Denver to find a thousand homes for a thousand homeless people.

As we look at the three straightforward beliefs that I have shared with you this morning - love, that life has meaning, and that we must act in the here and now -- I hope you also see that all of these work better in community. We can talk about love, but we really need the opportunity to share it. We can be positive about life, but we must also share it and give that hope to others. We can act alone, but think of how much more we can do together.

These are not narrow beliefs, either, but expansive ones. We want to bring our best, our love and our compassion, our hope and our inspiration to all that we know now. Our love is based upon the greatest teachings within every tradition. Our faith is based upon the meaning and purpose religious liberals have always found in life. And our desire to make a difference now is based upon what our tradition has taught us through many generations.

We must learn to trust our community, this church, which can bring us the greatest opportunity to live out our liberal ideals in our own lives and in our larger community. For the time is always now. The time to speak, to act, and to share our faith, our faith without certainty, which gives us our values of love and hope and integrity, inclusiveness, and tolerance and freedom.

Do not back down. We do possess the greatest values and we can speak them, teach them and act upon them today. That is our calling. It is what Unitarian Universalists believe.

AMEN