We are a most unusual religious people, we Unitarian Universalists.
We have no established theology, as most religions do. Our theologies are widely varied in language, focus, and belief. Our congregation’s annual CREDO booklet makes this theological diversity quite clear.
We also have no established rituals that all UU’s observe, like the Eucharist in Christianity, the reading and study of a portion of the Torah each week in Judaism, and praying five times a day in Islam.
The recently published report of the UUA Commission on Appraisal reveals our lack of commonality in ritual practices. A survey of some 400 UU congregations with regard to 44 different practices shows no ritual used by all. The highest percentage is for flower communion services, which 88% of our congregations do annually, but 12% do not. Seventy per cent have a water communion, but 30% do not. Only five practices are found in 35% of the congregations or more, while 39 are found in 17% or less.
Most religions have a text or personality that centers their teachings and their practices. Judaism is built around the Torah, Christianity around the figure of Jesus, and Islam around the Koran.
UU’s have a loose-leaf Bible, to which we are frequently adding and from which we often remove pages. UU’s look to the Buddha, to Jesus, to Moses, to Mandela, to Anthony, to Fahs, to King, to Schweitzer, and hundreds of others whose words and deeds instruct us in how to live good lives.
Lacking a core theology, an established set of rituals, or a single defining text or personality, it can be difficult to figure out what it really mans to be a Unitarian Unviersalist. The Commission on Appraisal asked with concern, what is that holds us together?
In the beginning, theology played an important role. The Unitarians proclaimed a monotheistic God in opposition to the Christians’ trinitarian conception. The Universalists insisted that God is Love and will save everybody, in contrast with Christian teaching that salvation is found in a belief about Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour.
But these theological ideas proved to be of lesser importance than the manner in which we stated them, debated them, refined them, and ultimately came to agree that belief in them was not required for membership.
What has held us together is something very precious, principles.
These principles emerged out of dark experience to guide us in both thought and practice. In time, they have had a salutary effect on others as well as on us.
There have been many versions of these principles. The UUA By-Laws lists seven of them. One minister, David Rankin, named ten, while a UU layperson counted 32. I described nine. They are posted outside the sanctuary on the wall to the left as you leave the sanctuary.
Embedded in all of the many versions of the principles are three characteristic of UU thought and practice. They will not be unfamiliar to you, as I have spoken of them often. In this penultimate valedictory sermon before my retirement, it seemed important to state them once again and talk about why they matter.
The first of these historic and vital principles is freedom.
By freedom, UU’s mean and have meant the right of each human being to make up her/his own mind and heart regarding religious questions and the meaning of life.
Freedom is a big word, easily misunderstood. Tyrants and self-righteous busybodies tend to think of freedom as their right to mind everybody else’s business. Anarchists understand freedom as the complete absence of any bonds whatsoever that might restrict the way a person thinks or acts.
Both those who think their freedom increases as others’ freedom decreases and those who think only absolute freedom is free do not grasp what freedom really is.
Freedom is not something we can enjoy unless others are free too. To curb the freedom of another is to involve ourselves in a process of constant attention to the denial of liberty of the other person. That is in itself a bondage. Authoritarians and censors undervalue human nature and end by wasting their time—and ours!—trying to impose controls.
Followers of the anarchic approach overvalue human capacity acting on its own. They neglect the degree to which human plans contradict and conflict with one another. They neglect as well the enhancement brought about by living within a society in which the common good is valued and for which we sacrifice and place limits on ourselves.
Freedom is neither an imposed conformity nor is it license.
An understanding of freedom begins with the knowledge of our
limits. We are constrained by time and place and physical make-up. We are not
free to partici
In the course of the last century or so, we have learned of unconscious barriers to our freedom. What Peter Gay termed “the unslakeable thirst of eros and the immortal rage of aggression,” appear to be, as Freud and his followers have convincingly demonstrated, deep and possibly indelible currents of human nature.
Each of us as an individual will also have certain restrictions due to the particular circumstances of our lives.
There are limits on our freedom, but within those limits freedom does exist. Freedom is about purpose and choice. It involves the capacity for choosing and the liberty for carrying out desired actions.
Freedom is the dynamic balance between tyranny and anarchy, between our total submission to the dictates of another or our total immersion in our own whims.
A friend of mine put this dynamic balance of freedom this way. She said it is like trying to teach her daughter why she cannot play naked in a public park, without extinguishing her need or desire to do so, perhaps by finding a place where she can play naked without freezing, getting a bad sunburn, or disturbing others.
Freedom is a shifting point between rigid order and total license. Conditions change and so does the place of freedom. Our task is to keep on finding where freedom belongs.
For UU’s, freedom is fundamental. Only in freedom can we
search out the depths of our hearts, open our minds to the fullness of this
amazing life of which we are a part, and develop some kind of theological and
philosophical and ethical stance with which to live in this world.
The UU religious movement calls on us to think, feel, and act responsibly in the use of freedom. As the little girl in one of our religious education classes once put it when asked for a definition of hell, “Hell is when you don’t believe in freedom.”
No story in our history better illustrates the great power
of freedom in religion than the story of our brothers and sisters in
They have never lost their faith. They have thought new
thoughts and preached new ideas, even under frightening conditions of tyranny.
They have recovered from losses of devastating proportions. When the horrors of
communist rule in
One of the wisest things our partner congregation in
Kezdivasarhely has done is to call Maria Pap as their minister. A young woman,
she is part of a small core of women in the ministry that will grow in numbers.
This is a new thing for Transylvanian Unitarianism, something that freedom has
brought. Maria has studied in both
The first principle of Unitarian Universalism is and always has been freedom, the right and the responsibility of each person to develop and to live their own spiritual understanding.
The second principle is tolerance.
By tolerance we mean and have meant the practice of allowing people to hold and express views at odds with what the majority believes, and in a more positive sense to understand views different from our own as a source of potential learning.
It is hard for people to get along. That seems one of the
deepest truths of human life. The earliest stories in the Bible point to this.
Adam and Eve and God had trouble getting along, so God banished the two of them
from
Difference threatens people, though usually differences are not at all threatening.
An example of a non-threatening difference is gay marriage. As Representative Barney Frank has several times asked on the floor of the House of Representatives, what harm does it cause people in heterosexual marriages if two men or two women love each other and want to be married? Of course, he has never received an answer. There is no answer except, no harm.
Tolerance is about recognizing that difference is the way life is, that people as unique individuals will have different ways of looking at things, and that nothing is wrong with that as long as we don’t hurt others. Hurt means real harm, not imagined harm. As Thomas Jefferson put it, “It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are 20 gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”
Tolerance begins with toleration, bearing with something we do not like.
One of the great statements of toleration was the Act of
Toleration and Freedom of Conscience of the only Unitarian king in history,
John Sigismund of
We do not have to like what others say and do. We do have to let them say it and do it.
Beyond this is the positive side of tolerance, the ability to learn from those with whom we may not agree. UU’s have been doing that quite actively for more than a century.
Beginning with the encounter with other religions at the World Parliament of Religions in 1893, we have been looking at, listening to, and learning from all the religions of humanity, just as our own Eliza Sunderland encouraged us to do in her paper at the Parliament, “The Serious Study of All Religions.”
Congregations across the country celebrate a range of holidays from Buddha’s birthday to the Jewish Passover to pagan festivals of the earth.
One of the courses in our religious education curriculum for children is Holidays and Holy Days, which provides respectful knowledge of the holidays and holy days of different religions.
UU ministers preach on the religions of the world and draw sermon illustrations from the many sacred texts of the world. Our hymnal is a rich resource of songs and teachings from Taoism, Confucianism, Native American religions, Humanism, Sikhism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and others.
Difference can be enlightening. Tolerance helps us to see that.
A caveat is required. Tolerance does not mean acceptance of any ideas or behaviour, any more than freedom means license to do anything. There are unacceptable behaviours and hateful ideas that do not deserve respect.
The ideas of al-Qaeda should not be tolerated. This congregation acted immediately some years ago to protect our children from a pedophile and his efforts to disseminate his ideas amongst us. Racism, homophobia, antisemitism, and other forms of prejudice are not acceptable.
Disrespectful behaviour, rudeness, verbal or physical assault, the manipulation of freedom to serve wrongful ends, and other means of the abuse of freedom are not to be tolerated.
It is right to be intolerant of the intolerant.
Tolerance—an openness to a wide variety of ideas and
practices—is the way freedom is guaranteed. Our president,
Tolerance is our second principle.
Reason is the third.
Reason is about observing and evaluating all experience, weighing carefully all known facts, and then thinking as logically and clearly as possible to arrive at a statement of truth. Reason understands that such truth is always partial, open to investigation, revision, and eventual possible rejection in the light of new evidence.
UU’s from the earliest days of our movement have seen reason as the best, though certainly not the only, guide to religious truth. Reason is a far better guide than believing or doing something because “we have always believed that or done that”, or because some theological doctrine says we should, or because a religious leader commands us to do so, or because we think God has told us to think or do something. Reason urges upon us the careful consideration of evidence before arriving at conclusions or actions.
It is sometimes wrongly thought that reason cancels out the non-rational mode of knowing. That is not true. The non-rational and the rational are both important means by which we apprehend truth and make our decisions. The non-rational relies on serendipity, grace, the unexpected, even what seem to be miracles. There is a readiness to accept truth when it is revealed to us.
In the best of all possible worlds, the rational and the non-rational act in concert and provide a wider realm of understanding than is possible with just one of them.
Reason tempers the enthusiasm of the non-rational with judgment. The non-rational brings spontaneity and joy to the more sober work of the rational.
When UU leaders in the early centuries of our movement
surveyed their Christian history, they observed many thinkers who defended the
rational and many who defended the non-rational
Origen, an early third century theologian, argued that God gave us the wonderful instrument that is the human mind, and therefore must have intended that we use it. Reason is primary.
Tertullian and Augustine disagreed, saying they believed in
the truth of Christianity because it was absurd and impossible and because
Thomas Aquinas felt that faith should not be in conflict with reason. Again, reason is primary.
The first UU’s came down strongly on the side of the rational. Socinus, for example, argued that reason should guide our study of the Scriptures. Castellio argued that it was irrational to kill people because of differing religious views.
All the great UU leaders asserted that the language of the heart matters profoundly, but that it must ultimately be filtered through reason lest the non-rational turn into superstition or blind faith that ignores evidence.
Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke for many of us when he commented that “we have a moral responsibility to be intelligent. Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”
Those who choose not to think tend to fall into one of two camps, the superficial or the fanatic. The superficial are merely sad, a waste of human capability out of laziness.
The fanatic is far more dangerous. Fanatics are those, in Churchill’s words, who “can’t change the subject and won’t shut up.” Fanatics do not let knowledge disturb their comfortable ideologies. Facts change. Conditions alter. Circumstances are different. The fanatic does not change his mind.
Even after the “smoking gun” was revealed in the Watergate investigation, several million people refused to believe that Richard Nixon had done anything wrong.
Even after numerous studies have shown that children of gay male and lesbian couples are as happy and well-adjusted and productive, if not more so, as children of heterosexual couples, fanatics ignore the evidence and continue to speak of the harm to children that homosexuals represent.
Reason is hard. It is not easy to think. Mrs.Gaskell once remarked petulantly, “I’ll not listen to reason; reason always means what somebody else has to say.” She spoke more wisely than she knew!
Reason means listening to other voices, considering all the evidence available, examining facts presented to us, seeking out the fullest possible range of knowledge, and then shaping our attitude or action accordingly.
In discussion of the most serious issues confronting this congregation during my years here, we have always chosen to hear different voices.
When we were deciding whether to become a sanctuary congregation in the mid-1980’s, I preached in support of doing so and two people spoke in that service in opposition.
In the days of the Gulf War, there were opportunities for supporters and opponents of the war to be heard.
At the time of the searing debate on the possibility of renting to a charter school, both sides were well represented in speeches and writings.
We are far more likely to arrive at sound conclusions and to conduct ourselves morally by being rational than by choosing not to listen to “what somebody else has to say.”
Mohammed was right: “God has not created anything better or more beautiful than reason.”
Reason will probably not take us to paradise, but it may well keep us from going to hell.
Reason is the third great principle of Unitarian Universalism.
For all human beings, life is a great Mystery. Religions have been created to address the questions we all ask about the nature and purpose of human life, of all life. Religions have tended to develop doctrines and rituals incumbent upon all members of that faith, and thus to minimize if not to terminate questions and doubts.
UU’s have approached religion differently, eschewing dogmatic theology and required rituals in favor of certain principles to guide our search for truth and our quest for a life of justice and peace.
Freedom, tolerance, and reason, the UU Trinity, are the very precious principles by which we live. They are a way for us to honor the spirit of Edwin Markham’s great vision:
“They drew a circle that shut us out,
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But love and we had the wit to win.
We drew a circle that took them in.” (rev.-KWP)
Trying to draw ever larger circles of inclusion and understanding and acceptance is the mission of our faith
We are an unusual religious people, but in a really quite wonderful way!