THE RISKS AND THE REWARDS OF BEING A UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST Sermon Delivered at First UU Congregation, Ann Arbor, MI, January 31, 2005 Four years ago I received an e-mail from a congregant that asked, "How about a series of sermons on the risks of being a Unitarian-Universalist?" The writer then went on to enumerate and explain several of these risks. "The danger of lacking theology, which it seems to me has been one of the great strengths of Christianity, despite all the horrors theology has been used to justify. In theological religions ethical and personal questions can be addressed through a rich, ancient, and still vital body of rational discourse. The U-U can be tempted by a number of easy ways out of moral dilemmas (relativism: all opinions are equally good; indifference: who knows?; it doesn't matter, and so forth." There are several elements to this stated risk. First of all is the question of the danger involved in "lacking theology." Theological religions have a "body of rational discourse" to help them address ethical and personal questions. In the case of Christianity, with its 25,000 or more world wide manifestations of the faith, that "body of rational discourse" is so splintered as to render it hopelessly confused on many issues. I cite the varied positions taken by good Christians on matters such as abortion, the right to die, capital punishment, same sex marriage, war and violence, women as religious leaders, and many others, all grounded in that "body of rational discourse", that is, in Scripture or doctrine or long tradition, and all quite contradictory of one another. Because of these many different ways of being a Christian-or, one could say, of being a Jew, a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Hindu, or any other religious posture-in the end, every individual must choose a perspective, a lens, a paradigm through which to interpret the "body of rational discourse" as it applies to a contemporary situation. UU's do the same. So while I agree that not having a specific body of theological reflection on which to draw is a risk, we actually go through the same process as any member of any religion. In our case, once we have our paradigm in place, we then have not just a single "body of rational discourse" on which to draw, but the entirety of the world's wisdom. We can do so without feeling somehow that we are violating the rules of our religion. Additionally, I am not so sure that it is accurate to say that we lack a theology. If theology involves an attitude towards life, then we are surely a very theologically rich people. While we make no creedal demands, we do hold certain principles to be fundamental to a good life. Classically they are three in number, freedom, tolerance, and reason. Each alone and all of them together say something theological. Our commitment to freedom implies that freedom is meaningful, that the choices we make are real choices, not just an acting out of some predestined fate, and that we are responsible for those choices for good or for ill. That is a theology of human nature, as much as the Christian doctrine of original sin. Our commitment to tolerance implies the possibility of a harmonious social life, full of very different people holding different ideas and pursuing different goals. Tolerance teaches us that difference is not automatically threatening and that one of the ways we learn is by engaging seriously with that which is different. That too is a theology of human nature, as much as the Islamic understanding that racial and ethnic differences are irrelevant in terms of human worth. Our commitment to reason implies that we have a capacity to understand the world, not just accept what some revelation thrusts at us. We can actively study, reflect on, and grasp how things work. Often we have been able to redirect the energies of nature to human betterment. Vaccines, analgesics, prosthetics, and hosts of other wonderful aids to healthier, safer, more comfortable living show how capable we are of doing good in the world with our knowledge. That too is a theological statement, as much as the doctrine of reincarnation with its belief in karma directing what happens to us. UU's tend to believe that the universe is either friendly or at the worst open to our efforts to make life meaningful and good. That is as theological as any doctrine of God, and at least as well grounded in fact. Beyond those theological assertions necessary for the principles to which we are universally committed lie the hundreds of thousands of individual theologies we each develop. Reading this congregation's annual CREDO booklet always makes clear how rich a theology we really do have. Our way of doing theology is risky, but I am not persuaded it is any more so than other ways. The second risk the congregant mentioned was "the danger of little built-in protection against what Christianity calls the sin of pride: Is the U-U tempted to feel superior and...reasonable and tolerant by dint of membership in a church that stands for those qualities and thus neglect the need to keep struggling to attain them?" Yes, UU's are very subject to the sin of pride. Yes, we do have a tendency to feel superior, particularly the many of us who transcended our childhood faith to become a UU. How wise we feel we are! How foolish those who linger back in the antiquated chambers of Christianity, Judaism, secularism, or whatever religious or non-religious atmosphere we grew up in! Our pride, however, is surely no worse than that of others. Pride has always been at the top of the list of the Deadly Sins, not because Christians are free of it but precisely because it is such a human temptation. In Christianity, pride is countered by prayer, by recognizing one's sinful nature, by living in the divine grace that alone can save, which our own efforts cannot do. UU's counter pride by remembering the sacred and inherent worth of every human being, by practicing tolerance and accepting pluralism with a glad heart, by cooperating with people of many different religious and philosophical understandings on common causes like ending hunger, housing the homeless, learning to settle disputes without violence, and much else. Are Christians free of pride? Hardly. That is why pride continues to be such a troublesome sin. It is why preachers rail against the hypocrisy that fills human life. Jesus said, "first take out the log that is in your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take out the speck in your neighbor's eye." UU's likewise continue to be prideful, but I suspect the risk is not so much because we are UU's as because we are human. Thirdly, there is, according to my correspondent, "the danger of cultural thinness and borrowing from others: Traditional religions have evoked art, literature, music, and ritual that enrich the lives of millions of people. Does the U-U lose something by borrowing from all this in untroubling translation while adding little to it (except perhaps for New Englanders of 150 years ago)?" I am in agreement about our "cultural thinness" but am not concerned about our borrowing from others. Borrowing is one of the ways cultures develop, never purely on their own. This is reflected in the stern injunctions of the ancient Hebrew prophets to the people not to give way to assimilation, but the people and the culture did. The Noah story is borrowed, as is the wife- sister motif in the Abraham and Isaac stories. It is likely that many of the rituals of Judaism were borrowed from their neighbors, including circumcision. Christianity borrowed a good portion, including Scriptures, rituals, and theology, from Judaism. Christianity makes no sense without the Hebrew Bible which Christians restructured and renamed the Old Testament, without the table fellowship called the Eucharist or Communion that grew partly out of the Passover Seder, without the Jewish God who intervenes in history and has a covenant with his special people and who redeems humanity at the end of time. Americans borrowed from the Iroquois Confederation and John Locke for many of the founding ideals of this land. Many of the new 20th century nations used those American documents in writing their own charters of liberty. Borrowing is an ancient and a contemporary practice, perfectly worthy as long as you give credit! Our cultural thinness is a serious risk for us. If we do not develop in the 21st century a more unified, compelling, and ethical story of our faith, complemented by music and art and ritual that will tell our tale, we are in danger of losing our soul and eventually our very existence. In the 19th century, we were clearly part of the Christian tradition, and within that tradition we had a place, a very radical place, but a place. Leaving Christianity at the beginning of the 20th century, we launched on uncharted waters: openness to every religion in the world, openness to all ideas and philosophies, openness to every individual's notion of what makes sense. No great cultural artifacts were produced in this setting, nothing that could rival Emerson's Self-Reliance, Parker's Permanent and Transient Elements of Religion, or Ballou's stirring proclamation of universalism. At the dawn of the 21st century, we need to reclaim lost cultural ground, lost theological ground, lost historical ground. To me the way ahead is obvious, though the path must be cleared. I refer to the need for the principles we have used within our congregations to welcome enormously diverse religious and spiritual understandings to become the guidelines for a world whose religions are just beginning to talk to each other. Since no force on earth has as much potential for violence as religion, this task is of great importance. I believe we must work to develop a theology of world religions, not to make them all the same, but to learn how to live respectfully and in mutual learning with our differences. There is great risk here, but also the potential for much good. I am encouraged to see the efforts in which this congregation is involved that are moving in that direction: the Interfaith Hospitality Network, the Interfaith Round Table, the new UU-Muslim Men's Group, the Interfaith Council for Peace and Justice. I am heartened that candidates for the UU ministry are now required to have a knowledge of the world's religions, which was not the case when I was taken into Fellowship more than 30 years ago. Good signs, all of them. Three risks are involved in being a UU according to my correspondent: the risk of lacking a theological language with which to address human problems, the risk of pride without a leavening force, and the risk of cultural thinness. My correspondent also wrote that "I know you can easily extend the list." Let me try. First, we could be wrong. We could be wrong with eternal consequences. We could be wrong not to worship Allah, and find ourselves tormented forever. We could be wrong not to believe in a cycle of reincarnation in which our actions in this life determine what happens to us next on the wheel of existence, and end up at a lower plane than we are on now. We could be wrong not to believe in the vengeful God of the Christian Fundamentalists, and spend eternity roasting in hell as the saved ones look gleefully on at our suffering. That prospect used to worry my mother a great deal, because her Presbyterian religion taught her that we UU's were doomed. She was eventually comforted when I encouraged her to hold fast to the God of Love in Whom she said she believed. "Trust your god!," I said. She did, and died content. That, in the end, is what we all have to do. We have to figure things out the best we can and then trust our judgment. UU's in particular insist on a rude kind of honesty about what we believe. We reject the idea of Pascal's wager, the notion that we should believe in God and perform every ritual associated with that belief because we pay a higher price for not believing if we are wrong. There is something calculating and unworthy about such a stance. UU's search for the truth, and live by what we find as well as we are able. We trust our God in whatever form or no-form we find that deity. It is a risk, but what on this fragile planet is not? A second risk is what Barry Schwartz calls "the tyranny of choice." He is talking about American life in general with our "300 kinds of cereal, 50 different cell phones, thousands of mutual funds." But it is a very apt phrase to describe our religion. Indeed, one of the most popular UU texts is Forest Church's and John Buehren's OUR CHOSEN FAITH. We are a people who embrace freedom. Freedom means that we get to choose: to believe in God or not, to read the Bible or not, to pray or not, to come to Sunday services or not, and many, many other choices. Choice tyrannizes us when we have so many options that we are either unable to make a choice or come to think it does not matter what we choose. As my e-mail correspondent pointed out, we "can be tempted by a number of easy ways out of moral dilemmas (relativism: all opinions are equally good; indifference: who knows?; it doesn't matter, and so forth)." The risk is partly that standing before so many options we end by choosing none because so many look good. Some people drift from one spiritual practice to another, never seeming to settle on any specific ways of addressing their spiritual needs, either theologically or ritually or morally. They just keep on choosing something else, unable to make up their minds. A life overwhelmed by choices can be a life without focus, without purpose, without meaning. The point of our freedom is not to be endlessly choosing, but to make wise choices without being bound to what seems to us to be foolish or dated or cruel. The risk is partly that we come to feel that it doesn't matter what we choose. Any option is as good as any other. Of course, that is not true. Choices that promote hatred and intolerance are not as good as choices that promote love and service. The view that women should not be religious leaders is a poor choice, as is the choice to think that we know that God is going to condemn lots of human beings to eternal damnation. Overwhelmed by choices, we can slip into thinking that any choice is okay. Being free does not mean we adopt such a carefree attitude, uninterested in what choices are made. Freedom means to be responsible, and that means we need to study, learn, discuss, reflect, think about, and then act, choose, as wisely and as morally as we are able. Too many choices is a risk in a religion that so highly honors freedom and tolerance. A third risk in being a UU is that people think we're really strange. We have been described as a people who believe in at most one God, as a people who think God is too good to damn us and, alternatively, as a people too good for God to damn. We have been described as people whose main ritual is to scratch our heads, who pride ourselves on being disorganized and who have substituted for the Ten Commandments the Ten Suggestions. At my parents' Presbyterian church in Hawaii, a member said that he thought UU's were people who didn't believe a damn thing on Sunday morning and then went out and practiced that all week long! Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority identified us as a spawn of the devil, the leaders of the secular humanistic wickedness of the late 20th century. Wow! A lot of people think we are really weird or really bad! The truth is that we are not really very odd, just different, or is my UUism showing when I say that? Some of us have some exotic beliefs and practices, but most of us are pretty ordinary, different but ordinary. What we lack at the moment is a major voice speaking the truth of our faith to the world, speaking in such a way that it would be clear that we are very much part of the usual ways of religious human beings. Once upon a time, we had brilliant and widely respected scholars like Henry Nelson Wieman and James Luther Adams and George Huntston Williams writing and teaching and engaging in the theological discussions of the day. We lack such voices in the 21st century, and part of the price of that is not to be taken seriously. The work of our current UU president, Bill Sinkford, has been excellent in identifying our values and our practices. Many ministers have been trained in how to raise public awareness of our faith. To be taken seriously, we must engage with society, with other religions, and with the spiritual issues that burden people in our times. The risk of being a different kind of religion is that we will be misunderstood, and that happens often. The risk is that we will not be able then to make the contributions to the wider world that we can make because people cannot stop seeing us as strange. The other side of this risk is the opportunity it affords us of showing that what seems weird and strange and even a little frightening is really quite ordinary, humanity in a different dress, a different posture, a different language, but still humanity. Maybe some of our ways might even be better than the more common ways, like the avoidance of dogma, the practice of tolerance, the use of reason., the commitment to social justice. If the whole world could learn that different is not necessarily threatening, that it can even be instructive, it would be a safer, happier, far more interesting world in which to live. In addition to my correspondent's list of risks, I have added three: the risk that we are wrong, the risk of being paralyzed or made stupid by so many choices, and the risk of not being taken seriously. The title of these remarks also promises some rewards. Let me briefly mention a few, briefly because in all of my sermons I am speaking of the rewards of our faith. The first reward is honesty. As someone who was raised in a religious environment where faith always trumped reason, where doubt was to be hidden, where creeds however unclear or just plain wrong were to be believed anyway, where variation from accepted doctrine was considered heretical, spending time in a UU congregation was and still is for me incredibly refreshing. I can still recall with some degree of astonishment that my views on the Bible-that it is a book written by human beings, that it is not a book by God but a book about how people have experienced what they think is God, that some parts of the Bible are so cruel and misguided as to be worthy of excision and others-these views were not scorned by my first UU friends nor any I have made since then. Neither was it the case that every one of the members of that first congregation or subsequent ones shared my perspective on the Bible. The first UU I met when I went to a book sale at Third Unitarian Church in Chicago believed in Jesus Christ as her lord and saviour and thought the Bible was very much Divine Writ. Some members of each of my congregations have believed or do now believe something similar. There are also people who think the Bible should be destroyed because it is mean- spirited, oppressive, and stupid. Honesty about our convictions does not deprive us of membership in a UU congregation. Honesty enables each of us to speak the truth of our lives, beliefs and doubts, confusions and certainties, and still belong to a religious community that honors the sacred and inherent worth of every individual. We cannot learn and grow if we are not honest. I was honest before I became a UU at the age of 33, but I paid a price in social ostracism as a person who did not hold to the right beliefs. I paid a price in being constantly evangelized to take Jesus into my heart. I paid a price in being frequently urged to pray fervently by letting go of my concerns and letting God take over. To get back into the good graces of those churches I would have had to be dishonest, choke off my questing spirit, my restless heart, my curious mind. I have never been asked directly or by implication to do that as a UU. Being a UU means exploring diverse paths of understanding, "living," as Rainer Maria Rilke once put it, "in the questions," being able to change and grow. It is harder to do these things if our honesty is scorned or suppressed. One of the rewards of being a UU is being able to be honest, to think our thoughts, to feel our feelings, to live fully our experiences., and to be respected for that honesty. I love being a UU! A second reward is laughter. UU's seem to understand that life really is funny, funny strange, funny peculiar, funny ha-ha. Life deserves a big laugh, and so do we and all our pretensions. The Buddhists tell a story about a god who must have had some UU blood. He once walked down the road in a hat that was blue on one side and red on the other. People in the fields to the left saw the god in a blue hat, and people in the fields to his right saw a red hat. Each then proclaimed and built a whole religious doctrine on god appearing in a blue or a red hat. So disputatious did they become with one another that they began to build walls to shut out the others and to hurl stones across the way. The god reappeared but from the opposite direction so that each of the two groups changed their minds and apologized to the other for mistaking the color of the god's hat. They grew so fierce in their apologies that they almost came to blows. Then the god appeared again, but this time he stopped and slowly turned all the way round so that the people could see how foolish they had been. Everyone began to laugh. It is a Buddhist story but the spirit is very much UU. The spirit is that of realizing that most things-like the color of a god's hat, or whether God is One or Three or 30 million, or what direction you face when you pray, or hosts of other things that have agitated the human race to the point of oppression and hatred and war-most things really do not matter as much as we think they do. Isn't it funny that we think they do? As the UU signboard says, "We curb our dogma." Laughter at human silliness, human pretensions, human mistakes is a healthy response to life's strangeness. You will hear laughter in every UU congregation in this country. And you will experience love. In this congregation we say every Sunday that "love is the spirit of this church," and we mean it. We mean that kindness and helpfulness and sharing matter in a way that no theological doctrine possibly could. We mean that taking care of each other really is what counts. We say that our covenant is to "search for truth in love," and we mean that too. We mean that we will seek the truth, we will try to learn, but not at the expense of other people. We mean that we will respect the differences that exist among us and honor the person no matter what her views. We mean that no truth is more important than the truth of love: cooperation, harmony, fairness, peacefulness, forgiveness, mercy, support, caring, and the ten thousand other ways that we tell each other how important love is, how important each of us is. Living in love is what we try to do, and the experience of doing that is rewarding beyond words. This sermon has highlighted my love of three's, which, in a Unitarian congregation, is certainly not a common thing, though because of tolerance it is not an unacceptable thing. The e-mail told of three risks: no theological language, pride, and cultural thinness. I added to that list three of my own: we could be wrong, the "tyranny of choice," and marginalization. I also offered some suggestions about the rewards of being UU: the heady air of honesty, the attitude of laughter, and love. Thank you, congregant, for that e-mail of a few years ago. I hope that I have adequately met the challenge you put to me. Now I pass on that challenge to each one of you, to draw up your own list of risks and rewards that you might better understand our common faith and feel, as I do, an even deeper attachment to it. BIBLIOGRAPHY 1. Ernest Cassara, UNIVERSALISM IN AMERICA, Beacon Press, 1971. 2. Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone, OUT OF THE FLAMES: THE REMARKABLE STORY OF A FEARLESS SCHOLAR, A FATAL HERESY, AND ONE OF THE RAREST BOOKS IN THRE WORLD, Broadway Books, 2002. 3. Mark W. Harris, HISTORICAL DICTIONARY OF UNITARIAN UNIVERSALISM, The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2004. 4. Jack Mendelsohn, BEING LIBERAL IN AN ILLIBERAL AGE: WHY I AM A UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST, Beacon Press, 199 5. 5. 6. Russell E. Miller, THE LARGER HOPE: THE FIRST CENTURY OF THE UNIVERSALIST CHURCH IN AMERICA, 1770-1870., Unitarian Universalist Association, 1979. 7. ...................., THE LARGER HOPE: THE SECOND CENTURY OF THE UNIVERSALIST CHURCH IN AMERICA, 1870-1970, Unitarian Universalist Association, 1985. 8. David B. Parke, THE EPIC OF UNITARIANISM: ORIGINAL WRITINGS FROM THE HISTORY OF LIBERAL RELIGION, Starr King Press, 1957. 9. David Robinson, THE UNITARIANS AND THE UNIVERSALISTS, Greenwood Press, 1985. 10. Earl Morse Wilbur, D.D., A HISTORY OF SOCIANISM: SOCIANISM AND ITS ANTECEDENTS, Beacon Press, 1945. 11. ............................., A HISTORY OF UNITARIANISM: IN TRANSYLVANIA, ENGLAND, AND AMERICA, Beacon Press, 1945. Kenneth W. Phifer, All Rights Reserved 1