by Preston Moore, Summer Minister

A sermon given August 28, 2005

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

CALL TO WORSHIP

In Plato’s Republic, the great philosopher declares, “For every city, however small, is divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich; these are at war with one another.”  In the cities we call Unitarian Universalism and our own Portland church, must it be so?  Come, let us worship together. 

In Boston in 1840, churchgoers always sat in the same pew from week to week.  Why?  Because they had bought and paid for them.  And the price varied depending on the view.  There were a few free seats—way up in the back of the balcony.  As the old saying goes, where you stood depended on where you sat.

Of all the churches in Boston, the Unitarian ones had the priciest pews.  In one such church that year, a radical minister named George Ripley proposed an open seating plan.  His proposal was resoundingly rejected, and shortly thereafter, he left. A century would pass before the last of the Unitarian churches in Boston abandoned the system of purchased pews.

This quaint practice is a telling chapter in the story of how identity is formed in religious communities.  What is the price of admission in our churches today?  And what is at stake in how we set that price?

A short walk from Reverend Ripley’s church, an even older institution is still selling seats today: Harvard University. What with scholarships and such, it’s hard to peg the exact price of admission.  But where you sit continues to reveal where you really stand.  The median income of Harvard families is over $150,000 per year.  And Harvard is no fluke.  At the selective private universities this year, more doctors are parents of freshmen than are hourly wage-earners, teachers, ministers, farmers, and soldiers—combined.

These disturbing new realities in higher education reflect stark changes in the class structure of America.  The richest 20% of the country now receive over half the income.  The disparity in income between rich and poor is now greater in the United States than in any major industrialized Western country.

College presidents are worried that they are reinforcing economic and social advantage, nullifying their mission of promoting class mobility.  High incomes of parents translate into huge educational advantages for children.  Those educational advantages in turn translate into high incomes. The repetition of this cycle is creating a new hereditary aristocracy.

Where are Unitarian Universalists in this class structure?  In the leading study of religious demography in America, we are described as “a group with a long history of high status in this society.”  How long a history?  Well, those Unitarians sitting in the pricey pews in Boston were very busy over at Harvard.  They gained control of the board of overseers of the college in 1805.  For the next half-century all the university presidents were Unitarian.  Harvard Divinity School was considered a Unitarian academy.

Conrad Wright, a leading Unitarian historian, says that our Unitarian ancestors “considered the school as sacred an institution as the church.”  The Universalists had the same passion.  They planted schools from Massachusetts all the way to the Pacific, where they started up a little school called Throop Polytechnic, which later became known as the California Institute of Technology.

A long history of high status indeed.  And how high today?  In terms of education, we’re Number One among American religious denominations.  The people whose children have the highest SAT scores by a big margin?  Unitarian Universalists.  In terms of income, we’re Number Two.  In terms of composite social standing based employment, income, education, and home ownership, we’re Number One.

In our church we say all are worthy, all are welcome; and we say it sincerely.   But in class terms, Unitarian Universalism is very far from mirroring American society as a whole.  It’s important to ask ourselves why.  We don’t require anyone to buy a pew any more, or to have a college degree to join our church.  But are there intangible “prices of admission” that make our church look “unaffordable”—that signal who belongs and who doesn’t?

Here too, our history may give some clues—particularly in how the Unitarian and Universalist sides of our family tree got grafted together.  Frankly, some of the Unitarians tended to look down their noses at the Universalists, whom they judged to be less refined.  Despite much theological kinship, it took nearly a hundred years of talking before the Unitarians and Universalists could get together.  When the subject came up for the umpteenth time in 1949, a plain-spoken Universalist leader said he had the impression the Unitarians were more interested in analyzing the nature of infinity than in the spirit of love.  “I feel that I ought to put on my company manners,” he said, “when I go into a Unitarian church.”  

Belonging is a subtle thing.  In its recent report on theological unity, the UUA asked, “If we say to anyone or everyone ‘you belong,’ what is it that they are invited to belong TO?”  For anyone to have a real feeling of belonging in our church, he must feel invited to something beyond Sunday morning worship—something like learning, conversation, volunteer work, socializing, eating, sharing experiences—in short, the culture of our community.  How much is our culture inflected by social class?  What do we talk about with each other—at coffee hour, after committee meetings, in the knitting circle?

These questions are important not only in relation to people who don’t walk through our doors or take a quick look and move on.  Our high educational and economic status represents averages.  Although their numbers may be relatively small, there are people here now who sometimes feel like outsiders based on social status, but who do not feel able to talk about it, as Pat Gorman did this morning with such candor and insight.

There are many places in our society where people who are not highly educated or highly compensated do not feel invited to belong.  With social mobility declining sharply, wide disparities in education and income represent a serious social justice issue.

At our General Assembly in 2000, we adopted a detailed Statement of Conscience on this subject, fueled by an inspiring sermon to the Assembly by our senior minister.  This outward-looking work is critical, and we can take pride in our church’s Economic Justice Action Group for pushing it forward.  But there is also inward-looking work to be done—looking within our own religious community and asking not only about the social justice implications of class structure, but also about the spiritual implications.

What is at stake for you and me in class structure is a basic spiritual value:  identity, the religious answer to the question “who am I?”  And because identity is formed in community, the real meaning of that little question is “what do I belong to?” Who do we mean when we say we?  And who don’t we mean?

In religious terms, identity has two layers—a transient one, and an essential one.  The transient one includes cultural elements like what we read, what we eat, and how we spend our leisure time.  It also includes education and income.  These are the kinds of feathers that cause certain birds to flock together.

The trouble comes when we treat this transient layer of identity as if it were the essential layer that lies beneath all those transient feathers.  The essential layer is what’s left after we have grasped that we are not our hobbies or interests, we are not the vacations we take, not our jobs, not our diplomas, not even the way we talk and think.  At our essence, we are beings who are beyond compare, who have inherent worth and dignity no matter what our transient characteristics.

This radically egalitarian conception of human identity is the first principle of our religion, contributed by our Universalist heritage.  Why, then, would we ever treat the transient layer of our identity as if it were the essential one?  Because we’re afraid.  Everyone wants to belong.  But belonging to a community organized on the basis of equal and inherent worth is hard, because connecting with that essential self, that essential identity, requires peeling back all those transient characteristics that add up to social status.  Unconsciously, we fear that although our first principle sounds wonderful, maybe that essential layer of identity, that inherent worth and dignity, doesn’t really exist.  So without exactly realizing it, we place our faith in the transient layer instead.

If we become afraid that we’re nothing more than the sum of those transient characteristics, then they take on an exaggerated importance.  If being highly educated and highly paid start to feel essential to our identity, then we will reinforce that identity by associating with other highly educated and highly paid people.  This way of reinforcing identity depends on there being other people who are excluded from the group, and who are made to feel lesser-than.

When we relate to others as if they were nothing more than their transient characteristics, we negate not only their essential identity—their inherent worth and dignity—but also our own.  Worth and dignity are either inherent in human nature or they’re not.  If we treat worth and dignity as varying from individual to individual, we nullify our cherished belief that it is inherent—an incalculable loss.

This loss is compounded by the missed opportunity to receive wisdom from people whose experiences are different from our own.  Those whose labor is more physical than intellectual learn things about life that can’t be found in books.  Those whose income is not so high have a perspective on issues of public policy that we need to have planted among us, instead of being something we read about in the newspaper.

The damaging effects of social status are everywhere in the world.  But the one place where some sanctuary from this damage should always be available is church.  The message that should fill our ears when we walk into church, shouted by the way we do EVERYTHING here, is “this is not a social club.”  Not even a very liberal, enlightened social club.  All are worthy, and all must be welcome—welcome not just to sit here and be merely tolerated, but to commune here, to reveal a wounded self, to open a heart, to trust and be trusted.  To smash the conventions of social status by saying, “take me as I am.  Love me exactly as I am.”  With no conditions placed on admission, no tuition, no price paid for a pew—not even the subtle and invisible ones of class-driven culture.

It is the mission of the church to distinguish the transient from the essential, so that all who walk through its doors may feel as never before a powerful sense of connection to their own essential selves and the essential selves of others.  This mission rests on a deep conviction that to experience this connectedness is transformative, something that our ordinary secular lives make it hard even to imagine.

In his letter to the Christians in Corinth, which Jennifer read this morning, Paul urged his followers to be such a church.  He chided the well-to-do congregants for bringing their fancy food to communion at the church, which was a real meal back then, rather than a symbol, and eating it in the presence of those who had little or nothing without sharing.  And the church supper is a metaphor, of course, for a broader and deeper communion.  Humans do not live by bread alone.  They also need conversation—particularly if they’re Unitarian Universalists.

Paul asked of his followers, “think of what you were before you were called,” meaning called to that radical early Christian church that had no snobbery, no institutional baggage.  “Not many of you were wise by human standards;” he reminded them, “not many were influential; not many were of noble birth.  But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong.  God chose what is low and despised in the world—things that are not—to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one may boast in the presence of God.”  Paul was talking about humility, the humility without which wisdom is out of reach—the wisdom to recognize our universal equality in the presence of what is infinite and holy.

Paul makes us feel uneasy.  His radically egalitarian church is a church of very hard work.  It demands more than our daily secular lives ever ask of us—that we always stay conscious of who’s included and who’s excluded.  At first this hard work might feel like walking on eggs, being hypercareful in conversation, in the planning of every activity; and who would want to do that?  We would only take on this hard work if we hoped for an extraordinary reward—something transformative.  Paul offered his followers that.  With the inspiration of Jesus still historically fresh, he offered testimony of his own spiritual experience—testimony that the kingdom of God was at hand, and that the way to reach out for it was to abandon the transient consolations of social status and embrace radical egalitarianism.

Two thousand years later, in a thoroughly secular world that offers very few spiritually inspiring figures, can we wish deeply enough for that transformative possibility? Are our imaginations strong enough to energize us for the work of creating Paul’s egalitarian church?  What testimony is offered?

Well, here is mine.  My path to ministry has been all about relinquishment of social status.  Until a few years ago, I had spent most of my life constructing an identity out of that transient stuff.  And I started to believe that was who I really was.  I traded on the opposite of Paul’s egalitarian humility—an ultraconfident air that would make clients think “now there’s the guy to handle my really tough legal problem.”  I invested myself in being articulate, in talking in ways that most people don’t talk.  I’ve spoken about this here before—most of you know my story.

When I interviewed for the intern position, Marilyn said, “Preston, what I want to know is, if you come to work here, are we going to get beyond being articulate?”  I’ve been living with that question all year—in my preaching, in working with staff and volunteers, in pastoral sessions with a great number of you, and in small group settings like the retreats and adult religious education.  For me, what we’re talking about this morning is where the pursuit of that question leads.

In this church, one person after another has looked past the identity I constructed out of social status—my mentors, my teammates on the staff, my intern committee, and most of all, the teaching congregation that the church has become after years of experience.  You have revealed yourselves in ways that showed me the transformative possibility in your lives and in mine—both as an individual and as a minister aspiring to open up transformative possibilities for others.  You have fired my imagination, and enabled me to wish more deeply than I thought possible.

CONCLUSION

An uncommonly popular name for Unitarian Universalist churches is “All Souls.”  To deliver on the transformative possibility that strains our imaginations, this is what our church must be—a church of all souls.  Not all souls in the top twenty percent of society in terms of income and education.  Not all souls of high social status.  Not all souls who read the New York Times or listen to NPR.  All souls.

My year with you strengthens my faith that we have everything we need to reach out for that egalitarian church.  We have all the love we need.  All the courage.  All the tools for taking down the invisible fences of social status.  It is a matter of imagination, of envisioning possibility.  May our loving embrace be open to the widest of possibilities and be worthy of our Universalist name.
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Copyright 2005, Preston Moore.  All rights reserved.