by Preston Moore, Summer Minister

A sermon given July 10, 2005

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

CALL TO WORSHIP

Commenting on religion, Thomas Jefferson once said, “it does me no injury for my neighbor to say that there are twenty Gods or no God.  It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”  Look at your neighbors in this sanctuary this morning and ask yourselves, is that true?  Can each Unitarian Universalist believe whatever he or she wants?  At what cost?  Come, let us worship together. 

Jennifer and I traveled to Texas on June 20.  Fort Worth.  A modern version of the deserts of my Biblical training in seminary:  flat, hot, uninviting—certainly no place for a vacation.  No real landmarks.  A place you could wander around in aimlessly for quite a while.  Being there felt a little bit like coming home, in that I grew up in the South.  But we weren’t on a vacation or a journey to my childhood home.  We were there to attend UU General Assembly.  I had never been before, and I hoped this would be an important spiritual journey. 

When the Exhibition Hall opened, I went directly to the UUA Bookstore and bought a newly issued report by the UUA’s Commission on Appraisal, a leadership group that selects an issue for in-depth study every few years.  When I began seminary in 2002, they were working on this question:  “Where is the unity in our theological diversity?”  A few months ago the Commission announced that its report on this question would be released at GA. 

I opened it immediately and started reading. The Commission observed, “theological diversity alone is an entirely inadequate basis for a strongly associated congregation of individuals, or for a truly functional association of congregations.”  It asked, what are we “calling people into community for?  . . .  [I]f we are a religious community, shouldn’t we be able to articulate theologically and religiously what it is that unites us?”  It wanted to know, “If we say to anyone or everyone, ‘you belong,’ what is it that they are invited to belong to?”    It warned that to ignore the issue of unity in our theological diversity would put our religion in peril of being “reduced to an agglomeration of liberal religious boutiques, loosely associated and without any real organizing principle,” and even in peril of failing to survive at all.

In the report, the word “unity” was carefully distinguished from uniformity or identicality of belief.  And mindful of a former UUA President’s observation that UUs have “a fear of creedalism that is irrational to the point of being dogmatic,” the Commission also assured its readers that it had no creeds in store, no plans for excommunication of theological refuseniks.  No, in looking for unity, the Commission was simply asking about our shared understanding of the basic elements of our religion. 

The Commission alluded to that old joke about a Unitarian as someone who, given a choice between going to Heaven or going to a discussion group about Heaven, would unhesitatingly opt for the discussion group.  It vowed, “we would disappoint no one more than ourselves if we were to rest content with the mere conclusion that ‘more dialogue’ is needed on this important subject”

Bold words.  I scanned the nine chapters of the 170-page report and turned to the Recommendations at the end.  Despite the Commission’s vow to suggest something stronger than more discussion, its recommendations seemed mostly to consist of just that.  I was disappointed.  I went back through the individual chapters in detail.  The bulk of the content was basically a collation and summary of the results of surveys the Commission took, asking congregants about their views and feelings about theological questions.  The leaders of our movement did not say what they thought our theological unity is or should be.  The closest they came was a listing of adjectives offered to describe our unity as a faith movement:  “grounded, ecological, profoundly human, responsible, experiential, free, imaginative, relational, curious, reasonable, and hopeful.”

The Commission described this listing as “a powerful vision.”  But I couldn’t see the power, and I certainly couldn’t see any meaningful unity.  To be real unity, the individual elements have to add up to a coherent whole—a coherence and wholeness sufficient to answer the questions the Commission so ably and provocatively posed for itself:  If we say to anyone or everyone, ‘you belong,’ what is it that they are invited to belong to?  What are we “calling people into community for?”

I was still vexing over those questions on the second evening of General Assembly, when I went to hear the Berry Street lecture.  This lecture is sponsored by the Berry Street Conference, a Unitarian group convened by William Ellery Channing in 1820 that sponsors an annual lecture on a subject of importance to Unitarians.  This year, the lecture was given by Reverend Burton Carley, minister of the First Unitarian Church of Memphis.  Burton’s lecture was actually a sermon, and a great one.

“The desire may begin,” he began, “without understanding what it is exactly that you are longing for.  One thing is for sure.  The urge is wrapped with a hollow feeling that has all the weight of missing something.  You cast about for what it might be that haunts you.  A fleeting shadow comes and goes at the corner of the eye.  Quickly you turn             to capture it, without success.  After a while you try to dismiss it, rationalize it, ignore it, but the yearning persists.”

I heard in Burton’s opening words the echo of a famous statement about religious communities, uttered by the Greek philosopher Xenophon thousands of years ago:  “So we sit around the fire, drinking wine, eating chickpeas, and asking the ancient questions.  Who are you?  Where did you come from?  Where are you going to, my dear one?  And how old were you when the fear came?”  Burton and Xenophon were describing the basic longing that shapes everything we do in religion:  a sense of incompleteness, of something missing, an urge to fill the emptiness with something larger than one’s own ego.  It is also a sense of death, a profound awareness of our own finiteness, in which lies the seeds of our awareness of the infinite—another way of saying “God.” 

This is a longing to be “transformed,” a word that means radically, fundamentally changed.  When this happens, we are not merely changed by degrees.  We are new people.  Some people (including some UUs) disavow this longing for drastic change.  But I believe that at the bottom of every human heart, there is another, truer voice that confesses to this longing—confesses to a thirst so relentless that, once it has been awakened in us, we will take a long and dangerous journey across the desert to satisfy it.

Burton’s Berry Street sermon was all about THAT journey.  In his vision, and in mine, it is not a journey for the sake of journeying.  It is not “for tourists but rather for pilgrims, not for collecting new experiences like souvenirs but rather for the growing of a soul, not for entertainment but rather for transformation, not for meandering but rather for pointing toward a destination and arriving at it.”

What does that destination look like?  To me, it looks like those fleeting glimpses of experience that awakened the longing for transformation in the first place.  An experience not of being giddy or pumped up with external success or good fortune; but rather, a sense of perfect sufficiency, a sense that the day you are given, with all of its so-called shortcomings, is exactly what it should be, that nothing needs to be fixed or added for you to feel utterly at peace.  And a feeling that, like everything else in this day you are given, you yourself are perfectly sufficient, needing no fixing, even though there is plenty of work to do fixing and building things in the world. 

The end of the journey looks like a city so luminous that this feeling of perfect enoughness would be so much more than a mere occasional flash.  It would pervade life, would fill most of our days, including even the days that bring sadness and loss.  It if didn’t sound so corny or dreamy, we might call it heaven—not the phony kind made of streets paved with gold, but a kind of paradise on earth.  A city so bright that just to stand at the outskirts of it would be transformative.

This is the journey and the destination described in today’s reading from Christian scripture. 

Our theology, our religion and our church are the vehicles for this journey.  They are not our home.  Home is where we are going—not to the homes we grew up in and in many cases pushed away, but rather to that home we glimpse occasionally, from afar, in transformative moments.  The community constituted by our theology, our religion, and our church is our caravan, our collective efforting to cross the desert and get home.  We need the caravan because we cannot transform our lives in splendid isolation, as mere individuals.

We need people who are willing to go with us on expeditions through the deserts of our own souls.  We cannot do this with people who have a worldview that is fundamentally at odds with our own.  We can respect such people, reach out to such people, and hope for greater mutual understanding with such people; but we cannot go hand in hand with them on that critical inward journey.  For that we need people with whom we feel a unity of belief on the basic questions we must answer in order to be transformed.  Without that unity, deep truth-telling, self-revelation, confession, mutual trust, and healing of wounds are impossible.

At our church’s Men’s Retreat this year, some of us opened up in ways we could not have imagined.  In some ways we were a very diverse group of men—different geographies, family histories, jobs, interests.  We didn’t agree on everything.  We had no creed.  But we did have a powerful unity in the way we looked at our world.  We weren’t a mini-interfaith-council.  We were Unitarian Universalists.  We belonged to each other.

Burton Carley recognized the importance of this belonging.  “Diversity may be an honored quality we seek to possess in our congregations,” he said, but by itself “it is not sufficient for calling people into covenant with us.  The real question is about belonging, about how we belong to each other.”  Those with whom we share mutual belonging are with us cheek to jowl in what Burton called “our constant wrestling with the theme of our identity, the search for our center, the discussions and struggles in each generation to find a theological consensus that necessarily involves limits.”

When we have all this, we have the makings of story—a story that enables us to tell ourselves and the world what our most cherished beliefs are, what it means for us to be “a gathered church.”

And when theology, religion, church, community, and story converge, we have the essential experience of belonging.  Just as we belong in that home city at the end of the journey, for today and tomorrow we belong with and to the people who are with us in this caravan.  We belong to this covenantal community, to the shared values to which we are answerable in our free and responsible search for truth and meaning.  And we belong to the overarching story out of which we live.

The Berry Street sermon was a strong antidote for the disappointment I felt about the report of the Commission on Appraisal.  We Unitarian Universalists need to do that inward work, but I wondered about whether that might pull us toward being a kind of private club.  I asked myself how to connect this inward-looking ethic with the need to look outward and translate our values into ethical action. 

I was still vexing over this inward versus outward integration when I went to the plenary General Assembly session at which the delegates would vote on the study/action issue for the coming year—the issue the UUA emphasizes and urges congregations to emphasize in their work.  One of the listed possibilities was entitled “Moral Values for a Pluralistic Society.” It posed the question:  “How might the moral and ethical grounding of Unitarian Universalism be given greater voice in the public square?”  The supporting text for this issue pushed this question further in a theological direction, asking, from what authority does our understanding of morality derive?  I got excited about this issue, because it seemed to point in the direction in which I had hoped the Commission on Appraisal would head:  the declaration of a moral center to our religious movement—a core of shared beliefs.

This issue was supported by the Youth Caucus.  Its speaker representative asserted a responsibility on the part of Unitarian Universalists to demonstrate that religious conviction is not inconsistent with rationality and tolerance.  He concluded with a call to our movement to seek recognition as what he called “a morally-bound religious body.”  Imagine that:  the Youth Caucus leading the charge for a morally binding religion!!  To my surprise, the moral values issue was adopted by the General Assembly as the study/action issue for the 2005-2006 year.

The inward-directed energy of Burton Carley and the outward-directed energy of the Youth Caucus and its “moral values” initiative were inspiring.  Reflecting on them, I asked myself whether Unitarian Universalists have a caravan strong enough for the journey home.  In particular, I asked myself whether we have the core of shared beliefs we need for a transformative impact. 

Shared beliefs are held together by covenants.  Our only covenant as a religious movement lies in our seven principles, which we have covenanted to affirm and promote, and in the related texts describing the sources of our living tradition.  Are these enough to get us home?  These texts do reflect some very valuable theological pieces of the puzzle; but I have serious doubts.  They say nothing about our finiteness, our death—they read as if written by beings who will live forever.  They say nothing about a holiness beyond finiteness to which we feel connected, which we hold sacred.  And they say nothing about what to do when, inevitably, we fail each other in our covenants, when we become cut off from that sense of the holy.  Traditional churches talk about these things with language like sin, salvation, and forgiveness.  We need our own articulations of these.  A few years ago, our President, Bill Sinkford, called us to a more wholehearted embrace of language of reverence.  He called it the most important initiative of his presidency.  We need to answer that call. 

So I don’t find in our Principles and Purposes that coherent unity that we need for the transformative work.  But I do find enough, at this point in our history, to journey onward in our caravan, so that we can develop a deeper, fuller set of shared beliefs. 

Even more important than our unfinished work on shared beliefs is whether we have a collective story that is big enough and compelling enough to inspire and contain the stories of individuals and families traveling as a community on this journey.  When I ask myself that question, I see quite a story.

I see a religious movement with a storied history of erudition, leadership, and martyrdom that reaches back nearly half a millennium.  A movement that has reinvented itself in the last hundred years more times and in more ways than most churches have changed over much longer histories.  The Catholic Church waited four hundred years before admitting it was wrong to persecute an old man named Galileo, for being scientifically accurate.  Our UU caravan will never wander that far off course for that long before redrawing its maps. 

We underappreciate this history.  As UU scholar David Robinson has observed, “Like a pauper who searches for the next meal, never knowing of the relatives whose will would make him rich, American Unitarians lament their vague religious identity, standing upon the richest theological legacy of any American denomination.” 

I also see a religious movement with a compelling present.  Thirty-five years ago, women made up less than 3% of UU ministry.  By 1988 this proportion had grown to 25%.  By 1999 it had crossed the 50% mark.  Is there another religious movement with that kind of dynamism on basic justice issues? 

And what about our future?  How compelling is that?  Well, that depends entirely on what story we write, and how we define ourselves in shared beliefs.  Can the most writerly, highly educated religious movement in America get an “A” in English composition and literature?  A religious movement with storytellers like this morning’s epiphanist, Joanna Klick?  I’m betting on it, literally.

So put that in your pipe and smoke it, Garrison Keillor.  We are a long way from home, no question; but we are no caravan of despair, no “church of Well, Whatever.”

And as for Thomas Jefferson, it’s hazardous to tilt against a deity, but I have to say it: he was wrong about religion.  It does matter whether your neighbor says there are twenty Gods or no God.  It does matter, terribly, what your neighbor says about religion—most particularly your neighbor who sits with you in the same sanctuary on Sunday.  For you and that neighbor to be spiritual strangers, to speak no common language of reverence, to share no basic beliefs, to sit there and try to worship privately and inertly—that does indeed pick your pocket.  It picks your spiritual pocket and leaves your soul impoverished.  And it will break your legs as well, and the legs of every camel in your caravan. 

We need to get home.  I can’t get there alone.  You can’t either.  It is time for our caravan to declare its colors and accelerate.  Amen.

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Copyright 2005, Preston Moore.  All rights reserved.