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Challenges of a Liberal Faith
February 18, 2001

Several people asked why was last week's sermon, The Wall of Separation, was 'difficult' for me?

The challenge of this free pulpit is to be forthright without being offensive--without mis-using the power of this pulpit.

The basic and necessary challenge of ministry is, as some wag put it, 'to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.' After seventeen years of ministry to this congregation--to you--I find fewer and fewer who need to be afflicted.

Comfort is illusive and temporary.

The afflictions have accumulated and I could easily spend the rest of my days attempting to provide comfort whenever possible.

Yet I am reminded by Emerson who said, "Truly speaking it is not instruction but provocation that I receive from another soul."

The challenge, then, is to provide comfort or spiritual nourishment, and to provoke, to stir the conscience, to dig deeper into the issues of our day, especially the spiritual issues, which are not limited to traditional religious categories.

After the memorial service for Van Crouse yesterday several people asked me about our Unitarian approach. One said, "I noticed there was no mention of God."

Now this question comes from the two ends of the religious spectrum: on one end, the questioner thinks I should have talked about God, but failed to satisfy his or her need for this God talk.

On the other side, the questioner is glad I didn't mention the G word.

Yesterday I responded by paraphrasing the poet Gibran: 'speak to us of God...have I spoken this day of ought else?'

Fortunately for my questioner I recalled only that line of paraphrasing from Gibran's book, The Prophet. Here's the piece in its entirety:

And an old priest said, "Speak to us of Religion."
And he said:
Have I spoken this day of aught else?
Is not religion all deeds and all reflection,
And that which is neither deed nor reflection, but a wonder and a surprise ever springing in the soul, even while the hands hew the stone or tend the loom?
Who can separate his faith from his actions, or his belief from his occupations?
Who can spread his hours before him, saying, "This for God and this for myself; This for my soul, and this other for my body?"
All your hours are wings that beat through space from self to self.
He who wears his morality but as his best garment were better naked.
The wind and the sun will tear no holes in his skin.
And he who defines his conduct by ethics imprisons his song-bird in a cage.
The freest song comes not through bars and wires.
And he to whom worshipping is a window, to open but also to shut, has not yet visited the house of his soul whose windows are from dawn to dawn.
Your daily life is your temple and your religion.
Whenever you enter into it take with you your all.
Take the plough and the forge and the mallet and the lute,
The things you have fashioned in necessity or for delight.
For in revery you cannot rise above your achievements nor fall lower than your failures.
And take with you all men:
For in adoration you cannot fly higher than their hopes nor humble yourself lower than their despair.
And if you would know God be not therefore a solver of riddles.
Rather look about you and you shall see Him playing with your children.
And look into space; you shall see Him walking in the cloud, outstretching His arms in the lightning and descending in rain.
You shall see Him smiling in flowers, then rising and waving His hands in trees.

As it turns out, this middle-aged couple was very pleased to find a religious institution where they could feel comfortable. They didn't need me to tell them about God, but they were very pleased with the possibility that they could find a place to nurture that aspect of life we call spiritual.

They asked the difference between the Unitarian approach and Ethical Culture and I responded that while we were, in general, very similar to Ethical Culture we agree that there is an aspect of life that we can refer to as spiritual, without defining it. I told them that I use the word God in poetry, since the word is always, at best, a metaphor; and at its worst it is used by politicians and clergy who want to get votes or money...or both...but maybe not in that order.

We had a nice conversation. It may be their only visit with Unitarians, and they left with a positive feeling.

Of course we get the opposite. Some years ago I had conducted a wedding in the summer at a college chapel. It was an extremely hot day and I was walking across the campus eager to get to my car. A young man in his 20's who had been to the ceremony ran up behind me and called to me. I stopped, turned and he asked, "Rev. did you write that service or did they?"

I said that we had worked on it together. I thought, at first, that he was going to ask if I'd officiate at his wedding, which has happened several times over the years.

Instead he said, "Well, you read from the Gospels, but you didn't tell the people it was the word of God."

I knew, then, what I had on my hands. So I asked, as politely as I could muster in the hot sun, "Did you know it was the word of God?"

"Yes," he answered innocently, not getting the point right away, "Yes, I knew," he reiterated rather proudly. "But you are supposed to tell the people that this is the word of God."

"But I didn't have to tell you, did I," I said. And he repeated, in a rather urgent voice, still not getting it--not getting what I was really saying to him...which I think he may not ever get.

One of the great challenges of a liberal faith--and a liberal minister--is to respect those who have a need to say 'this is the word of God,' without compromising oneself, on the one hand, and without insulting the other person on the other hand.

Sometimes it's just a matter of keeping your cool, as they say. There are some days on which that is easier said than done, for all of us.

One of the significant challenges in this very congregation is to satisfy the variety of religious needs or expressions, without compromising. On any given Sunday morning there's a wide variety of needs sitting in these chairs. Some are in grief after the loss of a loved one, or friend during the week--they need to be comforted. Some want to be challenged, if not afflicted. Some want a prayer and would be very pleased with something out of their tradition, and for some a traditional prayer that asks God to alter the universe for our sakes is offensive.

We play musical chairs in this regard, too. One who was looking to be challenged one week needs comforting the next, and so forth.

The god-question is a hint, but there are many other questions and issues that press buttons.

When someone asks you about God in a Unitarian setting, it would be good to have this passage from Whitman at your fingertips, or, better yet, on the tip of your tongue:

And I say to mankind, Be not curious about God,
For I who am curious about each am not curious about God, (No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God and about death.)
I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least...
Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four and each moment then,
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass,
I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign'd by God's name,
And I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe'er I go Others will punctually come for ever and ever.
There is that in me--I do not know what it is--but I know it is in me. ...
I do not know it--it is without name--it is a word unsaid, It is not in any dictionary, utterance, symbol.
Do you see O my brothers and sisters?
It is not chaos or death--it is form, union, plan--it is eternal life--it is Happiness.

The essential challenge of our liberal faith is to get beyond and beneath the words...to get at the feeling...to nourish the spirit without demanding agreement regarding creeds and dogma...theologies...and statements of belief.

I could have titled the sermon 'challenge of a liberal faith,' but I realized that there are many, many challenges...when you say you want to have an open faith system...that you want to marry science and religion...that you want to nourish the spirit without insulting the mind.

One of the many challenges of a liberal faith is to talk about money without scaring people off; to ask people to support the institution with their money, as well as in other ways.

It's tricky business, but it's part of the business of this place.

Money and everything under that big umbrella has a huge spiritual component: how do you get your money...how do you spend it and what do you give back? These questions have a spiritual component.

But money talk may be riskier than God talk. It presses old buttons, especially when it's connected to committing some of it to this place, and when clergy talk about money, that may very well be the underlying motive: give more!

There's a little poem from a Unitarian, Carl Sandburg:

"So you want to divide all the money there is and give every man his share?"
"that's it. Put it all in one big pile and split it even for everybody."
"and the land, the gold, silver, oil, copper, you want that divided up?"
"Sure - an even whack for all of us."
"Do you mean that to go for horses and cows"
"Sure - why not?"
"And how about pigs?"
"Oh to hell with you - you know I got a couple of pigs."

What do you think are the basic challenges of our liberal religious faith? That would be a good homework question.

Last week I indicated that Abraham Lincoln refused to belong to any church, saying that the churches seemed filled with disputation and dogma. Lincoln was too much of a good politician to use the word hypocrisy.

He said that he would gladly unite with a religious group whose aim and purpose was, as the Hebrew Scriptures indicate, to 'love your neighbor as yourself.'

Just as I would summarize real religion as simply 'the way you live your life,' so I would summarize what I see as the basic challenge of this faith of ours: we need to be a place where Lincoln would feel comfortable...where he would feel a kindred spirit...where he would feel inspired and encouraged.

One of the challenges of our faith is to nurture and nourish the soul, the spirit, and, at the same time, to have one foot firmly planted in the everyday world - the world of politics, money, crime and punishment...the world of work with economic justice; the world where poverty, racism and homophobia are serious problems with a spiritual or religious component.

How does one do that effectively without getting pulled into politics and losing the spiritual nourishment that's expected and needed here? How does one nurture the spirit without becoming too removed from the down-to-earth every day world?

It's a challenge. Balance.

I've been doing this work for more than thirty years, and I can tell you without hesitation that the challenges are greater now than when I began. It doesn't get easier. The more you know, the more you realize how little you know. The more you know, the more complicated it all becomes. The less you know, the more certain you are of everything. But you already knew that, didn't you.

Other challenges have to do with providing a good religious education program for our children.

What's a 'good religious education' program? What kind of religious education did you have? What do you want for your children and grandchildren, and for all the children in our congregation?

We want a religious education program that helps children to learn about the religions of the world--to respect the variety of approaches to the questions about religion, and to respect the people who practice this variety...while at the same time, helping them to develop their own ideas and beliefs--to be open to that process as a life-long task. The early religious education has enormous consequences for our lives.

It is a significant challenge to provide information, support and encouragement, without giving them the answers to the big questions...about God, eternity, salvation, and so forth.

They, of course, will have to find their own answers, and to accept the fact that new insights will keep coming, and to be open to them...to be open to growth and change.

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds adored by statesmen and divines." Emerson, again.

The bottom line in our religious education program for our children is to teach them to respect themselves and one another...to believe that they are capable of making appropriate moral and ethical choices and, of course, to make those choices...to do what is right.

I spoke last week with the early grades about not making fun of one another because of differences, and one of the teachers sent a note to me saying that they had a lively discussion about put-downs and all-hands were eagerly raised to give examples of put-downs they had seen or had felt.

One of the great challenges of our faith is to affirm our approach--our religion--without suggesting we're better than the others, or somehow superior to the others.

In our enthusiasm for this free and open approach we can sometimes get carried away and soon we sound like we think have the only true religion!

One of the challenges, then, is offer constructive criticism, the way loving family members try to do within a family.

It isn't easy.

We need to think about what it is we believe, what we affirm, and find ways to articulate it, not only for others who ask, "What do you Unitarians believe, anyway," but for ourselves-to find a way of expressing in a positive way what we have here and what we're creating together.

Our web site has a page from David Rankin, an articulate Unitarian minister who said it this way, in answer to the question: What do Unitarian Universalists believe?

1. We believe in the freedom of religious expression. All individuals should be encouraged to develop their own personal theology, and to present openly their religious opinions without fear of censure or reprisal.
2. We believe in the toleration of religious ideas. All religions, in every age and culture, possess not only an intrinsic merit, but also a potential value for those who have learned the art of listening.
3. We believe in the authority of reason and conscience. The ultimate arbiter in religion is not a church or a document, or an official, but the personal choice and decision of the individual.
4. We believe in the never-ending search for truth. If the mind and heart are truly free and open, the revelations which appear to the human spirit are infinitely numerous, eternally fruitful, and wondrously exciting.
5. We believe in the unity of experience. There is no fundamental conflict between faith and knowledge, religion and the world, the sacred and the secular, since they all have their source in the same reality.
6. We believe in the worth and dignity of each human being. All people on earth have an equal claim to life, liberty and justice - and no idea, ideal, or philosophy is superior to a single human life.
7. We believe in the ethical application of religion. Good works are a natural product of a good faith, the evidence of an inner grace that finds completion in social and community involvement.
8. We believe in the motive force of love. The governing principle in human relationships is the principle of love, which always seeks the welfare of others and never seeks to hurt or destroy.
9. We believe in the necessity of the democratic process. Records are open to scrutiny, elections are open to members, and ideas are open to criticism - so that people might govern themselves.
10. We believe in the importance of a religious community. The validation of experience requires the confirmation of peers, who provide a critical platform along with a network of mutual support.

President Buehrens recently asked what our elevator answer would be to that question...what's it mean to be a Unitarian, or what do Unitarian Universalists believe?

If you had only one floor to answer you might say: freedom, reason and tolerance.

If the elevator stopped at two floors you could use James Freeman Clark's a well-known 19th century Unitarian minister in Boston summarized it in a much-repeated affirmation at the time: we believe in the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, the leadership of Jesus, salvation by character, and the progress of mankind, onward and upward forever.

It might be better not to try to give an elevator answer, except 'come to our services for a few weeks and see what you think and feel...'

An ongoing challenge of our faith is, as Lincoln put it, 'to here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced...to be dedicated to the great task remaining before us...'

In a sense we remind one another of the essential challenge when we recite or read our affirmation: Love is the spirit of this church, and service its law..." It's up to each one of us to make love the spirit of this congregation. We do that by the way we treat one another and the way we strive to treat others when we leave here after a Sunday service; to help in whatever way we can to live out our commitment to service...as its law.

This, after all, is our great covenant: to dwell together in peace, to seek the truth in love and to help one another.

It's a covenant--an agreement, and a promise.

It can serve as an elevator answer, or a dinner-table discussion. It can serve as a reference point for a life-time of involvement, or if you're a visitor for just one Sunday, it can offer a quick snap shot.

"And if you would know God be not therefore a solver of riddles. Rather look about you and you shall see Him playing with your children. Look into space; you shall see Him walking in the cloud, outstretching His arms in the lightning and descending in rain.
You shall see Him smiling in flowers, then rising and waving His hands in trees."

 

 

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