Why We Gather: Intro to UU 101
A Sermon By The Rev. Susan Manker-Seale
January 16, 2005
What terrible tragedies we have witnessed these past weeks since Christmas! And what hope we have witnessed as well, as the world rises to aid those who survived the tsunami in India and Indonesia and Sri Lanka and Thailand and way over in Africa. The global response is evidence of a growing sense of global responsibility toward each other at a level which has been lacking in past decades regarding certain civil wars and famines in Africa. When countries vie to give the most, that’s a good competition!
We witness the tsunami devastation within the context of the war in Iraq, the continued global terrorist attacks, civil wars and peace accords that may or may not hold. We have avalanches in Utah and mudslides in California and through it all we have to ask, is this day any different than any other day? Are my eyes opening where before they were closed? Are we seeing the natural and human tragedies of the world with a new awareness?
More money was given – I won’t even use the word “raised” because it wasn’t, it was given – to help alleviate the suffering this time than ever before. People gave to many relief agencies, including the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee which gives through local organizations. Religious communities responded by taking up offerings on the Sundays following the tsunami or asking members to give generously however they might. It is as the Rev. Vincent Silliman wrote in our hymnal about what religion should be:
Let it be to us hope and purpose, and a discovering of opportunities to express our best through daily tasks: Religion, uniting us with all that is admirable in human beings everywhere; holding before our eyes a prospect of the better life for humankind, which each may help to make actual. (Singing the Living Tradition, 466)
Tragedies like the tsunami and 9/11 draw us out of our daily lives to search for deeper meaning and a sense of hope. People come to churches or temples, whether they have been attending all along or never set foot in the door before. Religious communities call to us when we need solace or inspiration or a sense that we are not alone. We come for many reasons, not the least of which is the hope of helping to make life better for humankind.
Why do you come to church? Why did you come today? Why did you come to this religious community rather than any other?
Unitarian Universalists are not unique in our desire to make life better for all. We are not the only religious organization to give generously to the needy in the world. We are not the only religious communities to offer solace or inspiration or a sense that we are not alone. What does make us unique is a set of values that includes respect for the inherent worth and dignity of every person as well as the free and responsible search for truth and meaning. That’s free and responsible, which means a religion sans dogma, a religion which challenges us to keep an open mind and heart in many matters of human living.
For this Intro to UU 101, let’s open our hymnals to the sixth page, just after the preface. There you will find the Principles and Purposes of our UU association. I was at the General Assembly in 1980 in Maine when we worked in small group sessions to help craft these common values. Let’s read this together, this our covenant, antiphonally, starting with those of you on your right side:
We, the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association, covenant to affirm and promote:
The living tradition we share draws from many sources:
We use words like respect and acceptance, conscience and responsible. We draw from many sources in our religious pluralism. These are some of what make us different from other religious organizations. Something here among these words drew you to this congregation more than any other and resonates in your heart and mind and spirit. That is why we gather. That is why we are Unitarian Universalists.
We didn’t start out this way, of course. By 1980, when these Principles and Purposes were written, we had evolved tremendously in the ways we worship. We started out, at least as a faith, as early Christians trying to follow the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.
Those were little communities at first, each trying to understand this new faith and writing letters to each other to that effect. They wrote down the stories as they knew them. By the fourth century there were many books going around the Mediterranean and different notions about the nature of God, no longer just the one God of their Jewish tradition but now a trinity of Gods: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. People got to arguing so much that in 325, Constantine, the Emperor of Rome, convened a Council at Nicaea and decided once and for all what books and teachings were true and which were not. Those that made it in compose the Bible as we know it today. Those that didn’t you may be familiar with under the name “Gnostic Gospels.”
The Unitarian idea of one god, as opposed to Trinitarian or three, was deemed a heresy and those who followed such views were proclaimed enemies of Christianity. The idea of universal salvation, the foundation of Universalism, was condemned as heresy two centuries later. Universal salvation taught that Jesus had died for all our sins and therefore we were all saved. No one would go to hell. Obviously that notion was just too dangerous for the powerful to allow to survive.
The Catholic religion held sway for another thousand years until the Reformation in the sixteenth century. Ideas were rediscovered in the Renaissance, and the invention of the printing press helped immensely in giving the common folk access to such information as well as the Bible itself. People actually read the Bible for the first time. What they discovered, like our Unitarian forbear Michael Servetus, was that there isn’t anything at all in the Bible about a trinity. Servetus wrote a book he called On the Errors of the Trinity, and after many years fighting it out with other Protestants and being imprisoned and hiding for his life, he was burned at the stake in 1553 by Calvin for his heretical beliefs.
Unitarianism did take hold successfully in Transylvania, where we eventually had a Unitarian king, King John Sigismund, who proclaimed an Edict of Toleration for the country to enable at least four established religions to worship in peace. Our hero there was Francis David, a Catholic priest who evolved through Protestantism to become the Bishop of the Unitarians and to convert King John to his faith. His words are in our hymnal: Egy Az Isten – God is one. (566) Unfortunately, he too, died for his beliefs, in a prison on the top of a hill, which I visited during my sabbatical two years ago.
Unitarian ideas spread around Europe mainly through the efforts of the Unitarian press at Rakow, an amazing story which I can’t tell you about now, of a town in Poland created just for religious freedom and tolerance. The Unitarian belief was called Socinianism then, and those books eventually crossed the channel to England and influenced the beginnings of Unitarianism there as well as coming across the ocean to the new world in the hands of such folks as Joseph Priestly and John Murray.
Unitarianism and Universalism eventually discovered they weren’t that different, proclaiming freedom, reason, and tolerance, ideas which grew out of the oppression of the Reformation experiences. They didn’t join until 1961, but that skips a lot. Unitarians got together in 1825, forming the American Unitarian Association under the guidance of ministers such as William Ellery Channing. Ralph Waldo Emerson was prominent in those days and he left his Unitarian pulpit because he no longer felt comfortable giving communion. He began to see divinity in everything, and to derive wisdom not only from the Bible but from the inner soul. He started the Transcendentalist movement.
Ideas were growing and changing in a religion that allowed such growth and change. The open mind demanded the second look and the tolerant approach. Old ways and habits of thinking couldn’t hold up to shared ideas and experiences. Women demanded their place of respect: the Universalist minister Olympia Brown was the first woman to be ordained by any denomination. That was 1863.
As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, Unitarianism grew away from dependence solely on the Bible and discovered wisdom in the world’s religions, as did Universalism. Reason taught us. Freedom taught us. Tolerance taught us. Justice became integral to religious practice. Oppression became a bad word and people found sanctuary among us and the acceptance of who they really are. Freedom to believe and to be shaped our faith.
I’ve skipped 99/100th’s of the story.
The point is that we gather for very important reasons as Unitarian Universalists, not the least of which is that openness to change that has formed our faith over the centuries. It is that very openness to change that will shape our faith in this new century. Our own history tells us that we do not see everything clearly. Every story is one of an evolving understanding of what it means to be human and to live in community on our beautiful planet. We gather to witness to that evolving knowledge and to support each other as we strive to understand and appreciate our world.
Even as we reach out to help others in their tragedies and struggles, I don’t know the manner in which we will hold hands in the future. How will we be seen by the peoples of the world? Will we end up teaching and leading or will we realize what we have missed and find ourselves following others to a deeper well than ours is now? I do believe that if we stay true to the values of respect for others and a goal of peace and justice for all, we will be competitive players in the eyes of the world. And it won’t be a game of who can give the most money to those in need, but rather the challenge of who can offer the most wisdom and hope to all the people of our evolving world community.
Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Northwest Tucson