Sermon

The Authority of the Pew

The Rev. Jack D. Bryant

Hope Unitarian Church

August 14, 2005

First Reading: James Luther Adams. The Prophethood of All Believers. P. 53

Belief in merely individualistic, fissiparous freedom of faith can lead only to vapidity, to a faith in “I know not what,” to faith in the arbitrary.

Faith in the knowledge about the commanding, sustaining, transforming reality cannot be “just any faith.” If it is to make a difference, if it is to enable us to distinguish between ourselves and Nazis, then it must have a definite, particular form. Religious liberals who say that religious liberalism encourages people merely to think as they please no longer believe there is a commanding reality. They have become “faith-fully” neutral, and this neutrality is only a halfway station (if not already a camouflage) for an unexamined faith, for an unreliable, destructive faith. Neither the vague nor the neutral “faith” can be overcome except in a faith-ful community.

The free church is that community which is committed to determining what is rightly of ultimate concern to persons of free faith. It is a community of the faith-ful and a community of sinners. When alive, it is the community in which men and women are called to seek fulfillment by the surrender of their lives to the control of the commanding, sustaining, transforming reality. It is the community in which women and men are called to recognize and abandon their ever-recurrent reliance upon the unreliable. It is the community in which the living spirit of faith tries to create and mold life-giving, life-transforming beliefs, the community in which persons open themselves to God and each other and to commanding, sustaining, transforming experiences from the past, appropriating, criticizing, and transforming tradition and giving that tradition as well as newborn faith the occasion to become relevant to the needs of a time. These roots of faith grow in the individual as one participates in the worshipping, educating, socially active fellowship of the church. And certainly if they do not grow in the individual they will not grow in the family, if they do not grow in the family they will not grow in the community, and if they do not grow in the community they will not grow in the nation and the world.

Second Reading: Walt Whitman. Song of the Open Road (6^th Stanza).

Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons,

It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.

Here a great personal deed has room,

(such a deed seizes upon the hearts of the whole race of men,

Its effusion of strength and will overwhelms law and mocks all authority and all argument against it.)

Here is the test of wisdom,

Wisdom is not finally tested in schools,

Wisdom cannot be pass’d from one having it to another not having it,

Wisdom is of the soul, is not susceptible of proof, is its own proof,

Applies to all stages and objects and qualities and is content,

It is the certainty of the reality and immortality of things, and the excellence of things;

Something there is in the float of the sight of things that provokes it out of the soul.

Now I re-examine philosophies and religions,

They may prove well in lecture-rooms, yet not prove at all under the spacious clouds and along the landscape and flowing currents.

Sermon

The Free Church. That is what we call ourselves. Earl Morse Wilbur, the great historian of Unitarianism, declared the Unitarian trinity of freedom, reason and tolerance - with freedom always coming first. Many of our theologians have argued that God - whatever that word might mean - is revealed in freedom. We are awash in freedom. We demand freedom, we expect freedom, we cherish it. It is one of our greatest strengths. But one’s greatest strengths will inevitably be the source of one’s greatest weaknesses.

Too often I have heard people who are members of Unitarian churches proclaim that this is a faith which says one can believe whatever one wants to believe. Such comments are echoed by some non-members who dismiss us as churches where people believe nothing. If it is true that this is a church where one can believe anything, then our outside critics are correct: We are a church where people believe nothing. Because to believe whatever you want is, for all practical purposes, to believe nothing - and more importantly, it is to be faithful to nothing, to have no genuine loyalty beyond the self. Such a religion is an empty religion, a null set, a void.

But that is not what freedom means. Genuine freedom is what happens when we choose - not when it is imposed upon us, but when we choose - to place limits upon ourselves and then to struggle against those limits. As the poet Robert Frost said, freedom means “pulling easy in the harness”. In matters of belief, it means we are free to believe as our conscience demands - not free to believe what we want to believe, but free to believe within the constraints of our conscience, the place theologians call the meeting ground between the individual and God. And the idea of freedom, as self-imposed restraint, lies at the heart of what I believe is the authority of the pew.

Our religious tradition is not a single thread; it is a multitude of threads woven together into a tapestry. One of the threads that stands out prominently is the commitment to congregational polity. Another thread is belief in the primacy of the individual conscience. The pilgrim and puritan churches from whom we are descended - reacting against the faults and foibles of the Anglican church - declared there was no higher authority than the local congregation and that specific belief was a matter for the individual to decide, not something to be dictated by dogma or creed. And the local church was to be governed by democratic means. The first democratic election held on the North American continent was in 1629 in First Parish church of Salem, Massachusetts. Its purpose was the election of their new minister. That is still our practice today. I was elected by the congregation to hold the office of minister. The board of trustees and the officers of this church were also so elected. The congregation - by democratic vote - approves the annual budget. We belong to an association of similar churches, but that association does not determine any of the decisions I have mentioned. From time to time they will make recommendations or suggestions, but the authority to decide is always right here in this church. More specifically, the authority for such decisions is amongst those who sit in the pews. Now I know we don’t have pews, we have chairs, but allow me the allegorical license. The absolute and final authority for how this church operates is the authority of the pew, the authority or power of the congregation. Of course, some of that power is delegated. The most obvious example is the delegation made to the office of minister. Not to me as an individual, but to the office with which I am entrusted. But if the authority of the pew is just about the power to decide, the power to govern the affairs of the church, then it is authority over nothing. One can only understand the authority of the pew if one is willing to embrace the other side of authority, the side that has to do with responsibility and accountability. That is a question that forces us to confront the question of why we have a church.

We do not have a church so people in the pews can exercise authority, hold office, decide for themselves what to believe, make decisions, elect officers, approve budgets and put on programs and parties. We have a church because we seek to discover that to which free people should be faithful. But such a church is necessarily one in which such power is exercised. Why is that so?

Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons,

It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.

Here a great personal deed has room,

(such a deed seizes upon the hearts of the whole race of men,

Its effusion of strength and will overwhelms law and mocks all authority and all argument against it.)

The words of the poet declare the truth. Greatness and truth require freedom. The freedom may be abused, but when it is not abused, when it is understood as giving us the choice between what is easy and what is right and when we choose the right, then the real purpose of the church is realized. Such a church is not a place for people to be neutral, because neutrality is the absence of faith. Not the faith of belief, but the faith of loyalty and trustworthiness and faithfulness, the faith that makes it possible for us to trust and to be trusted.

That is why we speak of freedom of the pew. In this church you do not have to agree with what is said from this pulpit. More specifically, you don’t have to agree with what I say. You have the freedom, the power, the authority to disagree. That does not make you faithless. Part of the faith of loyalty and trustworthiness is the courage to listen - especially when you disagree with the other. You may disagree with what I say and that is well and good. But it is not the authority or power of the pew to challenge me, to shout me down or to say that next week we need to hear a different opinion - to be fair and balanced. Nor is it the authority or power to declare the person sitting next to you in the pew to be a heretic, guilty of improper belief. The authority of the pew - in the sense of responsibility and accountability - says you are to be challenged, just as I am to be challenged when you disagree with me and the person sitting next to me. The authority of the pew, the faithfulness of the pew, lies in the courage to be challenged, it is the courage, as James Luther Adams said, to open yourself to the “commanding, sustaining, transforming experiences from the past, appropriating, criticizing, and transforming tradition and giving that tradition as well as newborn faith the occasion to become relevant to the needs of a time.”

Such a faith is not for the faint of heart. It is easy to have a creed that one accepts without thinking. It is easy to have a church that tells you what to think and if you don’t agree, just say the words and don’t think about them. It is also easy to have a so-called “free church” that requires nothing of you, that never challenges you, that only tells you to believe as you wish, to think as you wish and to challenge those who disagree with you. It is something else to have a church that says that just as the unexamined life is not worth living, the unexamined faith is not worth having (James Luther Adams). It is something else to have a church that says the authority of the pew carries with it the responsibility to challenge not others, but yourself, to examine your conscience, to ask not what the church will give you, but what can you give to your church. It is a church that says that if there is a God, then we are the hands of God, called to do the work that transforms the world one life at a time. In other words, the real authority of the pew is not the power to direct the affairs of the church - although that is where that power lies - the real authority of the church is the responsibility to use that power to examine your own faith, to demand loyalty first from yourself, to demand trustworthiness first from yourself, to demand action first from yourself. In other words, it is the power to challenge yourself to pull easy in the harness of freedom. I believe this is what Thomas Jefferson was saying when he wrote to his nephew Peter Carr in 1787 with some advice about religion:

[S]hake off all the fears & servile prejudices under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.

That is the authority of the free pew.

But how do we see this authority in practice? Some of you may recall that several months ago, prior to our annual fund raising canvass, we invited the congregation to lunch in our Fellowship Hall following our Sunday morning service. Over lunch people were invited to put forward their ideas for what the church should do in the coming year. But most importantly, it was said that we only wanted to hear the ideas on which each person would be willing to work personally. We did not want to hear what you thought others should be doing. We wanted to hear the projects to which you would be willing to commit your time, your talent and your fortune. That’s different than the projects to which you think others should commit their time, their talent and their fortune. We did so in recognition that the authority of the pew is not just the power to decide, it is the responsibility to use that power wisely - and before asking something of another to first ask it of oneself. That’s why I’m fond of saying no one is called to trust another person; rather, each of us is called to be trustworthy. None of us is called to believe in nor to judge the faithfulness of others; rather, each of us is called to be faithful.

The authority of the pew, therefore, arises out of the individual and collective commitment to create

. . . a community of the faith-ful and a community of sinners. When alive, it is the community in which men and women are called to seek fulfillment by the surrender of their lives to the control of the commanding, sustaining, transforming reality. It is the community in which women and men are called to recognize and abandon their ever-recurrent reliance upon the unreliable. It is the community in which the living spirit of faith tries to create and mold life-giving, life-transforming beliefs, the community in which persons open themselves to God and each other and to commanding, sustaining, transforming experiences from the past, appropriating, criticizing, and transforming tradition and giving that tradition as well as newborn faith the occasion to become relevant to the needs of a time. These roots of faith grow in the individual as one participates in the worshipping, educating, socially active fellowship of the church. And . . . if they do not grow in the individual they will not grow in the family, if they do not grow in the family they will not grow in the community, and if they do not grow in the community they will not grow in the nation and the world.

Therein lies the authority of the pew.

Amen.