Sermon

This I Believe

The Rev. Jack D. Bryant

Hope Unitarian Church

July 17, 2005

First Reading: H. Richard Niebuhr. Radical Monotheism and Western Culture. Page 41.

One way of describing the incarnate character of radical faith in the life of Israel is to say that for this people all human relations were transformed into covenant relations. Promise-making and promise-keeping were the essential elements in every connection between persons. Religion became such a matter of covenant. Whatever the natural connections might be between creator and creature or between the god of the fathers and the latter’s children, these were transformed into faith relations when the creator and the god of the fathers committed himself by a promise to maintain oath of allegiance to him. Now religious observance became fundamentally an affair of promise-keeping, or of keeping faith, in carrying on covenanted practices of worship and sacrifice. Domestic, commercial, and political relations were no less covenantal in character. The family, with all its natural basis in sex and parental love, was now given a subfoundation as it were in promise and the keeping of faith between husbands and wives, parents and children. The natural kinship of tribes having a common ancestry or language was in part replaced, in part reinforced, by the structure of covenant; the political tie was less one of the love of one’s own kind or of the native soil than of explicit fidelity in keeping the oath of a citizen. Man was understood, in this whole context, as Martin Buber has pointed out, not first of all as rational animal but as promise-making, promise-keeping, promise-breaking being, as man of faith. All live was permeated by the faith in the fundamental covenant between God and man and in every activity some phase of that covenant was re-enacted. Faith as confidence in the One and as loyalty to the universe of being was ingredient in every action and relation.

Second Reading: The Commission on Appraisal of the Unitarian Universalist Association: Engaging Our Theological Diversity. Pages 2-3.

The world needs the message of our liberal faith. There are so many voices crying out for the UU message of inclusion, democracy, and justice. One thing has become clear, however. Despite consensus within the church that the liberal message of Unitarian Universalism is important in this troubled world, we find it difficult to articulate that message clearly. Conversations with UUs across the continent lead us to wonder: Is our theological diversity getting in our way? These conversations lead us to believe that our theological diversity is not as much of a problem as UUs’ inability to do the hard work of finding common ground to build a strong, effective religious voice. In the words of UU historian Conrad Wright, “Even the freest of free churches needs . .. discipline if it is to last long enough to accomplish anything of value in this world.”

Sermon

I’m from Texas. As I’m sure you are aware Texas and everything in Texas is bigger and better than anything else. People not fortunate enough to be from Texas are often intimidated by Texas and Texans. Three weeks ago while in Fort Worth attending General Assembly, the national meeting of our congregations, my wife overheard a conversation while eating breakfast. A woman from New York was talking to her friends. Lynn knew she was from the New York because she was wearing her conference name tag identifying her home town. The woman said she had been afraid to come to Texas. She had been afraid because she felt intimidated and threatened by the prospect of all those pick-up trucks and women with big hair. However, to her surprise and relief, she had found people to be friendly. It wasn’t as bad as she had feared. Big hair and pick-up trucks. I must assume she would have been equally frightened by the prospect of visiting Oklahoma. Now here’s the best part. She was a minister. Folks, I don’t make this stuff up. My imagination’s not that good.

Why is it that people have this attitude about Texas? - both Texans and those not from Texas. I offer a simple answer: Texas is America writ large. Take everything you know about America, every fault, every virtue, every vice, every charm, and blow it up two hundred percent. That’s Texas. It is the best and worst of everything about America, all amplified out of any sense of proportion. The Star Spangled Banner says America is the land of the free and the home of the brace. But Texas is the land of the cowboy and the Alamo. Texas is the land of the Texas Rangers of history and legend and the Comanche Indians, the fiercest warriors of all the native Americans. Texas has been and always will be a land of extremes - both in reality and in perception. But what does that have to do with us in this church?

I believe Unitarian Universalism is a lot like Texas. As Texas is to America, UUism is to American religion. UUism is American religious life writ large. It contains every element of American religious life blown-up several hundred percent. It is the best and worst of religion in America. Take every extreme of American religious life and you will find its counterpart in UUism. Let me give you an example. The television evangelists are constantly talking about the Gospel of Prosperity. It is a theological perspective that says God wants you to be rich. It is a theological perspective that says God serves your ends, not the other way around. The heart and soul of such a theology is radical individualism. Such radical individualism permeates American society. You see it in John Wayne movies and our cultural inclination towards vigilantism. In the political context conservatives insist on radical economic individualism and liberals insist on radical individualism in personal behavior. And all these forms of radical individualism can be traced to the unitarian rejection of original sin and the embrace of a religious transcendentalism that in practice has tended to glorify the individual above all else. At its best this kind of radical individualism is the basis for self-reliance, creativity, and the confidence to tackle the impossible. It is our greatest strength as a religious movement. At its worst it produces adolescent behavior that rejects any concern for others and defines itself not in terms of what it is for, but in terms of what it is against. As such It is our greatest weakness as a religious movement. And somewhere amidst all the extremes is an extraordinary religion - a religion with a message that the world needs to hear - a message of inclusion, democracy, justice and love. And because of that I believe it is essential to confront what it is that lies at the heart of our religious movement.

That’s just what the Commission on Appraisal has attempted in the report which provided one of our readings this morning. But they don't answer the question. There is much that is good in the report, but it doesn’t answer the question. The report recognizes the issue of radical individualism. The report recognizes the diversity amongst us, although I believe it misunderstands its meaning. And perhaps most importantly, to the credit of the commission, the report recognizes that an avoidance of critical theological thinking has bedeviled us for over forty years since the merger of the Unitarians and the Universalists. As Roberta Finkelstein observed,

We took two religious movements, each with clear and distinct historical roots and at least some clear and distinct theological assumptions (such as the oneness of God, the goodness of God, the universality of salvation) and merged them organizationally without attempting to sort through the theological issues. In fact, we seem to have dealt with the thorny issue of potential theological disharmony by essentially banning all theology from the newly formed movement.

In place of clear theological thinking we attempted to substitute theological inclusiveness, the effort to be all things to all people. But the result of such attempted inclusiveness led, as a practical matter to the apparent banning of “all theology from the newly formed movement.” But in reality theology was not banned - only conversations about it. Another way of saying that is we attempted to ban any possible conflict about theology. As a movement we adopted conflict avoidance about theology as a highest value. But conflict avoidance is the path to the highest possible level of conflict. The conflict is there - only its existence is denied - and as a result its intensity is at the absolute highest level with no means to abate it. You just don’t talk about it, leaving us - as a movement - in a state of continual high anxiety - an anxiety that increases with every effort to deny its existence.

Since becoming a minister I don’t know how many times I’ve been told by individuals, in every church I’ve served, that I shouldn’t preach or teach about theological subjects such as sin, salvation, God, the resurrection and similar topics because people will be offended and no one will attend the class or listen to the sermon. And yet, when I preach or teach on such subjects, the turn out and response is always at the highest level. Always. Without exception. And I hear the same report from my colleagues. All of which has led me to believe that as a movement and as individuals we will be best served by putting an end to our efforts to avoid talking about theology and putting an end to our efforts to avoid theological conflict. If it is there, let us put it out in the open for all to see. I believe the reality of the resulting conflict will be insignificant compared to the anxiety that grips our movement as a result of our efforts to avoid the conflict.

I believe part of the conflict we have carefully avoided has to do with the theological idea of unitarianism from which we take our name. Theological unitarianism has several independent origins. But the one that concerns us is what happened in the seventeenth and eighteen century in New England. The congregational churches of New England began as a Christian reform movement. That reform movement led them to examine the doctrine of the Trinity, the dogmatic belief that God was a single God, but existed as three different and distinct persons - God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit. After examining the bible our religious ancestors concluded there was no reason to believe in the Trinity. They did not reject Christianity. Rather, they rejected what they saw as an excess doctrine, unnecessary for a rich and vibrant Christianity. But as time progressed the focus became the rejection of that doctrine. To this day if you ask for a definition of unitarianism it is almost always stated in the negative - as the rejection of the doctrine of the Trinity. And this focus on the negative in matters theological has dogged us ever since. The effect of this negative approach is vividly illustrated by these words of the poet T.S. Eliot, son of a distinguished Unitarian family who converted to the Anglican tradition in midlife:

In religion, Liberalism may be characterized as a progressive discarding of the elements in historical Christianity which appear superfluous or obsolete, confounded with practices and abuses which are legitimate objects of attack. But as its movement is controlled rather by its origin than by any goal, it loses force after a series of rejections, and with nothing left to destroy is left with nothing to uphold and with nowhere to go. (EOTD, p. 18)

But such an end need not follow the rejection of the Trinity. It need not follow if we, as a movement, are willing to move beyond what is superfluous to a positive development of what a unitarian theology could mean.

The doctrine of the Trinity has always seemed unnecessary and unsupportable to me. But I also believe it was an attempt to address a legitimate concern. Christianity emerged not in the world of Judaism which was monotheistic, but in the gentile world of the Roman Empire, a world dominated by polytheistic religions that understand every place and every people as separated from one another and owing ultimate loyalty to a pantheon of different competing deities. The challenge was how to take the message of Jesus, which Paul said was a message that meant there was no longer east nor west, Jew nor gentile, and make it intelligible to people who assumed there were multiple gods, with each god having its own favorite group of people or place. I think the Trinity with its three persons in one God was the attempt to solve that problem.

But the problem is still with us. We exist in a world where Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus and Buddhists are often divided. Even within each of those traditions there are deadly divisions. Also silly ones, such as the frequently heard distinction between Christians and Catholics. I have grown used to hearing fundamentalist Protestants make that distinction, but I was surprised to recently hear a Catholic embrace it.

Is it possible to construct a theological perspective that can unite us, instead of dividing us? If unitarianism is nothing more than the rejection of the Trinity, then all we have to offer as a movement is more theological divisiveness. But suppose we said the rejection of the Trinity was itself a superfluous theological idea, one that need not concern us. Suppose we said unitarianism should be understand as a positive theological idea about how we can construct a religion that honors, acknowledges and respects the differences between religions, but offers a theological basis for affirming our unity? In other words, a unitarianism that is not about the rejection of the Trinity, but one that is about the unity of the underlying object of experience, that ground of all experience that some call God. Not necessarily a God as one person or three persons, not necessarily a supernatural God, but the idea that there is something to which we can all pledge our allegiance, a common faith that can be shared by all?

This is not faith as belief. It is faith as loyalty. The faith that says religion is “an affair of promise-keeping, or of keeping faith”. This is the faith that transcends all beliefs. It is a faith that is covenantal, not creedal. And because it is covenantal, the essential question it asks is not what you believe, but to what are you loyal. It assumes that the idea of loyalty is the heart of religion.

Carried to its logical extreme radical individualism is a call for loyalty to the self. The Gospel of prosperity says God is to be loyal to you. Some forms of extreme right wing political conservatism say the ultimate loyalty is to personal financial gain. Enron, Halliburton and a host of others are the great exemplars of that kind of loyalty. Some forms of extreme left wing liberalism say the ultimate loyalty is to whatever makes you feel good. If it feels good do it - that hackneyed line from the sixties says it all. But each of these is just a variation of loyalty to the self. A positive theological unitarianism does not deny the self, but does cry out for something greater. It seeks an object of loyalty, it seeks something to which all can be loyal, it seeks that which underlies Jew and gentile, east and west, Muslim and Christian, conservative and liberal. It seeks the ground of all being on which we all stand, that common ground from which no one is excluded, because our very existence is proof that we are dependent upon what we hold in common. It is a theological unitarianism that must, I believe, affirm a doctrine of love. Not a selfish doctrine of love, but a love that is able to transcend all our differences. But it is not a triumphant love. It is a love that understands, as the poet Kahlil Gibran said, that we should “Stand together yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart. And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow.”

Where is our loyalty? What are the promises we will make and keep? As a church and as individuals I believe those are the questions. It is not an answer to say that we know what don’t believe. Such a religion is not about loyalty, but about denying loyalty. We must be able to say our promises aloud. As an individual congregation we must be willing to constantly affirm our values, our vision and our mission. At times this may be uncomfortable. At times it may be difficult. At times it may require us to struggle. At times it may produce conflict amongst us. But I believe all such problems are insignificant compared to the problems we create when we attempt to ignore these issues, when we attempt to have a religion without conflict and without loyalties - except loyalty to the self. It is an approach to religion that says we must be willing to have the discipline to stay the course, to remain loyal to that which is of ultimate value. As Conrad Wright said, “Even the freest of free churches needs . .. discipline if it is to last long enough to accomplish anything of value in this world.”

Amen.