Sermon | Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon | June 9, 2019
For awhile now, folks in our tradition of Unitarian Universalism have been pondering what stories we’d include in the list of the Top 10 stories all UUs should know.
We can probably easily list off some of the top 10 stories precious to Christians or Jews or even atheists (the Big Bang?).
What about our stories?
Thankfully, some UUs have taken a stab at it.
Rev. Gretchen Haley has her own list of Top 10 Stories for UUs. Here’s her #7, which I’ve adapted just a bit: ((I use Haley’s text, somewhat adapted, to tell this story. https://revgretchenhaley.wordpress.com/2012/04/24/top-ten-stories-for-uus-stories-7-and-8/ Her footnote says that much of this Unitarian Universalist history is informed by Warren Ross’ The Premise and the Promise.))
I tell this story today because in it I see the same conversations that arise within our own congregation, especially now at a time when we consider our own mission and vision.
About 50 years ago, in stuffy rooms and over dinners, and breakfasts, and coffee, and other drinks, people of goodwill and longings began to imagine what it would mean to combine their individual paths into a unified whole. But let me back up. In reality, the flirtation towards union of these good people began not 50, but over 150 years ago. Yes, way back in 1856, people were talking about the possible marriage of the Unitarians and the Universalists.
I mean, why not? By that point, the theological differences in these two strands of liberal Christianity were immaterial. Both believed in theological freedom, in a loving God, and soundly affirmed the inherent worth and dignity of every human being.
And based on these similarities, from the mid 1800s through the mid 1900s, the Unitarians and the Universalists took on all kinds of joint ventures. They cooperated in the publication of a shared hymnal, and in shared advertising and pamphlet production, and by the 1950s, they combined their youth movements into a common organization called the Liberal Religious Youth.
These joint ventures were a result of their many similarities. Their fear of their differences – well, at least initially, these obscured their sense of a shared purpose.
From the Universalist perspective, the role of religion was to spread the good news of Universalism to all. You may know the words attributed to eighteenth century Universalist John Murray – “Go out into the highways and by-ways. Give the people something of your new vision. Give them not hell, but hope and courage; preach the kindness and everlasting love of God.” Universalism was a Christian religion oriented towards reaching out to others. Their sense of mission led them to be social reformers, founding Universities and leading the prison reform movement.
A mostly rural faith, and firmly anti-establishment, they were a “group” in only the loosest of terms.
For the Unitarians, on the other hand, religion was a matter of self-improvement in knowledge and ethical character. They wanted to serve – not so much the needs of people “out there,” but us, the gathered community. They believed in human progress, what nineteenth century Unitarian minister James Freeman Clarke called “the progress of mankind onward and upward forever.” Straying pretty far from their Christian roots by the late nineteenth century, Unitarians relished humanism and scientific rationalism. Where Universalists were mostly rural, Unitarians were mostly urban and in costly impressive churches, and claimed a certain elitism, an intellectualism, as central to who they were.
And for a long time, these differences kept the Unitarians and the Universalists in relatively separate spheres, despite their apparent shared sense of purpose to serve and grow. But then, over the course of the first half of the twentieth century, the world changed. The world wars, the dropping of the atomic bomb, and the holocaust – all these things made the concept of “onward and upward forever” suddenly seem at the least, naïve, and at the most, dangerously wrong. And then, mainline Protestantism wasn’t talking all that much about hell, and so the Universalist message wasn’t holding as much evangelistic power as it once did.
Both the Unitarians and the Universalists started to worry more about their shared purpose than they did their personal and historical differences. And they started to see how they might need each other, need the ways they were different, if they were to live out their sense of a bigger mission. And so in May of 1960, the delegates of the American Unitarian Association, and the delegates of the Universalist Church of America voted, with an 82% majority, to consolidate and become the Unitarian Universalist Association. About 40 years later, in 2001, the Rev. John Buehrens reflected: “Unitarian Universalism is only now coming of age as a religious movement that is something new – more than the sum of two faith traditions that joined forces to form it.”
Only in the past two decades are we beginning to acknowledge and explore in a deeper way what it is we have created, what and who we are, more than just the sum of our parts. Though we are the Unitarians + the Universalists, we are also something else, a new thing, something unpredictable and wholly new, made possible only by our coming together in all our differences. We are liberal Christians and religious Humanists. And we are also Buddhists and mystics, Jews and pagans. We are all of these, and we are also something other than each of these things in and of themselves.
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When I hear us talk about ourselves as the Unitarian Universalist Church of Midland, it is striking how much these same questions remain alive – the same questions that Unitarians and Universalists considered when they were deciding whether to merge.
Are we here to meet in small rooms for intellectual debate and self-improvement? – Or are we here to gain strength to move beyond our walls to march in the streets and transform the world? Should our funds go toward creating a beautiful building and grounds that people will love coming to – like those Unitarians and their beautiful churches – or should our funds go toward feeding the poor, providing sanctuary to the immigrant, engaging in prison reform like those Universalists?
Of course it’s both – if Unitarian Universalism is to continue evolving and thriving we will continue learning that healing ourselves, and healing the world, are two sides of the same project. And so, like it says in our principles, we believe in the inherent worth and dignity of all humans, and the interdependent web of which these individuals are all but a part.
And so as I witnessed our conversations about possibly revising our mission and vision, there were so many times where I found myself thinking:
It’s both/and.
Here are a few great words I hear us using over and over again – and how a spirit of both/and can help us embrace the most empowering meaning of those words.
Safe – The word “safe” comes up over and over again when we talk about who we are. We want to be a safe place. It’s one of the best things we do – a person can walk in and know they are welcome here however they look, whomever they love, whatever they earn, however they believe. AND…if we stop there…if this is only a place where people are safe…we are not living out our principles to accept one another, yes, but also to encourage one another to spiritual growth. And so sometimes we challenge each other with new ideas, new practices – things that disrupt our perspectives and ways of being in the world. Feeling safe is important, but so is growth.
Diversity – We are a diverse place and want to be even more diverse. And yet, regardless of what kind of diversity we’re talking about, a place doesn’t become diverse only by being nice to the “diverse” people who walk in our doors. “They” won’t stay if we haven’t done the work. The work involves seeing and altering the ways our spaces privilege being white, male, heterosexual, cisgender, wealthy, able-bodied, etc. We might not realize or even intend these biases, but they’re there: the water we swim in. And so our mission of “Welcoming Diversity” requires transformative spiritual and communal work.
Do we talk at church about what we all hold in common – loneliness, joy, pain, etc? Or are we here sometimes to learn about our differences? Both. Because we can’t fully understand the human experience we think we all have in common until we learn about the spectrums and differences along the human experience. When we learn about our differences – whether it’s a Christian learning from an atheist, or a cisgender person learning from a transgender person, or any of the many, many ways our identities and experiences inform our being in the world….When we learn about these differences with curiosity and courage, we are growing. We are growing into people, into a community, that can reckon with this marvelous social experiment of being many amidst one. As UUs “We’re trying to build a world in which many worlds fit” as the Zapatistas say. We are trying to draw the circle as wide as we can…while still meaning something.
Community. Our current vision says we are here to create “beloved community” – and I encourage us not to lose sight of the historical meaning of that term. Beloved community does not simply mean a loving community. The UU Mark Belletini says, “For religion to be significant, it has to provide more than the comforts of community.” The concept of “beloved community” was popularized by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. For King, beloved community included economic and social justice. For King, the triple threat preventing us from getting to beloved community is racism, materialism, and militarism.
And so, as the current president of our Unitarian Universalist Association, Susan Frederick-Gray has repeated in these, her first two years of presidency:
This is no time for a casual faith. And this is no time to go it alone.
Susan Frederick-Gray
That story of either/or – of Unitarian or Universalist – remains in our DNA – makes us always need to push ourselves into a both/and….but also in our DNA is continuous evolution.
To close, again the words of Rev. Gretchen Haley:
We are a people for whom “the question: ‘Who are we?’ is dynamic, and alive and ever evolving … We know we are always in the midst of being changed, of becoming, of growing into ourselves, the selves we are not yet, and somehow have always been.”
– Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon