Sermon | June 23, 2019 | Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon
What do you say when people ask you what Unitarian Universalists believe?
My colleague Thom Belote has a story about this.
He was at a protest rally after the Governor of Missouri signed legislation that called for abstinence-only sex education in all Missouri schools. So, Thom was there at the protest, sign in hand, advocating for an approach to health education that says “information and education, rather than ignorance, is good health policy.” Now, at the rally were 2 young amateur reporters for a religious magazine, who, when they heard a minister was at the protest, went right to him for an interview.
He says: “I introduced myself as a Unitarian Universalist minister. They asked me how to spell that, and then they asked me to explain what UU’s believe. I explained that we are a covenantal faith, not a creedal faith. We share a covenant of how we try to be together, not a creed of what we all must believe together.”
Then the questions really began: “Well, does your church believe in the Bible?” they asked.
Thom’s response: “That is a creedal question. We are a covenantal congregation. We share a covenant of how we try to be together, not what we are expected to believe together.”
“Does your church believe in God?” they asked. “That is a creedal question. We are a covenantal faith. We share a covenant of how we try to be together, not what we are expected to believe together.”
This went on for a while. It took them a while to get what he was saying.
Thom writes, “I think that sometimes we stress the fact that we are not a creedal faith a lot more than we stress that we are a covenantal faith. We emphasize the creeds we are not asked to recite more than the covenants we are asked to share. We over-emphasize the fact that we are not necessarily required to believe in God or believe a certain doctrine about the Bible or the afterlife. And we under-emphasize the covenantal dimensions of our shared faith, preferring not to articulate the covenants of behavior we do share.”
Here’s my own story – not necessarily about creeds, but about covenant.
Before I was a UU minister, I was a UU member. I was doing ministry, but as a college chaplain, and not as a UU. I was raised in the Christian tradition and while, for my own reasons I didn’t want to join a Christian church, there were still things I loved about that tradition.
In particular, I loved the Bible. Now I don’t mean the Bible as the literal word of God, but in my own personal belief, the Bible as a collection of rich, deep, difficult stories of different peoples trying to make meaning of how to live with one another and what is sacred.
I loved these stories’ complexity and challenge.
The book of Genesis is one of my favorites – real human stuff: creation and destruction, lies and jealousy, love and longing, murder and heartbreak….The stories of real complex people wrestling with God and each other about what’s the ethical thing to do.
But when I showed up in my first UU church all those years ago, I felt like – instead of these rich, challenging, difficult stories – I was just hearing a bunch of Mary Oliver poems. And Rumi poems.
It felt to me like really inoffensive, unchallenging, lovey-dovey stuff.
I wanted challenge and I wasn’t seeing it (…not yet, but I’ll get to that…).
But thankfully I knew enough at the time to know that human communities aren’t perfect and that we make them what they are, and so I told the minister, “I want to become a member, but can I start a Bible class?” The minister said: “Some help with Adult RE? Yes, please!”
I did run that class, and we UUs had some great discussions about some awesome Bible texts.
But the reason I actually joined – and why I stayed – is because I stuck around long enough to see that the challenge that was really going to enrich my life wasn’t going to be found in any heady, intellectual exercise.
The challenge that would enrich my life was to be found in the real human community right in front of me: The people – the relationships – the covenant among us.
I vividly remember one of my early Sundays there, when I still had that question in my head about too many Mary Oliver poems, and suddenly I noticed that the people surrounding me, myself included, were all misfits of some sort.
(When we’re showing up as our real selves, we’re ALL misfits, aren’t we?).
There were people of different races, people of different mental health status, people of different physical or mental abilities, people of different backgrounds….
And here’s the thing: those differences were being affirmed, explored, and celebrated instead of being glossed over. Instead of saying, “Let’s just stay on the surface and focus on what we all have in common…” this community was saying, “let’s get real and learn about our differences and what they have to teach us.”
And as I sat in that pew – I realized there’s the challenge I’m seeking, and the promise.
I had been focusing on what texts were read from the pulpit, but I realized the best text was laid out before me in the relationships this community had with one another, in the covenant they committed to and kept coming back to.
Committing to that covenant is how I would grow in transformative ways.
As I shared a couple weeks ago, a church that doesn’t disappoint you sometimes, that doesn’t go through growing pains, that doesn’t have healthy engagement of difference and disagreement …is not a thriving church.
We make our covenants together because we believe that it is deeds not creeds that ultimately demonstrate our values. Most people in the West have gotten all tied up with religion being about belief – but you can much more easily tell what someone believes by how they act and relate. And so when we call each other into a covenant and really engage that covenant, I think we can be a little laboratory of how humans wrestle with those very things that still move me about those biblical stories – those things that show up in our lives and communities: creation and destruction, lies and jealousy, love and longing, murder and heartbreak.
My colleague Tandi Rogers says:
Circling back to my story… Of course the truth is that it’s not either/or: the texts read from the pulpit or the people gathered…the sermons or the relationships…
As I stuck around longer, I realized there were always challenging texts and sermons being offered as well – I just didn’t immediately understand it.
…And Mary Oliver poems can be complex, too.
– Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon