The Core of Our UU Faith

May 4, 2003

Rev. Gretchen Woods

READING

“I Call the Church Free” by James Luther Adams

I call that church free which enters into covenant with the ultimate source of existence,

That sustaining and transforming power not made with human hands.

It binds together families and generations, protecting against the idolatry of any human claim to absolute truth or authority.

This covenant is the charter and responsibility and joy of worship in the face of death as well as life.

I call that church free which brings individuals into a caring, trusting fellowship, that protects and nourishes their integrity and spiritual freedom; that yearns to belong to the church universal;

It is open to insight and conscience from every source; it bursts through rigid tradition, giving rise to new and living language, to new and broader fellowship.

It is a pilgrim church, a servant church, on an adventure of the spirit.

The goal is the prophethood and priesthood of all believers, the one for liberty of prophesying, the other for the ministry of healing.

It aims to find unity in diversity under the promptings of the spirit “that bloweth where it listeth . . . and maketh all things new.

SERMON

The Core of Our UU Faith

The Unitarian Universalist Association has five elected committees: the Ministerial Fellowship Board of Review, the Commission on Appraisal, the General Assembly Planning Committee, the Nominating Committee and the Commission on Social Witness. How many of you are aware of these committees? How many of you even care? One of them regularly studies who we are and where we want to go. That is the Commission on Appraisal.

According to UUA by-laws, the Commission on Appraisal shall:

• review any function or activity of the Association which in its judgment will benefit from an independent review and report its conclusions to a regular General Assembly;
• study and suggest approaches to issues which may be of concern to the Association; and
• report to a regular General Assembly at least once every four years on the program and accomplishments of the Association.

The study reported on in 1997 was “Interdependence: Renewing Congregational Polity.” In 2001, it was “Belonging: the Meaning of Membership.” The latest issue of study is “What Is the Core of Our Faith?”

Many argue there is no center, no core, no common perspective upon which we all agree. As a religious (or not) movement that has particularly emphasized individualism since the 1930’s, some even argue that there should not be a center. And, of course, there has been considerable discussion about whether Unitarian Universalism is a faith – or a religious movement – or a movement at all. Rather than chase down that alley today, I should like to go after a basic center around which we may gather, regardless of our spiritual – or non-spiritual – predispositions. I believe that we center upon three views:

• a free and responsible search for truth and meaning;
• direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life; and

§ a struggle to balance the search of the individual with the need for any individual to be in community.

Our Religious Education program this year has focused upon our Unitarian Universalist values and heritage, using the image or metaphor of the Trillium to guide our children and youth in deepening their understanding of our approach to meaning in life. In this model, “the roots of the Trillium are the sources that enrich and ennoble our living tradition.” The Stem is “The oneness of God (Unitarianism) and God as Love (Universalism). The Three leaves are “Freedom, Reason, and Tolerance,” the rallying call of Earl Morse Wilber in his history of Unitarianism. The Center corresponds to the fourth principle, the value I chose to place first at our center. The petals are principles 1,2,3,5,6,and 7.

I am deeply grateful to our religious curricula writers, Claudia Hall, Melinda Sayavedra, and Marilyn Walker for their insight in creating this metaphor for our children. As Parson Larson, our UU minister in Racine, Wisconsin, says, “If we don’t tell our children what we believe, someone else will be more than happy to!” The Trillium model provides something our children can latch on to concretely. It can hold them in the tide of varying opinions in our society.

So let’s return to the first perspective that holds us together: the free and responsible search for truth and meaning. The Rev. Dr. Lloyd Averill, an expert in 20^th century liberal theology, defines religion as :”the search for that meaning which has power to give shape to our experience, purposes to our existence, and motivation and moral energy to our human enterprises.” This does not posit an institution, nor any thing, but rather a process. As Unitarian Universalists, we affirm that our religion is a process.

Historically the word “responsible” was not added until a revision that began in 1981 and ended in 1985. That addition highlights that we are entitled to a free search, but that search must that take into account that we do not live in a vacuum. We need to recognize that others also engage in search, and we need to be responsible to their truths as well as our own.

Does this mean there is no empirical truth? The jury is out on this. What we have learned simply from the explorations of science is that truth is constantly unfolding. We are always in the process of enlarging our understanding of truth. Does that mean we should give up? Hardly. Our nature as human beings drives us to “grow in spirit and in truth.”

Does this mean there is no empirical meaning? Probably, for here we are constrained to recognize – through our responsibility – that each of us has a piece of meaning that must stand the test of examination and challenge from others. This is one of many reasons why I love the Covenant/Conversation Groups here at UUFC: they offer the opportunity to test our ideas in respectful and intelligent company. And this does not preclude challenge. If we truly love one another, we are called to encourage each other to broaden and deepen our consciousness through what Henry Nelson Weiman, the great Unitarian Process theologian of the 20^th century, called “creative interchange.” Each of us has an important piece of meaning to enrich the tapestry of human understanding. For, as Sophia Lyon Fahs, one of our greatest religious educators, reminds us, there are beliefs that constrain us and beliefs that expand us. It is in our shared search that we fully examine those meanings upon which we base our lives.

A sub-text of this approach is the recognition that we choose our beliefs, and we can change them. The search does us no good if we simply go around in very tight circles. We must open our circle of community so that we encounter others’ beliefs, their experiences of meaning, even when they do not resonate with ours. We may find that our own have more room to grow with those encounters. Parker J. Palmer, a Quaker student of public life, notes that the Greek word “idiot” refers to a person who has no public life, who has not engaged the meanings of others to hone one’s own.

For me this leads to the first source of Unitarian Universalism: “direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life.” The variety of ways in which we Unitarian Universalists encounter that direct experience is wondrous and myriad. And we are among the few religious groups that truly honor that panoply of possibility. Some of us find it in nature, some in the arts, some in thought, some in meditation, some in conversation, some in simply being totally mindful in the moment at any time. Each and all are valuable, and the sharing of these experiences enriches us all. Without direct experience of something beyond ourselves, we may well flounder in a morass of wishful thinking that has little relationship with our world.

Which brings me to the final presence at the center of our approach to religion: struggling to find balance between individual integrity and engagement in community. Ultimately, as the 1997 Commission on Appraisal notes, we must reconcile this paradox: that we need to honor our own truth and we need to share it with others. They call this “interdependence.” I believe that it is the hope of the future of humanity. If we truly recognized our interdependence, we would not be killing each other all over the world. We would engage in creative interchange, recognizing that we gain from it.

Garrett Hardin asserts that we move beyond the laws of physics and biology in the mental and spiritual realms. There entropy and enthropy do no apply. When we exchange energy in the form of ideas and/or spiritual energy, the sum of the energy does not decrease. It increases! Simply remember what it is like to fall in love: one feels energized and far more aware than usual. Love does not exist in a vacuum. It could not exist without community, the context into which one expands through love.

In our UU congregations, many opportunities arise to practice this balance. Whether we choose to teach religious education, to take adult program classes, to work with committees, to engage covenant conversations, we are in the process of creative interchange that helps us to balance our lives. We can only gain in experience and meaning through this, especially if we follow our Purposes and Principles so that we are constantly in right relation with ourselves, with each other, and with the process.

It is this process that is the task of religious community and the reason for our gathering week after week through the years in this religious community. Mark Morrison-Reed wrote of it so well:

The central task of the religious community is to unveil the bonds that bind each to all. There is a connectedness, a relationship discovered amid the particulars of our own lives and the lives of others. Once felt, it inspires us to act for justice.

It is the church that assures us that we are not struggling for justice on our own, but as members of a larger community. The religious community is essential, for alone our vision is too narrow to see all that must be seen, and our strength too limited to do all that must be done. Together, our vision widens and our strength is renewed.

Each of us has chosen freely to associate with this religious community where we are supported and challenged to become the best we can be and to work with others to leave our world better than we found it. That is a noble and exciting task. May we continue it with respect, responsibility, and relish for the process.

So Be it! Blessed Be!