"Release the Fear of Darkness" by Diane Daniels

First Unitarian Parish of Chester, Vermont
Sunday, October 9, 2022

"Standing With Ukraine" by Nancy Crumbine

Dearest Chester Congregation,

My article, published in the enclosed issue of the Inquirer --the UK Unitarian publication, equivalent to The World in the US -- came from my last sermon to our congregation, 6 March 2022. It is with much gratitude that I send it on to all of you now.

The Rev. Dr. Nancy J. Crumbine

John Holme's Spiritual Journey

I am a Christian.  You can throw me out if you want.  I know Unitarian-Universalists are supposed to be atheists or something, but that’s not true.  I‘ve heard quite a bit of talk about God since I’ve been around this church.

One of my grandfathers was a Methodist minister.  When my mother was a girl, the church required their family to move to a new parish every two years, which was very hard on my Mom.  Finally, her grandfather rescued her & sent her to private school, but she never renewed a formal connection with the church.

After my grandfather’s death, our family moved to Pleasantville, NY about 30 miles north of New York City, where my grandfather had his last church and where my grandmother still lived.  My sister and I started to go to my grandfather’s former Methodist church because a lot of our friends went there. I joined the junior choir and stayed in the church through high school.

When I was in law school, I attended the Presbyterian church in town because I liked the sermons which the young pastor gave. 

Diane & I have been married 55 years.  We were married in a United Church of Christ church in Reading, PA three days after I finished the bar exam and we moved to Rochester, NY. I love Diane very much. We have two children: Chris, whom many of you have met, along with his wife Manaslu, and Jennifer, who lives in Cincinnati with her three children.  Chris has a son, Franklin, who is married and living in Boston.   I believe that God has blessed me with such a wonderful wife and family.

In Rochester we joined a big Presbyterian church.  I served on boards and committees in that church.  In 1974 we moved to Toledo and joined a UCC church.  We moved to Vermont in 1982 joined the UCC church in Springfield because people were friendly, they had good preaching and a good choir.  I served on the board of the Vermont Conference of the UCC and on many church committees.  I was a member of the choir for about 23 years until it folded due to lack of funding.

About six or seven years ago I left the Springfield church.  Membership had declined drastically and most of my friends had left the church.  I no longer felt at home there.  I went looking for a new church home and ultimately met the folks in this church.   I was introduced to the church in the  summer of 2015 by Steven and Nancy Davis at a party for people from this church at their house.  I was very warmly received and I‘ve been coming to church here ever since.  I joined the church a few weeks ago because I’d been asked to serve on the board and I needed to be a member in order to vote.

When I was in my early 30s an elderly woman told me she thought I was a seeker.  I still am a seeker.   I think many of the people who go to church here are seekers like me.  When Kevin Carson formed a discussion group about the miracles of Jesus, a lot of people showed up.  Two weeks ago Buffy read us a sermon by Dr. Ford on Buddhism.  We have had sermons from Howard Davis in which he told us about The Autobiography of a Yogi.    If a Muslim came to speak here, I’m sure many people would attend.

 I heard a lot about Unitarian-Universalism from Kevin, but I haven’t retained much of it.  I still can’t tell you the difference between a Universalist and a Unitarian.

  My spiritual journey continues.  The week before Christmas I participated in two one hour Bible study sessions in one day.   Diane has been working with a group of folks from four UCC churches in the area.  She showed me a video of a Christmas Eve sermon that had been recorded by the pastor of the Bellows Falls church.  It was so powerful that I decided to join Diane and the pastor in the next two Bible study sessions on Zoom. I plan to continue to meet with them once a week.

The one thing I believe as a Christian is that we should love one another as we love ourselves.  The rest is doubt, including doubts about the virgin birth of Christ and the resurrection.

My sister in law, an active member of the Brewster UU church on Cape Cod, has a sign in her living room that says “Proceed as the Way Opens”.  That’s where I am now.  God willing, I will continue to proceed with you.  In the words of Dickens’ character Tiny Tim, “God bless us every one.”

“Our Story, Part 3: An American Faith”

Kevin M. Carson

A sermon given at the First Universalist Parish in Chester, Vermont, November 4, 2018

To appreciate our inclusive and diverse religious tradition, I believe it is important to understand our history.  Over three Sundays, we will explore the fascinating story of our Unitarian Universalist faith. Part three traces the development of the Unitarian and Universalist sides of our family tree in America, and how we eventually became the Unitarian Universalist faith we see today.

In my last sermon, I talked about some of the key players and events in the Unitarian Universalist story during the bloody period of religious turmoil in Europe that marked the 15th through the 17th centuries.  The Protestant Reformation was not a singular event; rather, it was a diverse and prolonged period of upheaval and religious innovation, with many people being executed for simply having beliefs outside the often shifting mainstream. In the middle all of this, one of the most pivotal moments in world history occurred, when Columbus sailed across the Atlantic Ocean and landed in the so-called “New World,” and this is where we begin today.

We can argue about whether Columbus truly “discovered” America, but what is undeniable is that his arrival began a period of unprecedented European colonization of North and South America, and an equally unprecedented period of devastation for the indigenous peoples who lived here first.  It is believed that roughly 500 First Nations existed at the time of European contact, with possibly 15 million people.  Like all people, they had religious practices and spiritual beliefs, but since their spirituality was more nature-oriented and intertwined with the routines of daily existence, few Europeans who arrived during the first few centuries of contact recognized anything they could identify as “religion” based on their own experience.  Coming from the land of cathedrals and parish churches, there were almost no identifiable religious centers beyond a few temples in Mesoamerica and earthen mounds in the Mississippian culture, and nothing in the New World resembled the corporate worship common to the Abrahamic faiths in the Old World.  The prevailing attitude was that Native Americans were simply a bunch of godless heathens who needed to be converted.  It would be late in the twentieth century before even Unitarian Universalists began to truly appreciate Native American spirituality.

As colonists began to arrive, the dominant religion in each colony reflected their country of origin, and sometimes the benefactors of their settlement.  Catholicism came along with Spanish, French, and Portuguese, and Reformed Protestantism with the Dutch.  The English were split mostly between Anglicanism in places like Virginia, and Puritanism in New England.  Some colonies, like Plymouth, had a strong religious identity and sense of purpose, while others were primarily focused on commerce with little interest in religion. Within a couple of centuries after Columbus, America was already becoming a religiously diverse place, at least with respect to varieties of Christianity, and many dissidents from the Old World, such as Quakers and Anabaptists, sought refuge in America, hoping to find a more tolerant atmosphere, or at least enough room to escape into the wilderness and be left alone.

The Unitarian story in America really begins with the Puritan churches in New England, despite the severe Calvinist theology that dominated the early churches.  The Puritans who settled in New England were either “separating Puritans” like those who founded Plymouth Colony, or “non-separating” like most of the Massachusetts Bay settlers.  “Separating Puritans” believed there was no hope for reforming the Church of England, while “non-separating Puritans” still held out hope that the Church of England could be purged of its corruption and a “pure,” original Christianity restored.  Neither group had any use for other religious sects of any stripe.  

If you thought they would be more tolerant after years of persecution in Europe, you would be wrong.  I think it would be fair to compare Puritan New England to Taliban Afghanistan or perhaps modern Saudi Arabia.  Setting aside the craziness of the witch trials, just consider the hanging of Mary Dyer on the Boston Common in 1660.  She was banned from the colony for being a Quaker, and when she kept coming back, they hanged her.  She was one of four Quakers hanged in Boston.  Or consider the case of Roger Williams.  Once admired as a brilliant young Puritan minister, and offered the pulpit of Boston’s First Church, he was about to be clapped in irons and sent back to England for probable execution for his crime of spreading “new and dangerous ideas” – ideas that included “liberty of conscience” about religion – when he escaped to live among his Narragansett Indian friends and found the colony of Rhode Island. 

Theologically, the Puritans believed in a Calvinist doctrine of predestination, the idea that only the “elect” chosen by God would be saved and there was nothing you could do about it.  You could tell who was among the elect by their godliness, of course, so Puritans obsessed over whether or not they were truly among the chosen.  One of the signs was to have a genuine conversion experience, and the first churches required public testimony of such for membership.  We have long abandoned that theology, but one thing we retained from the Puritan churches was their Congregational Polity.  Polity refers to how churches are governed, and unlike churches with an Episcopal Polity (meaning governance by bishops), or a Presbyterian Polity (meaning governance by Elders), the Puritan churches were considered independent congregations and were free to call whom they pleased to serve as ministers.  This is still the case with our UU congregations today.  

The other aspect of Congregational Polity which is still with us is an abject fear and loathing of anything that resembles ecclesiastical authority.  The Puritan churches were wary of churches, or even local ministers, forming any kind of association or partnerships lest they fall prey to the temptation to become hierarchical.  Fortunately, in 1648 they managed to come together just enough to create the Cambridge Platform, a document which served as an early “constitution,” outlining the polity of churches and civil government of New England, and establishing a mutual support network for the Congregationalist churches.  Going forward, I will use the term “Congregationalist” to describe the churches that would become the ancestors of congregations that are now either Unitarian Universalist or United Church of Christ, and a rare few that are both.

Over the next hundred years, two major influences helped shape the trajectory of the Congregationalist churches in New England.  One was the Enlightenment, which produced the scientific method and new philosophical thinking.  The other was a period of spiritual revival and evangelical zeal in the 1730’s and 40’s known as the Great Awakening, when the individual, emotional experience of religion (often called “enthusiasm” at the time) was seen as more important than doctrine.  In 1741, for example, Jonathan Edwards preached the famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” in Enfield, Connecticut.  His sermon reinforced Calvinist doctrine about the sinful nature of humanity, and salvation through grace alone, but he did so with imagery and language that touched on deep emotions.

Then as now, such religious emotionalism was not to everyone’s taste, and one of the fiercest critics of the Great Awakening was the Rev. Charles Chauncy, of Boston’s First Church, who in 1742 wrote a pamphlet, Enthusiasm Described and Cautioned Against.  He was the leader of the so-called “Old Lights” who rejected “enthusiasm” in religion. Heavily influenced by the intellectual rationalism of the Enlightenment, he later published two anonymous tracts, Salvation for All Men (1782) and The Mystery Hid from Ages and Generations (1784), arguing for the innate moral sense in man, free will, and universal salvation.  The latter tract was published two decades after he finished it, since his logical conclusions led him away from the orthodox Calvinist views he continued to preach publicly.  He is considered by many to be a proto-Unitarian or even a proto-UU.

By the early 1800’s a number of Congregationalist ministers were beginning to preach Unitarian ideas, and a split between them and the Trinitarian orthodoxy was becoming inevitable, especially among the faculty and students at Harvard Divinity School.  There was also an influx of European Unitarian ideas from publications and from people like Joseph Priestly, who immigrated to America in 1794 and settled around Philadelphia.  Already a familiar figure to the likes of Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Rush, and Thomas Jefferson, who shared common interests in science and theology, Priestly helped further the spread of both Unitarian and Universalist ideas in America.

By the 1820’s Unitarian and Trinitarian congregations across New England were beginning to split apart, with one group often starting a new church just down the street or across the town green.  In 1825, Unitarian-leaning ministers formed the American Unitarian Association, which was originally strictly a minister’s association but later evolved into the Unitarian denomination.

But, before I continue with the Unitarians, let me back up and catch up the Universalist side of the story.  Universalist ideas developed in small pockets among a number of colonial religious sects, including some Baptists and the Ephrata community of Pennsylvania, but it got a tremendous boost when John Murray arrived in America in 1770, settling in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and founding the first Universalist church in America there in 1774.  For this, and for his work organizing the denomination into the Universalist Church of America, which held its first General Assembly in 1793 in Philadelphia, he is rightfully called the “father of Universalism in America.”

With its hopeful message of God’s inexhaustible love and universal salvation, the Universalist Church of America attracted many converts away from the prevailing dismal Calvinism in the colonies, and after the Revolution it would experience a prodigious period of growth and church-planting, especially in rural America.  Universalist ministers spread out on horseback from the Deep South to the backwoods of New England, and by the onset of the Civil War, there were perhaps as many as 600,000 Universalists in America.  This church in Chester is a good example of how Universalists established churches in many small farming communities, while the Unitarians were mainly focused on larger towns and the growing urban population in cities.

Though merger was still over a century away, even in the first decades of the 1800’s most Universalist ministers were also Unitarian in their theology.  Many Unitarian clergy, though, saw Universalism as less intellectually vigorous and irrational, and were frankly very classist in their opinions.  The famous Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing, whose famous 1819 sermon “Unitarian Christianity” helped give identify to the Unitarian movement,  once described, “the growth of Universalism as the most threatening moral evil in our part of the country.”  Perhaps it was just jealousy at their success.

As the 19th century progressed, both denominations were influenced by the new era of biblical criticism coming largely from German scholars, along with access to translations of Eastern religious texts such as the Bhagavad Gita and the Sutras of Buddhism.  A nascent humanism was already creeping into the mix as well.  All of these would combine with the Transcendentalist movement that emerged from Concord and Boston intellectuals such as Emerson, Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller, and things would never be the same.  The “corpse-cold” Unitarianism that Emerson derided would become more open to Nature and the direct experience of the sacred, and less focused on establishing some ultra-rational form of Christianity.  Universalists, too would feel the influence of these trends, and begin a march toward a more pluralistic faith beyond the boundaries of Christianity.  

In 1852, feeling that too much authority was coming out of Boston, Unitarians in the Midwestern states formed the Western Unitarian Conference, and Chicago became an intellectual hub for very progressive theology for more than a century afterward.  With the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859, both Unitarians and Universalists began to embrace an even stronger scientific Humanism and, with notable exceptions, began to drift away from more traditional Christianity.  By 1886, the trend was so strong that more conservative Unitarians grew alarmed, and over the next few years, the Western Conference in particular debated the need to reassert a definitive Christian identity.  A consensus was never reached despite several attempts at statements of faith.

In 1893, Unitarians and Universalists were instrumental in sponsoring the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago, which was a watershed moment for opening the eyes of Americans to the richness of other religions. The highlight of the Parliament was the introduction of Hinduism to America through the charismatic figure Swami Vivekananda.  For Universalists, the Parliament was indicative of a growing interest in world religions and the universality of religious truth.  They too were beginning to wrestle with the question of how distinctively “Christian” their denomination remained.

By the turn of the twentieth century, the number of Universalists had shrunk significantly, and there were open talks of merger with either the Unitarians, or with the Congregationalists and other small Christian denominations that would eventually merge to form the United Church of Christ.  The First World War was difficult too, as Universalists lost some of their pre-war optimism about the progress of humankind onward and upward forever in the wake of the millions of deaths in Europe, and the horrifying advances in ways to mutilate and kill the war produced.  Unitarians were divided in their support of the First World War, and the American Unitarian Association came down hard on ministers and congregations who voiced pacifist beliefs in a time of fervent patriotism, even withholding financial assistance.  

Universalist decline and further talks of merger continued between the wars.  Humanism gained a tremendous influence in the wake of the first Humanist Manifesto in 1933, which was a document that outlined the basic tenets of religious humanism.  It was a remarkable document crafted by many elite thinkers of the age that called for a new science-based religion of human ethics and morality to supplant all other religions, and it viewed any form of supernaturalism with disdain.  Most of the thirty-five signers of the Humanist Manifesto were Unitarian ministers or scholars, and one was a Universalist minister.  What strikes me about the original Manifesto (there have been two others since) is that the language is remarkably arrogant and reflects a naive faith in science and technology, but this was the age of electrification and new pesticides and herbicides that would help us to feed the world.  This was also the age of Eugenics, when many people, including some leading Unitarians, thought we could breed a better humanity through science and eliminate undesirable traits like mental illness and criminal behavior. Humanism would remain the dominant influence in our tradition through the present time, but after the atrocities of the Second World War, and the environmental movement afterward, most of the blind faith in science and technology for our salvation has been rightfully tempered.

By the 1940’s Unitarian and Universalist youth groups were regularly meeting together, and in some ways they led us further along the path to consolidation.  In 1957, several small denominations merged to form the United Church of Christ, and by this point, the Universalists had become too humanist and too liberal to realistically consider joining them. Being snubbed for membership by the National Council of Churches twice (once in 1942 and again in 1944) for not being “Christian” enough was probably the final blow.  Universalist membership declined to its lowest point, unlike the Unitarians who were seeing a post-war boom from 350 churches and around 60,000 members at the end of World War II, to 1000 churches and over 150,000 members by the time of merger in 1961.  For many Universalists, the greatest fear was that a merger would see their historic identity swallowed up by their much larger cousin.  Other Universalists worried that too much “head” would take over the more “heart” tradition of Universalism.  Both fears were justified in hindsight.  On the Unitarian side, some on the far left opposed the consolidation for fear that the Universalists would drag the movement back to more conservative theological views, but this never came to pass.

In 1953, a Joint Commission to Study Federal Union was appointed, and that same year, the youth groups of both denominations were formally dissolved and merged into the Liberal Religious Youth.  The following year, the Council of Liberal Churches (Universalist-Unitarian) was formed to continue the process of consolidation.  From this latter group, a Joint Merger Commission was formed, and in 1958, they presented a proposal to both denominations titled Merger and Alternatives.  In this document, two basic alternatives were put on the table for consideration: complete merger of the two denominations, or an expanded Council of Liberal Churches.  

Approximately three-fourths of the congregations voted for the merger, so a more detailed plan for consolidation was developed in time for the 1959 annual General Assemblies of both denominations.  The plan retained the congregational polity and autonomy common to both traditions as well as the non-creedal basis for membership.  In final negotiations that grew intense at times, the name Unitarian Universalist Association was affirmed.  A last-minute contentious debate over the language of the merger document was resolved by changing “our Judeo-Christian heritage” to “the Judeo-Christian heritage.” (Remind anyone of the Early Church Councils?) The plan proceeded forward, and on May 23, 1960 in Boston, delegates from the two denominations met in separate, simultaneous General Assemblies and approved the merger.  The Unitarian Universalist Association would officially come into being in May 1961 at the next General Assembly.  So here we are.

When I decided to tell our story over the course of three sermons, I knew it would be a challenge.  There is so much history that it is hard to pick and choose topics into a narrative that does our faith justice, but I tried to highlight some of the key moments in the larger story, and I hope I whet your appetite to learn even more.  There are so many individual stories of triumph and tragedy and fascinating lives.  And though we should be proud of our record on issues like women in ministry, Civil Rights, and LGBTQ acceptance, there were also missed opportunities when Unitarians and Universalists could have shone even brighter, but instead succumbed to the endemic sexism, racism, classism, and other moral failures that have plagued American society since the beginning.  Someday, I might do an entire sermon on “what might have been,” perhaps for Yom Kippur or some other time of atonement.  

I hope you appreciate how complex the story really is, from ancient roots and centuries of theological speculation in Europe, to American innovations and openness to new ideas and sources of spiritual inspiration. Too often, Unitarian Universalists think of our faith, like the old joke says, as believing in the “fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, and the neighborhood of Boston.”  Or as I like to say, Unitarian Universalism was not handed down on stone tablets to Thoreau on the summit of Mt. Katahdin, nor did it spring fully-formed from the side of Emerson’s head like some Greek goddess.  It is a faith rooted in reason as well as the direct experience of the sacred, and it took a lot of blood, sweat, and tears to become the diverse liberal tradition we are today.  I want us to boldly claim the whole story of our faith.  We represent what the theologian Wilfred Cantwell Smith called a “cumulative tradition.”  There are many streams that flowed into the river of our story, and I have only touched on a handful.

Every few years, someone writes a book pronouncing the death of organized religion, and well ... something comes along and reinvigorates it.  It is well-known that organized religion is in decline overall, with the demographic group “spiritual but not religious” seeing the largest growth in recent years.  We have seen essentially flat growth as a denomination, with some parts of the country seeing some modest growth, but I remain hopeful that our diversity and inclusiveness will align well with the attitudes of modern spiritual seekers.  What I am more certain about goes back to the very beginning of my first sermon: the impulse to spirituality and religion is fundamental to being human.  As long as we are able to experience awe and wonder in the world, and enjoy the support of being in a community of fellow travelers in the mysterious journey of existence, our story will continue.

Readings

Opening Words

“Touch Not My Lips with the White Fire” by Alfred Storer Cole (1959)

Touch not my lips with the white fire

From the glowing altar of some peaceful shrine.

Thrust not into my hands the scroll of wisdom

Gleaned through the patient toil of the centuries;

Give me no finished chart that I may follow

Without effort or the bitter taste of tears.

I do not crave the comfort of the ancient creeds,

Nor the sheltered harbor where the great winds cease to blow;

But winnow my heart, O God; torture my mind

With doubt.  Let me feel the clean gales of the open sea,

Until Thy creative life is my life and my joy;

One with the miracle of Spring and the blowing grain,

The yearning of my fellowmen and the endless reach of stars.

Reading

excerpt from the sermon “The Transient and Permanent in Christianity” by Rev. Theodore Parker (1841)

Real Christianity gives men new life. It is the growth and perfect action of the Holy Spirit God puts into the sons of men. It makes us outgrow any form, or any system of doctrines we have devised, and approach still closer to the truth. It would lead us to take what help we can find. It would make the Bible our servant, not our master. It would teach us to profit by the wisdom and piety of David and Solomon; but not to sin their sins, nor bow to their idols. it would make us revere the holy words spoken by "godly men of old," but revere still more the word of God spoken through Conscience, Reason, and Faith, as the holiest of all. It would not make Christ the despot of the soul, but the brother of all men. It would not tell us, that even he had exhausted the fullness of God, so that He could create none greater; for with Him "all things are possible," and neither Old Testament or New Testament ever hints that creation exhausts the creator. Still less would it tell us, the wisdom, the piety the love, the manly excellence of Jesus, was the result of miraculous agency alone, but, that it was won, like the excellence of humbler men, by faithful obedience to Him who gave his Son such ample heritage. It would point to him as our brother, who went before, like the good shepherd, to charm us with the music of his words, and with the beauty of his life to tempt us up the steps of mortal toil, within the gate of Heaven. It would have us make the kingdom of God on earth, and enter more fittingly the kingdom on high. It would lead us to form Christ in the heart, on which Paul laid such stress, and work out our salvation by this. For it is not so much by the Christ who lived so blameless and beautiful eighteen centuries ago, that we are saved directly, but by the Christ we form in our hearts and live out in our daily life, that we save ourselves, God working with us, both to will and to do.

Reading

excerpt from the sermon “New Wine and Old Bottles!” by Rev. Brainerd F. Gibbons (1949)

“While fully aware of its Christian heritage, many equally sincere Universalists maintain that an inherent spirit of inquiry has carried Universalism beyond Christianity.  A new type of Universalism is proclaimed which shift the emphasis on universal salvation from salvation to religion and describes Universalism as boundless in scope, as broad as humanity, and as infinite as the universe.  Is this Universalisms answer: a religion, not exclusively Christian or any other named brand, but a synthesis of all religious knowledge which passes the test of human intelligence, a truly universal religion?

Every Universalists realizes that Universalism has changed considerably since the days of its New England forebears and many Christian dogmas have been gradually supplanted.  Even the sketchiest summary reveals the vast differences between then and now.  Divine revelation has been replaced by human investigation, ignorance by knowledge, superstition by reason, the closed mind by the open, stagnation by progress, celestial nonsense by common sense.  Hence, Universalists today consider all religions, including Christianity, expressions of human spiritual aspirations, not God-founded institutions; the Bible, a marvelous work of man, not the miraculous handiwork of God; Jesus a Spiritual Leader, not a Divine Savior; man’s fate in human hands, not supernatural clutches; faith the projection of known facts into the unknown, not blind creedal acceptance; the supernatural merely the natural beyond man’s present understanding, not a violation of nature’s laws.”

“Our Story, Part 2: European Roots”

Kevin M. Carson

A sermon given at the First Universalist Parish in Chester, Vermont, October 28, 2018

To appreciate our inclusive and diverse religious tradition, I believe it is important to understand our history.  Over three Sundays, we will explore the fascinating story of our Unitarian Universalist faith. In part two, we will examine the influence of religious movements in Europe during the turbulent centuries after the Reformation.

If you were here two weeks ago, for part one of this three-sermon series on the history of our faith, we covered a substantial timeline of religion.  I started with the first evidence of religion among our human ancestors some 225,000 years ago, and continued through the birth of Judaism and Christianity, and the theological origins of the doctrines of unitarianism and universalism in the early centuries of Christianity. I then briefly talked about the Middle Ages and ended on the cusp of the Protestant Reformation.  Today, I am covering only a few centuries, and I am focusing on Europe in particular, and as you will see, these were some extremely turbulent times.  In the third sermon, which specifically looks at our history in America, I will revisit some of this same time period from the American perspective, because there are a number of important connections between Europe and America during this period that deserve more attention.

There were three main takeaways I wanted you to get from my first sermon.  First, I wanted to emphasize that the human impulse to spirituality and religion is ancient and fundamental to what it means to be human. We have been spiritual creatures for a very, very long time.  My second takeaway is that there have been many ideas and influences that contributed to the story of our faith, and these ideas have evolved and diversified for centuries, often in very contentious times.  The Unitarian Universalist Association may have been established in 1961, but the roots of our faith are much deeper.  My third takeaway is that I wanted to make sure everyone is familiar with the basic meaning, and central issue, of the two theological doctrines in our denomination’s name: Unitarianism and Universalism.  

For Unitarians, the central issue was the status of Jesus.  Was Jesus God, or a divine or special being but not God, or a mortal like the rest of us?  In theological language, this is a question of Christology.  A “high” Christology sees Jesus as divine, and a “low” Christology sees Jesus as mortal. By denying the trinitarian idea that God the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit coexisted as part of a divine Trinity, those who held a lower Christology became known as “Unitarians,” or sometimes “Arians,” because of the unitarian theology of Arius of Alexandria.  And please note that is Arians with an “i,” and it has nothing to do with the Aryans with a “y” that are associated with race, white supremacy, and even Nazism.  It is an unfortunate coincidence that they sound alike.  There are so-called Aryan Nation churches with a “y” out there, but they have absolutely nothing in common with our liberal faith.

For Universalists, the central issue was who would be saved and reconciled to God in the afterlife.  Some Universalists believed everyone and everything in Creation would be saved without question because “God Is Love.”  Others believed everyone would be saved eventually, but you had to be punished for a time to pay for your sins in life.  That said, next time, I will talk about how Universalism evolved from its focus on salvation toward the idea of a universality of religious thinking, and how that opened the door for greater inclusion and the pluralism we see in our faith today.

Also as I pointed out last time, there have been several nuanced variations of these two Christian doctrines over the centuries.  I once heard someone quip that Unitarian Universalist theology boils down to, “There is only one God, and all dogs go to heaven.”  It is a little more complicated, I think, and as we explore the complex developments in Europe during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, or so-called “Age of Reason,” please keep in mind the principle issue of each theology.  

Most history books mark the beginning of the Protestant Reformation in the year 1517, when Martin Luther published his “Ninety-five Theses,” which was critical of the Roman Catholic Church, most notably criticizing the practice of selling “indulgences,” which were official documents the Church sold that promised reduced punishment in purgatory for earthly sins.  It was certainly a “big” event given everything that followed, and it is true that most of the big events associated with the Reformation did take place in the sixteenth century, but it is important to acknowledge that the issues that ignited the Reformation developed over centuries as the Church gained enormous power and influence across Europe.  I think it is also important to acknowledge the contribution of the printing press, invented in 1450, which allowed new translations of the Bible and other important books to be mass distributed across Europe.  Perhaps even more importantly, it allowed pamphlets promoting all kinds of ideas to quickly flood the cities of Europe and spread new thinking and foster public debate.  News from distant countries spread like never before, and the Church was often at the center of controversy.

Like any large political system, corruption in the Church was almost inevitable, and when you mix this with religious fervor, it was bound to create trouble.  The dream of the Reformation was, and always has been, to return the Church to the true teachings of Jesus, but interpreting those teachings to everyone’s satisfaction has remained problematic to say the least.  As early as the 1300’s, early reformers like John Wycliffe in England, and Jan Hus in what is now the Czech Republic, were arguing against papal authority as having no basis in scripture, and for translating the Bible into the language of the people.  Both would be branded as heretics and executed, but their ideas lived on.  You also had Humanist philosophers like Erasmus, who lived between 1466 and 1536, exploring ideas about the human condition outside the context of the Church.  Erasmus was so well respected he became known as the “Prince of the Humanists,” and though he was critical of the Church, he kept some distance from the more serious reformers like Luther, so he never drew as much ire from authorities.  His writings had a major intellectual impact across Europe, influencing the thinking of some of the less radical reformers such as King Henry VIII, and even some proponents of the Catholic Counter-Reformation.  

By the beginning of the sixteenth century, the stage was set for major upheaval, and the story of Miguel Serveto Conesa, better known by his Latinized name Michael Servetus, illustrates the issues on many levels.  He is important to our story, because he was also one of the earliest true Unitarians in this period, and both his writings and his martyrdom would be influential in spreading Unitarian thinking.  Born in Spain in 1509, Servetus was a classic example of the “Renaissance Man.”  He was a polymath extraordinaire who, from a young age, studied law, science, and medicine in addition to theology, and in those times, any one of those pursuits could easily end with you tied to a burning stake. He was known for his effective medical practice which often meant authorities were willing to ignore some of the more incendiary writings and allow him to remain among them.  He is noteworthy in the history of medicine for discovering the circulation of blood through the pulmonary system.

In 1531, at the age of 22, Servetus published his most famous and controversial work, On the Errors of the Trinity, which was a scholarly critique of the doctrine of the Trinity from the perspective of scripture, and from an analysis of the writings of the Early Church Fathers.  Growing up in Spain in the decades after so many Jews and Muslims were exiled, or forced to convert, with the doctrine of the Trinity being so central, Servetus found it difficult to comprehend how something without scriptural basis could cause such conflict. It only took a year after the publication of his book for the Inquisition to order his arrest on the charge of heresy, and for Protestant reformers to condemn him as well.  Servetus decided to go underground and moved around Europe for the next several years, adopting the name Michel de Villeneuve, an homage to his hometown of Villanueva in Spain. 

But the temptation to theological debate was simply too great.  In 1546 he published a new book titled, The Restoration of Christianity, which maintained a relatively high Christology, but expanded on his Unitarianism – and some would argue a form of pantheism, meaning God is everywhere in all things.  In 1553, Servetus was living in Lyon, pretending to be the good Catholic physician Michel de Villeneuve, when he was outed with the assistance of the letter from Guillaume Trie I read from this morning.  He was jailed by the Inquisition but managed to escape to Geneva, only to find himself the target of John Calvin’s condemnation for disagreeing with his own Protestant theology.  Despite pleas from notables across the European Protestant community, Servetus was condemned for heresy, and burned at the stake along with his books in Geneva on October 27, 1553.  Incidentally, the only surviving copy of Servetus’s The Restoration of Christianity was found in Calvin’s personal library, so we can thank him for preserving this Unitarian work for future generations.

The execution of Michael Servetus set off a wave of criticism, and even some riots, within Protestant circles in Europe, with calls for more tolerance and understanding among the emerging sects.  Some staunchly supported Calvin’s decision but many others firmly rejected it, and executions for heresy began to decline over the next century.  By the 1700’s tolerance laws had mostly ended the practice, but the last known execution for heresy was a Spanish schoolmaster who was convicted by the Inquisition in 1826.

The other legacy of Servetus was through the spread of his ideas, as his books were reprinted and disseminated across Europe.  They became popular among Anabaptist groups, and others in the so-called “Radical Reformation,” who not only decried the corruption of the Roman Church but equally rejected the magisterial corruption of Lutheranism and the heavy-handed authority of Calvin.  As early as 1536, radical reformers in Northern Italy were reading Servetus, including two more important figures in our story, Giorgio Biandrata and Lelio Sozzini, better known by his Latinized name Laelius Socinus.

As one Protestant leader wrote, the “Servetian plague” was spreading, and in a council attended by roughly 1,000 radical reformers in Venice, they produced a 10-point doctrine that included anti-trinitarian statements like, “Christ is not God but man, born of Joseph and Mary, but filled with all the powers of God.”  When the situation became more dangerous in Italy, both Biandrata and Socinus left, with Biandrata ending up in Transylvania, and Socinus ending up in Poland.  If there were time, I would love to tell you about the fascinating journeys of each man, but for today, I must simply mention them as part of our continuing game of connect the dots. 

The Reformed Church in Poland began around the year 1550, and from the start, there were debates about the doctrine of the trinity, reflecting the influence of the writings of Jan Hus.  In 1558, both Biandrata and Socinus arrived in Poland and started teaching, and by 1565, trinitarian Calvinists split off from other members of the Reformed Church, marking the beginning of an organized Unitarian movement.  They did not call themselves Unitarians and were called “Arians” by Catholic opponents. They simply wanted to be called Christians.  Later, they became known as the “Polish Brethren” or “Socinians,” especially under the leadership of Laelius Socinus’s nephew Faustus Socinus.  For roughly the next 100 years, the fortunes of the Polish Socinians ebbed and flowed with the political and religious conflicts of the era.  Lutherans and Catholics tried to annihilate them on occasion, and wars with Sweden and Russia combined with internal politics to make life very hard at times.  

Most of them settled in the town of Rakow, about seventy miles north of Krakow, and it is here than Faustus Socinus and his followers developed the “Racovian Catechism,” a systematic book of instruction in the doctrines of their Unitarian faith. The first edition of the Racovian Catechism was published in 1605, a year after Socinus’s death, and it became extremely popular in Europe, being translated into several languages.  It found a receptive audience in almost every country, and it quickly made it onto the banned books lists as word spread.  King James of England found it to be “Satanic,” and by April 2, 1652, the English Parliament voted to seize and burn all copies in circulation.  

It’s hard to keep a good book down though, and for the record, it is currently available on Amazon in hardcover, paperback, and even a free Kindle edition.

Things did not end well for the Polish Brethren unfortunately, as you might have guessed, since we don’t talk about the Polish Unitarian Church today. By the 1650’s, the Catholic Church in Poland began a severe crackdown on Protestants, and Unitarians in particular, martyring many, and forcing the rest to convert or face banishment.  A few hundred Polish Unitarians decided to flee to Transylvania where there was an established Unitarian Church, arriving in the city of Cluj in 1661, where they were warmly received.

It is in Transylvania, a region of modern Romania roughly two-thirds the size of Maine, that our stories converge.   This ancient region known as Dacia to the Romans has the geographic misfortune to be a frequent host to military clashes and conquering armies from the Romans and the Huns, to the Turks, Magyars, Germans, Swedes, Poles, and Russians.  It became part of Communist Romania after World War II, and its mostly ethnic Hungarian population has been persecuted by just about everyone who came to power.  By the 1520’s there were Reformed Lutheran churches in the region, reflecting a long history of disdain for the Roman Catholic Church.  As the crossroads of so many cultures and ethnicities, authorities had a generally more tolerant approach to diversity and dissent, so it is not surprising that the ideas of Servetus and other more radical reformers would find purchase there.

In a complicated period of Ottoman influence in Hungary and the surrounding regions, John Sigismund Zápolya became King John II of Transylvania, bringing with him his physician Giorgio Biandrata, and appointing Biandrata’s young friend Ferenc Dávid, also known as Francis David, as the court preacher.  Thanks to their anti-trinitarian theology, King John II converted first from Catholicism to Lutheranism, then to Calvinism, and then to Unitarianism.  He remains the only Unitarian king in history. Francis David himself followed a similar series of conversions, starting his ministry as a Catholic priest, before becoming a Lutheran, then a Calvinist bishop, and finally a Unitarian, after reading the works of Servetus and meeting Biandrata.  Francis David became a popular preacher in Transylvania, and as Unitarianism spread, there was inevitable conflict with Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists, that sometimes ended in violence, not unlike the turmoil in fourth-century Alexandria.  At David’s urging, the king convened the Diet in the city of Torda in 1568 to pass an edict of religious tolerance and put an end to the unrest.  The Edict of Torda was one of the earliest acts of religious tolerance in Europe, though it was limited to granting tolerance only among the prevalent forms of Christianity in the kingdom.  It didn’t last long though, because things quickly unraveled with the death of the king in 1571.  He was succeeded by a Roman Catholic who reinstituted a period of Protestant persecutions.  Francis David was arrested and imprisoned, and despite the attempted intervention of Faustus Socinus, he died in prison in 1579.  But, as many of you know, despite a number of serious challenges over the last 450 years, there is still a Unitarian Church in Transylvania which today has 141 places of worship and roughly 100,000 members, and many American UU churches have established partner church relationships.  

By the end of the sixteenth century, you had a small but determined Unitarian church in Transylvania and a few pockets of pro-Unitarian groups spread elsewhere across Eastern Europe.  The 1600’s would continue to see bloody religious conflicts across Europe, and the English Civil War would end with mass emigrations of Puritans to America. By the end of the eighteenth century, thanks in part to the famous Racovian Catechism, Unitarianism would gain a small foothold in England which continues to this day.  Some of these ideas would come to America with the English Unitarian Joseph Priestly, who is best known as the discoverer of oxygen.  

Today, I have focused on the Unitarian side of our history in Europe, since our time is limited, and that was where most of the action was, but Universalism also saw a resurgence during the Renaissance and Reformation.  This was aided by the theology of the Dutch reformer Arminius, who lived between 1560 and 1609.  “Arminianism,” as it became known, preached a doctrine that salvation was available to all because of God’s grace, as opposed to the Calvinist idea of predestination – that only the “elect” who were chosen by God would be saved.   And, when you take seriously the idea that “God is love,” it is easy to start doubting the idea that a loving God can condemn anyone for eternity no matter what mistakes they make in life.  

By the 1700’s many English Anglicans, turned Methodists, were influenced by Arminianism and were becoming convinced Universalists.  One of those was the Rev. James Relly, who was a popular preacher during the Great Awakening in the middle of the eighteenth century.  Relly’s Universalist followers were known as “Rellyeans” or “Rellyites,” and according to tradition, one day the young John Murray, then zealously anti-Rellyite, visited a Rellyean disciple who had left his congregation to convince her of her error. Much to his dismay, the woman confronted him with the logic of Universalism, and he decided to see what Relly was all about.  Sometime in the 1760s, on a Sunday when his own minister was away, Murray and his wife attended a service to hear Relly, and Murray described the service in his autobiography years later as a turning point in his theology.  Next time I will talk about Murray’s decision to come to America.

I hope this small taste of the European side of our story was helpful.  There are so many other strands in the tapestry of our faith that I would love to talk about, but the ones I highlighted should give you an idea about how complex and turbulent the Reformation was, and how our story fits into the larger narrative.  These were violent and bloody times, and we owe a great debt to the many brave souls who advanced our liberal tradition at great peril, often sacrificing their lives.  As we witnessed yesterday, on the very anniversary of Michael Servetus’s execution in Geneva, hatred of others on the basis of religion has been a source of violence and evil throughout human history, and it is still with us.  I pray that our inclusive and loving faith can help heal the world, at least in some small way.  Next week, we will conclude with the story of how we became an American faith.

Readings

Opening Words from Against the Libel by Calvin       Sebastian Castellio (1540)  

“The Scriptures are full of enigmas and inscrutable questions which have been in dispute for over a thousand years without agreement, nor can they be resolved without love, which appeases all controversies.  Yet on account of these enigmas the earth is filled with innocent blood ... On controversial points we would do better to defer judgment, even as God, who knows us to be guilty, yet postpones judgment and waits for us to amend our lives.  To kill a man is not to defend a doctrine.  It is simply to kill a man.”

Reading from a letter from Guillaume Trie in Geneva to his Catholic cousin in Lyons,

 February 26, 1553

“Although we allow greater liberty in religion and doctrine, we do not suffer the name of God to be blasphemed ... I can give you an example which is greatly to your confusion ... You suffer a heretic, who well deserves to be burned wherever he may be ... Here is one who will call Jesus Christ an idol, who will destroy all the fundamentals of the faith, who will amass all the phantasies of the ancient heretics, who will even condemn infant baptism, calling it an invention of the devil.  And this man is in good repute among you, and is suffered as if he were not wrong.  Where is the zeal you pretend?  Where is the police of this fine hierarchy of which you so boast?  The man of whom I speak has been condemned by all the churches you reprove, yet you suffer him and even let him print his books which are so full of blasphemies that I need say no more.  Here is a Portuguese Spaniard, named Michael Servetus.  That is his real name, but he goes under the name of Villeneuve and practices medicine.  Now he is at Vienne where his book has been printed by a certain Balthazar Arnoulette, and lest you think I am talking without warrant I send you the first folio.”

Reading Edict of Torda, from the Diet and King John Sigismund, 1568

ACT OF RELIGIOUS TOLERANCE AND FREEDOM OF CONSCIENCE

His majesty, our Lord, in what manner he - together with his realm - legislated in the matter of religion at the previous Diets, in the same matter now, in this Diet, reaffirms that in every place the preachers shall preach and explain the Gospel each according to his understanding of it, and if the congregation like it, well.  If not, no one shall compel them for their souls would not be satisfied, but they shall be permitted to keep a preacher whose teaching they approve. Therefore none of the superintendents or others shall abuse the preachers, no one shall be reviled for his religion by anyone, according to the previous statutes, and it is not permitted that anyone should threaten anyone else by imprisonment or by removal from his post for his teaching.  For faith is the gift of God and this comes from hearing, which hearings is by the word of God.

Mourner’s Kaddish in English Translation

Glorified and sanctified be God’s great name throughout the world
which He has created according to His will.

May He establish His kingdom in your lifetime and during your days,
and within the life of the entire House of Israel, speedily and soon;
and say, Amen.

May His great name be blessed forever and to all eternity.

Blessed and praised, glorified and exalted, extolled and honored,
adored and lauded be the name of the Holy One, blessed be He,
beyond all the blessings and hymns, praises and consolations that
are ever spoken in the world; and say, Amen.

May there be abundant peace from heaven, and life, for us
and for all Israel; and say, Amen.

He who creates peace in His celestial heights,
may He create peace for us and for all Israel;
and say, Amen.

“Our Story, Part 1: From Ancient Creeds to the Reformation”

Kevin M. Carson
A sermon given at the First Universalist Parish in Chester, Vermont, September 23, 2018

To appreciate our inclusive and diverse religious tradition, I believe it is important to understand our history.  Over three Sundays, we will explore the fascinating story of our Unitarian Universalist faith. Part one of this three part series looks at the theological origins of Unitarianism and Universalism leading up to the Reformation.

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Most people who identify as Unitarian Universalists are either born into the faith or, more often, accidentally find their way to one of our congregations during some period of spiritual searching.  We are not very good at evangelizing the “good news” of our faith the way we probably should, but perhaps this age of social media will help our liberal faith grow, despite the fact that church-going in general is in decline.  I believe we have a lot to offer the world, and our approach to religion seems like a good fit for what many contemporary people are searching for, especially those who identify as “spiritual but not religious.” And even though we are a “modern” faith in many ways, we have values and principles that have developed over the course of centuries.  We have a deep history and a compelling story.  

Unfortunately, most Unitarian Universalists only learn our story in dribs and drabs if they spend enough Sundays in church, perhaps learning about a few “famous UU’s” (or at least famous people we like to claim as our own) who shared some of our theology and values.  So, I decided to take a more direct approach and really look at our story, starting with my sermon today, and continuing the next two times I will be preaching here.  I believe it is important for us to know our story in order to understand who we are as a people of faith and how we got here.  It enhances our sense of identity and might even give us some idea of where our faith might be headed in the future.  Who knows?  You might be so inspired by our story that you feel compelled to tell the world about us – to heed the words attributed to Rev. John Murray, and “go out into the highways and byways of America, and give the people something of your new vision.”

Now, if you go to our denomination’s website at UUA.org, and work your way to the “history” page, you will see the following brief description of our faith:

“Unitarian Universalism is a liberal religious tradition that was formed from the consolidation of two religions: Unitarianism and Universalism. In America, the Universalist Church of America was founded in 1793, and the American Unitarian Association in 1825. After consolidating in 1961, these faiths became the new religion of Unitarian Universalism through the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA).”

This is basically accurate at a highest level.  Before the merger in 1961, you belonged to either a Unitarian or a Universalist congregation, but I know a number of people who would disagree with the idea that we became a “new religion” in 1961.   This description also doesn’t say anything about who we are, or what we believe, or even what Unitarians or Universalists believed in the past for that matter.  

After a few more clicks of the mouse, you can read an excerpt from a nice pamphlet about our history that does say more about the religious trends from the early days of Christianity to the present that influenced the development of our faith.  These are important points that I will touch on in my sermons, but to really understand our story, I think you have to begin earlier in human history – much, much earlier.  You have to look back a few hundred thousand years and think about why we have an impulse to be religious in the first place.  So, let’s borrow Mr. Peabody’s “Wayback Machine” for a few minutes and begin at the beginning.  Along our journey, I have cherry-picked some important moments in the interest of time, and there are lots of others that I would love to mention.  Maybe we can have a class someday.  It is all so fascinating.

We have no written record of the beginning, of course, but it is easy to imagine that long ago, an ancient ancestor of modern humans first looked up at the night sky, or at some spectacular natural vista, and felt an incredible sense of awe and wonder.  From that first moment in our evolutionary journey, on down to the present, we primates of the genus Homo have been spiritual creatures. We beheld the beauty of the natural world as well as the terrifying forces that nature could unleash upon us.  We gazed in wonder at the miracle of a newborn child.  We pondered the mystery of death, as we felt the grief of losing loved ones.  Our ancient ancestors probably recognized an undeniable “sacredness” about existence long before they invented religion.  There was a time when everyone alive could probably be called “spiritual but not religious,” but it depends on how you define such terms.

I think of the term spirituality as describing how we think and feel about our place in the universe – how we experience awe and wonder and a sense of the sacred.  Religion, on the other hand, is what we do to express our spirituality.  Religion is expressed in rituals, prayers, the creation of sacred stories and texts, and so on.  Using these definitions, it is impossible to say when exactly spirituality began among our humanoid ancestors – possibly millions of years ago – but we have archaeological evidence about the beginning of religion.   As early as 225,000 years ago, there is some evidence of burial rituals, and this is definitely the case among Neanderthals around 100,000 years ago.  By 40,000 years ago, our ancestors were creating sacred art and cremating the dead, and by 10,000 years ago, people began worshipping in sacred temples and holy places like the Göbekli Tepe complex in modern Turkey, and at Stonehenge in England.  Rituals became more complex and focused on placating cosmic forces beyond our control, honoring the gods and the spirits of animals and plants upon which human life depended, or venerating the seasons and other recognized cycles of life.

Human beings have been very creative in our religious imagination, and with the arrival of the Bronze Age around 3500 BCE, the story of our faith begins in earnest.  The major religious traditions that would one day influence the development of Unitarian Universalism began in agricultural civilizations that arose during the Bronze Age around three great river systems: the Nile River in Egypt, the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in Mesopotamia, and the Indus River in the northwestern Indian subcontinent.  Most of what I will spend the rest of my time talking about today concerns the first two regions, since they combined to form the so-called Fertile Crescent that gave birth to Judaism and Christianity, but it is worth mentioning the Indus Valley Civilization, because it is there that Hinduism emerged around 1700 BCE, and it later gave birth to Buddhism around 563 BCE.  Both of these ancient Eastern traditions would one day alter the trajectory of our faith, and you’ll hear more on this in the third sermon.

In Mesopotamia, the invention of cuneiform writing on clay tablets gave us the first written records of religion.  The earliest “scripture” discovered to date is the poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh, from ancient Sumeria, which dates to between 2750 and 2500 BCE.  It records the adventures of Gilgamesh, King of Uruk, as he interacts with gods and other characters.  It even tells the story of a Great Flood that is likely the origin of the story of Noah that appeared in the book of Genesis many centuries later. 

According to tradition, Mesopotamia is also the birthplace of Abraham, sometime around the year 1900 BCE, the patriarch claimed by the three great traditions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, although there is no archaeological evidence that Abraham was a real historical figure.  What is more certain, though, is that toward the end of the Bronze Age, around 1350 BCE, the idea of monotheism – that there is only one God – developed among the different peoples of the Fertile Crescent.  In Egypt, the pharaoh Amenhotep IV, also known as Akhenaten, disavowed the old gods in favor of worshipping one god, the “Aten,” represented by the sun disk.  This did not go over well, since he was branded a heretic after his death, but his ideas may have inspired the nearby Hebrews, who were influenced by Egyptian civilization, to shift from polytheism to monotheism, reimagining their sky god, Yahweh, as the one God Almighty.

During the Iron Age, from 1200 to 800 BCE, the biblical kingdoms of Israel and Judah were established, and there is some evidence to support the stories of King Saul and David, and the so-called monarchial period.  It is believed that the first texts of the Torah were written around 950 BCE, and the lives of the prophets Elijah, Amos, Hosea, Micah, and Isaiah spanned the next couple of centuries.  By the time of the Babylonian Captivity, from 597 to 538 BCE, when most of the educated class was taken from Judah into Babylon, Judaism was well established with the earliest texts, rituals, and beliefs.  There would be undeniable influences, though, from the time spent in Babylon, especially coming to terms with what it meant to be a Jew away from the Temple in Jerusalem.  After their emancipation by Cyrus the Great of Persia, when the Jews returned to Judah, a new flourishing of Jewish thought and identity began that continued through the conquests of Alexander the Great in 325 BCE and the Romans in 63 BCE.  

It is hard to overstate the influence that Alexander had on the ancient Near East.  The Hellenistic philosophy of Plato and others that followed along with Alexander highly influenced Judaism, and it was so essential to the formation of Christianity that I know a few scholars who suggest that Christianity really began in 325 BCE – three centuries before the birth of Jesus.  Even basic beliefs about the soul and the afterlife show this influence – are we made of spirit or matter or both, for example, and is spirit sacred and matter profane?  By the time Jesus was born, around 4 BCE, Palestine had become thoroughly Hellenistic, and almost everyone – including Jesus – spoke at least some Greek.  It is possible Jesus even preached in Greek at times when the audience was mixed.  This is certainly the case among the apostles as the Jesus Movement spread throughout the Roman Empire.

I suspect all of you are familiar with the essentials of Christianity: Jesus was born; he became a healer and spiritual teacher in Galilee; he traveled to Jerusalem where he was arrested by the Romans and crucified; he was believed by some to be resurrected from the dead; he appeared to his followers after death, and then he ascended into heaven.   Some of this is mentioned in the Nicene and other creeds of course, but the creeds mostly represent beliefs about the “post-Easter” Jesus – who was he, and what does his death and claims of resurrection mean for the believers who remain?   The creeds largely ignore what Jesus taught during his life, which focused on the coming “kingdom of God.” For those of us who can step outside of the tradition that developed after his death, it seems clear that Jesus was concerned with the here and now – a new reality on this earth, and not some otherworldly existence. 

Contrary to the mythology that some “orthodox” version of Christianity was handed down unchanged through the centuries, it wasn’t long after the crucifixion before different interpretations of the teachings of Jesus, and the meaning of his life and death, diversified into multiple forms of Christianity.  Biblical scholars now describe a story of early Christianity that is much more complex and messy than was once believed, and there were multiple centers where distinct “Christianities” developed, including Jerusalem, Rome, Antioch, Alexandria, Thessalonica, Corinth, Constantinople, and the Egyptian desert.  Even the New Testament canon wasn’t finalized until over a century after the crucifixion, and often a particular Christian sect would favor one gospel or other text over another.  It is during these first few centuries of Christianity that the theological ideas that would be labeled unitarian and universalist developed, but even these terms are not monolithic.  Over the last two thousand years there have been many nuanced varieties of both unitarianism and universalism.

Unitarian was attached to the idea of the oneness of God.  It generally refers to the belief that Jesus is not the same as God, though most early unitarians considered Jesus to be divine by birth, or to have become divine by adoption by God.  Some unitarians, then as now, have disavowed the idea that Jesus was divine at all, but instead considered him a completely mortal prophet or moral exemplar.  It is a different theological position than the trinitarianism of traditional Christian belief, which asserts that God exists in a three-person, or triune, Godhead consisting of God the Father, Jesus the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  How they relate and coexist in this state is one of the so-called “mysteries” of traditional Christianity that is called the perichoresis, which literally means “rotating” or “dancing around.”  Unitarians have argued since the beginning that the concept of the Trinity is not biblical, and in fact, the doctrine was not fully developed to include the Holy Spirit until the end of the fourth century.

Universalism refers to universal salvation, and it is the belief that everyone is ultimately reconciled with God, or “saved,” or at least that everyone has the potential to be saved.  Different varieties of universalism split over whether a period of atonement is required after death, or whether you even have to be Christian to be saved.  A restorationist universalist, for example, believes that, eventually, all souls will be saved, but your soul must be restored to God after death by enduring some period of punishment for the purgation of sin.  An ultra-universalist, on the other hand, believes that everyone is saved without exception, and no period of punishment is required.

A number of the early Christian theologians, often called the Church Fathers, could be called unitarian, unviersalist, or both.  Origen of Alexandria, who lived between the years 184 and 253, is a good example.  He was a very well respected theologian who taught that Jesus, as the Son of God, was subordinate to God the Father, and that all of Creation – even Satan himself – would ultimately be saved, an idea known as apocatastasis.  He would be considered a unitarian and an ultra-universalist.  Incidentally, his teaching on universalism remained the dominant position of the Church until it was officially labeled anathema in 553 at the Fifth Ecumenical Council in Constantinople.  Once revered as virtually a saint, he was condemned and the Council ordered his bones to be exhumed and cremated just to make a point – 300 years after his death.  

Arius of Alexandria, who lived between the years 256 and 336, just after Origen, is another good example.  His teachings expanded on the idea that Jesus was subordinate to God the Father, arguing that since Jesus was born, there was a time that the Son did not exist, and therefore the Son was not eternal. Because of Arius’s popularity, this unitarian position became known as “Arianism,” and it was one of the principle issues debated at the famous Council of Nicaea convened by Emperor Constantine in 325.  At that Council, Constantine insisted that the bishops gathered from around the empire codify one set of Christian beliefs that would then become the official Christianity of the state.  It is likely that Constantine really didn’t care what they came up with; he just wanted one official set of beliefs to promulgate throughout the empire for political purposes.  Even though he is considered the first “Christian” emperor, Constantine did not actually convert until shortly before his death, when he was baptized by the Arian bishop Eusebius.

Our second reading this morning gives you a glimpse at how contentious competing Christian theologies had become in the fourth century, and it was especially so in Alexandria, where Arius and his rival Athanasius, who was a Trinitarian, both had strong factional support.  It was not uncommon for street fights to break out over theological questions, or for gangs to burst into rival places of worship, beating the worshipers and ransacking the church.  And you thought committee meetings were sometimes rough!  In a sermon given by Gregory of Nyssa in Alexandria in 381, he said:

“If in this city you ask a shopkeeper for change, he will argue with you about whether the Son is begotten or unbegotten.  If you inquire about the quality of the bread, the baker will answer, ‘The Father is greater, the Son is less.’  And if you ask the bath attendant to draw your bath, he will tell you the Son was created ex nihilo.”         

By 323, it had gotten so bad that the bishop of Alexandria sent a letter to Emperor Constantine urging him to convene a Church Council, and so he invited 400 bishops to the Council of Nicaea, and roughly 250 attended, along with many priests, such as Arius and Athanasius, who played no official role in the debate.  The political maneuvering that occurred at Nicaea is fascinating but too complex to detail this morning, but one of the main arguments that would determine the fate of Christian orthodoxy rested on the choice of a single word.  The debate was between the Greek words homoousios, which means “same substance,” and homoiousios, which means “similar substance.”  The question was whether the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were of the same substance or only a similar substance. The difference between the two words is a single letter – an iota or “i” – and if you have heard the phrase, “it matters not one iota,” this is one time that it really, really mattered.  In the end, the homoousios position favored by Athanasius won the day and was included in the Nicene Creed.  Arius, and all who favored his more unitarian view, were branded heretics, and most were sent into exile.  The pendulum continued to swing for many decades, though, and even Arius was about to be redeemed by the Church when he died mysteriously, probably from poisoning.

After Nicaea, orthodox Christian doctrine continued to be refined in a series of Church Councils that continued after the Fall of Rome in 476.  Europe entered the so-called “Dark Ages,” which really weren’t that dark as it turns out, and in other parts of the world civilization and religion continued to flourish.  Islam spread across the Middle East and North Africa in the seventh and eighth centuries, Buddhism developed into many sects in Asia, and great civilizations developed in the Americas and Africa.  Many ideas from this era would also influence Unitarian Universalism along the way.

In the Middle Ages, Christian theology continued to evolve, for better or worse, in monasteries and the first universities.  Anselm of Canterbury, for example, developed the idea of substitutionary atonement – that the sins of humanity were so great that it required the suffering and death of Christ to atone for us.  Thomas Aquinas explored all sorts of ideas in his Summa Theologica, including the idea that one could earn meritorious grace through good works.  This was also a time of great mystics like Francis of Assisi, Hildegard of Bingen, Julian of Norwich, and Meister Eckhart.   And, it was also a time of bloody crusades in Palestine.

In 1054, in part because of another single word in a creed, the Eastern and Western Churches split in the Great Schism, and they are still not reconciled.  In this case the word in Latin was filioque, which means “and the Son,” and it was included in the revised Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, but only officially recognized in 1014.  The issue centered on whether the Holy Spirit emanated from God the Father alone, or from God the Father and the Son.  The Eastern Church felt it was subordinating the Holy Spirit to add the clause.

I have glossed over the Middle Ages a bit in the interest of time, and because, honestly, not much specific to Unitarian Universalist history happened in this time of Orthodox hegemony.  It is worth noting that pockets of unitarian and universalist thinking continued to survive, and the fact that we are here today should attest to this fact.

So, that brings us to the brink of the Protestant Reformation, which is most often associated with the year 1517, when Martin Luther supposedly nailed his Ninety-five Theses on the cathedral door in Wittenberg, Germany.  It is probable that someone else actually nailed a copy of his Theses, since Luther did not live there at the time, but it was an important event nonetheless.  His document which criticized many practices and doctrines of the Catholic Church quickly spread across Europe thanks to the printing press, which was invented in 1450.  Luther was not the only, or even the first, troublemaker of the Reformation though, and many reformers were unitarians and universalists.  This is where we will continue next time.

What I would like you to think about in the meantime is that our faith, and the faith of our spiritual ancestors, has always been a faith of heretics.  I say this because the word “heresy” comes from the Greek root meaning “choice.”  We have already explored how contentious, and sometimes bloody, our story has been, and – spoiler alert – it is about to get even bloodier in the century after the Reformation began.  But, like our ancient human ancestor who first experienced the feeling of awe and wonder, it is faith informed by personal experience and chosen individual belief.  We are a much more diverse faith today than the ancient doctrines we have discussed so far, and that expansive diversity in community is what makes us a stronger faith.  I also think it is interesting to speculate about how different the world might be if the Arians had won at Nicaea.  Would Unitarian Universalism even exist?   Stay tuned for episode two.

Readings

Opening Words Prayer to Practice the Golden Rule by Eusebius (263–339)

May I be an enemy to no one and the friend of what abides eternally.
May I never quarrel with those nearest me, and be reconciled quickly if I should. 
May I never plot evil against others, and if anyone plot evil against me, 
may I escape unharmed and without the need to hurt anyone else.
May I love, seek and attain only what is good. 
May I desire happiness for all and harbor envy for none.
May I never find joy in the misfortune of one who has wronged me.
May I never wait for the rebuke of others, but always rebuke myself until I make reparation.
May I gain no victory that harms me or my opponent.
May I reconcile friends who are mad at each other.
May I, insofar as I can, give all necessary help to my friends and to all who are in need.
May I never fail a friend in trouble.
May I be able to soften the pain of the grief stricken and give them comforting words.
May I respect myself.
May I always maintain control of my emotions.
May I habituate myself to be gentle, and never angry with others because of circumstances.
May I never discuss the wicked or what they have done, but know good people and follow in their footsteps. 

Reading Nicene Creed (original version from the First Council in 325)

We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of all things visible and invisible.  And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten of the Father, the only-begotten; that is, of the essence of the Father, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father.  By whom all things were made both in heaven and on earth; Who for us men, and for our salvation, came down and was incarnate and was made man; He suffered, and the third day he rose again, ascended into heaven; From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.  And in the Holy Ghost.  But those who say: 'There was a time when he was not;' and 'He was not before he was made;' and 'He was made out of nothing,' or 'He is of another substance' or 'essence,' or 'The Son of God is created,' or 'changeable,' or 'alterable'— they are condemned by the holy catholic and apostolic Church.

Reading an excerpt from When Jesus Became God: The Struggle to Define Christianity during the Last Days of Rome by Richard E. Rubenstein

“Alexandria, December 24, 361.  Midmorning.  By the time the men at the front of the mob smashed through the prison gates, the crowd had grown until it overflowed the square like water pouring over the sides of a full jar.  Even for Alexandria, where riots were as common as Mediterranean gales, this demonstration was unusually large. More unusual still, the mixed crowd formed a unified mass. Instead of fighting among themselves as the so often did, pagan and Christian rioters stood side by side, bellowing for blood.

A roar of approval greeted the splintering of the gates. Minutes later the invaders reemerged from the prison bearing their trussed-up quarry on their shoulders like hunters returning from the desert with a prize antelope or lion.  Three prisoners, their hands and feet still chained against the possibility of escape, were their catch.  As the demonstrators began to toss them about the square like toys, the helpless captives squealed in pain and terror.

Two of these unfortunates were high government officials.  They had earned the crowd’s hatred by carrying out the Roman emperor’s orders to close pagan temples, expel ‘heretical’ Christians from the churches, and punish protestors.  The mob’s prime target, however – the third man in manacles – was a figure of greater importance than any civil servant.  This was George of Cappadocia, the metropolitan bishop of Alexandria and titular head of Egypt’s huge Christian community.

Bishop George owed his recent preeminence and present agony to Constantius II, the son and successor of the first Christian emperor, Constantine the Great. Like Constantius, George was an Arian: a Christian who believed that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, but not God Himself.

[George] was widely known for his religious zeal and owned one of the finest private libraries in the empire.   ... After sending the current bishop of Alexandria, a local man named Athanasius, into exile [the emperor] brought George in from Asia Minor to replace him.  

The appointment was a disaster from the start.  Replacing a native Alexandrian with a Cappadocian “foreigner” who could not even speak Coptic, the language of the common people, was Constantius’s first mistake.  His second was to name as bishop a militant Arian who considered it his duty to persecute both pagans and Christians opposed to his theology.

Even with the aid of imperial troops, he could not establish control over Alexandria’s turbulent Christian community.

Punishment was duly administered.  George and his fellow prisoners died in the prison square, presumably as the result of lethal beatings.  A fifth-century historian reports that after the rioters killed their victims, they paraded their corpses through the middle of the city.”

"Tunnels of Hope"

by Kevin M. Carson
A sermon given at the First Universalist Parish in Chester, Vermont, September 23, 2018

Where are the tunnels of hope through our dark mountains of disappointment?

If you are like me and have a lot of email and social media connections to people and organizations focused on climate change, conservation, and other justice issues, you have been bombarded with messages ever since the 2016 elections that are filled with fear, alarm, and outrage. And let’s not kid ourselves; there are plenty of good reasons to be concerned. There is a lot wrong with America and the world in general. It can feel overwhelming, and you hear people talk about “scandal fatigue,” and even “compassion fatigue.” Not surprisingly, the tone of some of the messaging in social media has begun to reflect a growing sense of despair, as each day, the latest news or tweet seems to bring some new assault on our values. About a month ago, for example, I received an email from the Climate Reality Project with the subject line: “We’re not giving up – and neither should you.” Not the most uplifting way to grab your attention, perhaps, but at least it is an honest sentiment of the realities we face in these difficult times. When all you can see in front of you is a seemingly endless series of obstacles, it can be tempting to simply give up.

2017 was especially hard for so many of us as we watched a new administration in Washington roll back and weaken policies on the environment, healthcare, and human rights, policies that were often hard-won minor victories in the first place. We watched helplessly as our president walked away from the Paris Climate Agreement and seemed to relish antagonizing other nations, denigrating our long-standing allies while heaping praise on ruthless dictators. We witnessed the loss of even common decency in American politics, as our president bullied and mocked anyone with whom he disagreed, or who opposed him in even the slightest way. It was just over a year ago that white supremacists marched in Charlottesville, resulting in the death of a young woman who opposed the overt racism that has once again revealed its presence in society. I was not surprised at all when I saw an article on the CNN web site earlier this month that announced that poling data from 145 countries confirmed that 2017 was, “the world's most miserable for more than a decade.” It seems people really were miserable all over. Last New Year’s Eve, I remember commenting to my wife that, “2017 was such a terrible and emotionally draining year. Surely 2018 would be better!”

Little did I know that just two weeks into the New Year, 2018 would become, for me and my family, the worst year of our lives, when my beloved daughter, Rachel, died unexpectedly on January 14th. I never imagined the sadness that would enter our lives this year – that the “long dark night of the soul” could ever be so long and dark. Over these last eight months, there have been moments of deep despair when I have felt engulfed by the “why’s” and “what if’s” of Rachel’s death, moments when I felt so angry about her absence and the future she was denied. Sometimes I have wondered how I could ever find the hope I need to sustain my ministry, and my advocacy for the Earth, in a universe that no longer seemed to make sense. Could I find anything positive to say to a congregation without my words sounding hollow or insincere? It was so much easier for me to find inspiration when I could think of Rachel heading to college, pursuing a career in wildlife conservation, or when I could imagine her children and future generations of my descendants.

As I have confronted my grief, I have tried to heed the advice not to bottle up my feelings – to let myself feel angry or sad without remorse, and to also allow myself moments of joy and happiness, without feeling guilty that the pain of grief has subsided for a little while. Sometimes it is hard, but I think it is sound advice. It is far too easy to abide in the sorrow and punish yourself emotionally for the injustice of it all. It is far too easy to relentlessly mourn a future that will never be. It is healthier to give the full range of emotions their due. It is okay to let the darkness have its moments, trusting that joy can and will show up unexpectedly on occasion, reaffirming, as Mary Oliver’s poem says, that “life has some possibility left.”

When we allow ourselves to ride out these waves of conflicting emotions without judgment, I think it is an example of the Buddhist concept of maitri, which is usually translated as “loving-kindness,” or simply, compassion. What Buddhist teachers will tell you is that loving-kindness must begin with oneself. If we have any hope of extending compassion to others – even to the universe itself – we must begin with compassion for ourselves. When we do, we are acknowledging that suffering is fundamental to the human condition – the first of the so-called Four Noble Truths which are the core teachings of Buddhism. Suffering is something we all have in common and understanding this is the root of compassion. Indeed, the very origin of the English word compassion means to “suffer with.” And without going too deep into the teachings of Buddhism, acknowledging the inevitability of suffering is the first step in the journey to awakening and salvation.

But, this is only the beginning. Accepting that suffering exists does not mean we must simply accept the world as it is, doing nothing to alleviate the pain and injustice we see all around us. It can become the motivation for us to act in the world – to become warriors for compassion and usher hope into the world. Hope can arise from even the smallest gesture of kindness. Between the Internet and television news, we witness a constant stream of bad news about climate change and human rights every day– what Al Gore likes to describe as “a nature hike through the Book of Revelations” – but there are also signs of hope almost every day. A small piece of good news can be a welcomed respite from the troubles of the world. Maybe it’s a story about an animal being rescued by human strangers, an article about someone planting trees on the other side of the world, a judge blocking some awful policy, or some species showing signs of coming back from the brink of extinction. There are lots of moments like these that help balance the scales, even if only a little at a time. Sometimes we need to cherish such moments of hope though they are as ephemeral as rainbows.

The world can be an ugly place, and life can seem like a pointless struggle against the odds. Finding hope is not always easy, but I don’t know why we would ever assume it should be. I am reminded of my favorite quote from the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who said, “The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.” Even so, we can’t let that deter us.

When it comes to situations that challenge us to the core of our being, we can choose to take a stand and become a warrior for compassion even at great risk. Doing so in a universe that makes little sense at times is to embark on a hero’s journey, and if you know anything about heroic journeys, they are usually difficult and fraught with peril. And sometimes, whether we like it or not, the hero’s journey is even foisted upon us. We may feel like Odysseus, shipwrecked and adrift in a sea of troubles, wondering what gods we have offended and wondering if we will ever find our way home – and if we do make it home, what fresh calamities must await us there.

In Dr. King’s letter from the Birmingham jail, he acknowledges the difficulties experienced by the clergy who showed up in cities across the south in support of Civil Rights – how many of them were criticized or even dismissed by their faith communities for taking a stand against the evils of racism, and how many others were beaten and jailed by authorities. Dr. King then summarizes their struggle and suffering, saying, “They have carved a tunnel of hope through the dark mountain of disappointment.” There is a reason he chose the metaphor of carving a tunnel of hope. Tunneling through a mountain is laborious, difficult, and often dangerous; he did not say they found a new pass across the mountain, or discovered some easier way around it. Creating hope about an issue as large and difficult as changing a nation’s attitude about racial equality is relentlessly hard work that can test anyone’s resolve. Some days you might make good progress on your tunnel of hope, and other days, the best you can manage is to just keep digging, one shovel full at a time, holding on to the faith that one day you – or someone working with you – will break through to the other side.

Life can throw ruthless challenges in our path. Psychologists talk about the “change curve” that describes how we react to such challenges, and it relates to the so-called “stages of grief” that you have probably encountered at some point, based on the work of Elizabeth Kübler-Ross – those being denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Most psychologists now agree that the concept of “stages” implies a progression that is too linear to accurately describe how we react to grief or change – we really bounce around these emotional states much more depending on our personality – but the basic idea of the curve is still valid. When we are confronted by loss or significant change, whether it is good or bad, we generally react to the shock by denying its reality in some sense, then we get angry about it and enter periods of despair, before bargaining or experimenting with how to react, until we hopefully reach some level of acceptance and integration into our life. This emotional journey can be represented by a U-shaped curve, and an important feature of this journey is that you must go down into the valley of the curve – into the realm of despair and depression – before you can go back up and reach integration. For a relatively minor event in your life, this entire process may go quickly, and you may not even recognize some of the stages. But for something as serious as profound grief, this can be a lengthy process, and you may visit the valley of despair many times or dwell there for some time. The main thing to remember is that, no matter what, there is no shortcut to acceptance that skips over the valley of despair altogether. To find hope in the face of despair, we must go down to go up. Carving tunnels of hope through the dark mountain of disappointment is a nice metaphor for the emotionally draining work of confronting the dark feelings we can’t avoid on the way to a new integrated reality.

Last month, as part of my own efforts to climb up from the valley of despair, I attended Leadership Corps training in Los Angeles with the Climate Reality Project, the organization founded by Al Gore to educate the public about climate change. If you are looking for an issue that can seem almost insurmountable and fill you with shock and despair, climate change is a good candidate – and I would argue it is the most important issue humanity faces today. As the activist and author Bill McKibben once said, “You can’t really, plausibly, give an ‘I have a dream’ speech for climate change, because the two possibilities are a miserable century and an impossible one.” It is a very big deal, and I think it is a good example of the kind of challenge Dr. King spoke of from the Birmingham jail.

In the struggle to address climate change, I think we must look at something like the abolition of slavery for an adequate comparison – a struggle that took decades of work by thousands of people, and even a bloody Civil War that cost perhaps a million lives, before the evil of slavery was ended. And, you could even argue that the struggle continued for over another century with the Civil Rights movement, and it continues today in the efforts to confront institutional racism and oppression. The big difference between climate change and abolition is that climate change is truly an equal opportunity problem. Everyone is impacted by climate change no matter your race, color, nationality, or creed – or even your species.

The dark mountain of disappointment looms large. The drastic changes we need to make around the world to have any hope of maintaining a reasonably comfortable world in the coming years faces powerful opposition. But, despite the depressing political environment and climate deniers that can make your blood boil, despite the epic storms that are routinely dumping “thousand year” rainfall events these days, despite the scientific data on melting polar ice and accelerating extinction rates, and despite the year after year of record global temperatures, there are tunnels of hope forming all around us. Thousands of grass roots organizations are emerging in countries around the world, and people are getting educated about the reality of climate change more than ever before. In Los Angeles, the Climate Reality Project held it largest training so far, adding 2,200 new leaders to its corps of 17,000 worldwide – people dedicated to educating others and advocating in their homelands. Networks of advocates are forming at an amazing rate. Over just the last few weeks, I have connected with around 100 new friends on Facebook dedicated to making a difference. They live on every continent except Antarctica, and a significant number of these folks live in some of the poorest nations on Earth. We are certainly not alone in our struggles. There are warriors for compassion in every land.

People are recognizing the intersectionality of justice issues that will feel the impact of climate change, and they are forming alliances that link thousands of individuals into communities of justice. A good example is the formal alliance that has been formed between the Climate Reality Project and the Poor People’s Campaign, which has been revived in recent years by the Rev. William Barber. Faith communities are playing a key role in bringing groups together, and they are providing the important spiritual and moral leadership that justice movements need to sustain their energy and faith in the future. And when you look at the polls, most Americans – and even a greater majority of people in other nations – support significant efforts to address climate change. Fossil fuel companies may be rich and powerful, but so were the slaveholders, the slave traders, and all the industries that depended on slave labor.

Friends, if I didn’t see such a groundswell of hope I don’t think I could be speaking to you today. And if climate change is not your main issue, I encourage you to look around and see similar signs that tunnels of hope are out there. I am confident they are.

On a final note, I want us to remind ourselves to keep some perspective as we stare up at the dark mountains of disappointment in our lives. There is a saying I am very fond of that is usually attributed to the Talmud, but it is really a mash-up of quotes from two more recent rabbinical commentaries on the Talmud. I may have even quoted it to you before, and it goes like this:

Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief.

Do justly, now.

Love mercy, now.

Walk humbly, now.

You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.

We all need tunnels of hope through the dark mountain of disappointment, and problems like climate change are going to need lots of folks carving lots of tunnels, sometimes relying solely on the faith that humanity will eventually break through to the other side. If life or world events get you down, never let despair have the last word. Get angry. Be sad. Grieve while you must, and then find yourself a purpose and a shovel and get digging!

Opening Words

“Don’t Hesitate” by Mary Oliver

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,

don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty

of lives and whole towns destroyed or about

to be. We are not wise, and not very often

kind. And much can never be redeemed.

Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this

is its way of fighting back, that sometimes

something happens better than all the riches

or power in the world. It could be anything,

but very likely you notice it in the instant

when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the

case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid

of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.

Readings

Excerpt from Letters to the River: A Guide to a Dream Worth Living by Sparrow Hart

“Something’s not working. Everybody knows it. The turmoil and breakdown of order, sustainability, and basic sanity in almost every natural and human system is overwhelming and disheartening. The list – war, economic injustice, environmental disaster, poverty, decline of democratic ideals and decency – goes on and on. When the system itself is at fault and every problem is interconnected, it can appear like there’s nowhere to start and whatever we do won’t make a difference.

The need to face ‘inconvenient truths’ grows stronger every day. Wise voices announce we need a new paradigm. No doubt this is true, but how can we step outside and look at a reality we live within? When the ways we perceive and think about the world are a root cause of the problem itself, what can we do?

…

Today we face a task of creating a world worth living in, and doing so requires stepping outside the boundaries of what’s known and familiar. We won’t find the solutions we need by recycling the same old routines with better management, more efficiency, or greater effort, for it is the worldview or ‘dream’ of the culture itself that leads to most of the dis-ease and dysfunction of modern life. Like the heroes and heroines of old, we must leave home and enter new territories of the mind, soul, and imagination if we are to find the answers we seek.”

Excerpt from “Letter from the Birmingham Jail” by Martin Luther King, Jr., April 16, 1963

“If today’s church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust. Perhaps I have once again been too optimistic. Is organized religion too inextricably bound to the status quo to save our nation and the world? Perhaps I must turn my faith to the inner spiritual church, the church within the church, as the true ekklesia and the hope of the world. But again I am thankful to God that some noble souls from the ranks of organized religion have broken loose from the paralyzing chains of conformity and joined us as active partners in the struggle for freedom. They have left their secure congregations and walked the streets of Albany, Georgia, with us. They have gone down the highways of the South on tortuous rides for freedom. Yes, they have gone to jail with us. Some have been dismissed from their churches, have lost the support of their bishops and fellow ministers. But they have acted in the faith that right defeated is stronger than evil triumphant. Their witness has been the spiritual salt that has preserved the true meaning of the gospel in these troubled times. They have carved a tunnel of hope through the dark mountain of disappointment.”

Spoken Prayer

“Take a Knee” by Rev. Kirk Loadman-Copeland

As you approach the grave of any soldier who died defending America, take a knee.

For the courage and clarity of Colin Kaepernick, and his protest against police abuse, take a knee.

For Michael Brown, Eric Gardner, Tamar Rice, Walter Scott, Freddie Grey, Philandro Castile, and all the others who have died tragically and needlessly at the hands of police, those very officers who swore an oath to serve, protect, and defend, take a knee.

For Heather Heyer who was killed by a white nationalist in Charlottesville, take a knee.

For the more than ninety people killed and others who were wounded in shootings in churches in the last 20 years including Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist in Knoxville, the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin, Mother Emanuel in Charleston, and First Baptist in Sutherland Springs, take a knee.

For the churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples that have been desecrated or burned, take a knee.

For all those killed and wounded in more than 200 school shootings since April 1999, including Columbine, Red Lake, West Nickel Mines, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, Umpqua Community College, Santa Fe, and Parkland, take a knee.

For all of the other mass killings including the concert in Las Vegas, the Pulse Nightclub, and San Bernadino, take a knee.

For the refusal of legislators to pass sensible gun control legislation, take a knee.

For all of the wounded warriors who struggle for healing and wholeness, and for those veterans whose service to America led to homelessness or finally ended in suicide, take a knee.

For all of the immigrants who came to this land in search of a dream called America, for those now being denied asylum, for children ripped from their parents’ arms and imprisoned, and for countless others who died in the deserts of the Southwest trying to get here, take a knee.

For the Statue of Liberty, who now weeps, take a knee.

For black lives that have not mattered since slaves were brought to America in the 1560s, for the stunning incarceration rates of black males that represent the new Jim Crow, and for the cancer of dehumanizing racism that seems stronger than ever, take a knee.

For the genocide of the first peoples of this land and for every treaty made with Native tribes that was broken by the United States, take a knee.

For the ravage of drug overdoses, now dramatically increased by opioids, which killed over 70,000 Americans in 2017, take a knee.

For the corporate greed that resulted in close to six million foreclosures during the Great Recession: jobs lost, careers ended, families ripped apart, and dreams forever destroyed, take a knee.

For those white lives that now no longer matter, though their grievances are used to fuel the fires of dissension and racism within America, take a knee.

For the assault on our democracy: voter suppression, gerrymandered districts, Citizens United, special interests, Russian meddling, and more, take a knee.

For the undermining of the rule of law, for trading lies for truth, for the assault on the free press, for political tribalism, for legislators who betray the constitution and their oath of office, and public officials whose greed places self-interest above the national interest, take a knee.

For the willful ignorance of climate change and the peril that the earth and we face, along with all life, take a knee.

For those who have given up on the American dream, both in this country and among our allies throughout the world, take a knee.

For all the women who have been paid less than men for the same job, for those who have suffered domestic abuse, and for those who have suffered sexual harassment and assault, take a knee.

For the elderly who seek dignity in their declining years, for the differently-abled who struggle to make a life worth living, and for all who simply seek to love whom they love without ridicule or discrimination, take a knee.

And for every other way in which we have fallen short of the nobility of which we as individuals and a country are capable, take a knee.

Take a knee as an act of compassion, a call to justice, an awareness of humility, a gesture of solidarity, a prayer of kindness, an invocation of our better angels, and a necessary precursor to reclaim our power as citizens.

Take a knee, and then, in the wise words of poet Maya Angelou, “rise.” Rise to resist, to protest, to march, to vote, to volunteer, to dream, and to work for as long as it takes to “Let America be America again. / Let it be the dream it used to be,” as the poet Langston Hughes wrote.

Take a knee, and then stand, place your hand over your heart, and whisper the words, “with liberty and justice for all,” and mean it.

“Constituents in the Heart of an Emergent God” | Kevin Carson

A sermon given at the First Universalist Parish in Chester, Vermont, June 10, 2018

Science has come a long way since Jonathan Edwards preached his famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” in Enfield, Connecticut in 1741.  Theology has come a long way too, though you wouldn’t know it in most American churches on Sunday morning.  In this follow up to my sermon, “The Double Dark Night of the Soul,” we will explore some of the exciting ideas about “God” that modern science and theology reveals.

In Medieval Europe, theology was considered a “science” because it concerned not only God but the physical world we live in.  In fact, theology was called “the queen of the sciences.” While some medieval scholars explored questions in areas of what we now call the natural sciences, the overarching standard of “truth” belonged to the accepted orthodox Christian theology of the day.  If your “science” conflicted with accepted theological “truth,” then your findings were obviously wrong.  If you had a different opinion about that, well … that could be very dangerous. You might easily find yourself tied to a burning stake like a number of our theological ancestors.  When I was in Rome a couple of weeks ago I saw a statue commemorating the philosopher Giordano Bruno, for example.  He was held prisoner in the Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome for three years and then burned as a heretic by the Inquisition in the year 1600.  His “crime,” in the eyes of the Church, was supporting the Copernican model of the solar system and a form of Unitarian theology. We owe a lot to brave individuals like Giordano Bruno who continued to advance the evolution of both science and theology through even the darkest times.  And though fundamentalism in a variety of forms continues to plague the human family, the world has generally grown more tolerant of diverse religious views, and so today we see an incredible smorgasbord of beliefs and practices.  

The story of our Unitarian Universalist faith lies mostly in the Western Christian lineage, but you can see a similar evolution of ideas among other great religious traditions.  Change is inevitable, because human beings learn and explore.  Despite what we might claim about our personal beliefs, or even the most cherished doctrines of the church, new ideas come along from science and philosophy and the old thinking simply must adjust.  And when it comes to ideas about topics like God, or the afterlife, if we are honest, we have to admit that all theology is at its core speculation.  Theologians can only speculate about the nature of the sacred and make reasoned arguments to support their propositions.  Theology is not something that can be proven by logic or experimental evidence.  We don’t even think of theology as a “science” anymore, because it cannot be tested by the scientific method, but that doesn’t mean there are no theological truths that stand the test of time.  Theology changes when old assumptions are challenged and we discard ideas that no longer make sense.  It is a healthy process, though it can be painful to abandon the old as we struggle to embrace the new.  Sometimes old beliefs don’t go quietly, and wars have even been fought over competing religious ideas.
As religious liberals, we are more willing to explore new ideas and take theological risks, and historically we certainly have.  For our ministers, this has sometimes come at great personal and professional risk.  We claim to respect the freedom of the pulpit, but we too have a long history of ministers who found themselves preaching too far outside of the mainstream, and it seldom ended well.  Even someone as exalted as Emerson ruffled quite a few feathers among the Unitarian establishment when he spoke of revitalizing religion by tapping into the lived experience of nature and the divine.  It is really no surprise that after seminary, he left the ministry after less than three years.  

On the Universalist side of our family tree, the “good news” of universal salvation was central to the preaching you would hear on just about any given Sunday in Universalist churches like this one, usually backed up by dozens of biblical citations to “prove” its theological correctness.  

But, sometimes even the idea that everyone was worthy of God’s love and salvation was too much to tolerate.  According to one legendary story, once, when Rev. John Murray was preaching in Boston in the late 1700s, one of his opponents threw a large rock through a window, narrowly missing his head.  Without hesitation, Murray picked up the rock and said, “This argument is solid and weighty, but it is neither rational nor convincing.”  Then, laying the rock aside, he announced, “Not all the stones in Boston, except they stop my breath, shall shut my mouth.”

These days, it is uncommon to hear much real theology preached on Sunday mornings even in liberal churches, and I think that is unfortunate.  It is easier, and honestly safer, for many of us, to simply revisit familiar themes that speak to the human condition within a comfortable context and language, without pushing the theological envelope even a little.  We may not fear being beaned in the head by a rock or burned at the stake anymore, but in some religious circles, especially in more conservative churches, uttering anything too controversial can still be quite risky.  Also, I think many ministers shy away from the best theology they study in seminary and beyond because it is complex and challenging.  It is admittedly hard to preach on very complex topics without feeling you are only scratching the surface.  Good theological conversations can last many hours, and if you get an opportunity to really explore such topics within a congregation, you will find we have all kinds of interesting ideas to consider. Unfortunately, most people are limited to what they hear on Sunday morning, and there are many other subjects that rightfully compete with theology for attention in worship.  Deep theological musings week after week would also become overbearing.  Sometimes, when we come to church, we just need to be comforted and “lay our burdens down.” But, if our faith hopes to remain relevant and vital going forward, I do think we need to make time for more theological exploration in our pulpits.  Our faith, after all, is a journey of discovery, and Sunday morning is the best chance most people have.  

I hope that most of you were here in November for my sermon, “The Double Dark Night of the Soul,” when I talked about how our theological thinking must adjust to the reality of a universe full of dark matter and energy that is proving to be more bizarre and mysterious that we might have imagined.  This is the follow up I promised, that was unfortunately delayed quite a bit by events in my personal life. But if you missed the first one, or if it’s been too long to remember what I said last fall, it’s okay.  What I want to explore in the rest of my sermon today is one possible answer to the question I asked in the earlier sermon: where might “God” exist in a universe than is mostly invisible, constantly evolving, and still very mysterious to the one form of intelligent life on Earth that has emerged with the capacity to even ask such a question?
So, let’s begin by considering where God is not.  If you read the blurb about today’s service, I mentioned that the title of my sermon today is intended as an homage to the famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” that Jonathan Edwards preached in Enfield, Connecticut in 1741.  That sermon is considered to be one of the exemplary works of religious thinking during the so-called Great Awakening period in America, and it is filled with images of the horrors of hellfire and damnation that await those who are not saved.  It was literally a sermon that intended to scare the hell out of everyone, so they would repent and turn to Christ for salvation.  As an example of his imagery, Edwards famously compares humanity dangling over the pit of hell to a spider dangling by a web over a fire.  The only thing keeping our depraved, sinful selves out of the well-deserved enteral fires of hell is the grace of God – and God is very angry with us.  I’m guessing that most of you these days would find such a sermon troubling to say the least.  

Our Unitarian and Universalist ancestors had a lot of trouble with these ideas too, so their theology evolved over the next several decades toward a more benign view of the Almighty, and a more sympathetic understanding of humanity.  They acknowledged that we human beings are capable of great sin, but they also saw that we are inherently capable of great good and worthy of salvation.  But, even so, they still held onto the idea that “God” was something apart from the universe.  He was “out there” somewhere, pushed farther and farther away as our knowledge of the universe expanded.  God increasingly became the “God of the gaps” our second reading described.  Then, after a few more decades of scientific discoveries, Humanism swept through our faith and very nearly pushed the idea of “god” completely out the door.  It seemed like we had to make a choice between having a conventional concept of God or having no god at all, and the debate has remained contentious to this day among Unitarian Universalists.  But what if there is at least a third option?

When I was here in May I talked about Religious Naturalism as the core theology of our faith, and today I want to take a deeper look at one of the many strands of thinking that comes under that general philosophical label.  So, let me begin by unpacking what I mean by the unusual title of today’s sermon: Constituents in the Heart of an Emergent God, and it is probably best to start at the end and work backwards.  

What do I mean by an emergent God?  In general, emergence describes something that comes out of something else.  In this case, I am specifically talking about an idea from the field of Systems Theory that refers to a quality or trait that can only be realized by a system at a certain level of organization.  For example, think about all the layers of complex systems that make up a living creature.  At the lowest levels, there are elementary particles, then atoms, then molecules, then complex molecules like DNA, then cells, then organs, then systems of organs (like the circulatory system), then finally the organism.  At each level of complexity, there are attributes or traits that have no meaning at lower levels, and could never be anticipated by looking up the chain.  We say, for example, that cells and organisms have the quality of “being alive,” but you could never predict the quality of “being alive” by only looking only at the billions of atoms at the lower levels, or even the multitude of chemical reactions between molecules upon which life depends.  So, we can say “being alive” is an emergent quality of a cell or organism.  Another example is the quality of “intelligent behavior,” which is an emergent quality of organisms with complex brains.  These are demonstrably real qualities that are easy to observe and describe, but they only exist within a certain context.  

Now, let’s take this up a level to the level of society. We can talk about something like “market forces” or “culture” or “the media” as if they are real things, but these concepts are emergent, and only exist when there is an underlying society of human beings that enables their existence.  Here again, clearly these concepts are “real” in the context of society, since we can all understand them and give examples, but they make no sense at the level of an individual, and are absurd to speak of at the cellular or atomic layer.

So, back to this idea of an emergent God.  What might that mean?  Nancy Ellen Abrams, who is a philosopher of science and a religious naturalist, explores this idea very nicely in her recent book, A God That Could Be Real.  She begins from this simple proposition: “If we look for God in what is real, the argument about God’s existence is over, and we begin to discover its true nature and relationship to us.”  She then develops the idea of an emergent God using the same kind of arguments about emergent phenomena that I just described.  She writes, “God is endlessly emerging from the staggering complexity of all humanity’s aspirations across time … Each of us is directly connected to the emerging God.”  In other words, an emergent God is a phenomenon that can exist because of human consciousness – and only because of human consciousness.  It may be startling to say out loud, but an emergent God simply could not exist without us, but that doesn’t make God any less real.  Let that sink in a little … an endlessly emerging God that arises from the combined aspirations of humanity, with each of us connected to this sacred creative force.  

Taking it a step further, the idea that “God” emerges from our combined human aspirations is why I say we are “constituents in the heart” of this emergent God. We are constituents because it is through the mutuality of humankind that an emergent God has existence.  We, and everyone who ever lived, or will ever live, are all part of God.  It is an idea that sounds very familiar to Emerson’s description of “that Unity, that Over-Soul, within which every man’s particular being is contained and made one with all other.” It is an ancient idea – as old as the mystic teachings of holy men and women through the ages – and yet, by embracing the concept of emergence from the scientific world, it presents us with an image of God that is both relevant to contemporary theology and consistent with the truths about the universe uncovered by the latest physics and cosmology.  This is important because recent scientific discoveries may very well be able to describe the origins of our strange and wonderful universe, with its mysterious dark energy and matter, without appealing to a creator, and this is one of the last refuges for a “god of the gaps.” For those who find the concept of “God” to be useful and relevant, it may soon be hard to locate God anywhere else with any intellectual integrity.

And if you think this is just Humanism hiding behind some clever use of “god” language, remember that emergent phenomena are real within the right context.  Emergent God theology proposes that such a God is as real and worthy of worship as any other concept of God we might propose.  The important element is that consciousness must exist first, and it is consciousness that allows us to overlay meaning on the events we experience.  As Abrams suggests, you could say, “God did not create the universe.  God created the meaning of the universe.”  It is because of our combined human journey through time that we have values and apply names and meanings to the world of our senses.  You might even say God is the conceptual framework that holds the universe together.

As I warned you earlier, I can only give you a glimpse of the possibilities of Emergent God theology in a Sunday sermon.  If this kind of theology appeals to you, also consider this is just one among many new ideas about God that have been proposed over the last century, as theology tries to reconcile with our growing scientific understanding of the universe.   There are fascinating theological ideas ranging from very complex philosophical frameworks like Process Theology, to thinking of God as the creative force at work in the universe, and even to so-called “non-realist” ideas that God ultimately has no objective reality but is merely a useful mental concept at best.  

Each idea is worthy of exploration, but I find  the idea of an emergent God – humanity’s God that arises from our shared aspirations – a God that brings meaning to the world, is a God I could relate to and celebrate in worship .  An emergent God invites us to retain the language and rituals of our human story while exploring bold new possibilities that are exciting, and sometimes a bit challenging.  That said, I should note that one thing about this I am struggling with is whether we should extend these ideas beyond human consciousness to the differing levels of consciousness present in animals and potentially even in plants.  And for that matter, what about other intelligent life forms that likely exist in this vast universe – or even a multiverse?  Does this imply there is a pantheon of different emergent “gods” spread across time and space? 

Mind blowing isn’t it!  I hope this gives you some good theological thoughts to chew on over the summer.  What we reflect on in Sunday morning worship can present some powerful ideas and implications. I am reminded of a great quote about Sunday worship, from the author Annie Dillard, who said, “Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews.”

So, I say to you this morning, let us be bold in our theological journey!  It’s how we roll as Unitarian Universalists, and it’s why we have communities like this one to support us in our explorations.  Each of us must examine new ideas to see what might be a good spiritual fit, and this often changes over time.  I hope sermons like this one will help stimulate your imaginations.

Readings

Opening Words

“Where Does the Temple Begin, Where Does It End?” by Mary Oliver

Where Does the Temple Begin, Where Does It End?
There are things you can’t reach. But you can reach out to them, and all day long.
The wind, the bird flying away. The idea of God.
And it can keep you as busy as anything else, and happier.
The snake slides away; the fish jumps, like a little lily, out of the water and back in; the goldfinches singfrom the unreachable top of the tree.
I look; morning to night I am never done with looking.
Looking I mean not just standing around, but standing aroundas though with your arms open.
And thinking: maybe something will come, someshining coil of wind, or a few leaves from any old tree – they are all in this too.
And now I will tell you the truth. Everything in the worldcomes.
At least, closer.
And, cordially.
Like the nibbling, tinsel-eyed fish; the unlooping snake.Like goldfinches, little dolls of goldfluttering around the corner of the sky
of God, the blue air.

First Reading         

excerpt from The Over-Soul by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1841)

“The Supreme Critic on the errors of the past and the present, and the only prophet of that which must be, is that great nature in which we rest as the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere; that Unity, that Over-Soul, within which every man’s particular being is contained and made one with all other; that common heart of which all sincere conversation is the worship, to which all right action is submission; that overpowering reality which confutes our tricks and talents, and constrains every one to pass for what he is, and so to speak from his character and not from his tongue, and which evermore tends to pass into our thought and hand and become wisdom and virtue and power and beauty.  We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles.  Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty; to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE.”
Second Reading    excerpt from Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s Foreword in A God That Could Be Real by Nancy Ellen Abrams
“For centuries we have been stuck in a futile battle between believers and atheists, with each lampooning and denouncing each other’s beliefs.  It is my hope that [… we can enjoy] a new revival of true cultural dialogue, debate, and exploration.  We must move beyond the polemics and polarization that have come to characterize so much scientific-religious and interfaith discourse in our time.
The God that I worship is not one that sits in Heaven, apprehensively worrying that humanity will discover his (or her) secrets.  No, not at all.  The God that I believe in commands us to love God with all our mind and wants us to keep learning and discovering and exploring every inch or millimeter (or nanometer) of creation.  Over time, we graduate from more simplistic understandings of God to richer and more complex ones.

Far too often God is a “God of the gaps” – where we fill our lack of knowledge with a belief that there must be a God.  For many centuries, when our understanding of the universe extended just to the planets and heavenly stars, we thought God resided just beyond.  Then as our knowledge of the universe expanded, we have pushed God farther and farther out in space in time.  God must be much more than just a placeholder for what we do not yet know.”
 

“The Unclimbed Mountain, the Unfinished Trail” | Kevin Carson

A Sermon Given at the First Universalist Parish in Chester, Vermont, October 22, 2017

There is a saying that we are made strong not by winning easy battles, but by losing hard-fought ones. Failure can be an opening to the grace of personal growth.

There is a famous line in a Robert Burns poem, written in November 1785, that goes, “The best-
laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley,” or as it is usually translated, “The best laid plans
of mice and men often go awry.” The line comes from Burns’ poem, To a Mouse, on Turning
Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough. The context, as the poem’s name suggests, is that he is
apologizing to a poor field mouse whose nest he inadvertently plowed up when turning the soil
in his garden on the heels of winter. Seeing the destroyed nest, he realized that the poor
creature would be unlikely to survive the coming cold weather, despite all the time and effort she had expended in preparing her nest. Her work has been in vain, and she will be forced to
accept defeat. It is a harsh lesson in the cruelty of circumstance to be sure.

All of us may have to face such a harsh lesson in the face of failure someday, but fortunately,
the numerous failures we encounter in life’s journey rarely result in such dire consequences.
Most of the time, the worst we are likely to face is disappointment, frustration, anger, and
perhaps a sense of guilt or shame. When we fail to achieve our goals, we might suffer
financially or professionally in some way, but life usually allows us the grace to recover and
move on, though it may take tremendous effort and considerable time in some cases. It is
simply a fact of being human that our best laid plans will indeed often go awry. After all, who
among us has not failed to achieve some goal in life? But, unless it is a truly fatal turn of events,
the lessons we learn can help us understand what it means to be human.

There are many kinds of failure, but I want to broadly divide them into two categories. There are incidental failures, which may be quite significant or very small, in which I include any failure to complete plans or reach goals due to obstacles or circumstances which may or may not be under our control. There are also failures of character, a category that is uniquely human so far as we know, which are moments when we act in willful opposition to our better selves – what we might call “sin” in traditional theological language. While there are differences between the two kinds of failure, they can sometimes be bound together around a single event, and how we react to both kinds of failure can be very similar. Both can produce very negative emotions, especially fear and shame, and we may find ourselves dwelling on these negative feelings for a substantial amount of time. Even relatively trivial failures can leave us ruminating for days on what we should have said or done differently in some situation, and some deeper feelings may stay with us for a lifetime. It is important that we process our feelings and integrate our failures into the narrative of our identity without simply denying them or forgetting the lessons learned, but we must be careful not to allow our failures to define us.

In the reading this morning from my favorite spiritual writer, Belden C. Lane, he uses the idea of
the “unclimbed mountain” or the unfinished trail as an example of a real incidental failure on a small scale, which can be seen as a metaphor for the more significant failures we experience. It
comes from his book, Backpacking with the Saints: Wilderness Hiking as Spiritual Practice, so
from the title you could anticipate he would draw on the experiential spirituality of nature.

Anyone who likes to hike or climb mountains can easily appreciate that sometimes reaching our objective is just not in the cards. Weather, fatigue, or simply overly ambitious plans will force us to turn back or alter our plans on occasion. Just think of the many people who have attempted to climb mountains like Everest, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars and making every preparation they could imagine, only to turn back before reaching the summit. I haven’t experienced something quite so expensive, but my wife and I did once travel all the way to Alaska’s Denali National Park for a planned multi-day backpacking trip only to spend one long day hiking in the wilderness before bugging out. For a number of reasons, mostly involving our comfort zone within an unfamiliar landscape, we decided to radically change our plans and return to civilization. We still had a good trip, but it was not at all what we had planned.

I can think of many unclimbed mountains and unfinished trails in my life, both real and
metaphorical, and I’m sure all of you can too. What Lane is trying to say in his book is that
these are useful gifts for helping us see our inherent value and authentic selves, “failure points
us back to the true measure of our worth, to something grounded in nothing that we do, but only what we are.” Who we really are is not diminished by failing to climb the mountain, but this can be hard for us to see sometimes. It is easy to dwell on the failure and imbue it with more significance than it deserves. External factors and our own psychological constitution can also leave us trapped in a persona that makes it hard to admit defeat. We can create unrealistic
expectations for personal perfection, and we can crash very hard when we fall short. As Lane
notes, “In our consumer-driven society, an image of flawless proficiency is crucial to success.
To admit failure in a world that judges value by polished surfaces is to lose your edge as a
commodity in the marketplace. This is as true, sadly, in higher education and religion as it is in
business, sports, and politics.”

Even just the fear of failing to live up to our expectations can evoke strong feelings of shame, or leave us paralyzed and filled with dread. As we learn in his book, Lane’s personal struggles
with feelings of inadequacy as a graduate theology student at Princeton even evoked thoughts
of suicide at one point. He describes how ignorant he felt the first year among the professors
and other students who discussed unfamiliar topics, and how he would run to the library to try to keep up. He felt like a fraud and doubted his own abilities. And, as a theology student
struggling with the search for truth and meaning, he felt unworthy in the eyes of God. He might
have dropped out, or worse, were it not for a candid discussion with a fellow student who
admitted feeling the same way.

So, let me first say a little more about the way Lane’s book is structured to help you understand
where I am about to go with this. Lane’s book is organized into chapters that pair a spiritual
topic with a saint or famous historical figure from Christianity, and he then uses a personal
wilderness experience as the context for diving deeper. The chapter that inspired this sermon,
for example, is titled, Failure: Mt. Whitney and Martin Luther. The reason he chose Martin
Luther is that Luther’s great theological breakthrough was the result of his struggle with his own sense of inadequacy and sinfulness. Luther not only felt he had been a failure in the eyes of his parents by pursuing the monastic life instead of becoming a lawyer, he felt his vocation as a monk was flawed, and that he too was unworthy in the eyes of God. Then, one evening in 1512, Luther was reading Paul’s letter to the Romans, and he had a sudden realization that what he did or did not do with his life was not what mattered. What he was – a human being created in the image of God – was all that mattered, and that even serious failures of character, our most egregious sins, were not beyond the reach of God’s grace. In theological terms, he embraced a doctrine of salvation by grace, rather than the idea of salvation by works. We did not need to purchase our salvation through acts of contrition or earning merit through our deeds, in fact, none of that really mattered. We were already saved by being worthy as human beings, and with his particular beliefs, because of the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. The theologian Paul Tillich called Luther’s epiphany: learning to “accept his acceptance.” This idea that we are all worthy in the eyes of God, and faith was all that we really need, resonated throughout the Protestant Reformation, of course, and it was certainly central in the theology of our Universalist ancestors. And though our tradition has become more pluralistic and less Christian in recent times, it echoes still in the First Principle of Unitarian Universalism: we affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person.

No matter how broken or sinful we feel, or how much we have failed to be our best authentic
selves, we possess inherent worth and dignity. Indeed, it is often in the hearts of the most
broken among us – those whose failures are many – that we may come to see the divine light
shining the brightest. Lane recounts a wonderful Sufi story to illustrate this point:
The disciple of a Sufi master once came to his teacher, saying, “Master, I’ve done
terrible things in my life. I know Allah can never forgive me. What can I do?” “Ah, my
son,” answered the master, “Don’t you see? All of us are connected to God by a piece
of rope, one that is the same length for every one of us. When we sin, alas, we cut the
rope that connects us to the Holy One. But when we repent, God is eager to tie the
pieces together again. Every time you tie a knot in a rope, of course, it gets shorter.
Hence, those with more knots in their rope are that much closer to God. So trust, my
son, in the forgiveness of Allah, the Merciful and Compassionate One. He loves to tie
knots!”

I love this image of the knots in the rope which connects us with the divine, and if the theistic
language doesn’t work for you, think of the knots as markers in our personal stories that note
times when we have experienced failures and integrated their meaning into our story – periods
in our lives when we were forced to overcome adversity and disappointment, or make peace
with great failures of character. Some knots may be much bigger than others.

Each human being is a story, and sometimes our greatest failures become the most interesting
and important chapters. They may be gateways to possibilities we never imagined. There is an
old Quaker saying, “way closes, way opens,” and sometimes it is only after the way slams shut
in front of us that we realize we can turn around and look for different opportunities. Perhaps a
layoff from employment makes you rethink your career or vocation. Maybe the end of a
relationship frees your more authentic self to explore new possibilities. The hard part can be
letting go of expectations, and being receptive to where life may be trying to lead you.

So, let the unclimbed mountains, the unfinished trails, the many knots in our ropes – whatever
metaphor you choose to use – become a reminder that your failures in life do not define you.
They may even make you stronger or wiser. We are not the knots. We are the whole rope that
remains connected to the sacred. We are all worthy and beloved beings, born with inherent
worth and dignity.

It is my hope that our faith can help others realize this, and that our faith communities will
always be a refuge for the world-weary souls struggling to find their own sense of worth.
I am thinking that one day, if I live to a ripe old age, I might reflect on the lessons of life and
write a book titled, Trails I Never Hiked to Destinations I Never Reached. I’m sure it would be a
real page-turner, filled with the wisdom that only the grace of failure can teach

Readings

Opening Words
“A Warning to My Readers” by Wendell Berry
Do not think me gentle
because I speak in praise
of gentleness, or elegant
because I honor the grace
that keeps this world. I am
a man crude as any,
gross of speech, intolerant,
stubborn, angry, full
of fits and furies. That I
may have spoken well
at times, is not natural.
A wonder is what it is.

Reading an excerpt from “Backpacking with the Saints: Wilderness Hiking as Spiritual
Practice” by Belden C. Lane

There are times on the trail when you have to turn back. Nothing is more discouraging. Maybe
you’ve done something stupid, like lost the map. Changing weather conditions may have made
it dangerous or foolhardy to go any further. Maybe your gear is soaking wet or the black flies
have become unbearable. Sometimes you simply don’t have it in you to go on. Whatever
brings you to that point, you admit defeat and grudgingly head back toward the trailhead.
…
As I think back on my failure to climb Mt. Whitney, I find comfort in the fact that John Muir didn’t make it on his first try either. On the morning of October 16, 1873, he started out for the peak, leaving his horse to graze in a meadow in one of the lower canyons. After hiking all day, he couldn’t find wood to build a fire so he continued climbing into the night, taking bearings by the stars. “By midnight,” he wrote in his journal, “I was among the summit needles [though still shy of the top]. There I had to dance all night to keep from freezing, and was feeble and starving next morning.” He finally had to turn back. But a week later Muir returned to scale the peak by a direct route from the east side. It was the first time anyone had made the ascent.
We don’t always succeed. But sometimes failure proves to be a better gift. Failure points us
back to the true measure of our worth, to something grounded in nothing that we do, but only
what we are. The cloud-covered majesty of Mt. Whitney, the mountain I didn’t climb, will always remind me of that.
 

What Can We Do | Rev. Jane Dwinell

A Sermon Given at the First Universalist Parish in Chester, Vermont, May 28, 2017

A month ago, I was with 200,000 other concerned citizens at the People’s March for Climate, Jobs, Justice on a sweltering 93 degree day in Washington, DC. There was not enough water — or porta-potties — for all of us, but we survived. A New Orleans-style brass band kept our spirits up, along with the cheering people on the sidewalk. Afterwards, my husband and I (along with a lot of other people) gratefully collapsed at a sidewalk cafe for cold drinks, then made our way to our hotel for a cool shower and a nap in air-conditioned comfort.

Some day, before too long, if nothing changes, we will no longer have the gift of sidewalk cafes selling imported wine and beer, hotels with showers and air conditioning, or transportation to get us there. 

James Howard Kuntsler has written a series of novels that take place in such a future. Set in New York state on the Vermont border, he envisions a world without fossil fuels, transportation only by foot or horse, available food only what is grown in the area, and health care provided by the last remaining doctor without many supplies, and an herbalist. Luckily, there is enough hard cider to keep people happy, but the world is ugly and without hope. There is conflict, and people are struggling.

We don’t have to have that future. I believe we can create a world where everyone will have enough. Enough won’t include Mexican strawberries in January, Chilean grapes, New Zealand beef, or French wine. Enough won’t include a car for everyone, a 5,000 square foot home for a family of three, or open heart surgery and hip replacements for everyone who wants one. But, I think a world can be created where we will all have enough to survive — and thrive — but we must start work on it now. We have no time to lose.

As Bill McKibben said in an article in this week’s Seven Days: 

“In the long run, the damage that [President Trump]’s doing on environmental stuff is the stuff that we’ll never get back. The thing that he’s costing us on climate change is the thing we have the least of, which is time. He’s president during an absolutely critical four years, and it’s obviously going to be a wasted four years. We don’t have four years to spare.”

Winona Laduke, Native American activist, put it this way:

“In our prophecies as Anishinaabe people, we are told that there is a choice between two paths. This is known as the time of the Seventh Fire. And in the time of the Seventh Fire, we are told that we, as Anishinaabe people, would have a choice between two paths. One path, they say, would be well worn, but scorched. The other path, they say, would be not well worn, and it would be green. And it would be our choice upon which path to embark.

“So this is the scorched path. This is what fracking looks like from the air. It is what is known as extreme extraction. Extreme extraction is what occurs when you have consumed as much of the fossil fuels resources of this world as we have. In my life and your life, we’ve consumed about half the world’s known fossil fuel resources, right? … I had a good time. Did you all have a good time? Let’s be honest. It’s been a blast. We’ve had a really good time consuming at this level. … did you guys all get your flowers from Colombia this week? You know what I’m saying. Sometimes I just like to order that Fiji water—you know what I’m talking about?—because I feel like I should have water from the furthest part of the planet. You understand what I’m saying. This is like—it is absurdity, the level of the fossil fuels economy and our level of consumption and entitlement associated with that. We are complicit. That is the fact.”

It’s time to choose the second path, the green one, the not-well-worn one.

But, how do we do that?

Bill McKibben has one answer, one that I agree with:

We can do three things —

We can lobby our elected officials, attend marches and rallies, and speak up whenever we can.

We can live “smaller.”

And, mostly importantly, we can create community.

We are lucky here in Vermont that our Congressmen are smart guys, and on the right side of this issue. I don’t know about you, but I have spent more time in the last five months contacting them than I have in all the years they’ve been in office. Even though Leahy, Sanders and Welch are right on the climate change issue, I believe they still need support and praise for what they do do. I’ve contacted my representatives in Montpelier as well. As citizens, I believe it is our duty to stay engaged with the political process — no matter how challenging it feels right now.

I attend every march I can. Luckily, I am physically able, and financially stable that I can do that. If marches aren’t your thing, or there are other reasons why you can’t go, consider supporting others in your community who do want to go, but for some reason can’t — if you have the money, you can pay their way to the march, or at least pack them a lunch and a bag of cookies for the trip. When the Standing Rock Sioux put out a call last fall for clergy to go to North Dakota for a prayer vigil in opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline, I was not in a position to be able to go. So I checked what I would have spent on transportation and lodging, and sent that money to other UU clergy who could go, but didn’t have the funds.

It can feel frustrating to lobby (or not) our elected officials — clearly, many of them do not listen to their constituents about this and many other issues.  But, living smaller — that I can do. I have spent the last 35 years living smaller, and teaching others how to do it.

The culmination of living smaller for me was when my husband and I designed and built a tiny house on wheels, and lived in it for two years. If you need to put your life and your possessions into 160 square feet, you learn quickly what you actually need, and what you don’t need. We downsized (after already living in a 700 square foot house) for the tiny house, only leaving four boxes of photo albums and memorabilia behind in a friend’s basement. We’re back to living in a 700 square foot house now, but we maintain our “tiny house” lifestyle. 

For me, living smaller means I think about every need or want I have, every decision I make, in terms of the planetary and financial resources it will take to get or do that thing. There are many ways to the same end, but the planetary and financial cost will differ, depending on your choice.

An example — coffee. Never mind that climate change is affecting the coffee trees, and we may not be able to enjoy this great beverage that much longer. Think of all the different ways there are to buy coffee, and to prepare it. You can buy it organically and fair trade raised, or you can buy the store brand at your favorite grocer’s. You can buy it ground or whole bean. You can buy the raw beans, and roast them yourself. You can prepare the coffee in an old fashioned percolator, with a Keurig machine, in a Mr Coffee-type electric machine, with a French press, with an espresso machine, in an old aluminum pot over a campfire, or with boiling water poured through a reusable filter. Or buy it already made at your favorite coffee shop, Dunkin’ Donuts or mini-mart.

Didn’t think coffee could be so complicated, did you?

I choose to make coffee with organic, free trade beans that I buy in bulk and grind myself, with a simple, reusable filter and boiling water from my electric kettle powered by my solar panels. This is the choice I have made, the one I think has the least impact to the planet.

How about drying clothes? Do you just toss them in the dryer, or do you take the time to hang them up on a clothesline or drying rack? Or eating leftovers? (You do eat leftovers, right?) Do you eat them cold, heat them in a microwave, on the top of the stove, or in a solar oven?

We are privileged enough to have choices, but not all of them are equal. Al Gore was right when he talked about An Inconvenient Truth. The time will come when things may get inconvenient — never mind the extra time it takes to hang our clothes on the line, we may be washing them by hand. We make think that our appliances of convenience save us time, but they also consume a vast amount of planetary resources — in the metals and minerals needed for manufacture, in the manufacturing process itself, in the packaging and transportation costs to get the product to us, to the electricity needed to run it, and finally our money that has to pay for the whole thing.

The next time you’re about to hop in the car to go to the store, stop and ask yourself, “Do I really need what I’m about to buy?” “Is there another way to get what I want?” “Is there another way to get to the store?” — riding with a friend, walking, riding a bike, waiting until you have to go to town for something else. I expect y’all live in the country — or at least out of walking and biking distance to stores and services — I did that for many years myself — but that’s one reason my husband and I left the Northeast Kingdom to move to Montpelier and then Burlington — we now walk or bike or take public transportation to almost everything, unless we are leaving town. Saves money, saves the planet — just another example of living smaller.

But, finally, and most importantly, there is creating, building and sustaining community. That’s what a congregation is for — to create a community where everyone can rely on one another in good times and bad. As the planet heats up and resources become scarcer and/or more expensive, we will need one another even more than we do now. The gardeners and farmers among us will need to share food with those who aren’t able to grow it themselves. The strong ones will need to cut, split and stack firewood for those who can’t. We will need handy-people to repair and maintain our homes and community buildings. We will need health care professionals to do house calls, and provide basic advice and care when our health care system implodes. We will need to look in on one another when extreme weather hits, as scientists tell us it will with increasing frequency. 

But climate change is not just about us. We need to care for those that we will never even meet — those who are already being seriously affected by climate change right now — those in drought-stricken areas of Africa, those living on islands rapidly going underwater in the South Pacific, those dying of tropical diseases that are now moving rapidly north and south away from their home at equator.

Paul Hawken, in his latest book, Drawdown, offers 100 things to do that will most likely help to prevent or slow serious climate change. He assembled a team of scientists to look into solutions and rate them in terms of efficiency and cost, and ranked them in order. Several in the top ten will not surprise you — an increase in onshore wind development, solar farms, and rooftop solar, and an increase in forests by reclaiming our tropical rainforests and encouraging “silvopasturing” — raising livestock in the woods.

But the others were more surprising to me.

The number one most helpful thing we can do — which will reduce CO2 emissions by 90 gigatons — is to stop the production of HFCs for refrigerators and, in particular, air conditioners. You may remember the bruhaha about CFCs destroying the ozone layer in the 1908s? The industry went to work on that problem and developed HFCs to take their place. The ozone hole healed — all was well, right? Nope. Turns out the HFCs contribute incredibly to increasing the CO2 in the atmosphere. And, as the climate continues to heat, people living in places like India and the Middle East will need AC simply to survive. There are new, safer technologies to provide cooling, but they are much more expensive, and poor countries like India may simply not be able to afford them. One more reason to have a fairer distribution of wealth in the world — and for our country to its part to help poorer countries.

Two more solutions in the top ten had to do with food. Many of us already know about the destructive practices of conventional agriculture — whether it is raising plants or animals. We are lucky here in Vermont to have a strong agricultural base, and much of it organic. You will probably not be surprised to know that choosing a plant-based diet is of significant help in slowing climate change — 66 gigatons of CO2 removed if we ate more plants and less meat. This doesn’t mean giving up meat altogether, but having plants become a central part of a meal, with meat as a condiment, while being sure to choose meat that has been raised sustainably and not from factory farms. Sure, it’s more expensive, but if you’re eating less, the cost should balance out. You can do as chef and cookbook author, Mark Bittman, does — be vegan until 6 — when you can then add animal food to your meal. Or join the “Meatless Mondays” movement. Or become vegan or vegetarian if that suits you. Once again, we have many choices.

However, the other food-based solution in the top ten is to reduce food waste. If all the agricultural land used to grow food that is later thrown away — either at the farm, at the processing plant, at the store, or in your own kitchen — was a country, it would be the third largest country in the world!  Not only does rotting food produce methane, another greenhouse gas — we need that food to feed the world’s hungry people, of which there will be many more because of climate-change-caused droughts and floods. Think of that the next time to you forget to eat your leftovers!

But, the final top-ten solutions surprised me the most — educating girls and women, and provide free family planning services. There are simply too many people on our planet, and if girls and women can understand their choices, and choose smaller families, we could reduce 120 gigatons of CO2! So, perhaps the most significant thing you can do to slow climate change is to donate to Planned Parenthood and other organizations that provide family planning services world wide and/or organizations that support education for girls around the world.

Knowing that climate change is not just about us hit home for me in January 2016 when I went to Lesvos, Greece as part of a medical team that received the refugees as they came ashore on flimsy life rafts with inadequate lifejackets. As many of you may know, the Syrian War started partly because of climate change. For many years, Syria suffered a climate change-induced drought that caused many farmers to move into the cities to find work to support their families. Crowded conditions and a lack of enough food caused unrest, and a civil war was born.

The refugees seeking safe harbor in Greece came from Syria, and from Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and North Africa. They came with nothing but the clothes on their backs, their passports and papers tied around their necks in plastic bags. They came with the elderly in wheelchairs, with the family dog or cat, with babes tucked inside their father’s coats, and with many, many scared and wet children. These refugees were not terrorists, but people simply seeking safety, food, shelter, and peace for their families.

Day after day, in January, with freezing seas and cold winds, these refugees arrived after paying exorbitant prices to smugglers who piled them into boats with small outboard motors and enough gas, hopefully, to get them across the five miles of open Aegean Sea. Some poor man was given a brief lesson in running the motor — most of whom had never even been in a boat — and told to drive. They arrived sopping wet, hypothermic, hungry and cold. We helped them into dry clothes, warmed them with tea and wood fires, cared for their injuries and fears, and sent them off to a UN-run refugee camp. Boat after boat, day after day, sometimes as many as 500 people arriving per day.

These are the faces of climate change. These are the people that I see when I am making a decision about what to buy, what to do, and where to send my money. These are the people I see when I contact my legislators, when I plant my garden, when I work to build community.

They remind me that we are not alone on this journey. They remind me that we truly are connected in the interdependent web of life.They remind me that it is up to all of us, working together, to solve this greatest challenge of our time.

Amen.

A Science Sermon | Nicholas Boke

A Sermon Given at the First Universalist Parish in Chester, Vermont, May 7, 2017

Science is probably all we can really count on. Not science in the sense of what we know now, but science in the sense of a process by which we ask and answer the big questions that we face as individuals, as a species, as inhabitants of this planet and solar system.
Not “scientism,” which actually means simply using the scientific process, but which comes with the connotations of all -isms, as a faith-based system, a set of unquestioned and unquestionable assumptions.

Nope. Science. The processes that Sir Francis Bacon was setting in motion  400 years ago, when he wrote, for example, that “to invent is to discover that we know not, and not to recover what we already know,” because—yes, it was he who said it—“knowledge is itself power,” adding that such processes take time, noting that “to deliberate about useful things is the safest delay” and “half of science is putting forth the right questions.”

Science. 

The process by which we try to figure out everything from how sodium bonds with chloride to make salt, why birds sing, how far it is to the closest “goldilocks”—neither too hot nor too cold—planet, and what makes the human mind the human mind.

That last one, the stuff about the brain, is the one I’ve been paying the most attention to over the past decade or so. Reading books and articles, then viewing lots of my work with teaching and learning through the lens of the question, “What is the brain doing now?” 

Every now and then I meet a neurobiologist or a brain scientist or whatever they call themselves, and I feel like I’m in the presence of some … well, some sort of priest, or at least acolyte, somebody who’s as close to the divine as one can be.

Not because there’s anything divine or even really special about the human brain. Just because it’s there, allowing me to type these words, to read these words while you listen to these words, think about these words or maybe hope that Marilyn brought deviled eggs today, or think about how your son or daughter or grandson or nephew is faring in nursery school or graduate school or with his or her new partner—or whatever that amazing doo-hickey in your head is doing right now as I say the words, “whatever that amazing doo-hickey in your head is doing right now.”

So it was no wonder that when I read that Brown University was culminating its Brain Week with the Brown Brain Fair on Sunday, March 19, I headed over to Sayles Hall to see what was up.
It wasn’t just a matter of seeing what they had to say about the brain. It was bigger. There I’d be, amid some really smart people who’d be manning (or is it personning these days?) tables offering information about everything from Autism to neuroplasticity.

See, because I’d been studying—that’s a loose use of the term—what the research was showing us about the brain, I knew that I’d probably encounter the cutting edge of some of these topics. 

And please remember that when I was messing around with the idea of science while introducing the subject of this sermon, I didn’t call science “what we know about” various things, but “the process by which we try to figure out” various things.

So I knew, for example, that brain researchers (and others) have been studying and debating things like whether there is something that can reasonably be referred to as “human nature,” or whether we’re just a bundle of cultural characteristics attached to a few pretty basic instincts; and whether there is a “self” somewhere in the brain, or whether it’s just an illusion that the brain develops to make life easier for the being it’s in charge of. I knew that some of the older issues—whether there are specific locations in the brain for specific kinds of knowledge, whether the brain can regenerate lost skills, and the like—had been resolved, or so it would appear. 

And I knew that brain researchers have a long way to go.

I know this because of my old friend Steve, a nuclear physicist whom I met in kindergarten in 1952. He’s spent 25 years working on controlled fusion—you know, the possibility that the result of fusing two atoms could be controlled so as not to make a hydrogen bomb, but to release energy that could be used to generate electricity. 

Twenty-five years, essentially messing around with the same formulae in the hopes that the planned experiment, called “ignition,” when lasers would be aimed at some atoms in the hope that more energy would be released than it took to run the lasers, would take place.

Twenty-five years. He finally retired, not long after an only moderately successful effort. He still goes back to the lab to lend a hand from time to time. He’s still hopeful.

Will it work? Will we ever successfully control these fusion reactions to produce the power we need? 

Who knows?

And that’s not just a rhetorical answer. Nobody knows. And nobody will know until we do it, until somebody somewhere can control the energy released by fusing two atoms. Until we do it, we don’t know, either whether it’s possible or impossible. That’s science. You don’t know until you know. You can’t ever say it won’t work. All you’ll be able to say is that it works when it works. 

Trial and error. 

Scientific research.

If the likes of Steve don’t continue working on the problem, we’ll never know.

That’s science.

Science like that pursued by a couple of graduate students at a table sponsored by Brown’s Metcalf Infant Research Lab. One is studying whether babies learn nouns first or verbs. 

Which is it? I asked.

Nouns. Hmm. Makes sense, doesn’t it? Nouns are often things. Things are what make up the world. Makes sense that’s what the brain would want to know about.

This conversation led us off into a discussion of the is-there-human-nature-or-not? debate. Not to answer it. Just to connect it with this research.

And then I asked, Is it nouns first in all languages?

No, he responded. In Mandarin, infants learn verbs first.

Hmm.  Do verbs play a different role in Mandarin from the one they play in English?

Yeah, he said, it’s a more verb-centric language. 

How so?

In Mandarin, you don’t have to always state the noun; it can be implied in the verb.
So we continued with the human-nature-or-not debate.

But I walked away without asking the big question: Why study this at all?

I didn’t ask because I knew the answer. 

Scientists study this because it’s there to be studied. It’s part of the world we live in. It’s better to figure out how the world works and why than not.

Why? Because you never know. You never know what any discovery will do, how it might help, what it might be used for, what it might tell you about things you don’t even know you don’t know anything about. 

This is, of course, not to say that all scientific efforts are benign. We discovered radioactivity over a hundred years ago. A half-century later, we discovered that it could be used to kill more people at one fell swoop than anything we’d ever discovered, leading the Manhattan Project’s J. Robert Oppenheimer to quote from the Bhagavad Gita on watching the first atomic explosion, saying “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” A decade or so later, we started to use it to produce power. In relatively short order, we discovered that producing power like this came with big downsides called Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. 

So, Steve and his buddies got to work.

Or, to use another example, while we’re all benefiting—often without even realizing it—from the computer-based safety features that come with our automobiles, with the algorithms that allow me to find out the dates of Francis Bacon’s life with a few keystrokes, with all the pre-artificial-intelligence-like activities that so much of the modern world relies on, there’s Mr. Physics himself, Stephen Hawking, warning us about the likely downsides of this kind of research.

Speaking to the Times of London, this long-time supporter of artificial intelligence research suggests that the only way to protect ourselves from what the headline refers to as a “robot uprising” if we’re not careful with where we take the research—and where it takes us—may be world government. He explains that “We need to be quicker to identify such threats and act before they get out of control…. [But] this might mean some form of world government..., [which, however,] might become a tyranny.”

Science. 

It’s given us anti-biotics, which have … enabled? caused? forced? … the evolution of superbugs for which there is no cure. It’s given us treatments that allow us to live longer and longer, though some of us live out those last years essentially quarantined in institutions, or in demented states. 

And so on.

To say nothing of the periodic revelation of scientists who have faked their research for personal or professional reasons. To say nothing of the findings—like those that told us to switch from butter to margarine—that further research indicates were incorrect—like those telling us that the kind of saturated fats found in margarine actually do more harm than the animal fats that come with butter; to say nothing of the debates over extremes like vegan diets versus paleo-diets.

And then there’s the fact that science just isn’t as sexy as what most religions have to offer. Here’s what Stephen Dunn has to say about sending his daughter to summer camp at the Smithville Methodist Church:

Then we took our seats in the church and the children sang a song about the Ark, and Hallelujah and one in which they had to jump up and down for Jesus. I can't remember ever feeling so uncertain about what's comic, what's serious. 

Evolution is magical but devoid of heroes. You can't say to your child "Evolution loves you." The story stinks of extinction and nothing exciting happens for centuries. I didn't have a wonderful story for my child and she was beaming. All the way home in the car she sang the songs, 
occasionally standing up for Jesus. There was nothing to do but drive, ride it out, sing along in silence. 

That’s it. There’s science at its bare-bones most basic. “Evolution stinks of extinction and nothing exciting happens for centuries.” 

That’s it. A far cry from an all-powerful God creating this and that out of nothing, just because he wants to, or Sumerian gods or Hindu gods or Aztec gods battling it out for this or that, taking sides with us or them. With suffering that has meaning, with death that offers fulfillment, with big questions that some being actually knows the answers to.

None of the magic and drama. None of the clarity and certainty. None of the purpose and direction. 

Science doesn’t offer us this.

But it does offer the possibility of, eventually, helping us understand what’s really going on. Not why—there’s probably no answer for that—but what, and how, and for how long, and where.
These are really troubling times to live in, with politics all around the world twisting and turning toward inwardness and hatred and violence, with overall climates and specific weather patterns clearly taking new and probably troublesome tacks, with species disappearing while new microbes invent themselves in ways that may make us sicker than those that we’ve conquered.
Through it all, though, I periodically come upon amazing comfort. 

This may come from reading things like what Alexander von Humboldt had to say to the poet Goethe as he began to understand in the early 1800s how amazingly complex nature was, when he wrote, “Nature must be experienced through feeling. Those who want to describe the world by simply classifying plants, animals and rocks will never get close to it.”

Or reading what ethnologist Pierre Clastre discovered about the place of war in primitive societies from his years of research in the Amazon basin. 

Or from watching a NASA video about the seven earth-like planets orbiting a dwarf star at the center of the Trappist One system that a telescope in Chile recently discovered.

Or listening to the young woman at the Brain Fair describing what she’s finding about how babies learn language. Or listening to my friend Steve talking about his hopes that eventually the problem he spent a quarter of a century researching will eventually bear fruit.

I read or watch or hear any of these things and I’m comforted, exhilarated,  that people like this are here, that they exist, that they’re trying to figure out what’s going on, how it works, what it might have to tell us.

No, it’s not as comforting as the idea that some deity cares about me.

But it tells me that there are people who understand that it’s up to us to figure it all out, and who’re willing to dedicate their lives to the endeavor.

Science is no religion, and these people are no saints.

But they may be as close as we can get.

In Praise of Diversity

Kevin M. Carson
A Sermon Given at the First Universalist Parish in Chester, Vermont, April 23, 2017

Our Unitarian Universalist faith is a celebration of diverse beliefs, and this is one of our great strengths in an increasingly diverse world. 

If you log into Facebook, or open your email, or even turn on the television these days, it is clear that America is a land divided.  And though the focus has been on politics in the last few months, it is not just a matter of Democrats versus Republicans, or whether we are “pro-Trump” or “anti-Trump.”  We are divided by opinions on race and gender equality, and whether or not our religion really does require us to feed the hungry and welcome the stranger.  We are divided by an economic system that has created huge inequality between the “haves” and the “have nots,” and we disagree on who or what is to blame, and what we should do to fix this problem – even if it needs fixing at all.  We look around and try to discern who is friend and who is foe.  We align ourselves with camps of like-minded folks on issues like immigration and climate change, and too often we are unwilling to even listen to differing points of view.  For some people, even objective facts seem to be open to dispute these days, if the so-called “facts” disagree with their preconceptions about the way things “really are.”  There are many boxes into which each of us can be neatly categorized and sorted, and we can choose to live isolated lives among our own kind, all the while suspicious of “the other” who is not like us.  Our national motto, E Pluribus, Unum, “out of many, one,” seems impossibly naïve, a relic from a more optimistic time.  Indeed, we are plagued with divisiveness, perhaps the most we have seen in our country since the Civil War.  

There is a difference between divisiveness and diversity, but far too often, because of our distrust of “the other” in whatever form he or she may take, we allow our differences to create barriers where none should exist.  In our worst moments, our biases can erupt in open hostility and even violence.  This is very troubling, because it is a simple fact that America is becoming an increasingly diverse country in many ways.  The percentage of our population who are non-white continues to increase every year, across almost every ethnic minority, and sometime within the next few decades, America will soon become a minority-majority nation.  According to the most recent census statistics, 50.2 percent of children under the age of 5 are now minorities.  As this new generation ages, it is inevitable that the shift to a minority-majority nation will become the new normal.  This ethnic diversification will bring with it new challenges for communities that experience different cultures and languages, in many cases, for the first time.  

Religious affiliation is also shifting, with the fastest growing identity group being the so-called “nones” – that is, those who are either not religious at all, or those who say they are “spiritual but not religious.”  While America is still predominantly Protestant, there are sharp declines in membership in almost every Protestant denomination, and even small denominations like ours are either in decline, or see little or no growth, despite a growing overall population.  As Robert P. Jones says in his book, The End of White Christian America, “for most of the twentieth century, in White Christian America the terms ‘Christian’ and ‘Protestant’ were virtually synonymous.”  This is no longer the case.  Roman Catholics are experiencing shrinking numbers as well, and it is evidenced by the frequent local news reports of parish closings in mostly Catholic communities across New England.  Meanwhile, the number of people who belong to minority religious groups continues to increase with the increase in our diverse population. Religion in America today is not what it used to be fifty years ago, and the march toward a more secular and religiously pluralistic society is likely to continue for many years to come. There will always be those of us drawn to traditional religions and spiritual searching, but we are entering unexplored territory in the American religious landscape.  

We Unitarian Universalists embraced religious pluralism a long time ago, so if we play our cards right, I suggest we could experience a remarkable period of growth in the next few decades.  Many of the issues that mainstream Christian denominations are struggling with today are issues our Unitarian and Universalist ancestors debated and settled over a century ago.  In the early 1800s, ministers and other educated people began to learn about Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and other world religions and many of them appreciated the diverse wisdom these spiritual traditions expressed.  New England Transcendentalists were drawn to Eastern philosophy that emphasized the unity of all things.  Around the same time, advances in science, and especially Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, bolstered a nascent Humanism that has become the dominant theological identity in our movement.  By the late 1800s, we were already having debates about whether Unitarianism or Universalism was still a “Christian” faith.  And although the Universalists tended to see themselves more Christian perhaps, the very theological foundation of the faith left the path to religious pluralism wide open.  Universalism was founded on the idea of universal salvation, that all souls – even all of Creation – would be “saved” or reconciled with God in the end. There was no eternal hellfire that awaited even the most despicable among us.  Jesus was still considered the agent of salvation by most Universalists, but, unlike most of their Christian neighbors, Universalists did not require that one “believed” in Jesus Christ as the Savior in order to be saved.  When you take such an inclusive position about salvation, what does this mean for those with very different religious beliefs and practices?  The tent of our faith suddenly became much larger.  We would need a few more seats at the welcome table. 

Our spiritual ancestors were quick to recognize what Thomas Berry described as the “futility of exclusivism” among religious traditions.  We have continued to expand our inclusive faith, and we have opened our doors and hearts to anyone who wants to join us on the journey, as long as they are willing to abide by our values and principles.  These days, many Unitarian Universalists identify as Buddhist or Pagan, in addition the Christians, Jews, and Humanists we have long included in our ranks.  We are devout believers in God, and we are also atheists and agnostics, and everywhere in between.  We are mystics and Religious Naturalists, and we seekers who have trouble even articulating what we believe.  Sometimes you hear someone say, “You can believe anything you want and be a UU,” but that is only partially true.  You can believe almost anything you want as long as it does not demean or diminish the dignity and rights of others.  It would be hard to be a bigot or a fundamentalist of any faith and feel welcome in one of our congregations for very long.  We celebrate diversity in mutuality.  Our faith communities are joined in a covenantal relationship of love and respect.

After traveling around America in the 1830’s, the French diplomat and historian Alexis de Tocqueville famously described America as a “Great Experiment.”  Our young republic was something new in the global politics of the day, a nation where the government represented the consent and will of the people.  It was a democracy where, ideally at least, diverse voices and beliefs could be heard and debated to find common ground, and to promote the common good.  We were not perfect of course, and de Tocqueville rightly criticized the practice of slavery in America as contrary to our professed love of liberty and equality, and then as now, it was largely white male voices that enjoyed a privileged position in the political dialogue. But despite our imperfections, it was a glorious, if messy, experiment based on the idea that a diverse people could create a better world in voluntary community.

I believe our Unitarian Universalist faith is a similar “Great Experiment” in religious diversity.  In the decades since the 1961 merger of our parent denominations into the Unitarian Universalist Association, we have established a framework of Seven Principles, through a grassroots democratic process, to guide our diverse spiritual journey.  Our Principles are not dogma or doctrine like you see in most religious traditions; rather, they are a statement of shared values for how we join together in worship, and in the exploration of the sacred and the meaning of life. Personally, I would like to see the language of our Principles changed to reflect a more spiritual tone, but they are reasonably good as they are.  If you have ever experienced the process of wordsmithing a document by committee, you can appreciate the fact that we ever agreed on the language at all!  

Some of you may not know the Seven Principles of Unitarian Universalism by heart, or it may have been a while, so let me read them to you.

We affirm and promote:

1. The inherent worth and dignity of every person;
2. Justice, equity and compassion in human relations;
3. Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations;
4. A free and responsible search for truth and meaning;
5. The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large;
6. The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all;
7. Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.

It is true that we sometimes fail to live up to the principles we claim to embrace, but we try very hard.  Though I have mixed feelings about the recent controversy about white privilege in our denomination, and the resulting resignations of several denominational leaders, I think it reflects how seriously we take our Principles.  Sometimes, I fear we can be too critical of ourselves as a faith.  If anyone would like to talk more about what has transpired in the last few weeks, please feel free to talk to me about it after our worship service during the coffee hour.

I only wish more Americans would find their way to one of our congregations.  There are so many people who are hurting in the world and thirst for the kind of open and inclusive spirituality that we offer.  Our religious diversity is inherently welcoming.  Because we have embraced a universal understanding of the human story, we have often found ourselves in the vanguard of social justice movements from abolition, to women’s suffrage, to marriage equality.  Both the Unitarians and the Universalists were among the first denominations to ordain female clergy, and we are leading the way by far on the ordination of LGBT clergy today.  We have added many diverse voices to our faith story.  As any ecologist will tell you about ecosystems, there is strength and richness in diversity that is greater than the sum of its parts, and I think the same is true of religious movements.  We are simply better together when we share our unique insights and perspectives.  

Over the last few years, I have preached at fourteen UU congregations around New England, and I am always interested to see the art and symbolic altar objects in each congregation.  Most of our churches have very little art or religious symbols other than a familiar chalice, but some have a wonderful collection of religious symbols representing the diversity of the world’s faith traditions.  At St. Paul’s UU Church in Palmer, for example, the altar includes a cross, a menorah, a Buddha, a dancing depiction of the Hindu god Shiva, and a wild turkey feather.  I particularly like the turkey feather because it reminds me not only of our connection to the natural world, but also the spiritual wisdom of Native Americans.  The wild turkey is such a majestic bird, and it is a fitting symbol of the spirit of the American wilderness.  And especially in the last few months since the election, you often see a rainbow flag displayed prominently inside or outside of our churches. We proudly acknowledge both our religious and cultural diversity, and I think it is very important in today’s unfortunate political climate.

The message these religious symbols convey to me is that we have a deep Christian heritage, but we find inspiration from many other sources.  We value diversity in others, and take seriously the admonitions of Jesus, who said, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Matt 22:39), and that, “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places” (John 14:2).  We recognize the holy that dwells in the hearts of the whole human family, and that no single religion has a lock on the truth.  As it says in the Qur’an, “People, We have created you all male and female and have made you nations and tribes so that you would recognize each other.” (Surah al-Hujurat 49:13)

Thomas Berry said of the world’s faith traditions that, “None can be fully itself without the others.”  I think this also applies to the people who make up our diverse faith communities.  None of us is fully our self without the others who join us in the search for truth and meaning.  We complete each other.  Pluralism is not always easy, and sometimes, we may lock horns about the truth and meaning we have embraced along the way.  But as I said earlier, there is a difference between diversity and divisiveness. Let us try our best to keep that in mind.

There is a wonderful saying that is usually attributed to the famous Transylvanian Unitarian Frances David, who lived in the 16th century, but the true origins are uncertain.  It goes, “We need not all think alike to love alike.”  It is a message that encapsulates our faith like no other I know.  It is a message that America could surely use these days.  As Americans awake to the virtues and challenges that come with greater diversity, perhaps the time has come for our Unitarian Universalist faith to finally become that “city upon a hill” of which our Puritan ancestors dreamt, and show the world what beloved diverse communities look like.

Opening Words

“Pied Beauty” by Gerard Manley Hopkins

GLORY be to God for dappled things—

  For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

    For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

  Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;

    And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

  Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

    With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

                  Praise him.

Reading from “The Cathedral of the World” by Forrest Church

“Welcome to the cathedral of the world.

Above all else, contemplate the windows. In the cathedral of the world there are windows without number, some long forgotten, covered with many patinas of dust, others revered by millions, the most sacred of shrines. Each in its own way is beautiful. Some are abstract, others representational; some dark and meditative, others bright and dazzling. Each tells a story about the creation of the world, the meaning of history, the purpose of life, the nature of humankind, the mystery of death. The windows of the cathedral are where the light shines in.

As with all extended metaphors, this one is imperfect. The light of God ("God" is not God's name, but our name for that which is greater than all and yet present in each) not only shines down upon us, but also out from within us. Together with the windows, the darkness and the light, we are part of the cathedral, not apart from it. Together we comprise an interdependent web of being; if the cathedral is built out of star stuff, so are we. But we are that part (that known part) that contemplates the meaning of the whole. Because the cathedral is so vast, our time so short, and our vision so dim, we are able to contemplate only a tiny part of the cathedral, explore a few apses, reflect upon the play of darkness and light through a few of its windows. Yet, since the whole—holographically or organically—is contained in each of the parts, as we ponder and act upon the insight from our ruminations, we may discover meanings that give coherence and meaning both to it and to us.

This is Universalism.”

Reading from “Religions of India” by Thomas Berry

“In every phase of life, in the intellectual, artistic, and spiritual aspects of life, the total human past is now the past of each people and each individual person. We do not live only in the West or even primarily in the West; we live in the world, the total world of humans. The achievements of India and China are now available to us and form part of our own heritage, as do the cultures of Japan and Persia and Africa. This is the period of the worldwide expansion of the mind in all areas of life. The global spiritual past is the only adequate context for present understanding of humans even though this effort at universal awareness is thwarted by exclusivist attitudes that still exist in the world. Even now, however, the futility of such exclusivism is widely recognized. All live currents of thought seek to encompass the full dimensions of humankind. 

Within this larger world of humankind, the multiple spiritual and humanist traditions implicate each other, complete each other, and evoke from each other higher developments of which each is capable. These traditions implicate each other, for each has a universal mission to humankind. Each is panhuman in its significance. None can be fully itself without the others. Each has a distinctive contribution to make to human development that can only be made by itself. Each must therefore be kept distinctive even as it reaches a universal diffusion among humans. For any tradition to withhold itself from the other societies of humankind or for any to exclude the other traditions is to vitiate and stultify its own tradition and development, to condemn itself to sterile isolation from the only forces that can give it life and creativity. All human traditions are dimensions of each other.”

Thomas Berry, Religions of India, 193–94

Freeze-Dried Religion

by Kevin M. Carson
A Sermon Given at First Universalist Parish in Chester, Vermont, March 26, 2017

The intensely personal mystical experience of religion

In our Unitarian Universalist Association, the long process of ministerial formation leads to what we call “fellowship.”  After completing a Master of Divinity degree and an internship at a congregation and some other requirements, you eventually have an interview with the Ministerial Fellowship Committee, where they ask you lots of questions to see if you are ready to be a minister.  Each candidate submits about an eighty-page packet of materials to the committee before the interview, and among the required materials are a number of short essays on specific topics.  One of the short essays I had to write was a response to the question: “What is the theological context of your call to Unitarian Universalist ministry?”  In other words, how would you describe your personal theology, and why do you feel called to ministry?  With the diversity of beliefs within our liberal religious movement, I imagine the committee receives a wide range of responses to this question.  Some UU ministerial candidates identify strongly with a single spiritual tradition – Christian, Buddhist, or Pagan for example – but most of us are more like the majority of the folks in our pews on Sunday morning.  For most of us, our initial answer to that question would probably be: “It’s complicated.”  As seekers on a lifelong spiritual journey of discovery, it is hard to label or categorize the many influences we have encountered on the way.  You probably wouldn’t be sitting here in a Unitarian Universalist church if you didn’t have ongoing questions, and very few easy answers, as to what life is all about. 

But of course, a ministerial candidate can’t get away with simply saying, “It’s complicated.”  After all, if you have completed all the work to prepare for ministry, you really should have a better understanding of your own theology before you are unleashed on the world.  In my “theological context” essay, I described how I really have three theological contexts that I draw on depending on the situation or question. One is Religious Naturalism, which reflects my understanding of the science behind the cosmos, and how we human beings evolved from this Earth and remain part of her.  Another is Christian Humanism, which is how I describe the source of my ethical and moral foundation – firmly rooted in the teachings of Jesus and the idea of building the kingdom of God on Earth. My third context is Mysticism, and I will speak much more on this in a moment.  I will probably explore this idea of multiple “religious identities” some Sunday in the future, but the reason I am telling you about this today is that, in my essay, I went on to say that, if I had to choose only one answer to this question it would have to be mysticism.

So, what do I mean by mysticism?  It is an intriguing word that seems to imply something magical or even occult.  Perhaps you think I fancy myself to be some sort of wizard.  The truth is far more mundane I’m afraid, but there is an undeniable sense of something sacred and spiritual in my use of the word.  The Oxford Dictionary offers two definitions for mysticism:

Belief that union with or absorption into the Deity or the absolute, or the spiritual apprehension of knowledge inaccessible to the intellect, may be attained through contemplation and self-surrender.

Belief characterized by self-delusion or dreamy confusion of thought, especially when based on the assumption of occult qualities or mysterious agencies.

I don’t believe either of these definitions is sufficient, or really describes my use of the word in broad enough terms, but I can appreciate the conundrum the authors faced in trying to pin down a definition.  Any talk of mysticism eventually bumps into the limits of language and begins to sound vaguely mysterious – you may end up wandering in that “dreamy confusion of thought” the Oxford folks warned us about.  You reach a point when, for example, the ancient author of the Taoist sacred text, the Tao Te Ching, says something like, “The Tao that can be spoken of is not the true Tao.”  Mysticism is ultimately about intuitive understanding, when words fail to convey what can only be experienced.  I think the two important characteristics of mysticism these definitions are trying to capture are: a sense of “union [or unity] with the absolute,” and the relationship between “self-delusion” and “self-surrender.”  So, having admitted that words are insufficient for revealing the heart of mysticism, and can even be a barrier to a deeper understanding, let me risk continuing on with my sermon.

I choose to embrace the label mysticism as my primary “theological context” because it reflects my experience of a sacred creative unity that pervades everything around us, and I am comfortable naming that sacred unity “God.”  More often, I prefer to call this reality the “Sacred Mystery,” since it acknowledges how little we can say about the sacred with any certainty.  Every part and particle, and every moment of the cosmos, reveals the reality of the “interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part” that we lift up in our Seventh Principle, and it is good and holy.  Since I imagine everything that is, or was, or is yet to be, as held within this sacred unity, it makes more sense for me to talk about other aspects of my theological identity – which are more focused on the secular world – as secondary.  To call myself a mystic also reflects my understanding of that first spiritual source we draw upon in our Unitarian Universalist tradition: “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.” I am convinced that we can and do have direct experiences of that transcending mystery, if only in glimpses, perhaps during prayer or from the awe and wonder we encounter in nature, or at other times when we are most aware of our full humanity.   

When I come to Chester to preach, I usually travel on Saturday and spend the night, but sometimes I drive up early on Sunday morning.  One Sunday morning last March, just over a year ago, as I was driving up, I was listening to the program On Being on WGBH, and the guest was Rabbi Lawrence Kushner.  The program was a rebroadcast of a 2014 interview by the host Krista Tippett, and the topic of the program was “Kabbalah and the Inner Life of God.”  Rabbi Kushner is a Reform rabbi, and a long-time student of the Jewish mystic tradition of Kabbalah, in the lineage of his late teacher Rabi Gershom Scholem.  Scholem is credited with revitalizing interest in Kabbalah in the twentieth century.  There are many varieties of Kabbalah that range from a practical focus on ethics to the very esoteric.  Some forms are centered on contemplation, for example, while others search for coded messages contained in the text of the Torah.  There are some forms that have a doctrine of reincarnation, and others that focus on the feminine aspect of the divine.  It is hard to generalize about the practices or beliefs of the Kabbalah tradition, but at its heart, Kabbalah is a search for understanding the relationship between the created world and the mysterious, infinite divine.  In Kabbalah, all being is rooted in the Ein Sof, the Holy Oneness of Creation.

About half-way through the interview, Kushner was attempting to articulate the nature of mysticism, and here is how he described it:

“It’s a handful of smoke. Yeah, it’s real hard to talk about. But it’s the most important thing to talk about. My suspicion is, and I don’t know who … said that ‘whatever it is that makes religion religion, mysticism has more of it.’ It seems to be freeze-dried, it seems to be intensified, focused. It’s the name of the game. It’s the very center of what we are talking about. Because, to be sure, mysticism is intensely personal, and that’s what it always winds up doing for people.”

I love Kushner’s analogy of mysticism as an intensified, “freeze-dried” experience of religion.  If you have ever eaten a freeze-dried strawberry, and tasted the explosion of flavor, you can appreciate what he was trying to say.  In terms of religious experience, it is the difference between a Sunday morning worship service – even a great one – and a moment of real epiphany, a moment when you feel an overwhelming sense of unity with the world, or the undeniable presence of something holy.  It is in such moments that the delusion of a duality between our notion of being an individual “self” that is something apart from the sacred unity is shattered.  This is the surrender of “self” to “no-self” that so many spiritual traditions have discovered in their more mystic forms.  It is the emptiness sought in Buddhist contemplative practices, and the experience of divine union and the Christ Consciousness for Jewish and Christian mystics.  For the Religious Naturalist, it is the recognition of our “ecological self” – the recognition that our own “being” extends beyond our physical bodies in an inseparable relationship with the Earth’s living systems, and even the inorganic processes that sustain life.

I believe that small mystical moments abound in our lives.  They need not be profound experiences that forever alter your path in life, but they might be.  Small mystical moments may present themselves in the most ordinary situations.  We just need to learn how to recognize them.  In his classic work, The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James identified four characteristics of a mystical experience.  First of all, it is transient and unpredictable.  You cannot summon a mystical moment by force of will; they come and go as they please.  The second characteristic is that you are the passive recipient of such moments.  A mystical moment takes you by surprise.  As Rabi Kushner says, “You don’t have the experience, it has you.” The third characteristic James identified is that there is an intellectual component to the experience.  It has what he called “a noetic quality” that leaves one with a flash of insight, revelation, or illumination.  But sharing this insight is problematic, because the fourth characteristic returns us to the familiar conundrum: a mystical experience is ineffable – words fail to fully describe the experience.  Try as we might, it is impossible to fit a mystical experience into a purely rational container, and this is why we need a religion that allows us to explore the meaning and the sheer mystery of the sacred moments we encounter.  Rationalism is not enough.

We Unitarian Universalists are such a diverse lot that I am wary of generalizing about the spirituality of Unitarian Universalism, but I believe it is fair to say that our tradition has a long history of holding reason in tension with the experience of “that transcending mystery and wonder.”  We are guarded and suspicious of feelings that are unprovable, preferring reasonableness in our search for truth and meaning. But, even as we use reason as a tool to probe the mysteries of existence, our exploration often ends in feelings of piety and awe – feelings of wonder that hint at profound spiritual truths.  Reason is important, but we have kept the door open to trusting our intuition, cultivating what the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher called a “sense and taste for the infinite.” Our faith today is a celebration of Transcendentalism and religious individualism, even as we hold on to the great spiritual traditions of the past and explore their wisdom for guidance for living in our own times.  We embrace science and reason and spirituality as complementary aspects of what it means to be fully human, and this is our great strength.  I agree with Rev. Tom Owen-Towle who characterized Unitarian Universalists as“bona fide mystics” because “the substance of our faith points to an ineffable yet undeniable connection with sacrality, both mysterious and sustaining, … [that] our lives are embraced by a mystery that is gracious and trustworthy, and our human fulfillment lies in surrendering to it.”  It is the same sentiment Emerson expressed in the excerpt from The Oversoul which we read together this morning.  Our experience of religion is holistic.  It is intensely personal but at the same time intensely unifying.  

Many people are understandably anxious these days about politics, and the damage that we human beings seem so willing to inflict on our earthly home, but I believe humanity is slowly awakening to a confluence of science and spirituality that can and will change everything.  More and more people are learning the story of how our universe came to be what it is, and there is an undeniable “freeze-dried,” mystical quality to this new understanding as Kushner described.  I hear echoes of Emerson when contemporary scientists wax poetically about nature and the universe, when for example, cosmologist Brian Swimme says, “The deep truth about matter … is that, over the course of four billion years, molten rocks transformed themselves into monarch butterflies, blue herons, and the exalted music of Mozart.”  Friends, if that doesn’t inspire awe and wonder, I can’t imagine what would!  

With our embrace of reason and the importance of the individual experience of religion, I believe our faith is aligned very well with this global awakening.  But in our individualism, we must avoid the pitfall of becoming what Rev. James Luther Adams called a “purely spiritual religion.”  In an essay Adams wrote in 1946, he cautioned that,

 “A purely spiritual religion is a purely spurious religion; it is one that exempts its believer from surrender to the sustaining, transforming reality which demands the community of justice and love.  This sham spirituality, far more than materialism, is the great enemy of religion.”

It may be tempting these days to retreat from the world and simply navel-gaze while the world around us burns with injustice, but to ignore the practical demands of religion would be a great moral failure.  Once we recognize the hidden unity in the world, and our illusion of isolation is shattered, once we see the suffering of others as if it is our own, we are compelled to act to alleviate it.  Or, you could look at from the other direction.  In one on his books, Rabbi Kushner wrote, “A mystic is anyone who has the gnawing suspicion that the apparent discord, brokenness, contradictions, and discontinuities that assault us every day might conceal a hidden unity.” Perhaps it is all of this brokenness and discord that we share as human beings that opens our eyes and instills this “gnawing suspicion” of a hidden unity, and moves us to heal the world.

In this year that has already been fraught with discord, brokenness, contradictions, and plenty of anxiety, it is my wish that all of you allow yourselves the grace of quiet time – time to listen to the still small voice within, time to nurture your inner mystic, time to acknowledge the “gnawing suspicion” of a hidden unity that brings a “peace which passeth all understanding.”

References

Krista Tippet interview with Rabi Lawrence Kushner from 2014, “Kabbalah and the Inner Life of God,” rebroadcast on the WGBH program “On Being,” March 10, 2016, transcript available online.

Brian Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker, Journey of the Universe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014).

James Luther Adams, A Faith for Free Men (1946).

Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (1799).

Hymns

#42 “Morning, So Fair to See”

#123 "Spirit of Life"

#92 “Mysterious Presence, Source of All”

#298 “Wake, Now, My Senses”

Opening Words from the poem “Tintern Abbey” by William Wordsworth

And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;

A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world

Of eye, and ear, -- both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.

Responsive Reading

#531 “The Oversoul”

Readings

“A Common Destiny” by David H. Eaton

All living substance, all substance of Energy,

 and Being, 

and Purpose, 

are united and share the same destiny.

All people, 

those we love and those we know not of 

are united and share the same destiny.

Birth-to-Death

this unity we share with

    the Sun,

    Earth

    our Brothers and Sisters,

Strangers

Flowers of the field,

Snowflakes

Volcanoes and Moon Beams.

Birth—Life – Death

Unknown – Known – Unknown

Our Destiny: from Unknown to Unknown.

I pray that we will know the Awe

    and not fall into the pit of intellectual arrogance

    in attempting to explain it away.

The Mystery can be our substance.

May we have the faith to accept this wonderful Mystery

    and build upon its everlasting Truth.

“hymn to the sacred body of the universe” by Drew Dellinger

Let’s meet
at the confluence
where you flow into me
and one breath
swirls between our lungs

Let’s meet
at the confluence
where you flow into me
and one breath
swirls between our lungs

For one instant
to dwell in the presence of the galaxies
for one instant
to live in the truth of the heart
the poet says this entire traveling cosmos is
“the secret One slowly growing a body”

Two eagles are mating—
clasping each other’s claws
and turning cartwheels in the sky
grasses are blooming
grandfathers dying
consciousness blinking on and off
all of this is happening at once
all of this, vibrating into existence
out of nothingness

Every particle
foaming into existence
transcribing the ineffable

Arising and passing away
arising and passing away
23 trillion times per second—
when Buddha saw that,
he smiled

16 million tons of rain are falling every second
on the planet
an ocean
perpetually falling
and every drop
is your body
every motion, every feather, every thought
is your body
time
is your body,
and the infinite
curled inside like
invisible rainbows folded into light

Every word of every tongue is love
telling a story to her own ears

Let our lives be incense
burning
like a hymn to the sacred
body of the universe
my religion is rain
my religion is stone
my religion reveals itself to me in
sweaty epiphanies

Every leaf, every river,
every animal,
your body
every creature trapped in the gears
of corporate nightmares
every species made extinct
was once
your body

10 million people are dreaming
that they’re flying
junipers and violets are blossoming
stars exploding and being born
god
is having
déjà vu
I am one
elaborate
crush
we cry petals
as the void
is singing

You are the dark
that holds the stars
in intimate
distance

That spun the whirling,
whirling,
world
into existence

Let’s meet
at the confluence
where you flow into me
and one breath
swirls between our lungs.