Month of Sundays Service

Hold On to Your Hats:
All of Unitarian Universalist History in Sixteen Minutes

Opening Words
"Come as You Are"
by the Rev. Roy Phillips

Can there be vital religious community without the personal and institutional style of authoritarianism, of certainty and of ecclesiastical directiveness?

These are the questions which our experiment in religious community seeks to answer in the affirmative.

We Unitarian Universalists say: Come as you are. You don't need to bother to get your beliefs on straight first, before you come. Come as you are. Come with your doubts, your hunches, your convictions, your ambiguities.

Come and be welcome. Come here as you are; let us be together, let all of us grow in open religious community.

Religious community is concerned with truth and love and personal growth. We say that to begin with "truth" may be to preclude ever getting beyond concern with "truth" to establish acceptance and love and personal growth.

In our experiment in religious community we are saying: begin with acceptance, begin with the openness which is a form of love, begin with the love that lets others be who they are - then personal growth is more likely to follow and truth - living, relevant personal truth - is likely to follow, too.

Marcus Aurelius said, "People are made for one another; teach them then, or bear with them." People are made for one another - bear with them, learn to appreciate their differences and encourage them to speak honestly out of who they really are, and we will all be teaching one another, and all be growing religiously in the process.

Children's Story
"The Infidel's Picnic - Jenkin Lloyd
by Denise D. Tracy, from Living in the Wind

Jenkin Lloyd Jones rode horseback with his Bible in his pack traveling to preach to those in the western wilderness. He traveled thousands of miles as a Unitarian Missionary in the west. Wherever people would listen, he would speak.

Today he was traveling to Wisconsin to see a man known as an infidel. He was curious, because in some towns, after he began to preach the Unitarian gospel of the oneness of God, he, too, was called an infidel.

"Infidel," he said to himself. "An unfaithful person. But I have very great faith. It is not the faith of those who search for dogma, but rather it is the faith of the free thinker."

The infidel he was visiting was known for gathering his congregation on the Fourth of July for an infidels' picnic. Jenkin had heard far and wide of this event and had come to see what infidels did at a picnic.

When he arrived at the town, three people directed him to the infidel's home. There was a man with his shirt sleeves rolled up standing amidst a herd of cows. He was touching them, patting them. He had white hair and was over 80 years old.

The night before the infidels' picnic, Jenkin Lloyd Jones and the stranger talked late into the night. They talked of religious freedom, of their love of humanity. of their defiance to being like everyone else. The infidel was intolerant only of the intolerant, and he did not like pretense or lies.

Jenkin and the man did not quarrel once. They agreed on every- thing. Finally the infidel said, "We must get some sleep. Tomorrow we will celebrate my favorite holiday of the year." So they slept.

The next morning the townspeople set out tables and benches for the infidels' picnic. They set out platters of food and drink and then gathered in a circle - men and women together to celebrate the Fourth of July. Rumor had it that infidels danced in the street, drank too much and created a rowdy party for their most holy day. Jenkin was curious to see if that matter of celebration would occur.

This is what happened next: All of the citizens sitting in the circle took from their pockets and purses small, thin volumes. One by one the people read paragraphs, listened and responded to each other. The infidels on the Fourth of July read and studied the words of Thomas Paine --whose ideas helped shape the freedom and liberty which gave birth to our great nation.

At lunch time people ate and drank. Afterwards they discussed and celebrated Paine's philosophy again, through sincere and thought- ful discussion.

Jenkin Lloyd Jones smiled to himself. Others have created a lie of the infidels' picnic. It is a celebration of freedom, nothing more.

At the end of the day, Jenkin saddled his horse and bid farewell to the infidel. As he rode away, he said to himself, "I, too, am an infidel. I love liberty. Perhaps next year I will call my friends together for an infidels' picnic, to celebrate freedom."

Meditation

from the Bylaws of the Unitarian Universalist Association Section C-2.1 Principles

We, the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association, covenant to affirm and promote

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

The living tradition which we share draws from many sources:

• Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to the renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life;
• Words and deeds of prophetic women and men which challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion and the transforming power of love;
• Wisdom from the world's religions which inspires us in our ethical and spiritual life;
• Jewish and Christian teachings which call us to respond to God's love by loving our neighbors as ourselves;
• Humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit.

Grateful for the religious pluralism which enriches and ennobles our faith, we are inspired to deepen our understanding and expand our vision. As free congregations we enter into this covenant, promising to one another our mutual trust and support.

Sermon
Sermon: "Hold On to Your Hats: All of Unitarian Universalist History in Sixteen Minutes"
by the Rev. Jane Rzepka, Minister, Unitarian Universalist Church of Reading, Massachusetts

I have a confession to make. In the title of this sermon I say some- thing about "all of Unitarian Universalist history in 16 minutes." The "sixteen minutes" part sounds precise. It sounds as if I really mean it. One would think that the "sixteen minutes" part could be counted on - it has the tone almost of a promise. But no. Don't be fooled. It was a trap, a ploy, nothing more, and if at the end of six- teen minutes I hear your watches beeping or playing a tune, I plan to keep right on going, having made this confession in advance.

Now. A word about the part of the sermon title that reads "all of Unitarian Universalist history." To take not one denomination but two, having origins in ancient Alexandria, 16th Century Transylvania, 18th Century England, and 19th Century America, two denominations whose theological identities have always grown and changed, to do justice to our rich heritage in one Sunday sermon- is of course no problem at all.

I'll begin with a story , a story from the Jewish tradition, a story not at all connected with our history on the face of it, yet a story that tells it all.

"A young man went to seminary to study for the rabbinate. In the middle of the year he became discouraged and lost his faith. He went to his own rabbi and said, 'I must leave the seminary. I lost my faith in God and do not believe in the Bible and the Jewish laws.' The rabbi listened and then said, 'Let me tell you a story.' He went on, 'About twenty years ago when I was a student at the semi- nary, I lost my faith and I went to one of my professors and said to him, 'Professor. I must leave the seminary for I have lost my faith in God and I no longer believe in the Bible, and the Jewish laws.' He said, 'Let me tell you a story. About twenty years ago I studied to be a rabbi and I lost my faith in God and the Bible and the Talmud. I did not know what to do. I finally went to the head of the semi- nary, a tall saintly man with a white flowing beard and piercing black eyes. I said to him, 'Father, Rabbi, teacher, I am ashamed to come to you for the purpose I have in mind. But I must leave the seminary. I have lost my faith in God and no longer believe in the Jewish laws. I must leave the seminary.' The kindly man put his arm around me and said, 'Sit down, I must tell you a story.'", (East Shore [Ohio] newsletter)

Our own history shows generations and generations of people who seem first to lose their religion, and then by means of private struggle and personal risk, find new ways of being religious. Our founders were doubters, thinkers, people for whom integrity counted for something. In the language of the story , they too wanted to 'leave the seminary' but they too, through processes of theological reinterpretation and revolution, found ways to continue their religious lives.

We have countless founders - courageous, great minds, but many are lost to us. I will tell you our history, but with sadness, because we don't know what we should about the contributions of blacks, of women, of Canadians, for example. I wish it were different, and we are trying to learn more.

Our first notable ancestor was an Alexandrian named Origen. It was the second century, when Christians were persecuted. Origen, at age 17, his father imprisoned and then killed as a Christian, was willing to martyr himself for his religious faith. But his mother kept hiding all of his clothes, preventing him from leaving home, thus saving his life. Origen went on to become a dedicated scholar , devoting himself single- mindedly to the pursuit of Christian truth through the use of reason, instead of faith. The more he studied the Bible, the more he began to doubt the usual notion of the existence of heaven and hell. Origen believed that everyone, not just Christians, not just good people, would find redemption. It was the "ultimate reconciliation of all souls with God," it was "universal salvation," it was "universalism." Origen was condemned as a heretic, but Universalism lived on as a thread in our liberal history.

And then there was Pelagius, the fourth century English monk, another of my favorites. At a time when Augustine insisted on the total depravity of human nature, Pelagius, bless him, courageously advocated moral free will and spiritual liberty. Pelagius was well- respected at the time, and while Augustine clearly had the upper hand, Pelagius posed a real threat to the church's doctrine of natural corruption. There is no doubt that Augustine won the debate. But again, a thread of faith has persisted: we have an ability to choose good over evil. We have Pelagius to thank for that.

A big jump now to the Reformation, where our hero is Michael Servetus, a Spaniard. I have mixed feelings about Servetus. Here we have a 19 year old kid who takes on both the Catholic and Protestant authorities. They believe in the Trinity; and Servetus says, and I quote, "Your Trinity is a product of subtlety and madness. The Gospel knows nothing of it." He was brilliant and intemperate. He infuriated the Inquisitors as well as Calvin, they gave him chance after chance to moderate his views, he insulted them repeatedly, and finally, Calvin had Servetus burned at the stake. Personally, I wish Servetus had seen fit to proceed with a little more caution and save himself. He did leave us with the idea that God is indivisible, and the observation that there is no Trinity taught in the Bible, and those were important beginnings for a new theology. But I wonder, had he lived, where his theology would have taken him - and us.

Now to Poland and Transylvania, the cradle of European Unitarianism. Sixteenth century. Faustus Socinus. Socinus organized non-Trinitarian liberal congregations devoted to religious liberty, reason, and tolerance. The movement spread rapidly, attracting many of the most enlightened and gifted minds. But they were persecuted - the "Socinian heresy" was stomped on, and Socinus himself was attacked in the streets of Krakow - his face was smeared and his mouth filled with mud. Eventually, broken by the attacks, he died. A few Socinian exiles made their way to Transylvania (now part of Romania), where the liberal congregations survived and continue to survive 400 years later as Unitarian churches.

England. Eighteenth century. Religious liberals here knew about Socinianism: they advocated Socinian tolerance of differences in belief, they applied the Socinian test of reason to religious doctrines, and preached the Socinian concepts of God and Jesus. We come upon Joseph Priestley, discoverer of oxygen, Unitarian minister, and espouser of a number of liberal and unpopular causes, including the French Revolution. Priestley gave intellectual brilliance to the development of Unitarian religion and stimulated a mushrooming of Unitarian institutions. But established church leaders became exasperated, inflamed a mob, and Priestley's home, laboratory, library, and Unitarian chapel were attacked and burned. He escaped by the skin of his teeth and, tempted by an invitation from his friend Thomas Jefferson, sailed to the United States in 1794, bringing Unitarianism with him.

John Murray, the late 1700s, another Englishman, a Universalist. Murray's life in England was suddenly falling apart. His only child died, and then his wife, followed by his three sisters and his mother. He lost his job and landed in debtors' prison. When he got out, he resolved to go to America to seek a new life. John Murray did just that, and wound up on a ship that was eventually grounded on a sandbar off the coast of New Jersey. While the ship's crew waited for a fair wind and a high tide to move them along, Murray went ashore, where he met a farmer named Thomas Potter. Now it seems that this Thomas Potter had built a chapel nearby, and had just been waiting for a preacher who believed in universal salvation to happen by. Potter became convinced that God had sent John Murray to preach in his chapel. John Murray was not at all convinced. Potter said, "The wind will never change, sir, until you preach for us." And Murray's ship remained stuck until Sunday, when Murray began his preaching career, bringing Universalism to the colonies. It was largely through his efforts, beginning in Gloucester, spreading through small-town New England and heading westward into rural New York, the Western Reserve, Indiana and Illinois, that Universalism took hold in this country. It was a religion that praised God, and preached a loving theology of inclusivism in heaven and also here on earth. Universalism devoted itself to prison reform, schools, temperance, pacifism, and women's rights.

Well. We've made progress. We now have Unitarianism and Universalism on the American continent. It is the early nineteenth century, and Calvinist orthodoxy, straight from the Puritans, is the status quo. Universalists, in their universal salvation, offered relief from the likeliness of Calvinist damnation. Unitarian-oriented clergy began more and more to sit up and take notice of Calvinist pessimism about human nature. The prevailing Calvinist theology in the culture forced them to come to grips with their own liberal theologies of human free will, dignity, and rationality. William Ellery Channing confirmed the presence of the new theological movement, and rallied the liberals together as a theological group. By the third decade of the nineteenth century, many of the Puritan Congregational churches began to call themselves Unitarian.

Every generation of American Unitarians, like the rabbinical students in the story with which I began, has questioned the faith. Almost as soon as American Unitarianism was established, a young generation of Transcendentalists - Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker among them - changed the religious orientation from one of empiricism and historicism to a religion of direct intuition of God (or the universe). Unitarianism drifted away from belief in the Bible and the divinity of Jesus. The Universalists had fewer theological disputes and did retain the Christian basis of their faith more completely. But they, too, changed over the years, and by the early decades of the twentieth century, Universalism emphasized the notion that evil is the result of "unjust social and economic conditions." Universalism, in the words of Clarence Skinner, was economic and social as well as spiritual.

The generations continued, and our denominations continued to evolve. The rise of the Humanist movement among the Unitarians has been an attempt to reformulate liberal theology on completely non-theistic grounds. The Universalists moved from their long- standing emphasis on universal salvation to an understanding of universalism as universal religion - "boundless in scope, as broad as humanity, as infinite as the universe."

By mid-century, leadership in both denominations recognized the advantages of combining efforts through merger. The proposed merger was controversial for both Unitarians and Universalists, each quite naturally fearing a loss of tradition and identity. But finally, in 1961, the merger plan was overwhelmingly ratified by the individual churches and then by the American Unitarian Association Annual Meeting and the Universalist General Assembly. My description of the process of merger is history book-ish, and that's too bad, because we lose the power and the color of the experience that so many of us lived through. A number of people in this church grew up Universalist, or Unitarian, and were for or against merger, and have thought it successful or tragic. We knew our neighbor, the minister in Concord, Dana Greeley, the first president of the merged denominations. We fought the fights and drank the champagne and changed the letterhead, and I, for one, am proud to be called a Unitarian Universalist.

I think once more of the story of the rabbinical students, and how generation after generation of good, earnest souls still examine the faith, reshape it, and persist in it. Frederick May Eliot, president of the American Unitarian Association from 1937-1958, once said, "one of the most interesting aspects of our history is the process by which the radicals of one generation have come to be regarded as '100% Unitarians' by succeeding generations. The truth of the mat- ter is that we are a church in which growth is not only permitted But encouraged - growth in thought, growth in sensitiveness (sic) to moral values, growth in courage to put religion to work in the world."

Jack Mendelsohn, a distinguished UU minister, wrote (adapted),

"We have inherited quite a religion. It is honest; of one piece. It does not indulge in self-deceit.

It is lived. It is not just a set of bromides and pietisms. It is a serious effort to conduct life according to principles and ideals.

It is emotional; heart-swelling. It is even naive. In spite of uncertainty, it does not rule out leaps of faith.

It is free, not bound by tradition, inheritance, geography, or the passing parade.

It is first-hand; a personal experience.

It is responsible. It does not try to escape the consequences of decision.

It is growing. It never thinks of itself as perfected and final.

It embraces humility, recognizing that faith is not certainty where there is in fact mystery.

It is compassionate. It understands that religions universally wrap their essence in myth. It reaches to grasp and appreciate the truths bound up in the myths of other believers.

It is tough on its possessors, committing them to sacrifice, but it is tender toward those who disagree.

It is social, struggling to realize its own vision at community, national and world levels.

It radiant, blessing its possessor with courage, serenity and zest.

This is our history, and also our hope."

So may it be.

Meditation
The Liberal Church

This is the liberal church:

A place to go where you know you belong -

Where the mind is free to soar beyond the coercions and crudities that inevitably beset all orthodoxies;

Where the heart is free to extend that large love to all, unencumbered by dogma, tradition, race, country or class;

Where the hands are free to work for the cause and the hope of peace;

Where the soul is free to open, stretch, discover, develop, deepen, change and grow, always and continuously and progressively;

Where the rights of individual conscience and action are guarded with vigilance, out of belief in the fitness of diversity, the liberty to be different, out of eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the human mind;

Where the glory resident and potential on our planet earth is enjoyed and celebrated, not denied or blasphemed in the name of sin or spurious escapes to another world;

Where the promise of humankind is nurtured, supported and blessed, and never cursed, degraded or despaired of;

Where the faiths by which we live are regarded as important enough to be examined and checked against the tests of experience, the cannons of logic, the methods of science;

Where the church is committed to speak and act on the great moral issues of the day not denying or hiding or ignoring its prophetic role as an agent for the transformation of society into a kingdom of righteousness;

Where the whole person can enter fully into the religious mood without insult to reason or irrelevance to daily life;

Where the whole person can utilize, without reservation, the resources of one's own tradition, whatever that particular religious heritage is;

Where people are invited to be themselves - in joy, in sorrow, in the struggle of the deeper self to be born, in the resolution of some great issue, in the witnessing to high ideals, in living and dying, seeking and finding and serving;

A place to learn, to grow, to sing, to stand;

A place to be a more authentic self;

A place to encounter, reckon, judge, accept, and be accepted;

A place to be challenged by new insight and be reminded of what one already knows;

A place to respond to a vision of holiness, all arts, and other depths;

A place to be with others in co-creating with God;

A place to provide conditions for the coursing of the Creativity which vivifies, heals and makes all things new;

A place to go where you know you belong - this is the liberal church.

Hymn
No. 2 "Down the Ages We Have Trod"
from Singing the Living Tradition

Benediction
by Unitarians in Edinburgh, Communications Committee, 1985

Our faith is personal

because it begins where people are.

Our faith is reasonable

because it respects the place of human thought.

Our faith is free

because it provides space for individual growth and development.

Our faith is developing

because it grows with our greater understanding of how things are.

Our faith is supportive

because we share it with others in a mutually creative, tolerant and compassionate community.

Our faith is responsible

because we cannot separate it from the local, global and ecological communities of which we are part.

Our faith is diverse

because it draws not only on Jewish and Christian teachings about responding to God's love by loving our neighbours as ourselves; but also on wisdom from the world's religions, insights from science and humanism, and on personal experience.

Our faith is Unitarian

because it acknowledges the unity of the cosmos, the oneness of God, and the humanity of Jesus and other religious pioneers.

Our faith is Universalist

because it draws upon traditions which will not limit the love of God but affirm the dignity of every person.

Questions for Discussion

1. Does a quick review of the history of Unitarianism and Universalism help you to understand Unitarian Universalism as it exists today? If so, in what ways?
2. Do you have a particular hero or heroine from UU history? What is it about that person that particularly appeals to you?
3. Jane Rzepka makes the observation that "the radicals of one generation have come to be regarded as 100% Unitarians by succeeding generations." What radical ideas of today can you imagine becoming accepted or even conservative ideas in the future?
4. The sermon ends with several statements by Jack Mendelsohn in praise of Unitarian Universalism. Can you add to his list with statements of your own about the aspects of UUism that you find especially praiseworthy?

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Last updated June 12, 2005