A Rite of Spring

"The question is not whether we believe in resurrection 

but whether we have known it -- 

known it in our own lived experience, 

seen it in the lives of others, 

felt it in the world around us."

For the last two decades or so, on the Sunday the majority of Christians celebrate Easter, every congregation I have served has held a service titled, "A Rite of Spring:  An Eastertide Celebration in Two Acts."  It is a visually rich service of readings and hymns, much like many Christmas Eve services, an it is one of the things from my time as a parish minister of which I am most proud.  I think it is an authentic expression of Unitarian Universalism -- both our message and our method.
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Back in 2016 I posted the text of "A Rite of Spring."  It is a very different thing to read the text without being able to see the roughly 100 images that are projected throughout or to experience the beauty of the hymns.  Still, even by themselves I think the words are worth considering.  If you're interested, here is the link:

A Rite of Spring:  An Eastertide Celebration in Two Acts

Pax tecum,

RevWik

Here We Have Gathered

This is the text of the reflections I offered to the congregation I serve on July 29, 2018.  I have also included the Opening and Closing words, and hope UUA President Susan Frederick-Gray will understand their importance to the whole.

Opening Words:

As a people—a people of faith—that say we are committed to justice, compassion, and equity. As a faith that says we are committed to the inherent worth and dignity of all people. As a faith that says we are committed to respect for the interdependent web of all life—we have a critical role to play in this time.

Two things that are absolutely clear. #1—This is no time for a casual commitment to your faith, your community, and your values, and

#2—this is not time to think we are in this alone. 

Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray, from her sermon, “No Time for a Casual Faith,”
 delivered at the 2018 General Assembly Sunday service

Sermon:  “Here We Have Gathered”

It is not uncommon to hear people talk about being “cultural Christians.”  They are acknowledging that there is something Christian-ish about them, but don’t mistake them for strong adherents of the faith; these are not what you might call “committed Christians.”  The scholar of comparative religion, Winston Smith, was once asked why, after he’d studied the great religions of the world and incorporated into his own life many of the spiritual understandings and practices he’d encountered, why he still referred to himself as a Methodist.  He replied, without skipping a beat, “ancestor worship.”  He had been born into the Methodist tradition, and he continued to claim it long after it’d had ceased to have any claim on him.  (This is true in all religious traditions – there are “cultural” Jews, and Buddhists, and Hindus, and, for that matter, Atheists.  People for whom their relationship with the spiritual/religious tradition they claim has little or no claim on them; people who we might say are “casual” in their religious affiliations.)

Leia, our Director of Faith Development, and I once ran a two-day training for staff teams – ordained ministers and the professional religious educators with whom they worked.  One of the exercises that we’d borrowed from some place began with participants calling out things that the congregation they served did that they were particularly proud of.  “Our monthly food pantry!” one said.  “Our collaboration with other faith communities to provide housing for the homeless during the coldest months of the year,” said another.  “The work we do to keep the vision of the United Nations alive in the minds of our congregation.”  “Our ministry with, for, and by young adults.”  Someone said, “Our religious education programming,” with someone else quickly adding, “especially our youth!”  “Meaningful worship.”  (That came from one of the clergy people present.)  “Our covenant groups that bring small groups together in powerful ways.”  “Our support of the Movement for Black Lives.”  “Having become a Green Sanctuary.”  Having become a Welcoming Congregation.”  “Our program to bring food to members of the congregation when they are sick.”  “Our practice of raising money monthly for non-profits doing meaningful work in our wider community.” 

I could go on.  They certainly did.  They had no problem listing program after program, project after project, one after another, of which they were proud.  (The list I just read, by the way, didn’t come from my notes after that weekend: they’re all things we do here that I’m proud of.)

Like I said, this group had no problem coming up with a long list of things the congregations they served were doing that were making a difference in the lives of their members and their wider communities.  It was the second part of the exercise that we tough.  Participants were asked to read together an item from that list beginning with the words, “We do …” and ending with, “. . . because we’re Unitarian Universalists.”

·    We have a monthly food pantry because we’re Unitarian Universalists. 

·    We collaborate with other faith communities to provide housing for the homeless during the coldest months of the year because we’re Unitarian Universalists.

·    We have a ministry with, for, and by young adults because we’re Unitarian Universalists

·    We bring food to members of the congregation who are sick because we’re Unitarian Universalists.

·    We became a Green Sanctuary and a Welcoming Congregation because we’re Unitarian Universalists

Not everyone had a hard time with this, but a lot of the people there found it really hard to say that they and the congregations they served do the good and important things they do because they are Unitarian Universalists.  They would have felt comfortable saying that they did them because they were good people, because they cared about each other and the world, because they were the right things to do.  But to say that they did them because of being Unitarian Universalists, because our faith traditions compels them to, because as Unitarian Universalists they felt a mandate to make the world a better place … well … a lot of the folks in that workshop weren’t all that comfortable saying that.  And these were religious professionals!

Last week during the annual “Questions & Responses” service I was asked what I found most frustrating about Unitarian Universalism (and, by extension, I’d think, “about Unitarian Universalists”).  In addition to the things I mentioned then, I’d add this – the number of people who are, for lack of a better phrase, cultural, or casual, UUs.  Oh we’re good-hearted people, just as are most “cultural Christians.”  If asked, we will claim our connection to this Unitarian Universalist tradition, yet if we’re being really honest, it has little to no claim on us.  It isn’t truly a part of our identity – our core ­identity.  It’s what we do, where we go on Sunday mornings (and a few other times during the week), yet it’s not really who we are.

And I find that frustrating – and more than a little sad, frankly – because our Unitarian Universalist faith is something.  Our tradition has a history, and an identity, and a power that is different than the history, identity, and power of other religious traditions or civic groups.  Unitarian Universalism is more than, as one joke at our expense puts it, “halfway between the Methodists and the golf course.”  Yet when we don’t feel, don’t know ourselves to be part of something larger than ourselves, larger than the congregation we happen to go to when we think there’ll be something interesting to us, it is so easy to become focused on our own congregation and what’s happening there right now.  This is true in and about Unitarian Universalist congregations wherever we’ve set up shop, and whatever is, or that we might think isn’t, happening in them at any particular moment.  (And how we feel about it.)

When we become so isolated and insular, we cut ourselves off from the power of our association, and I’m not talking about our institutional Association, but the reality that our congregations are associated with one another, connected with one another, can draw strength from and offer support to one another.  When we lose sight of the fact that we are part of something larger than merely the group of people who gather at 717 Rugby Road in Charlottesville, or 351 Boylston Street in Boston, or 2952 South Peoria Avenue in Tulsa, or online through the Church of the Larger Ministry, then we all too often also lose sight of the fact that we are a part of an association of several hundred thousand people, over 1,600 congregations, and a faith that, in the United States, can trace its roots back to the founding of the Universalist Church of America in 1793. Our Unitarian Universalist tradition is something, and we lose something when we don’t fully recognize, acknowledge, and own that as a part of who we are.  We lose something, and our congregations, and our wider Association loses much when we are just “cultural UUs” or, “casual” about our Unitarian Universalism.

In the sermon I quoted from as our Opening Words, the Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray also said,

“Friends, this is no time to go it alone—we as Unitarian Universalists can’t go it alone. We as individual congregations cannot be in this struggle alone.

[…]

This time we are living in is one of tremendous opportunity and needed change—and the health and strength of our communities and our commitment to our values, to this theology of love and interdependence is crucial”

And she said,

“This is no time for a casual faith. As Unitarian Universalists, we are first and foremost religious communities, religious communities that practice love as our foundation—and we are living in times of heartbreak, violence, struggle, and pain. In this time, we need communities that remind us of our humanity in this very inhumane time.”

And these are very “inhumane” times, indeed. 

Hate crimes “more than doubled the day after the 2016 election, with a 92 percent spike in average daily hate crimes in the two weeks following the election compared to the daily average from the beginning of the year. Crimes against Latinos increased by the greatest percent, followed by Muslims and Arabs and African-Americans.”  (I quoted that from an article co-authored by the Director of the Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism at California State University San Bernardino.)

These are inhumane times

This past Thursday the Justice Department issued a legal brief arguing that federal civil rights law does not ban discrimination on sexual orientation.  In April the administration rewrote a federal rule that had bared discrimination in health care due to “gender identity,” and the State Department reportedly has been, “retroactively revoking passports for transgender women, forcing them to provide proof of their gender.”  Some in the EPA have come out and said that under Trump their mission is changing, “from protecting human health and the environment to protecting industry.” 

These are inhumane times.

All this, and I haven’t yet mentioned that, according to U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw, the administration is responsible for “losing several hundred parents” of the more than 2,700 children forcible separated at the U.S. boarder since October of last year, nor that, as a recent article in New York magazine put it, it seems increasingly plausible that “Trump has been a Russian asset since 1987.”

These are inhumane times indeed.  Frightening times.  Dangerous times.  And times that call on us to work, perhaps harder than we’ve ever worked before, to both stem and then reverse the rising tide of hatred.  These are times that call on us as Unitarian Universalists to do this work, because as Unitarian Universalists we have something rare and unique to offer.  We know more about interfaith collaboration than just about anyone, because every Sunday in every UU sanctuary is something of an interfaith service.  We know a lot about working for justice as an expression of our spirituality, because the work of justice has been at the core of our Unitarian Universalist faith and the Unitarian and Universalist faiths which preceded it.  We know so much about inclusion, for it has been a principle around which we have rallied since the beginning that every person has inherent worth and dignity.

I’m going to give the last words here to the Rev. Olympia Brown who, among other things, was the first woman ordained in the United States with the full support and backing of a denomination.  In a well-known passage from her writings (included in the back of our hymnal at #569) she said,

Stand by this faith. Work for it and sacrifice for it. There is nothing in all the world so important as to be loyal to this faith which has placed before us the loftiest ideals, which has comforted us in sorrow, strengthened us for noble duty and made the world beautiful. Do not demand immediate results but rejoice that we are worthy to be entrusted with this great message, that you are strong enough to work for a great true principle without counting the cost.

Parting Words

For our Parting Words I will once again return to Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray’s GA sermon:

The promise of our faith means liberating ourselves from the systems of dominance and exploitation we all suffer under. The promise of our faith means making compassion a way of being, it means creating a collective sense of both community and responsibility. It holds the vision of a yet to be realized future where our collective survival, our liberation, and a practice of the fullness of our theology is possible.

[…]

Theologically, our Universalism tells us that no one is outside the circle of love. However, we must understand that in our lives, in the context of oppression and discrimination, that the circle has never been drawn wider from the center. It has always grown wider because of the vision, leadership and organizing of people living on the margins who truly understand the limits and costs of oppressive policies—and what liberation means.

This time we are living in is one of tremendous opportunity and needed change—and the health and strength of our communities and our commitment to our values, to this theology of love and interdependence is crucial. I know this work is calling more from us, but I also know that we have been readying for it. And I know it will change us, but I also see that day when we will look back and see the measurable change in our hearts, in our communities, in our faith and in our society that were nurtured by our struggles and our courageous love today.

Now this change won’t come through optimistic hope or casual practice. It will take a greater commitment and generosity to communities that sustain courage, love, hope and resiliency. It will mean new ways of living our faith and reaching out more boldly, lovingly and faithfully with others for justice. And it will take each of us finding our work, our place—where our gifts help call something new—something life giving—into this world.

Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray

Benediction

Instead of our usual benediction, this morning I offer the words with which Susan concluded her sermon:

May the spiritual community that we practice strengthen all of our hearts, may it give us courage, may we not be silent or shrink back from the demands of love. May we hold one another in love as we follow new pathways of joy, of community, of change, of risk and of joy. And may we all be held the practice of agape love that leads us to the liberation we all need—until all are free.

Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray

Introduction to the Closing Hymn

These are the words Jason Shelton spoke at the 2017 General Assembly when he premiered the updated lyrics for his beloved song, “Standing on the Side of Love” (now “Answering the Call of Love”).  This morning was the first time we sang the new words, so we shared Jason’s introduction:

Sometimes we build a barrier to keep love tightly bound.
Sometimes our words themselves are the barriers.
The metaphors we use for the work of justice matter.

If we are called to be in this work together, then we have to understand when our words become barriers to full participation.

What does love call us to do? For some, it’s standing on the side of love. For some, standing is not an option. And the continued use of that metaphor is a painful reminder of the barriers to full inclusion of people with disabilities in our congregations and at our General Assemblies.

What is my responsibility as an artist when awareness of this pain comes to my consciousness?

I am clear that the SSL metaphor — as I intended it — has nothing to do with the physical act of standing. It’s about aligning ourselves with what love calls us to do. But I am also clear that intent is not the same thing is impact, and the impact of this metaphor has become a barrier for some among us.

Friends, when love calls, it sometimes asks us to let go of our attachments, and maybe even our t-shirts. I’m not sure what to do about those t-shirts, but I do know that love is calling us to a new and deeper awareness, and I can do something about the song that I wrote.

So I ask you to rise not in body, but truly to rise in spirit — mindful of all that might mean for you — and join me in Answering the Call of Love.

Roots Run Deep and Wide

Henry David Thoreau wrote, “If you have made castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be.  Now put the foundations under them.”

I cannot tell you how many people, over the years, have told me that they discovered Unitarian Universalism at some time in their adulthood, recognized it immediately as the spiritual home they had been searching for, and thought that it had to be something new, something that had come into being recently, bursting onto the religious scene, fully formed, like Athena from the head of Zeus.  They are often shocked to know that modern Unitarian Universalism has roots that go back thousands of years.

At the Council of Nicea, in 325, a priest named Arius argued that Jesus was not eternal, that he was created by God at a particular point in history, and, therefore, that Jesus was not God.  This heresy is sometimes named after Arius – “Arianism” – and sometimes by its more technical name – “monarchism.”  By any name it is the theological position that the Christian God is not three persons, but one.  In other words, it is an anti-trinitarian theology.  In other words, it is unitarian theology.  The Unitarian roots of modern Unitarian Universalism go back to the beginning of the Christianity. 

So, too, the roots of the other parent of our faith, Universalism.  During the first 600 years of Christianity there were six major schools of Christianity, four of which were one or another form of universalism.   This was the belief that no soul would be condemned to eternal damnation; that all souls would, at least eventually, be reconciled with God.  In other words, four of the six earliest theological traditions within Christianity affirmed some form of universal salvation.

If you have ever thought that modern Unitarian Universalism was something new, an example of creation ex nihil (creation out of nothing), then you should know that there are actually some pretty solid foundations under this seeming cloud castle.  You should know that we have roots that go pretty deep. 

And the reason that it’s important to know about these roots is that it is hard to understand – or to understand fully – why we are as we are without knowing at least something about who we’ve been.  Roots – a person’s or an institution’s, no less than a plant’s – feed the organism, and as we all know, “you are what you eat.”

In the Polish Brethren of the 1500s in Rakow, Poland you can see the seeds of our commitment to the principle of the separation of church and state (a principle they advocated long before Jefferson opined that there should be a “wall” between them).  These early anti-trinitarians saw all people as kin to one another, and believed that within the religious sphere all people should be treated equally regardless of religious “rank.”  Our current affirmation of the “priest and prophethood of all people,” or the recognition of that both lay and ordained people are, truly, ministers with distinct but equal important callings, can be traced here.

Around this same time, King John Sigusmund of Transylvania was issuing his famous Edict of Toleration which declared that within the borders of his kingdom there would be no religious favoritism nor discrimination.  This was a big deal, because in other kingdoms during this period people were being burned at the stake for holding the wrong theology.  (Michael Servetus, for instance, was burned at the stake by John Calvin because of his book On The Errors of the Trinity, and Calvin had a copy of the book bound to Servetus's body so that when he arrived in hell they’d know why he’d come.)  But in Transylvania, there was an edict of the king affirming religious freedom.

…[I]n 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 […] no one shall be reviled for his religion by anyone […] for faith is the gift of God ...

The “freedom of the pulpit” we affirm can be seen to have its roots here.  And while this no doubt was primarily focused on a freedom for anyone in the Christian traditions to be free to hold their views, it should be noted that King John was no doubt influenced by his mother, Queen Isabella who, when her reign was under attack, sought and found safe haven with the Muslim Emperor Saladin.  That experience must have affected young John, and most certainly affected his mother.  The value of religious freedom which we so cherish flows into us through our well-established roots.

I could go on, talking about educators, social reformers, artists, activists, pioneers and exemplars of much of the liberal religious and political perspectives that form our faith today.  They are legion, and their enumeration can be a source of real pride.  Google “famous Unitarian Universalists” and you’ll find a number of such lists.  Champions of abolition, women’s suffrage, humane treatment of people with mental illness, peace, the vision of a united world, humanism, universal literacy, religious freedom, civil rights for people of color and the LGBTQI communities … I could go on and on. 

And it’s important to know our roots because we cannot understand why we areas we are without knowing at least something about who we’ve been.  And we’ve been some very good things.

Yet those are not our only roots.  Rarely are one’s roots entirely healthy.  I have said here before that on my mother’s side of the family I can trace my roots back to Berowold, the first laird ofInnes, in 1160.  That’s something I sometimes puff my chest out a bit about.

In that same lineage, though, I have ancestors who owned slaves, and one, John Harper, according to a paper of the time, held on his property a “mock lynching.”  His brother and sister had been murdered, and although evidence seemed to point to one of his nephews, it was apparently easier to blame some of the black people who worked there, so he took them, put nooses around their necks, and said that he would hang them if they didn’t say what they knew.  He released them when it was clear that they knew nothing, but he did that, and that is one of my roots.

And while we as a faith tradition justly celebrate the pride of our past, it is important to remember that modern Unitarian Universalism has not just strong and lovely roots, but rotted and poisonous ones as well.

So we celebrate Theodore Parker, who preached with a gun in the pulpit because he knew that in the church basement there were runaway slaves, but we also have Millard Fillmore, the President who signed the Fugitive Slave Act into law.

And we have often been at the forefront of civil rights movements, it is also a part of our faith tradition’s history is that we very systematically undermined promising ministries by and among people of color.  We could be now growing in places we wish would could be, but we intentionally ripped those roots out.

And along with our embrace and affirmation of life-affirming humanism,  many of our ancestors also advocated for eugenics – the so-called science that assumed that some people were genetically superior and others inferior, and that measures should be taken to ensure the growth of the former and the decline of the later.

For some years now, it has been the practice at our General Assemblies to acknowledge that the land on which we meet once belonged to someone else.  And so we seek out representatives of the indigenous peoples of the area to ask for their welcome.  When we met in Boulder, Colorado, though, then President Bill Sinkford asked not only for a welcome from a Ute leader, but forgiveness as well.  A part of our history includes the 1870s, during which Unitarians were among the religious denominations that sent missionaries to “civilize” native peoples in that region. 

We cannot know why we are as we are without knowing the whole of who we have been … and who we have been has been a decidedly mixed bag. 

And who we are today – not just our movement, but also this congregation – is a decidedly mixed bag. When I stand here and praise Unitarian Universalism I always begin with the qualifier, “At our best …”  “At our best we are like this.  At our best we are like that.” 

In our faith tradition we affirm lay ministry, yet often – and even in this congregation – we distrust our leaders – religious professionals and lay leaders both – and we do not always affirm one another’s “inherent worth,” nor assume good intentions of one another.

And while embracing religious diversity is one of the cornerstone values we espouse, we can be as closed-minded about this as anyone else, and be convinced that some religious perspectives – particularly, perhaps, the ones we happen to hold – are better than others.  All too often, all too many of us believe this, and we demonstrate this belief with our actions.  In our movement – even within this congregation – there are people who won’t say what they believe because they believe that what they’d say wouldn’t be welcome, and that they, then, would be unwelcome.

We lift up as a virtue the freedom of thought and behavior that our roots carry to us from those earliest of days, yet this freedom can often lead to a lack of a sense of engagement.  Since this faith does not tell us what to believe or what should do, far too many of us – even in this congregation – far too often come when its convenient to do so, holding back from a full-on commitment to this congregation, in large part, because we do not feel compelled.  I think that one of the sources of the low level of the contributions of time, talent, and treasure so many have observed can be traced to this.

We cannot understand why we are as we are if we do not know – and own – all that we have been.  And while some of our roots have been deep and strong, others have been rotten and poisonous.

Yet my message this morning is not a condemnation.  For when we are not at our best we are not evil, we are simply as human, and our institutions are as human, as is so often true of anyone else.  To move forward, though, to live more often from our best, we can not ignore those roots we would prefer not to see.  If we do they will continue to exert their putrid and putrefying influence in ways we will not recognize, and might not even be able to imagine.

Our roots – both our powerful and our poisonous – affect who we are, yet they do not dictate who we will become.  That is entirely up to us.  From which roots we draw our nourishment is a choice, and we – as individuals, as a congregation, as a faith tradition, and as a society – must make that choice.

The good news is that our Unitarian roots remind us that we have the mind and the will to make such choices wisely, and our Universalist roots remind us that we will, in the end, always choose Love.

Pax tecum,

RevWik