Support the Chronicle. During December, its senior minister, Davidson Loehr, was dismissed from the church. For many the dismissal process was unfair, upsetting, and wrong. While many others felt the dismissal was fair. Many remain distressed over the dismissal. And that word even feels strong, passionate, and capable. How we define someone shows where we want to locate the power and dignity: with them, or with us.
Rachel Naomi Remen tells a powerful story on this point, taken from her own life. It took her an hour to tell her story. He listened closely and with great sympathy for her. After she finished he was filled with pity for her, and asked if she was still able to practice at least a little Remen is also a physician. Shocked, she reminded him that her schedule was as busy as his. Then she reflected:. But his remark had reawakened a deep sense of doubt.
Many years ago, other doctors had told me that I would be dead long before now. On the strength of their authority I had decided not to marry or become a parent. The power of the expert is very great and the way in which an expert sees you may easily become the way in which you see yourself.
Kitchen Table Wisdom, p. In the weeks that followed, she worried more about her physical problems. Finally, one of her physician friends asked her why she seemed to be having such a hard time. Remen writes:. Almost in tears, I told him what had happened. Like Dr. When I had finished he looked at me for a long time.
You are a warrior! Defining someone as a victim is one of the most brutal and demeaning things we can do to them. That left liberals without a necessary role to play. It also shows, perhaps painfully, that the reason we define our token groups as victims is so that we can give ourselves a necessary role to play. The salvation story of political liberals requires victims. Shelby Steele, Thomas Sowell, Jonathan Rauch, Jim Sleeper, Christina Hoff Sommers, Camille Paglia and Todd Gitlin come quickly to mind as among the many authors who wrote widely-read critiques of the racism, sexism and narcissism of the liberal culture.
She was describing the American middle class, but specifically the parts of it that constitute cultural liberalism. Using logic to show the incoherence of the Seven Banalities feels kind of rude, like throwing melons at a little dancing bear. But think about this. That means this alleged worth and dignity are not inherent, but — perhaps to coin a word — adherent: not there from conception but somehow added later. Well, when? And how? This principle dissolves as soon as it is examined, which may be why there has been no serious effort to do this kind of critical examination.
Only that? Only goodness? Just a big happy face? What about inherent evil? What about our inherent gullibility, foolishness, or selfishness?
What about our tendency toward self-absorption and the rest of the shadow sides that complete the make-up of the human condition: what of them? If all these potentialities are present, then we need the ability to make necessary distinctions between the inherent or adherent parts of us that are silly, self-absorbed, etc.
If strict Calvinists err by overemphasizing original sin, it is surely more dangerous to ignore it, and to cover the human condition with a childish happy face. Are Sowell and Steele the wrong kind of black people?
If so, why so? Why is Unitarian Universalism dying? There have been several fairly clear steps:. Do you see how radical it is?
Whether or not Emerson can be seen as a Unitarian — and the leading Unitarians of his time denied that he could be — he was definitely a religious liberal, and a courageous preacher of honest religion.
But honest religion is a style, not a position. When it becomes a position, a belief, a creed or orthodoxy, we need to hold lightly to it. The movement Emerson started was called Transcendentalism.
And for the Transcendentalists, time made the ancient teachings about Jesus, God and the Bible uncouth. Uncouth, because they no longer led reasonable and informed minds to truth that helped them come alive, no longer led to truth that could heal them or their world and help make them more authentic and whole.
But it is important to look back to that spirit that drove them beyond the comfort zone of those around them. The spirit always moves on beyond all creeds and orthodoxies, beyond the beliefs of any person or any time and place.
This life-giving spirit is called many things. One name for it is the spirit of life; another is the spirit of heresy. People engaging in honest religion were, are and always will be heretics. So yet another name for the spirit of honest religion, the spirit of heresy, is the Holy Spirit.
It is the Holy Spirit that may never be fenced in, the Holy Spirit that is larger than all creeds, all gods, and all religions. Emerson believed it is within us all, and I think he was right.
And as Emerson saw and said, it is bigger than all our religions. You can see this spirit at every level of life. It is what makes plants turn toward the sun. It is what makes kittens, puppies and children run toward things that welcome them and run away from things that frighten them.
I once saw an amoeba through a microscope, and even it was moving into the open places, moving toward food, and moving away from impurities or negative things in its environment.
There is a famous passage from the ancient Chinese classic the Tao te Ching that says it this way:. We want to be a part of that Tao, that way, to let it help us get around impurities and obstacles in our own lives.
In our Western religions where time has indeed made much of their ancient good uncouth, many of the obstacles today are the very creeds and orthodoxies which theologians, priests and churches have frozen into little outdated idols. And the Holy Spirit hates those little linguistic idols, so it keeps bringing us these heretics, these prophets of honest religion, who will let the questions more profound than answers challenge and shatter those answers when they can no longer help us come alive.
Ralph Waldo Emerson was one of the servants of those questions more profound than answers, a servant of that spirit of life. And this is a kind of hide-and-seek where the best part of the game is definitely being found. Rabbi LeBurkien is now a member of this church, and was gracious enough to provide many materials — and some basic education for me — on these two holidays. He also brought his shofar and played it at the beginning and end of the service.
Most of the ritual words here were taken or adapted from Jewish materials, while the sermon was my attempt to incorporate some of the wisdom from these stories and traditions into our own tradition of doing honest religion in ordinary language.
According to some Jewish writers, the sound of the shofar is like a prayer, or even like the voice of God in our midst.
We welcome both. Please join me in the responsive invocation written in your order of service. The sons of Jacob were twelve in number, Now Jacob loved Joseph more than any of his other sons, so he made a coat of many colors for him.
When his brothers saw the coat they believed that their father loved Joseph more than any of them, and began to hate their brother. Joseph had a series of dreams which he told his brothers about. The first was of binding up of sheaves in the field. Joseph came to them again with another dream in which the sun, moon and 11 stars bowed down to him.
And again his brothers increased their hatred of their brother Joseph who was unaware of their feelings against him. And so Joseph set off but his brothers saw him at a distance and began plotting the murder of their brother because of their hatred and jealousy. After these deeds, the brothers sat down to eat a meal and as they ate, they watched a caravan of Ishmaelites from and in doing so saved my life, Gilead coming with their spices, balm and laudanum bound for Egypt.
After all he is our brother. They returned the bloody coat to their father and Joseph was believed to have died from animal attack. Joseph did well in the land of Egypt. He worked very hard and bought himself out of slavery, and rose in importance to become close to the king or Pharaoh. He had his brothers brought before him and contemplated taking revenge against them but could not. Be not grieved nor angry but hurry back to my father and speak to him from his son Joseph: You will live near me, you, your sons, your grandsons, your flocks and herds and all that belongs to you and I will provide for you through the years of famine to come.
You must tell my father who I am in Egypt, and all you have seen and bring him back here to me. And Yom Kippur, which ended the ten days of repentance and atonement this past Thursday.
Rosh Hashanah is a time of repenting for bad actions toward other people, a time for looking inside, asking what kind of people our actions have shown us to be in the past year. Before forgiveness can happen, we have to confess to the people we believe we have wronged. Yom Kippur, the end of this ten days, is called the Day of Atonement. Being at one with yourself and your highest and most life-giving values — or in theological language, with your God. Most of Judaism is for Jews, just as most of Christianity is for Christians.
But there are parts of all religions that are ours for the taking, and we want to learn from them if we can. Those parts are the insights into the human condition, and the wisdom for living more wisely and well.
And like the rest of us, they usually fail to keep many of them. The world seldom cooperates with all of our resolutions, and then what do we do? Life can put us in a hole or back us into a corner or frighten us, and we lower our expectations and our standards. This is part of the religious lesson of that story of Joseph that Rabbi LeBurkien told you earlier.
If you looked in the Hall of Fame for Dysfunctional Families, their group photo would be there. Some wanted to kill him, others to throw him into a deep hole so the wild animals would eat him, and the kindest of them decided simply to sell him into slavery. If you got to choose your brothers, nobody would choose them.
Years later, Joseph has risen to power through the strength of his own character and the luck of life. His brothers — due to bad luck, which in this story is also meant as a judgment on their character — are brought before him. Joseph can take all the vengeance he wants now. He can get even with them in spades for everything they did to him and everything they thought about doing to him.
But what would he gain? Sure, it would give him a wonderful cheap thrill, getting even. But then he would have stooped to their level. He would be showing that he was their brother in the worst way rather than in the best way. What Joseph did in this ancient myth by acting out of love, out of his highest and proudest ideals, is more than most of us might do. It calls us to a higher plane of being, to live out of only our proudest ideals. Unless we can forgive a past that cannot be changed, we will carry anger, resentment and the hope for vengeance or anger or a paralyzing fear into the future.
So instead, we forgive ourselves and each other and begin again in love. Think of the current economic mess our country and growing parts of the world are in. But stocks have fallen, some people have lost thousands from their retirement funds, and other countries are panicked as well.
Nonprofits and churches are also worried because right now, in this panic, charitable giving is slowing down. People are afraid want to put their money under their pillow, or under a rock. A lot of people are afraid that the light at the end of the tunnel might be an oncoming train.
We are Joseph, thrown into a hole. Not by this or that Republican or Democrat or Congress, but by Life. We are Joseph. Do we allow ourselves to be ruled by fear and anger? So many strong winds blowing us in so many directions right now. Which winds do we let blow us around? Should we give up on the pledge drive, cancel the wonderful building campaign we have planned for our children, our programs, our future, cancel all two dozen of our split-the-plate recipients and sell the church for spare parts?
We will not be frightened away from life. I read an article from a company called Resource Services Inc. It was founded in by two evangelical classmates from Baylor University, to help churches plan successful capital campaigns, and at one point, of the 25 largest successful church capital campaigns in history, all but one of them was planned by this company.
So they have learned a lot about the vicissitudes of economics and economic history. Each year we have given more than the previous year. They suggest thinking about it this way: everything we give, Life gave to us first. The economy always recovers. Even if this is going to be compared to the great scares like the stock market crash, or the one way back in , the economy is now far more global. Too much is at stake for too many people to let everything slide off a cliff.
In other words, it is safe to act as though our highest values are still our best guides to living now. The next year or two may well be tough. Tough times are a part of living. This past Wednesday I attended the Kol Nidre service at Congregation Agudis Achim, a local conservative congregation, and heard a new version of an old story. I want to share it with you. An older man was out walking on the beach one day when he noticed, far ahead of him, a young woman who would bend down, pick something up, throw it into the ocean, then walk on until she stopped and did it again.
Curious, he walked toward her, and as he got closer he saw she was picking up starfish, one at a time, and throwing them back into the ocean. I throw them back to their home. He laughed. The ocean has been doing this for millions of years. Millions of starfish have died on the beach, and always will. Do you honestly think you can make any difference? She walked over to another starfish, picked it up, and threw it back into the ocean.
But it forced him to think, and to act. As she walked on, he joined her, and before long he bent over, picked up a starfish, threw it back to the sea, and a big smile broke out on his face. Some other people on the beach who had been watching this interchange began getting up and walking toward the ocean, picking up starfish and tossing them into the sea. Soon nearly everyone was doing it, and kept doing it until they had covered the whole beach.
When the last starfish had been thrown back to its home in the ocean, the people all cheered and hugged one another. Like the story of Joseph, that beach is a metaphor for life. But the real truth about us is just how powerful we really are if we will act on our highest values, no matter what life brings us.
Because people are watching. We are watching. Then comes the laughing and cheering. Cheering ourselves, for having the courage of our deepest convictions, the courage to come alive, embrace our most life-giving truths, and begin healing ourselves and our world. If you have hesitated to come into our pledge drive, or have entered it hesitantly and would be prouder to invest more of your money, time and spirit here, I advise you to come in boldly.
Come join us on this wonderful and challenging beach of life. Help us clean the fearful and paralyzing debris off of it. Help us return everything to life. If it takes us all a little longer than we think to restore health to our economy and you need to adjust your pledge next spring or summer, of course you can do that. But for now, be hopeful and bold because that gives life both to us and to you. It is a mission of at-one-ment, coming to be at one with our proudest ideals and highest values.
So come join us on this beach, and help us maintain it and ourselves as beacons of light, life and hope. The work together is inspiring and fun. Join us! Splitting the air, reminding us to let go of unworthy goals and selfish behaviors, and instill in our hearts a new spirit. Together we have celebrated the creation of the universe, the creations of nature, and the power of creation which is within each one of us. We are the creators and co-creators of our lives, our world, and our future.
We have, each of us, a small power of creation like unto that of God. Let us go forth from here reclaiming our ability to know good from evil. We go forth as creative and powerful people, called again to serve only our highest callings, to come alive, to seek truth and to heal our world.
Please join me in our responsive benediction. Let us be pulled into spiritual paths that leave us with a good aftertaste. There is so much religious advice around telling us how we had better get in line with this or that set of beliefs being hawked by churches and preachers who sometimes just feel too slick or mean. But their certainty is too simple, doesn? Let us instead be lured into paths of loving others as we love ourselves, and loving ourselves as children of God, the sons and daughters of Life?
Such spiritual paths are very simple, but they have an aroma and an aftertaste that is still pleasing even years later. So much in life can be identified by the lasting taste, smell and feel it leaves with us. Let us learn to be drawn to the places that smell good — that smell like ambrosia, or the subtle scent of those angels of our better nature.
The Friar Bernard lamented in his cell on Mount Cenis the crimes of mankind, and rising one morning before day from his bed of moss and dry leaves, he gnawed his roots and berries, drank of the spring, and set forth to go to Rome to reform the corruption of mankind.
On his way he encountered many travellers who greeted him courteously; and the cabins of the peasants and the castles of the lords supplied his few wants. When he came at last to Rome, his piety and good will easily introduced him to many families of the rich, and on the first day he saw and talked with gentle mothers with their babes at their breasts, who told him how much love they bore their children, and how they were perplexed in their daily walk lest they should fail in their duty to them.
These are stories of godly children and holy families and romantic sacrifices made in old or in recent times by great and not mean persons; and last evening, our family was collected, and our husbands and brothers discoursed sadly on what we could save and give in the hard times. Does thy convent want gifts? Every religious liberal has heard some version of this question from their family or friends. Maybe all I can do here is let you hear how I grapple with this, hoping it might help you grapple with it too.
One way of getting into the complexities of belief today is through understanding the complexities of families today. And what is true of our blended families is also true of the blend of beliefs we each have. Honest religious belief can never again be the simplistic kind of white-bread thing we thought it was fifty years ago. The things we cling to today are blended families of beliefs, borrowing from all over the world map.
In old-time religion, it might have seemed enough to recite a creed cobbled together many centuries earlier by people living in a very different world, as though that could do more than make us uncritical members of a very old club with no necessary wisdom for the modern world. Now the lights from which we find enlightenment come in many different sizes, shapes and genders, like the lights upon our altar.
Men, women, children, experiences we never expected to change our life, but did. In this more complex world of spirituality, orthodoxy is always too small for real life. To exalt beliefs is to give way too much credit to theologians! You might think that there must be some secret knowledge that theologians learn, that gives them a special kind of authority not available to normal people.
But I spent seven years in graduate school, and if there had been that kind of secret knowledge, I would have found it. Theologians are academics, and their courses are restricted to thinking about life from the perspective of their religion.
Talking to a theologian is like talking to a Buick salesman. The same is true with theologians. They also have a conflict of interest. Orthodoxies and polished belief statements are mostly like advertising brochures that often have very little to do with the lives led by the believers. Think of the Roman family in that reading by Ralph Waldo Emerson. They were completely outside the acceptable boundaries of belief that Friar Bernard had learned, so he prayed for his God to destroy these Romans.
Now that alone is incredible, disgusting, and not terribly surprising. His beliefs were making him small and dangerous, in a world that went way beyond them, the way the world usually goes way beyond the boundaries of beliefs.
As we heard his disgust beginning to unfold for this generous family, he was starting to smell bad. But then his humanity trumped his theology, he realized these were cultured and caring people — lovers, even!
His beliefs no longer seemed so valid, because life had trumped belief. Life should always be able to trump beliefs. The Romans had a saying that we should behave as though all the truly decent people who had ever lived were watching us, and then do only what we could proudly do in front of that audience.
And in this story they certainly behaved that way. So what do we believe, anyway? Usually when we are asked what we believe, we try to think of some polished belief statements somebody taught us, because they sound more impressive than something we could just make up. If we just make up our own words for what we believe, it seldom sounds very dramatic. When conservatives do it, we liberals often love to pick them apart. Billions of galaxies. And three thousand years ago, when the god of the Bible was first exalted by a small tribe of Hebrew people in the Middle East, they thought the whole universe was smaller than the state of Texas.
I think some Texans still do. On the other hand, if we try to use our own words, or slogans we hear in our highly evolved liberal groups to define ourselves by beliefs, it can get just as arrogant, and may not be very truthful. If we say we celebrate freedom of belief — and we love the sound of that one! The trouble with using polished and rehearsed little bromides is that they will usually sound more impressive than our lives look. That doesnt really fool anybody, and it has a bad aroma. But how much of this has been evident in the way you lived your life during the last couple weeks?
And it gets worse. When we do something really charitable, we usually want credit for it. So then were our motives altruistic, or mostly self-centered? Jesus said to give in secret, not to let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, and we probably all admire that degree of humility, but we seldom have it. You might like high-sounding rhetoric, like hearing good sermons that lift up really noble aspirations, and somewhere in both your head and heart you really mean all this as much as you know how to mean anything.
One answer is to define ourselves not by beliefs but by behaviors, and to try and act like all the most decent people in the world were watching us. John Calvin was the 16th century theologian who preached the gospel of original sin and human depravity, and taught it to tens of millions of Christians who followed his Calvinist theology.
When a brilliant and impertinent Spanish physician named Michael Servetus — this was the physician who first discovered the circulation of blood — wrote an essay on the errors of the Trinity, and sent a copy to Calvin, Calvin seethed. Worse than that, Calvin instructed the executioners to tie Servetus in a chair, lower him into the flames, then raise him up, lower him again, so in all it took half an hour before Servetus died.
But their behavior put the lie to their professed beliefs, and left a terrible stench in the annals of history. There was nothing of God about either of them in these actions. The goal is authenticity, not orthodoxy. And orthodoxies often offer little more than an anesthetic for those who are afraid or unsure how to be authentic. And the clues to this are all around us:. The priest defined himself by beliefs and we all knew he was too small.
The Romans never even mentioned beliefs, and even in the story they smelled sweet. A bigger clue, and better news, is the fact that we all knew that. And the best news is that we act on it, and act on it naturally, easily, and often. We just ordained Jack Harris-Bonham here this morning. We did it because he was here for two years, as an intern then as the contract minister during my sabbatical, and we came to know his heart and mind through his actions toward others.
And like the Roman family, we knew this was a decent person and a blessing to the world, whatever beliefs get him there. So what can we say about honest religion that might be useful? One thing is that there is no secret knowledge: nothing that is necessary to us is really hidden.
We can hear stories like the reading by Emerson, awful stories of arrogant men like John Calvin and the Ayatollah Khomeini, we can delight in recognizing the promise of someone like Jack Harris-Bonham and ordain him to whatever kinds of ministry his heart and the whims of the world may lead him to, and we have already shown that we have almost all the spiritual knowledge we need to be saved, and to help heal the world around us.
We know the difference between the stench of bad faith inflicted on ourselves and others, and the sweet smell of a life lived pretty fully and well here and now, among one another.
Religious instruction is important, to help train the moral sense that is already a part of us. When someone or something in life opens us to the possibility of a life with more understanding, compassion or wholeness, let us gather our courage and step through that opening, from a world of the habitual into a world of the possible.
When we feel the pull of authenticity, let us bend toward it, that it may draw us into lives of greater integrity, love and joy. Life is a series of pushes and pulls, too many trying to push us toward selling out, settling for too little from ourselves, pushing us toward the dissipation of our spirits. But not all of life is against us. If we live among angels and demons, and have been frightened by the demons, let us remember there are angels as well: messengers from Life, from places of trust and empowerment, from a healing kind of truth and hope.
Those angels. Let us walk with those angels, in whatever guise they appear. Sometimes they even appear among those who love us. We hunger for messages of wholeness and hope.
Let us listen for them, answer them, and be prepared to be transformed. I want to spend some time this fall making us more aware of the rich history of honest religion. Today I want to jump years and talk about Rev.
William Ellery Channing. Most of you may never have heard of him, but he was the man most responsible for making Unitarianism into a separate American faith, nearly two hundred years ago.
Is it just mindless hero-worship? Worse, is it a kind of slobbering narcissism? I want that too; maybe I can learn something here! So I want to start by backing off and describing what the spirit of honest religion is about, so we can see this William Ellery Channing fellow in the right context, so we can see how any of this might be useful in our own search for honest religion.
But it was never about how many gods we should count. It was about a style of seeking honest religion, and it was the same style that has been there in all times and places, whenever the spirit of honest religion appears. There are many ways to put this primal spirit of honest religion. What else of our theology is embarrassing? As luck would have it, I heard Rebecca discuss this last week and I think it is pretty good. The only point of the house metaphor is to provide a metacognitive scaffold for people to better understand the elements of classical systematic theology.
My thinking today is that we may be wired for metaphor and narrative regardless of how apt or useful they are. What if via Frankl as we attempt to make meaning of the world we are directed by our language via Whorff-Sapir towards constructive metaphors that we string into narratives? However, I suspect that a nearby DRE might have a copy for you to borrow.
This history helps explain us today and it also points to places where our shared implicit theology breaks down. Where aspects of our theology as currently practiced today in many UU congregations break?
For example, our congregational polity developed in reaction to other forms of church polity where power was centralized and authoritarian hierarchies were present. While our polity came about to address certain anti-oppression concerns, are there ways that congregational polity might oppress members of our congregations and the wider community?
Finally, we do need to keep in mind that any old and dusty piece of writing can look embarrassing to us today. We need to keep in mind the historical context that created these writings.
Yes, the United States would expand, but not by war, rather by the power of her ideas, the pressure of her commerce, by the steady advance of a superior race, with superior ideas and a better civilization, by being better than Mexico, wiser, humaner, more free and manly.
We might bungle things and make mistakes. Want to echo what everyone here is saying about the progressive narrative being kaput. Because we hope it to be so and are willing to live it into being.
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