3.6.16
What if I told you that the history of our Unitarian ancestors was relevant for you here today?
If you were truthful, you might say you don’t believe me!
You might not believe me if you don’t know our history, and you might not know our history because you might not care, to be honest – and you might not care because you know enough to know that Unitarians were Christians.
If you’re not Christian, you might not be very interested in our Christian history – in fact, you might wish we didn’t talk about it – because of the ways you’ve seen some Christians behave, you would be glad not to be associated with Christians and glad if our Christian history was lost to the past.
But what if I told you that learning about our Christian Unitarian ancestors would help us better understand ourselves now?
But I should back up because maybe not everyone here knows that Unitarians were Christians. It’s true: Unitarians and Universalists were Christian denominations. They merged in the 60s to become Unitarian Universalism.
One of the ways to understand Unitarian Universalism’s relationship to Christianity is like the relationship to a grandparent.
For example, Americans whose grandparents were immigrants from Mexico have varying degrees of relationship to that heritage, whether because of circumstance or choice. Some stay very close to that heritage, perhaps speaking Spanish fluently and observing Mexican traditions. Others have picked up many elements of other cultures. Some have created new variations of Mexican culture only found here in the U.S. All have done varying degrees of all of the above.
Likewise, because Unitarian Universalism has Christianity in its DNA, you’ll find varying relationships to Christianity among different congregations and different individual UUs.
There are certainly some UUs who consider themselves Christian, including here in our congregation.
But I think all would agree that Unitarian Universalism as a whole is no longer Christian – we aren’t any one specific world religion. That’s because we are Unitarian Universalists!
So the question becomes: what is Unitarian Universalism?
We have to begin by understanding our DNA – our history. Today we look at the Unitarian side. Next week, the Universalist side.
The short-hand usually used for explaining Unitarians is that they didn’t believe in the Trinity: God being three in One: Father, Son, Holy Spirit – they had various interpretations about whether Jesus was fully divine enough to be considered on the same level as God. That was of course considered heresy.
But that quick explanation doesn’t do full justice to the many additional, and more important ways that Unitarians were heretics.
I will explain the heresy by describing to you three major moments in Unitarian history. I’m calling them OMG moments: those of you familiar with texting and social media know that OMG is an exclamation of Oh My God.
I’m calling them OMG moments because if any of those three moments had occurred today in our time of social media, everyone in attendance would be tweeting, posting to facebook, texting their friends with emojis of shocked faces.
These three OMG moments are all related to talks or sermons given by three of our most famous ancestors: Unitarians William Ellery Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Theodore Parker.
The first OMG moment was in reaction to a sermon by William Ellery Channing, who in 1819 gave a sermon titled “Unitarian Christianity.” …Probably sounds like a boring or blah title to us, but at the time, Unitarian was a slur of sorts. With this title, Channing said: ‘Fine, call us Unitarians – but I’m going to set straight for you what we actually believe.’
Religion professor Jeff Wilson describes that day:
When [Channing] strode up to the pulpit… he set in motion a carefully orchestrated set of events designed to permanently plant a stake for liberal religion in the United States. On hand were ministers (and journalists) from around the country brought in specifically to witness this historic moment, and within hours of Channing’s speech the sermon had been reported in newspapers and soon thereafter went to the printing presses.
To understand this moment, you need to know that at the time, Christians in New England were heatedly debating many theological points, the Trinity just being one of them. To us, their debates may seem boring or quaint, but this was a dramatic time for them – friendships were made and broken over these debates.
So in the midst of these debates, Channing laid out Unitarian Christianity by making several claims that were daring at the time.
At root, all of his claims were about arguing for and protecting the human capacity to develop our moral character.
Channing’s first heresy was that God is Good – a benevolent Father figure, not a distant mysterious King determined to confuse and test us. It was important to him that God’s moral character be good because it is God’s moral character that we try to emulate.
He championed the then radical phrase “Divinity within us” to say that original sin is not a thing. Human nature is fundamentally positive. He also came out against predestination – the idea that only certain chosen people will be saved. He said instead, that we can all develop our moral capacities and be good people, which opens us all up to salvation.
Even his argument against the Trinity was about moral character – he said Jesus is not to be worshipped because Jesus is too like a human and our veneration should only be for the moral perfections of God.
He argued that the orthodox Christians who saw humans as depraved and God as judgmental:
subvert our responsibility and the laws of our moral nature, that they make men machines, that they cast on God the blame of all evil deeds, that they discourage good minds, and inflate the fanatical with wild conceits …
Channing was still very much a Christian – he relied heavily on the Bible for all of the beliefs I just described – but his emphasis on humans’ ability to develop their moral character began a trajectory that brought us to today.
The next major moment in that trajectory came relatively quickly… Almost 20 years later, we come to our second OMG moment – this time the tweets and texts would have been about Ralph Waldo Emerson who critiqued his own Unitarian tradition.
Emerson had been invited by the students at Harvard to speak to their graduating class. The faculty at Harvard protested because Emerson was already considered a heretic. In fact, six years earlier, Emerson had resigned his post as minister at a Unitarian church, citing his inability to offer the Holy Communion in good faith. But the students prevailed, and Emerson came to speak.
He delivered on controversy, even from the very first sentence of his talk. His first words would not strike us as odd, but they were incredibly unusual and bold for his time. He began:
In this refulgent summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life. The grass grows, the buds burst, the meadow is spotted with fire and gold in the tint of flowers. The air is full of birds, and sweet with the breath of the pine….
He went on like this, describing the beauty of nature. This was shocking because in contrast, every minister of the time – even Channing – began any talk or sermon with a reference to the Bible. But Emerson talked about the glory of nature, and he told a personal story from his own life! … He did this because, whereas previously revelation had been limited to the Bible, Emerson saw revelation as coming from our own experiences – from the “intuition of the soul.”
He argued that by our intuition, we strive to understand truth and virtue – divine laws that become evident in our character and actions. He took Jesus down from the pedestal and said that the divine speaks in all of us.
…He wasn’t invited back to Harvard for 30 years.
But while the Harvard administration was slow to come around to Emerson’s ideas, others embraced them right away. One of the many people in attendance that day who would have friended Emerson on facebook after that sermon was Theodore Parker.
Parker was a recent Harvard graduate who took up Emerson’s call to change Unitarianism from the inside.
Only 3 years later – Theodore Parker delivered our third OMG moment – in the form of his sermon “The Transient and the Permanent in Christianity.”
Parker was preaching in a time of great upheaval and change–two decades before the Civil War and just after the Second Great Awakening. Religious denominations were responding to this change by trying to restore stability with new creeds and assertions of religious authority.
But, Theodore Parker said – instead of trying to grasp tighter to the “stuff” of our religious identities, let us seek the heart of our faith. So he laid out what he thought was not essential to Christianity and could fall away – the “transient” – vs. the “permanent” heart of Christianity. He called transient all forms of traditional doctrine – including belief in Jesus.
He said the religion of love that Jesus preached is permanent. Parker’s message was deeper than just “Was Jesus real or not?” …
…Parker’s message – still relevant for us today – was about humility regarding our particular beliefs, rituals, and stories – for they are forms shaped by our time and our culture and thus will likely pass away.
So how do we make sure we are focused not primarily on the form but on the heart at the center of the form?
Parker said,
Now who shall tell us that the change is to stop here? That this sect or that, or even all sects united, have exhausted the river of life, and received it all in their canonized urns…? Who shall tell us that another age will not smile at our doctrines, disputes, and unchristian quarrels?
But this did not leave Parker wandering in complacency or relativism. He believed deeply in the existence of God and in Jesus’ message of love, and he lived it out in his actions…
He was one of the first American ministers to endorse women’s suffrage, and the first to refer to God as both “Father” and “Mother.” He became the intellectual leader of the antislavery movement, opposed the “Mexican War,” led the Boston movement to rescue fugitive slaves, and created a new kind of church that was a center for social reform activists.
His religious faith was at the root of this action.
He did all of this despite the fact that, because of his sermon – that OMG moment – he was ostracized by his colleagues. Regardless, thousands regularly came to hear him preach.
These three OMG moments paved the way for Unitarianism to move further and further away, as a whole, from what we recognize as Christianity (but please understand that many UUs consider themselves to be Christian and they are an important part of our tradition).
What we have inherited from Channing, Emerson, and Parker is what is now called liberal religion. …Liberal not necessarily as in politically liberal, like democrat, but liberal meaning an optimism about humans and about the positive progress of ideas throughout time thanks to the use of our reason and intuition.
In one of my History classes, our professor Susan Ritchie told us that a secular historian would probably call Unitarian Universalism Post-Christian Protestantism.
The root word Protest within Protestantism hints at why a historian would describe us that way – Protestantism has always been about the impulse for continuous self-questioning, reformation and innovation.
But there’s a catch: the UU historian David Robinson says this impulse for continuous reformation is a bit of a curse: he calls it “the self-devouring nature of an impulse that must always destroy itself to go beyond itself.”
So if you sometimes wonder, “Why is it so hard for me to explain Unitarian Universalism to others?” … part of it is that we as a tradition have consistently been destroying ourselves in order to go beyond ourselves.
Just as Channing, Emerson, and Parker did in their own ways, we continue to break with the creedal and institutional boundaries that traditionally define religion.
I titled this sermon, “I Call that Mind Free” quoting William Ellery Channing. But we must be careful the freedom does not become meaningless.
What have we freed ourselves to believe or to do? If our process of reformation isn’t to leave us with nothing, we must rigorously ask ourselves – what is at the heart of our belief and how do we gain the strength to live it out in the world?
This journey through history helps me argue for what can remain at the heart of our Unitarian Universalist tradition.
I would place two things at the heart.
The first I would call the commitment to Stand on the Side of Love. There’s actually a lot packed into that phrase. Love requires us to give our allegiance to something bigger than ourselves – and to act on it.
The second impulse at the heart of our tradition is well described by Rev. Rebecca Benner:
[It] is not a particular theological belief or ritual, but rather how we go about ‘doing religion.’ We hold that the process of religion is ongoing, that there is always more truth to be found, that our faith is never finished. That which is ultimate is continually being shown to us—through the sacred scriptures of the world’s religions, through science and study, through the natural world, through the arts, through human relationships, through our own experiences in the world.
This process of reformation must be done with intention, in community.
So this is our challenge: that we not waste our free minds by ending up in some superficial, convenient, everything-and-anything-goes complacency.
Instead…
I Call that Mind Free which does the hard work of continually cultivating what Channing would have called our moral character …so that we can better understand how to Act in Love in the world.
I know that we already do this!
Let us remember to come back again and again to this community where we will be strengthened in that practice so we can continue the work.
May the courage and the commitments of our ancestors inspire in us a free mind that leads us further and further into the creation of a better world.
May it be so. Amen.
-Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon