November 12, 2017
Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon
Audio (quality of audio is not as good as audio for other sermons)
SERMON((I borrowed the title of this sermon from one by Rev. Scott Alexander. His sermon also inspired my use of the Marge Piercy quote, and the UU jokes at the beginning, as well as the quote from Charles Magistro.))
Perhaps you’ve heard some of the jokes about Unitarian Universalism –
Q: Why can’t UUs sing very well in choirs?
A: Because they’re always reading ahead to see if they agree with the next verse.
UU’s are basically good people, who, for the most part, try to live by the 10 suggestions.
Q: What do you get when you cross a UU with a Jehovah’s Witness?
A: Someone who knocks on your door for no apparent reason.
Sometimes it’s healthy and humbling to poke fun at ourselves – it helps us realize who we are and what we might do to be who we want to be.
The hope is that our laughter isn’t about complacency, though…for do we really want to be the tradition described in those jokes?
At one point in her novel Fly Away Home, Marge Piercy – one of my favorite writers – has one of her characters say of her daughters: “The girls had been raised Unitarian which seemed a nice, sensible compromise between having no religion at all and having to lie about what we believed. …Enough religion to be respectable but not enough to get in the way.”
A RELIGION THAT GETS IN THE WAY
I want a religion that gets in the way…that gets in the way of complacency, of the status quo.
I want a faith that upsets the money-changers’ tables, a faith that topples unjust empires, a faith that roots me even in rocky times to the source of Life that can sustain me.
So today, we’ll talk about a serious Unitarian Universalist faith. A lived faith that transforms our lives and the lives of those around us. I know that many of you are already on this path – the questions you ask propel you to live out your faith in the world in ways courageous and daring, small and large, bringing more justice and love to our world.
UU Robert Walsh says that once in the newspaper there was a story about a seminary professor in Kansas City who was put on trial by the Southern Baptists, accused of being a universalist. Walsh says:
It’s no wonder they were suspicious. He had stated publicly his belief that all people born into the world are children of God. And as if that were not enough, he also supported the ordination of women. Case closed? The professor denied the charges. “I’m not a universalist,” he said, and he convinced them. After four hours of deliberation they voted 21 to 11 to let him keep his job.
Now, I confess to being a universalist. In fact, I am a Unitarian Universalist. But I wonder. If I were arrested and charged with being one, would there be enough evidence to convict me?
As we discussed last week, faith is not the same as belief. Even an atheist, (sometimes especially an atheist!) has faith. Faith is the journey of integrating our deepest commitments and hopes into the ways in which we move through the world.
Faith is the Courage to BE, as the theologian Paul Tillich described it.
The courage to be, even in the face of death and despair. The courage to act even in the face of our limited power. The courage to transform, despite the fear and the risk of change.
We often don’t like to evangelize, but the truth is that so many people need Unitarian Universalism. But Unitarian Universalism will never realize its great potential and mission unless we are (in both reputation and reality) serious religious people.
My colleague Charles Magistro speaks to this point:
I’m amused by the view that it’s easy to be a Unitarian Universalist. It’s as easy to be a Unitarian Universalist as it is to search the murky waters of life without sure charts to guide us or any guarantee that we will find a safe port in which to put down anchor. … Our way in religion is not the way of ease. We are called to be sailors. For many worlds exist waiting to be discovered. And not the least of them is within us. …We have only begun to discover our potential.
Many Unitarian Universalists are come-outers – we left faith traditions that insulted our intelligence and even hurt us. At first, we needed space and time to express anger and eventually grief about what we have left. We cast off the old practices, communities, and beliefs. This stage of faith, as we talked about last week, is focused on what we don’t believe and sometimes on critiquing others’ beliefs.
We have embraced freedom, and have found it exhilarating, but eventually we come back down to earth and discover that we need more than just freedom.
“Freedom, like the air we breathe,” said the philosopher Santayana, “is necessary for existence but is insufficient for nourishment.”
The true Trinity for early Unitarian churches was “freedom, reason, and tolerance.”
Here’s an ad our Midland church put in the paper in 1981.
UU historians say “freedom, reason, and tolerance” were like the three legs of the stool of Unitarian Universalism. They got us far, and were essential to that part of our tradition’s history.
But we are a living tradition, and, lately UUs have been reconsidering whether these three are still indeed the core of our faith.
Speaking for myself, I do not want a faith based solely on “freedom, reason, and tolerance”.
Together with freedom, we need responsibility – accountability. Thus the paradox in our fourth principle: “the free AND responsible search for truth and meaning.”
Reason – reason alone leaves us dry – thus our first source: Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, which goes beyond reason. And then there’s that last word in our Trinity: “tolerance.” I know that in our history, tolerance was a great, radical notion. But now we know we must go beyond tolerance. Beyond “I tolerate you” to “I see the ways you and I are woven together.”
In truth the search for this deeper faith is what brought me to a Unitarian Universalist church for the first time. I had left the tradition of my upbringing. I had gone through divinity school. And I still stubbornly resisted joining any religious community. But I soon realized, living on my own and working as a multifaith chaplain, that it was not working to be out there on my own – “unaffiliated” without any moorings. I sensed I needed the accountability of a tradition and community.
I learned about our UU 7 principles, and at first they looked easy…common sense…almost cliché. But the more I brought myself fully into the church community, the more I saw opportunities to wrestle with my faith – my deepest truths – the why and how of living. I saw a community that was not perfect, but full of challenge – people quite different than me. …People both discussing deep questions AND living out their answers through working together on common projects. Reluctantly at first, I joined that UU church. Even though it wasn’t perfect. Because no human institution is perfect.
And here we are now: Midland UUs, working together to be the church beyond our walls.
Last year we discussed our calling to do something together in this community: something that the community needed and that only WE could do. In the last few months, I have seen us do that.
Over the summer, we hosted a local farmer here in our church, so he could bring his vegetables to Midlanders invested in sustainable agriculture, local farming.
Last week, we helped sponsor a symposium on education about transgender issues – over 100 people attended the 2-day event: counselors, lawyers, and community residents who now have more awareness and tools to support transgender people in the Permian Basin. Nothing like that has been done before here.
Last night: our church sponsored an evening on immigration. Community residents told the stories of their family members and neighbors who are immigrants, some undocumented. We spoke of compassion, of interdependence, of education that defeats the rampant misinformation about immigration…
This kind of ongoing work is how we live out our faith together as a church, in the world. And it’s not just about the big events. We live out our faith moment to moment, day to day.
So, faith must include works…but let us not forget that works must also include faith.
That’s the message of the poem “Faithless Works” by Rev. Dr. Jonipher Kūpono Kwong:
They say faith without works is dead
So I worked for equality
Next to my queer friends who wanted to get married
And I worked for religious freedom
Next to my Muslim friends who were
accused of being terrorists
And I worked for racial justice
Next to my Black friends whose lives were affected by police brutality
Yet I didn’t feel fully alive even after
working myself to death
Until I let my work become a spiritual
practice
Until I let go of my attachment to the
outcome
Until I stopped chasing after political issues, one after another
I still believe faith without works is dead
But works without faith is just as lifeless
In the work of living a faith-filled life, we embrace a rhythm of moving between the poles of action and contemplation.
Indeed, the Catholic teacher Richard Rohr founded the Center for Action & Contemplation, where I studied for a month after college. I was a burnt-out activist, seeking grounding – I went there for the contemplative piece, and of course found that it must be a rhythm – we cannot go deep into one without going deep into the other.
Richard Rohr says the following about developing a faith that nourishes participation in the world (he uses the language of “God,” but I think non-theists can do their own translation):
God refuses to be known intellectually. God can only be loved and known in the act of love; God can only be experienced in communion. …Love is like a living organism, an active force-field upon which we can rely, from which we can draw, and we can allow to pass through us. … I am afraid you can believe doctrines to be true and not enjoy such a radical confidence in love or God at all. I have met many such merely intellectual believers.
So: to cultivate a serious Unitarian Universalist faith – a faith that makes a difference in our lives and in the world, we must continually embrace this rhythm between Action and Contemplation.
On the contemplative side, we nurture spiritual practices that ground us, that connect us to that in which we trust. These spiritual practices can be meditation, silence, deep conversation, writing, being in nature…Those practices give us the nourishment to move more fully into the world to live out our faith where we can make a difference. That work brings us back into our spiritual practice…And so on….
And in this back and forth, we soon find a symbiotic rhythm. We become that motion. We find that everything is ONE.
It is good to be doing this work together…diving into our faith, getting serious about this holy task of living.
May it be so.
– Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon