Sermon
January 7, 2018
Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon
Audio:
Did you know there was a Unitarian King?
King John Sigismund ruled in Hungary, Transylvania, and the present area of Romania. (It turns out a big part of my father’s family line is from Hungary, so I am particularly curious about this history.)
This Unitarian King John Sigismund was in power during the reformation, and truly reformed his own ideas. This may sound familiar to some of you…He was originally Catholic, and converted to Lutheranism, and then to Calvinism, and finally to Unitarianism, where he remained. Instrumental in his conversion was Francis David, whose 500-year-old words we just read for our responsive reading. Francis David had been trained as a Catholic priest and also converted to Lutheranism, to Calvinism, to Unitarianism.
Unitarians were at first a very small group of people who believed that the Bible did not state that Jesus was the son of God, but a great example of an enlightened human. They said we should live like Jesus, not worship him. Francis David’s Unitarian views convinced Sigismund to become Unitarian as well. In that time period it was typical for the king to decree that everyone convert to his religion. King Sigismund was prepared to do just that when Francis David urged him to do the opposite and in fact enact instead The Edict of Torda, which historians have celebrated as the first European policy of expansive religious toleration. Here it is:((https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmXoypizjW3WknFiJnKLwHCnL72vedxjQkDDP1mXWo6uco/wiki/Edict_of_Torda.html))
…In 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. Therefore… no one shall be reviled for his religion by anyone… For faith is the gift of God and this comes from hearing, which hearing is by the word of God.
This year is the 450th anniversary of the Edict of Torda, a major strand in our spiritual DNA as a faith that values a free search for truth and meaning.
And here is Francis David, inspiring this radically tolerant Edict, so ahead of its time.
He is shown with a ray of light descending on him as if this idea came about through an immaculate conception.((http://www.minnslectures.org/archive/Ritchie/RitchieLecture2.pdf))
Of course, we like to see ourselves that way…us bold Unitarians with our radically innovative ideas.
And, surely, Francis David was bold, very bright, and committed: – after King Sigismund died, and a less enlightened king took his place, the edict was reversed, and David died in a prison cell, a martyr for his beliefs.
But it turns out David’s inspiration for the radically tolerant Edict of Torda did not come out of thin air, or as an immaculate conception…
Some of you may remember Rev. Dr. Susan Ritchie.
Dr. Ritchie is a well-respected historian and leader in Unitarian Universalism – (I took three history courses from her!)
She set out not too long ago to investigate whether there was any influence on Francis David and his fellow Unitarians by the Ottoman Islamic empire that was in fact sovereign over them.
She found that yes, indeed there was great influence.((https://www.uuabookstore.org/Children-of-the-Same-God-P17382.aspx))
What quick brushstrokes of Unitarian history often forget is that Unitarians were allowed to thrive in Transylvania because Muslim Ottoman Turks extended their protection and created conditions of religious tolerance.
Unlike Christian ruling powers of the time – who expelled Jews and Muslims and even promoted war within their own religion between Protestant and Catholic – when ruling Islamic Ottomans were in power, they allowed local groups to continue to practice their religions. In fact, the educated Jewish community of the Ottoman Empire enjoyed one of Judaism’s Golden Ages, even while anti-semitism grew in Christian Europe. All kinds of non-orthodox Christians found a haven in the Muslim Ottoman Empire – including our Unitarian ancestors, who not only practiced their faith, but advanced and evolved it there.((Rev. Dr. Susan Ritchie | “Children of the Same God: Unitarianism in Kinship with Judaism and Islam | Lecture Two of the Series Children of the Same God: European Unitarianism in Creative Cultural Exchange with Ottoman Islam1 | Minns Lectures, 2009))
If not for the Ottoman Empire, Unitarians could not have survived and succeeded in spreading their ideas.
Back to the Edict of Torda: Susan Ritchie discovered that it is clear that Francis David was inspired by a previous edict of religious toleration that was issued twenty years before, within the Ottoman Empire:((ibid))
The Sultan’s representative in Buda was requested by local authorities … to take action against the …Protestant pastor there… [T]he Catholic authorities…offended by [the pastor’s]… reform ideas, asked that he either be killed or driven from the city for heresy. The Chief Intendent of the Pasha of Buda not only communicated to the authorities that the Pasha denied their request, he also issued an edict of toleration which states in part “preachers of the faith invented by Luther shall be allowed to preach the gospel everywhere to everybody, whoever wants to hear, freely and without fear, and that all…should be able to listen to and receive the word of God without any danger.”
Sounds like the Edict of Torda, right? But from the Islamic Ottoman Empire.
However, Dr. Ritchie cautions us not to imagine this as a one-way trail of influence. She says:((ibid))
I hope instead [what] gradually begins to emerge [is] a portrait of two cultures more greatly enmeshed in patterns of creative engagement, mutual attraction, and circular patterns of influence than we have imagined before.
As evidence of this mixing, Ritchie points to considerable patterns of intermarriage within Christian denominations, and between Christians and Muslims. Then there is the interesting case of Ibrahim Müteferrika, a young Unitarian raised in Hungary, who emigrated to Turkey where he both converted to Islam and established the first modern printing press in a Muslim land. So the printing press, developed in Europe, was a gift to the Muslim East by a Unitarian.((ibid))
So, as Susan Ritchie emphasizes:((ibid))
the grounds for religious toleration were prepared for in the everyday lives of actual persons
– persons living in multicultural, multireligious environments.
I realize this is a much more academic, history-heavy sermon than I usually preach…but Susan Ritchie was in fact the first teacher to get me interested in the subject of history (believe it or not, it had always bored me throughout all my previous schooling). She points to this history – and it interests me – because it holds the heart of our unique gift as Unitarian Universalists to the world.
Because each religion is not in fact the same; each has unique gifts.
Embodying this truth is a story from 1979 – a story about Jews and Buddhists learning from each other’s distinctive gifts:
In 1979 the Dalai Lama was having a hard time helping his people maintain their sense of identity while in exile from communist China. So he did a novel thing: he decided to ask Jewish people to come and advise him and other Buddhist leaders, because of course Jews have a special wisdom about surviving in diaspora. So the Jewish leaders came, and spoke with the Dalai Lama and other Buddhist leaders. Along the way, the Jewish leaders realized they could not leave without learning something in return from Buddhism. So the special wisdom the Dalai Lama chose to give to the Jewish people was about deep spiritual practice…to take their ancient spiritual practices and make them newly relevant to a fresh generation. The Jewish renewal movement was in part sparked by this meeting.
So what is OUR unique gift to the world? For Jews it was surviving amidst diaspora…for Buddhists: spiritual practice. Susan Ritchie asks, “What is our unique gift to the world?” and suggests:((From Susan Ritchie’s sermon, “A Mixing Gesture”))
Unitarian Universalism has its special gift in knowing something about the nature of religion. That religion is not a container that holds a kind of context, but that religion is a matrix of relationships, a kind of circulation, not static and not pure. Nor was it meant to be pure. That religion in some sixth sense is a mixed gesture, or even better yet, a mixing gesture. Or even better yet, I wonder if we don’t understand that religion comes out of mixing gestures.
So, all religions are actually products of mixing gestures, but we as UUs have really taken on this mixing motion, haven’t we?
We have a history of drawing that which is different inside with generosity and curiosity, instead of expelling it. This is how we, a tradition that was once clearly Christian, now also include pagans and atheists and agnostics and Jews and more… We allowed ourselves to be changed by who showed up.
We have an interfaith spirit because that impulse beats at the heart of our history.
Another part of history many UUs do not know:
Many of our Unitarian ancestors were anti-Trinitarian in part because the Trinity (Jesus as the son of God) unnecessarily separated us from Islam and Judaism.((Rev. Dr. Susan Ritchie | Children of the Same God: Unitarianism in Kinship with Judaism and Islam | Lecture 1: Children of the Same God: The Early Unitarian Theology of Relationship to Judaism and Islam | Minns Lectures, 2009))
Remember that in the history of Christianity, Jesus’s divinity was not always an established and universal belief. When the Council of Nicaea chose, among many other theologies presented at the time, to see Jesus as divine, it was clear they would be alienating Jews, and later, Muslims. In fact, Constantine himself explained in a letter he sent to clergy unable to attend:
We ought not, therefore, to have anything in common with the Jews…and…we desire, dearest brethren, to separate ourselves from the detestable company of Jews. – Constantine
(Of course I should say many Trinitarian Christians today can and do find common ground with Jews and Muslims, but nevertheless, this history is there.)
So: our spiritual history and DNA includes a willingness to be changed by that which seems other.
We understand that new possibilities emerge when we don’t have strict borders.
…When we create a church like our own where Tree of Life, the pagan group, holds rituals on Fridays, and the Buddhist group meditates on Tuesdays, and we host a Baptist guest minister to preach, and the sermons can draw from strikingly different sources and styles from one Sunday to the next…and we open our doors to all, even those strikingly different from us.
We embrace this faith in part because we know there is strength in allowing ourselves to be changed by something new.
As our own Director of Religious Education and lifelong UU Barbara Handley says: “I love this church because here you can change your beliefs without having to change churches.”
So, may this ever-deepening understanding of our history root us in an affirmed commitment
to be open to the creative interplay between differences,
to be curious about the possibilities that bloom at our borders,
to engage with one another across our siloes.
God knows that the world needs that… this unique gift we can share.
May it be so.
– Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon, with thanks to Susan Ritchie