Sermon Part 1

Rev. Eric Banner

Next week we’ll be doing Pathways to Membership again, for anyone interested in finding out more about what it means to call First Universalist your spiritual home. And for years when I did a membership event at a UU congregation, I would ask people to tell us why they came, and the answers were so similar I stopped asking the question, and answered it for them.

People are coming here for the systematic theology.

No?

No.

They say, you say, “I came looking for community.” And it’s true, we all come looking for community. In a world that is filled with separation, we all have a need to belong, to have a place where we, to quote Birch from a few weeks ago, not only come out, but come in.

Even still, while it’s true, it’s only true as far as it goes, because there are an awful lot of places you can find, or make, community. Work. Your neighborhood. The gym. So many places. But you come here, and part of the reason you come to a place like this is because there is a community that speaks to the most important things in life, and makes spaces for you and your life. And, while we don’t dive deep into systematic theology, really ever, there is a theological underpinning that is at the heart of what we do, even when we don’t name it as such.

Years ago I was in seminary and the professor said something that’s stayed with me all these years. Speaking about the kind of religious dislocation that so many of us have had, she said virtually everyone reaches a point in their life when something that they were taught runs headlong into something that doesn’t fit. About themselves. About their neighbors. About the world. Good, evil, suffering, you name it.

And she said that two things typically happen in that moment.

For some people what they were taught to believe is so important to who they are that they cannot countenance it being wrong, and so they strap on their blinders and they hold fast to what they were taught, to what they thought, and just avoid thinking about anything that contradicts it. No, the earth cannot possibly circle around the sun, and if you say otherwise, we’ll throw you in jail. No, the text cannot possibly contradict itself, it is inerant in every way, and I won’t talk about it. You strap on the blinders, and you ignore what doesn’t fit.

For other people, she said, their world crumbles. If one thing isn’t true, the whole edifice begins to fall. And so you reject it all. These are the zealots we all know. So often the most vocal of the angry atheists, as one of our happy humanist members once called them, are the formerly evangelical, who put their heart and soul into something that left them just as adamant that there could be nothing of value in a tradition that claimed innerancy, but didn’t match the facts that science, and archeology, and other texts provided to us. And, if you’ve been the victim of religious bullying, trauma, and spiritual violence, it can be really protective to wall yourself off from the sources of your hurt, and your pain.

But, she said, these two were not the only choices. There was a third option.

You could, she said, become a theologian.

In other traditions, to think theologically “is thinking about the God of the universe, the world God has created, and God’s many children who populate it.”

As Unitarian Universalists, we do things a little differently. For us, thinking theologically involves asking questions about what we believe, and why we believe it, and as importantly, what we will do because of it. It is the practice of looking back, at texts, and lives, others and our own, and asking what we make of this world, and what this world makes of us.

When done well, it’s a lot harder than just saying “I believe the universe is basically good,” Or “God is in nature” or “I would never have done what they did.” It’s saying “Here’s the goodness I’ve experienced in the universe” and “Nature is beautiful and bloody nearly all the time” and “I have done what they did, and I’m not proud of it.”

When done well our theology says “I have been a human for a while now, and I know how hard that is, and so I find my own place in the story, and how it is speaking to me, and when I’ve been the person in the text,” and then trying things out and seeing how they work out.

You don’t have to write a treatise, or read the entire corpus of sacred literature the world over, but you are invited, invited, to consider what it means when you go back and ask not just what were you taught, but what have you found?

Sermon Part 2

Birch Cue

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