Sermon: The Larger Faith – Rev. Eric Banner

I’ve known this week was coming for some time, and given that I’m the one who planned it, you’d think I’d have been better prepared for it than I was. We’re in the middle of a series of services exploring what it means to look at leadership from a Unitarian Universalist lens, and I’ve always known that somewhere in that series we were going to have to ask the question of what to do about the intersection of our own work and the work of something larger than any of us alone. But somehow, I’m always caught off guard by the tension within me, the tension between believing in the power the power of institutions, the power of wanting to belong, and the pull that comes from being the kind of person who even as a teen was said by classmates to have taken individuality a bit too far.

So, this week I don’t come to you with the good and fully formed conclusion that tells you exactly what is, as grounded in five highly sourced and well researched sources from the history of the world’s wisdom traditions.

What I come with, instead, is what a mentor of mine once said to me was the work of ministry, not to have sure, and definitive answers all the time, but to be in the questions with one another. And the question we face as religiously liberal people is simply this – when so many institutions have hurt so many people, is there a place for a larger faith at all, or are we best left to just find our own way?

Let me tell you what I mean. Most of us have been hurt by institutions. By larger bodies of people that failed us, or actively hurt us, in one way or another. They were schools, or businesses, colleges, or employers, and yes, even churches. They protected people who hurt us. They themselves hurt us. We were fired for having the temerity to stand up and as hard questions about values. We were shamed and isolated by leaders who saw us as threats to their power. We were not ourselves the targets, but we watched as those very institutions that proclaimed a higher, better way turned to protect themselves and their resources. We watched as they promoted leaders based on charisma instead of competence, and we were left to pick up the pieces of broken possibilities when it all came tumbling down.

I’ve heard the stories. I’ve lived my life in constant tension between loving what is possible when people come together to build something bigger than us all, and recognizing the ways in which I am, in my very bones suspicious of what happens when we lose ourselves, or worse, when we see only ourselves. And yet, today, we recognized the newest memebers of this congregation, an institution that has been here long before any of us were even born, and that, if we do our work well, will outlive us all. People who came looking for a spiritual home, a place to build connection and community, and wanted to know they did so in a values centered institution. And we are grateful that you have joined us, imperfect though we are, to help build the beloved community, both on this small corner of south Denver, and in the homes and workplaces and neighborhoods you call your own.

But, this is the tension – the way in which those things that are greater than we can ever be alone are made possible by forces that we do not, and cannot, ever fully control, and that have the power to do good and ill in equal measure. Let me offer you a few brief examples of what I mean –

I spent the last week in Albuquerque with professional colleagues at a gathering that happens every three years. UU ministers who took time to get together and do some learning. I was in a learning track about meeting this moment that we are in, when so many of us are worried about institutions that are actively breaking apart families, and collecting public resources to put them to work for the private gain of a few. I’m glad I went, and I hope the time will serve this congregation well. I’ll be meeting shortly with our safety and security team, and sharing some of the tools I brought home with me. It was possible because there is a larger institution, a professional association, with paid staff and people who can plan and implement programs.

Not long ago I was reading a history of this congregation, and I came across a story of a time it nearly died. Not in 1953, but some thirty years earlier. The building had been mostly closed for a year. The national body of Universalist churches agreed to pay three full years of salary to bring a minister here to Denver. Harold Niles started his ministry in July of 1923. If it hadn’t been for that larger faith investing in us, we would not be gathered here this morning.

We were hardly alone in that experience. Our reading this morning is from what I believe was the last sermon Olympia Brown ever delivered. For those who don’t recognize her name, she was the first woman minister to receive denominational, institutional, if you will, endorsement in American history. She was a Universalist. She served the church in Connecticut where PT Barnum was a member. She moved to take a job in Racine, Wisconsin, a church that, when she arrived was nearly moribund for lack of care and tending by a string of leaders who preceeded her. That church, too, nearly closed more than once in its history. Long after she had passed away, the church nearly voted to close their doors, but Olympia Brown’s daughter declared that as long as she was alive her mother’s church would not close. I heard the story directly from the minister who came next, a minister who had trained at one of our seminaries, an institution, that prepared him for the work for ministry and service that led ultimately to helping build the largest Unitarian Universalist congregation in the country in Tulsa, Oklahoma, John Wolf.

This is part of what I mean when I say that I believe in institutions. Not just that they can do more than we can do alone, but that they have the ability to be there when we fall. To catch us. To save us. Not just as members, but as human beings who will inevitably face times when things did not go right, are not going right, and we need something bigger than our own private lives. That makes it sound like the larger faith we hold is some kind of insurance plan, the kind of cosmic safety net that we reject in so much of our theology.

So, yes, I know they matter. And, still, even still, the tension remains. I know what Olympia Brown meant when she exhorted the members of that church 100 years ago to “stand by this faith. Work for it and sacrifice for it. There is nothing in all the world so important to you as to be loyal to this faith which has placed before you the loftiest ideals, which has comforted you in sorrow, strengthened you for noble duty, and made the world beautiful for you.” It has done those things for me. And it can do them for you. And we need leaders who are connected to a larger faith. Who work for, who sacrifice for the loftiest of ideals, who build the pieces that will comfort us in our sorrow, strengthen us for the work before us. We do. I know it.

And even still, the tension lies deep in not just my life, but in this tradition. Another hundred years before Olympia Brown shared that message another of our leading lights, the Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing not only rejected the offer to lead the American Unitarian Association, whose very name was drawn from a sermon he had given, he sat down to write an address on why he rejected the very idea of formal associations at all.

He regarded the very gathering of associations as dangerous to the inward spiritual development of each and all. “We are in great peril of … forgetting or never learning our true responsibility; of living in unconsciousness of that divine power with which we are invested over ourselves and in which all the dignity of our nature is concerned; of overlooking the sacredness of our minds and laying them open to impressions from any and all who surround us. Resistance of this foreign pressure is our only safeguard and is essential to virtue. All virtue lies in individual action, in inward energy, in self determination. There is no moral worth in being swept away by a crowd even towards the best objects. We must act from an inward spring. The good as well as the bad may injure us if through that intolerance which is a common infirmity of the good, they impose on us authoritatively their own convictions and obstruct our own intellectual and moral activity.”

So this is my message to you this morning. If you are suspicious of churches because they hurt you, or hurt the ones you love, you’re right to do so. If you are suspicious of leaders, or leadership, because of the harm they have caused in your life, or in the life of the ones you love, you’re right to do so. But the call of this faith is to remember that there is a risk of equal measure that falls the other way. For without the power of a larger faith, a bigger message, a greater grounding, it is all too easy for everything and everyone to live as if the only thing that matters is what I want, what I can get, what my power, unhinged from the independent stability that holds us, and holds us to account. And it is all too easy to find ourselves alone in our hour of need. We need a larger faith, but it must be one dedicated to a larger cause.

I wish I had three easy questions that would tell you the answer to which larger faith is worthy of your devotion, your efforts, your care. I wish I could tell you how to know whether your allegiance will bear goodness before you step forth on the path of association in perfect measure. But since I cannot, what I offer you this morning is this, instead-

When Olympia Brown stood before that gathered community, not so different than the one that is gathered here this morning, at not a single point in time did she say “Put your faith in the Universalist General Convention.” Never did she say “Send your money to the Theological School at St. Lawrence,” her alma mater, “so there will be ministers to follow me.” She said something bigger, and deeper. She said “But this is the work which Universalists are appointed to do. Universalists, sometimes, somehow, somewhere, must ever teach this great lesson. We are not alone. There is always an unseen power working for righteousness.”

That work will never be completed if we must do it all our own, but together, with a larger faith, and as part of a larger faith, another thing is possible. It will take your efforts, and mine, and all of ours together. It will take institutions that earn our respect, and our effort. It will take time, and resources. And, I regret to say, it won’t be perfect, it just won’t. And when it isn’t, we would do well to remember the words of the anthropologist Margaret Mead –

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

Rev. Eric Banner
Senior Minister