Sermon: The Three Foundations – Rev. Eric Banner

All Creation is an event. You can’t see it in the spoken word, but when John Buehrens wrote that, he wrote Creation with a capitol C. If you don’t recognize the name, John was president of our Unitarian Universalist Association back in the 90s. He’s gone on to serve a variety of other congregations since then, and is now retired, and still writing. But I wanted to start with him because many years ago he co-wrote a book about our theology, and in it one of the things he wrote about was the changing of the foundations we rest upon. The idea that even that which seems solid is vibrating with life, or at least energy, and that they way we talk about ultimate things is rooted, always, in the understanding we hold that those foundations are not dead, inert things, but things that live in the world, if you will.

This week is many things, including Palm Sunday, and the week of the start of Passover, but around First Universalist, it’s also something more. Our congregation was founded on April 1st, 1891, and so each year, around this time, we mark one Sunday service as Founder’s Sunday. If you were here last week you heard Austin Karr, our Stewardship Chair this year, share some about Founder’s Sunday, and about the church that we have been. But this Sunday I wanted to do something different, I wanted to talk not about this church specifically, but about this larger faith we are a part of, and the foundations on which we build. I want to spend a few moments, if you will, on the key ideas that underlie all that we believe and all that we do, just as surely as the bedrock that lies beneath us. Or, put slightly differently, I want us all to leave this morning with a sense of an answer to that question that comes to us all from time to time, “Unitarian Universalism? What’s that?”

The newer people here may not have heard this before, but those of you who have been here for some time have heard us say that while it is true that both the Universalist and the Unitarians were named after specific Christian theological points of view, the rejection of the Trinity, and the rejection of eternal hellfire and damnation, one god and salvation for all, it has been a long time since either of those positions were widely debated in our congregations. And those of you who have been here a while have also heard me tell you about Bucky McKeeman’s adage that what it really means, in this day and age, is that we all came from the same place, and we’re all going to the same place, so we better figure out how to get along with each other, and ourselves, in the here and now.

All of that is true, but on this Founder’s Sunday I wanted to go just a bit deeper, and offer us a window into the what I think of as the three foundation stones, in this congregation, and Unitarian Universalism writ large, not a historical exercise, but as a reminder that in this living, shifting, changing faith, there are some things we have held for a very long time, and, as near as I can tell, hold us up together in one shared set of beliefs that build out into many different forms, the heart of it all, and to do that takes not two things, but three, Universalism, Unitarianism, and Humanism.

Many years ago the Rev. Carl Scovel, who served one of the two churches that compete for status as the first Unitarian congregation in America, King’s Chapel in Boston, was invited to give an annual address known as the Berry Street Address, and in it, in spite of where he worked, and how he had first come into ministry, as a Unitarian, he gave what I have come to think of as one of the quintessential descriptions of what we mean when we say we are Universalists. He was speaking that afternoon about spirituality, but what he offered was what he called the great surmise.

“We know that our yearning for meaning and fulfillment is given in our very being. So! Follow that yearning, need, reaching to its source, to our creation, to our createdness and surmise with me, if you will, that this yearning, this reaching, this need, is no accident, no psychic atavism, but a reflection of that reality from which we come.

 

The Great Surmise says simply this: At the heart of all creation lies a good intent, a purposeful goodness, from which we come, by which we live our fullest, to which we shall at last return. And this is the supreme reality of our lives.”

This, to me, is the heart of our Universalist heritage, the piece of the foundation that connects us over the centuries to those brave religious radicals who stood up to the power of the state and said, “We will not pay taxes to support preachers who tell us that it is judgement and suffering that are the essential heart of the world. We do not, and cannot, believe that in a world filled with goodness as it is, that the heart of all creation is judgement and suffering. We believe there is a love alive in the world, and it is our calling to bring our lives into alignment with that goodness, not out of fear,” but instead, as Carl said a few lines later, “to explore, enjoy, and share this goodness, to know it without reserve or hesitation.”

Universalism is, and has, for as long as we have been, offered up this reminder of the good news in a world that is filled with reasons to believe otherwise. The good news that no matter how bad things are, now, then, and in the years between, there is a goodness alive in this world, and it is available to each and every one of us, and to which each of us will someday return. And we would do well, in days when things are hard, when the news, or our families, or our work, or our lives wants us to forget it, we say, yes, that’s all true, AND there is something more. It is, as Carl put it – “The love from which we were born, which bears us now, and will receive us at the end.” The Great Surmise.

If Universalism says there is goodness in the world, then Unitarianism offers another foundation, the idea that reason in religion is not a paradox, but a gift. All those insufferable debates about just how to understand Jesus that went on for centuries, two thousand years ago, two hundred years ago, they weren’t just about how to make sense of the scriptures that people read, they were about how to reconcile our experience of the world with what was read and taught in churches all across six continents. When William Ellery Channing stood up in that pulpit in Baltimore and shared the message that is forever known as Unitarian Christianity, he wasn’t really talking about Jesus, he was talking about the way he read sacred texts. He was talking about the gift of thought and mind, and encouraging everyone to use them.

Like now, it was a time when there were those who said that the only true religion was one taken on faith, and faith alone. Unquestioned and unquestioning. Perhaps excited by a charismatic preacher, but not to be questioned, nor compared with the facts in front of us. But Unitarianism offered a different view. It said that we must take into account all of what we know, all that has been brought before us, and then we must put our minds to work to make sense of it. For Channing this was about God and he believed that crafting a trinity from a unity was, in his words, injurious, and counter to a plain reading of what was before us. But rather than tell his listeners that they should believe as he did, he laid forth the reasons why he believed what he did, and asked them to do the same.

“Revelation,” he said, “is addressed to us as rational beings. We may wish, in our sloth,” I love those old timey preachers… In our sloth… “We may wish, in our sloth,” for a system that did not require us to think for ourselves, but that is not what we have. “It is the part of wisdom to take revelation as it is given to us, and to interpret it by the help of the faculties, which it everywhere supposes,” and, I would add, which it supposed each of us has. “We honor revelation too highly to make it the antagonist of reason, or to believe that it calls us to renounce our highest powers.”

Which brings us to the twist that Channing never saw coming. The third foundation on which we build. I think by now that most of you know that when I speak of my own theological foundations, I describe myself as a religious humanist. It was a hundred years after Channing, and a hundred years before us today, that the commitment to reason in religion had what might be considered its final break with the old ways, and the humanists asserted themselves without depending upon the Bible at all. And here I’m going to say something that will sound off to some of you, but if you think about it, I suspect you’ll find you agree. When it comes to our religious or spiritual lives, we first encounter the holy, and then we attempt to explain or define it.

Now, maybe that’s not your word, holy. Maybe it’s the connectedness, or the spirit, or a dozen other words, but that is my point. All around the world, and throughout time, we humans have had the experience of awe and wonder and then we have sought to explain, and all too often contain, it. It was this very thing that caused the founder of American psychology, William James, to spend an entire book exploring the varieties of religious experience.

John Dietrich knew that. He had been a preacher in the Reformed tradition, and was brought up on heresy charges, tried for not believing the Bible infallible, for not believing in a virgin birth, for including secular readings in the services he led, and he was kicked out of that tradition. And once you accept that it is experience that comes first, and then the explanation, it becomes possible to have religion without God at all, as so many in our congregations do. For Dietrich, and the other humanist preachers, many of whom were Unitarians or Universalists, religion came to be not first and foremost about God, but about people, and our lives, not about esoteric doctrines and ideas.

“It is principally,” he wrote, “ a shifting of emphasis in religion from God to man. It makes the prime task of religion not the contemplation of the eternal, the worship of the most high, the withdrawal from this world that one may better commune with God; but rather the contemplation of the conditions of human life, and the entering into the world in order that by human effort human life may be improved… It conceives of religion as spiritual enthusiasm directed toward the enrichment of the individual life and the improvement of the social order… And if there be not a God, it makes no difference – there (we are) just the same, with (our) insatiable craving for something better than (we) have yet known, with (our) ineradicable feeling that (our) true nature, toward which (we) must forever strive, is greater and nobler” than we have yet known.

This is the third rock on which we build, that to be deeply religious requires no supernatural frame of belief, not expectation of life after death, or a creator meddling in the affairs of the universe, only the belief that we are, and we can be better. The belief that we are, and we can love one another. The belief that we are, and that, with our efforts, we can live richer, fuller lives, and the work of a religious community is to help us do just that. Not to make us believe a certain way, or to confess certain things, whether we believe them or not, but to live out the meaning of the experiences we have had, and will have, without handing over the definition of those experiences to anyone who does not speak truly to our hearts, our minds, and our deepest selves.

So there you have it, three foundations. The great surmise, that there is a goodness alive in the world, from which we come, and to which we shall return, the power of reason to deepen our faith, and the recognition that religion can be complete with God, or without, but that either way the proof is in the pudding of our lives. Each of them vibrating within a universe alive with possibility, none of them confined to an unchanging past, but stones formed through time, changing with time, and building a base on which we can call our spirits home, whenever, and wherever, we may go.

Rev. Eric Banner
Senior Minister