Sermon: What's the Problem? – Rev. Eric Banner

What’s your problem? Anyone ever asked you that question? Did they mean it as a question? Or did they mean you were the problem? As a relational tool, it’s not a very good question. As Rev. Ruth pointed out a few years ago, it’s a lot like the “question” What’s the matter with you, instead of the question what happened to you? So this Sunday, I want to do something I try to do at least once a year, and that is to give you an answer, instead of a question, that helps you understand what our Unitarian Universalist faith is, and what we’re about. And the question I want to answer is simply this—what’s the problem that we’re trying to solve?

Now, before I get too far along, I thought it might be useful to tell you a little back story. This fall we’re launching a new program for adults, loosely modeled on a new member program another church does down in Atlanta. As I was reviewing their materials, I realized that they, a Christian church, were very clear about what problem they thought their faith solved. As a Christian church, the problem they believe that their faith solves is sin. Or, perhaps more accurately, separation from God caused by sin.

And even if I don’t agree with them, it was striking to me to see it laid out quite so clearly. Here’s the problem, here’s the solution. And the more I sat with it, the more I realized that, religious or philosphical, all the major schools of thought around the world identify a problem, and then they offer a solution to it.

• Christianity – Sin and separation, solved by salvation through Jesus as your personal lord and savior.
• Islam – Pride, a tendency to rely upon ourselves as the solution, solved by submission, the literal meaning of the word Islam, to God, as practiced through the five pillars, and outlined in the Qu’ran.
• Buddhism – Suffering, pain, and dissatisfaction, solved by awakening to the true nature of the universe, and giving up attachment.

You see where I’m going with this. We could go on. Confucionism, Taoism, Hinduism—they all have a core problem they are trying to solve, and an answer that they believe their faith solves.

And it’s not just religion. The same idea applies to major schools of philosophy. We could start with ones you might be more familiar with—

• Existentialism – The problem is that life in inherently meaningless. The solution is to engage in radical personal freedom and take responsibility for the meaning in our life.
• Pragmatism – The problem is, people keep coming up with theories about how things should be that don’t match reality. The solution is to find out what actually happens when people live certain ways, and then go with what “works.”
• How about Cynicism? – The problem is corruption, of everything and everyone. The solution, rejection of social expectations and structures.

I’m actually going to get to a whole sermon about stoicism in a few weeks, but if the problem it identifies is that sometimes we feel bad, then the solution it offers is that we should distinguish between what we can, and cannot control.

Problems and solutions. And, if you resonate with the problem that is at the center of the teaching, and the solution works for you, then you’ve got a complete package.

But what about Unitarian Universalism? What is the problem we’re trying to solve, and what is the solution we offer? Though I am sure that there are those who would disagree with me, my best answer, based on a lifetime of membership, and more than a little study, is that the problem we have been trying to solve for people for 400+ years is what to do with freedom?

And the answers that we have been offering, varied though they are, over the years is that if freedom is the problem, then reason and community consciousness is the solution.

If this were an academic paper, I’d take you down a long list of citations and history, step by step, to get to the conclusion, but I feel like a story might be more helpful—

When I was in seminary I was in a class rooted in the teachings of the Brazilian educator Augusto Boal and his framework called the Theater of the Oppressed. It was a highly participatory class, and one day in class another student was moving around, as she thought she’d been instructed to do, and she bumped into someone. “But I was doing what you told me to do, move freely throughout the room,” she said. And, echoing the old teaching about your fist and my face, the instructor kindly said that while that was true, she was still responsible for how her freedom intersected with everyone else’s. Each of us, he said, is responsible for not just doing whatever we want, but for ensuring that we take care about how our choices impact others. It’s not a radical teaching, but it sticks with me because it embodied the bigger point that lies at the heart of the challenge we face as Unitarian Universalists.

You can be free just about anywhere. You can freely express yourself and your identity and your preferences at Costco on Sunday morning, far more easily than you can here. In contrast, you come here and you didn’t pick the music, you won’t get the fancy coffee of your choice, you have only the most limited influence over what will be said (and you hope that whatever it is, it’s not hurtful or offensive). At Costco you can decide between dozens of kinds of cheese. You can buy speakers to listen to whatever music you want. You can come any day of the week, many hours of the day, and you certainly aren’t stuck with a single hour on a single day. And, to be honest, Costco has a pretty limited selection. Amazon, that’s where real freedom lies.

You get my point, I trust.

But, here’s the thing—if you can have freedom, if not anywhere, then certainly in a very large number of places and times, then what is the problem that we solve in a place like this?

Freedom alone is just an opening, but it doesn’t tell you what to do with it, what makes it meaningful, what makes it worthwhile. Freedom alone is just as able to end up with you at the rock bottom end of addiction, or lonely in a crowd, as it is to bring you to joy and flourishing. It’s what we do with our freedom that matters. And what we do, as UUs, with freedom, is we apply, together, the paired partnership of reason and community to find out if our exercise of freedom is one that makes life meaningful.

The theologian James Luther Adams put it this way, in an address titled “A Faith for the Free” many years ago:

“The free person,” he wrote, “is not bound to accept a faith ‘once delivered.’ Indeed, they see no virtue in accepting a faith simply on the ground that it was determined before their births. In their view, consensus, not compulsion, free and open discussion, not docile obedience, should rule in matters of faith… The free person,” he continued, “does not live by an unexamined faith. To do so is to worship an idol whittled out and made into a fetish. The free person believes with Socrates that the true can be separated from the false only through observation and rational discussion… An unexamined faith is not worth having, for it can be true only by accident. A faith worth having,” he said, “is a faith worth discussing and testing.”

A faith worth having is a faith worth discussing and testing... This idea, that freedom and flourish, burnished to its full glory by the the work of community, connection, and reason, has been at the heart of what our Unitarian Universalist faith has proclaimed right from the very beginning. And it is the thread that ties us together over the centuries with people who lived in very different times, and lived very different lives, than we do today.

There’s a reading from the Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing in our gray hymnals titled simply “The Free Mind.” But that is not the name of the source it comes from. It might, or might not, surprise you to find out that two hundred years ago it was a common practice for ministers to offer what was called the election day sermon. It wasn’t on the day of the election, but rather a message offered by a prominent local clergyman to the newly assembled legislature of the state, and the reading came from such a sermon delivered in 1830, titled “Spiritual Freedom.” Freedom has always been our key concern, spiritual, and by extension, physical, personal, embodied freedom, along with the call of our moral compass pointing to what makes that freedom possible, not just for me, or for my friends and family, but for everyone, is what we are about. Channing knew that. You know it. But sermons in the 1800s were really long, so I won’t read it all this morning. Here’s a portion of what he said that day:

We are encompassed “from our birth by difficulty and allurement, (by) a world where wrong doing is often gainful, and duty rough and perilous, where many voices oppose the dictates of the inward monitor… We are in the midst of influences, which menace the intellect and the heart, and to be free is to withstand and conquer these.”

For Channing, and for us today, freedom is not simply about doing whatever, whenever, wherever, for whatever reason. It is a deeper calling. For Channing that freedom included a kind of spirituality that distrusted the body in ways I do not share, and he spoke of that, too. But then he got to the portion preserved in the hymnal holds out it’s wisdom for us.

“I call that mind free, which jealously guards its intellectual rights and powers, which calls (no one) master, which does not content itself with a passive or hereditary faith, which opens itself to light whencesoever it may come which receives new truth as an angel from heaven, which, whilst consulting others, inquires still more of the oracle within itself, and uses instruction from abroad, not to supersede, but to quicken and exalt its own energies.

 

I call that mind free, which sets no bounds to its Love, which is not imprisoned in itself or in a sect, which recognizes in all human beings the image of God and the rights of his children, which delights in virtue and sympathizes with suffering wherever they are seen, which conquers pride, anger and sloth, and offers itself up…”

He goes on, for pages, actually, about what a free mind is, and means, and that is why, not because Channing said it, but because we agree with him, that is why we see the challenge before us as freedom. Because it has been so grieviously misunderstood. So often framed as might makes right. So often framed as some sort of hedonic existence where the only question is how can I feel good, right now, without regard to values or virtues or consequences. So often people have imagined that freedom alone is enough, but it is not. It is an engaged freedom that matters, one that is put to the test by reason and experience, by community and the inner calling of that inward monitor, as Channing put it. The examined faith of James Luther Adams. Freedom alone is not enough, it’s an openning that makes space for us all, each and every one, to consider what we might DO with our freedom.

Now, I happen to know that this room is filed with bright, amazing people. And as bright, amazing people I know that you have already reached the obvious question that comes from this—Sure, but why do you need a church for that? Can’t you just figure out what matters on your own? And that’s the second part of the answer.

You can, but it’s harder, and we’re all more likely to get drawn in by errors of our own minds. Years ago the academic Jonathan Haidt wrote a book called the Happiness Hypothesis. In it he offers a simply analogy for how we operate, most especially when we operate without a community of people to guide us. Our minds, he suggests, are like a person riding an elephant. The elephant is ten times our size, but we imagine ourselves in control. The elephant goes where it wants, and when we arive there, we tell ourselves that it was where we wanted to go. It is our automatic responses that so often guide us, and when they do we rationalize our behavoir after the fact, post hoc, as the philosophers say.

And that is where our freedom needs to encounter people who have seen more, and different things than we have. That is where our freedom needs a community of people who share our values, but also share the love of life, and people, and possibility, to help us see what is not visible from our small corner of the world. That is where our freedom needs not just post hoc rationalization, but reason and reverence, as the former president of our seminary in Chicago put it in a book years ago.

Alone, we are too small to confront lifes great challenges

Alone, we are too weak to hold all that must be held

Alone, we are too apt to mislead ourselves, and call it righteousness

Alone, we are too few to hold our own hands, or comfort our losses

But together that freedom comes alive

Together, we strengthen each other

Together, we make possible what we can never do alone

Together, we see the errors in our thinking, and live lives greater than our own

Together, we make of what is the foundations of what yet may be

So, no, if you came here wishing to be told that you are a sinner, or that the only true answer is to give yourself over to someone else’s plan, this is not the place for you. But if you came here because you know in your heart that you are free, and that you need a place to make that freedom worth something, then you’ve come to the right place. If you came here hoping you would be told that nothing really matters, or that all that matters is what feels good, this, also, probably isn’t the place for you. But if you came here because you know what it means to have true freedom, spiritual freedom, to listen for the voice of conscience, and reason, compassion and love, and then to do what is right, when it is joyful and even when it is not, and you know you need a community of people to help you live that calling out, well then, you’ve come to the right place.

A place where freedom isn’t just freedom from, it’s all about the freedom to.
If only we will make it so.

Rev. Eric Banner
Senior Minister