WHAT UNITES UNITARIAN UNIVERSALISTS?

a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday January 11th, 2004


There's a rumor that goes around every year about this time, among students completing their preparation for the Unitarian Universalist ministry, that the one question you can pretty much count on being asked by the Ministerial Fellowship Committee (which is the body responsible for examining and credentialing aspiring ministers in our movement), basically goes something like this: Imagine that you are on an elevator with someone who knows nothing about Unitarian Universalism except that you are a Unitarian Universalist minister. Explain our faith in the time that it takes to travel from the 1st to the 25th floor.

It's probably a good thing that I saw the Fellowship Committee many, many years ago, because I'm not sure I could come up with a good answer to this so-called “elevator question.” For one thing, I can't even remember the last time I was in a building with 25 floors: frankly, I tend to live my live a lot closer to the ground, and typically don't spend a lot of my time in expensive hotels or high-rise office buildings. But this is a minor detail. I also have a problem in that now that I have finished my PhD and am officially The Reverend Doctor (and occasionally even Professor) Jensen, whenever I’m asked questions like this, I habitually tend to offer complex and elaborately-nuanced answers requiring footnotes -- answers which are historically accurate and precise, but which really offer very little in the way of useful information. So when somebody asks me "What is Unitarian Universalism anyway?" I might begin by asking them whether they’ve heard of the Pilgrims, and conclude fifty minutes later, after outlining four centuries worth of theological development, by saying something along the lines of “Unitarian Universalists are the direct spiritual and institutional descendants of those courageous souls who crossed the Atlantic ocean in 1620 aboard the Mayflower in search of religious freedom in the New World, and created American democracy in the process." Or if I'm feeling a little cranky or petulant, I might just say something like "Unitarian Universalists are Enlightened Puritans" and leave it at that. Back in the 19th century Dean John Gorham Palfrey described the Unitarian students of the Harvard Divinity School as a combination of "mystics, skeptics, and dyspeptics" — and, so far as I could tell, things really hadn't changed that much by the time I got there 150 years later. But none of these answers really tells a person much about contemporary Unitarian Universalism; instead, they tend to be kind of vague, arrogant, and elitist, which, for an outsider, is probably exactly the kind of impression they have formed of us already.

So today I'm going to try to improve a little upon these answers. And I want to begin by talking a little about the underlying problem that sometimes makes it difficult to explain Unitarian Universalism in 25 floors or less. Historically speaking, Unitarianism, Universalism, and Unitarian-Universalism were and are all non-confessional faiths. What this means is that we are a Church without a Creed: there is no standard statement of belief or doctrine to which Unitarian-Universalists must assent in order to become a member of the church. And what this sometimes translates to in the popular imagination is that we are a church that has no beliefs, and where people are free to believe whatever they like.

Well, this is obviously absurd. There are lots of things I would like to believe that I can't or don't believe. I would like to believe, for example, that good will always triumph over evil, that the truth will always drive out falsehood, and that when left to their own devices, people are basically pretty decent and will inevitably do the right thing. I used to believe all of these things, but I have seen the opposite often enough now to know that they are not always true. And this is really what Freedom of Belief is all about: not an opportunity to believe whatever you like, but the liberty to believe what your reason, your conscience, and your experience tell you to be true, independent from any external, authoritarian coercion. Truth is the ultimate arbiter of belief. And the Truth it its own proof, and frankly cares little whether we believe it or not.

This brings me to another thing that is sometimes said about Unitarian Universalism that really isn't so. Critics of our movement sometimes claim that Unitarian Universalism is a subjective and relativistic faith, with little regard for objective truth or moral absolutes — that we essentially exalt human reason above the so-called "Word of God." Once again, nothing could be further from the fact. There are a lot of folks in this world who will tell you that they know exactly what God is thinking, and that if you really want to do God's Will you'd better do exactly as they tell you. Unitarian Universalists tend to be a lot more humble than this. We understand that "now we see as through a glass, darkly;" that none of us will ever know the Divine "perfectly," in its essence, but rather that we can appreciate Ultimate Reality only through our personal experience of it, however limited that may be. A lot of us aren't even sure that "God" is a concept that really does justice to our experience of the Sacred, but this is not to say that we have mistaken our subjective experience of a thing for the thing itself.

Socrates realized that he was the wisest philosopher in Athens because at least he was aware of his own ignorance. Unlike the other people with whom he spoke, he knew what he did not know. Unitarian Universalism's reputation for subjectivity and relativism grows out of a similar sense of intellectual humility. It's not that we exalt human reason above the Word of God. But how else are we to understand the Will and the Word of the Divine, if not through the use of our own human reason? And likewise, since human beings are not omnipotent, omniscient creatures, it's only natural that we should expect a certain amount of diversity of belief among us. It's not that we think we're all equally right. It's just that we recognize the possibility, that we are all probably a little wrong.

So, in a movement where there is no authoritative creed to guide us, where individual conscience and experience comprise the pathway to religious knowledge, and a wide degree of diversity of belief is considered normative, where do we look to identify the qualities that we have in common, and which unite us as a religious community? One obvious place is to the past: to the heritage and traditions that have historically defined our community, and given it its unique character. The Unitarian historian Earl Morse Wilbur has written that there are three "controlling principles" that have historically characterized our movement since the time of the Protestant Reformation, and I think you will recognize them immediately from what we have just been talking about. They are "complete mental freedom, unrestricted reason, and the generous tolerance of differences, in religion."

So, Freedom, Reason, and Tolerance, these three abide. The first expresses our faith, our trust, that if we strip away the external barriers which restrict us from seeking Truth, we will eventually discover it. The second represents our optimistic expectation that we possess the ability to know the Truth when we see it, our hope that we will recognize Truth for its own sake, and not merely because it is vouched for by some external authority. And the last, and in many ways the greatest of these principles — tolerance — is the tangible manifestation of a community based on notions of love and mutual respect, and the realization that we can all possess different gifts and different insights, and still associate together as one body.

Freedom, Reason, and Tolerance are not, however (at least according to Wilbur) "the final goals to be aimed at in religion, but only conditions under which the true ends may best be attained. The ultimate ends proper to a religious movement, are two" Wilbur writes: "the elevation of the personal character, and the perfecting of the social organism, and the success of a religious body may be judged by the degree to which it attains these ends." In other words, our methodology is our content, but our success is to be measured "by its fruits" — by our ability, in Wilbur's words, "to live worthily as children of God, and to make [our] institutions worthy of the Kingdom of Heaven."

"Well, this is all fine and good" you may well be thinking, "but it's also a little abstract. I mean, Freedom, Reason and Tolerance are great, but how does someone go about putting this all into practice on a practical basis?" Think of the potential complications. Is Freedom absolute, or are there also certain responsibilities that go along with it? Does a reliance upon Reason automatically preclude intuitive or emotional approaches to religion? And what are the limits of Tolerance? — how should we hold individuals accountable to the entire community when their behavior threatens to tear it apart? These are the kinds of pragmatic considerations that must be addressed by any group of individuals attempting to bring these abstract principles to life. Yet we've been doing it more or less successfully now for hundreds of years — what is the secret of our success?

I've already spoken about how we are a church without a creed — how there is no explicit statement of belief to which the individual must subscribe in order to become a member of the community. But this does not mean that we are not accountable to one another, or that there are no implicit beliefs which we share. When I say something like "Unitarian Universalists believe that 'To Question is the Answer,' and that a Free and Responsible Search for Truth and Meaning, unencumbered by coercive and authoritarian external restrictions, will eventually result in the discovery of both.…" I have expressed a pretty broad-reaching assumption both about the nature of Truth and the process by which we seek it. And these assumptions manifest themselves not only in high-sounding, abstract principles, but also in the very methods by which we organize our religious societies and conduct our public worship.

Unitarian Universalist religious societies are organized according to the principle of Congregational Polity. At the heart of our worship service is a doctrine known as Freedom of the Pulpit. And holding it all together at the center, in the place of an explicit, confessional creed, we lift up the notion of a Covenant: a relationship of reciprocal accountability and responsibility, of mutual trust and support, which does not require us all to think alike in order for us to act together for a common purpose.

Congregational polity is more than just "majority rule." The principle of Congregational polity essentially states that while we may all be members of the "Church Universal," here in this particular place we ourselves are responsible for carrying out the mission of the ENTIRE church, and we therefore have the authority to make the decisions that will empower us to do so. It's that simple. Local Responsibility equals Local Authority. We don't need to get permission from somewhere else in order to put our faith into action in our own front yard.

Freedom of the Pulpit is also a little different from Freedom of Speech, although obviously the two are related. Both draw their strength from the notion that the truth plainly spoken, free from fear, free from censorship, free from the threat of retaliation, has the power to expose falsehood for what it is and drive it out of the shadows of our lives. But the pulpit is not a soapbox — nor is a worship service simply another free forum in the marketplace of ideas. The Free Pulpit draws its authority from the relationship between the Preacher and the People, a relationship of trust, of service, of honesty and authenticity — and in this respect it differs dramatically from the kinds of assumptions which drive our political discourse, in which partisanship is assumed, and truth emerges from the conflagration of open debate. We expect our politicians to lie to us, and for their opponents to attempt to expose those lies. But the job of the Preacher is to expose the lies that we tell ourselves: to confront our excuses, to challenge our shortcomings, to exhort us to do better than we have done in the past.

And how do preachers do this? By opening their own lives and their own struggles to public scrutiny — and by sharing whatever truths they have found in the course of their spiritual journeys, in the hope that the people sitting in the pews will be able to recognize those truths in their own lives as well. "The true preacher can be known by this," Ralph Waldo Emerson observed in his Divinity School Address. "that he deals out to the people his life — life passed through the fire of thought." The relationship between pulpit and pew is not one of debate, but of dialog — and Truth resides in the places where authentic life touches authentic life.

This brings us at last to the idea of Covenant, which is essentially nothing more than a mutual promise among a group of people to be faithful, to be accountable, to be authentic to one another. It is an agreement, to quote the traditional language, "to walk together according to God's Holy Ordinances, insofar as they shall be made known to us in his Blessed Word of Truth." To walk together in Truth, according to our best understanding of it: this is the promise that makes both Congregational Polity and Freedom of the Pulpit effective tools for both the cultivation of our private character, and the reform and revitalization of our civil society.

In a way, our name says it all. The one tangible thing that Unites Unitarian Universalists is that we are members of the Unitarian Universalist Association. "Unitarian" because we have historically affirmed that God is One — and that however imperfectly we may understand it, the same standard of Truth applies to all people: rich or poor, black or white, male or female, believers and non-believers alike. "Universalist" because we are confident that ultimately All Souls will be reconciled to their Creator: that every human being has inherent worth and dignity, and that we are all sisters and brothers to one another, sons and daughters of the power that gave us life, created in the image of God. And "Association" because our relationship with one another is lateral rather than hierarchical — we are accountable to the law that is written upon our hearts, and seek the assistance of our neighbors that they might help us to discern it.

I didn't become a Unitarian Universalist because someone cornered me in an elevator and shared their succinct yet snappy testimony with me. I became UU the old fashioned way: through my family. My mother was the daughter of a Jewish Socialist and a Methodist Sunday School teacher; my father's family were Scandinavian Lutherans, who faithfully attended church every Christmas eve. When my parents decided it was time for my brothers and I to receive some religious education, they sought out a community that would honor those diverse backgrounds, and still provide us with the opportunity to think for ourselves, to find our own way in the world, to discover who we really were and what we believed and how best to put those beliefs into practice in our lives.

That was over 40 years ago now, and I still don't have it all figured out...but I've had some excellent teachers along the way, received a lot of support and nurture and guidance in my journey, and made some pretty good friends as well. There have been some tough times, and there have been some really terrific times, and there have been a lot of times when it was just kind of tedious, and a little frustrating, and I wondered whether a particular meeting, or workshop, or sermon was ever going to end. (I suspect that there may be some of you who are feeling that way right about now) But you know, that's life. And that's Church. And at the end of the day, I wouldn't want it any other way....