Responsibility and "Easy Religion"

July 20, 2008

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Although I was laughing, I had to cringe a bit when I first heard it. It was one of the most accurate portrayals of someone stumbling through a definition of Unitarian Universalism that I had ever heard, and I saw it on a 2006 episode of The Colbert Report. After reciting the entire Nicene Creed, the host asks a staff member, Bobby, what religion he is a part of. When Bobby responds, “I’m a Unitarian,” Colbert asks, “So you’re a Christian, too?” Here’s Bobby’s response: “Well, I incorporate Christian values as well as aspects of many other religious traditions in my belief in God, and I don’t mean to imply that I necessarily think God exists or doesn’t exist, or that it even maters to Him, or It, or Whoever, what I do or do not believe. What’s important is that it’s my choice, and that’s what holds the Unitarians together.”

A very confused Stephen Colbert asks Bobby, “So, do you celebrate Christmas or Hanukkah?” – to which Bobby replies, “Sure.”

To hit this close to home with the satire, one of the writers must have known us well.

Has anyone else out there ever felt like Bobby ? tripping over our words and apologizing, doubling back as we try and explain exactly what it is that we do here? It is not necessarily a simple thing to explain a liberal religions community in a few breaths. It would be a lot easier if our religious tradition had its own version of the Nicene Creed, but that’s just not the religion that we signed up for.

I think that my mixed reaction to these types of portrayals of UU’s comes up because it hits on my personal feelings about what it is that we do in this community and how we present ourselves to the world. Most of the time, when friends or family ask what it is we are about, I give them a brief explanation, and then lately I have gotten in the habit of saying, “But the best way to really know more is to come and experience us for yourself; here’s where we’re located.”

After some time and experience, most of the people close to me get it.But not always, and there’s one response that really gets me. Often, a stranger who sees me wearing a UU t-shirt or the person sitting next to me on an airplane will ask me what I do for a living. When I explain to them our vision of universal inclusion of humanity and freedom of conscience in religion, of deed not creeds, I sometimes get the response, “Well, Unitarian Universalism sounds like a pretty easy religion.” I don’t know about any of you, but in my experience of trying to live fully in this dynamic community and tradition, that couldn’t be further from the truth. At its best, Unitarian Universalism is no easy religion.

When I try to live out the values that we hold up as a community in my daily life, it is far from easy. It is not a simple task to assert that no one religious tradition can hold all of the truth, even my own. It is not simple to be humbled in the face of such grand questions of meaning, community, and the sacred. It is not simple to cast aside superstition, and yet stand in awe of the beauty and mystery of the universe, attempting to speak truth while allowing for poetry and metaphor to make its way into our spiritual lives. To imagine that each part of creation, that every individual on this earth (no matter how much I disagree with them), participates in the sacred and deserves love ?this is one of the hardest religious tasks I can ever be asked to do.

At their best, our religious lives are certainly not easy. But they can be sometimes. It would be easy for me to call myself a tolerant and open minded man ? to ride around with a “Coexist” bumper sticker on my car and continue to become enraged at other drivers or look down on others whose vehicle expressions don’t match my “open minded” views.

It is easy for me to think I know all I need to know about someone because of the way they voted in the last election, to assume the worst motives of someone who believes differently and then become enraged when my views are misrepresented.

It would be easy for us as a religious community to call ourselves a “welcoming congregation” and then ignore guests who join us for coffee after the service ? and this happens all the time. How many times in church have I finished singing a hymn like “We’re Gonna Sit at the Welcome Table” or “Enter Rejoice and Come In” and then noticed that I had not met the person sitting right next to me in the pews?

It is easy to talk about how many religious beliefs are welcomed in a community like ours and then never really share them with the people who join us here. And it would be easy to imagine that the reason we join together in a religious community is to only learn new facts or be surrounded by like minded people, and not to be transformed in love.

This kind of spiritual life, this kind of community like we find in a Unitarian Universalist church can certainly be easy. But at its best, when we are truly responsible for the vitality of our spiritual lives and making real the things we say we believe, it will be one of the most difficult journeys we’ve ever begun. But I think it will be worth it.

One hundred and eight years ago, the Universalist minister, Rev. Frederic Williams Perkins, wrote an essay titled, “Why I am a Universalist.” In one section of this work, Perkins explains that for him, the core of his Universalist Christianity of the time rested, not in the correct facts, but in living in the reality of love – that easy religion thinks it is done when it finally gets things right, but a challenging faith calls us deeper than that. Here’s part of what he said:

“The heretic, to the Universalist, is not the man who denies the accuracy of a method of creation portrayed in the book of Genesis; he is the one who distrusts the deathless love of God . . . . It is the depth and earnestness of the religion, and not the correctness of the scholarship, that is of primary concern.”

It is not easy to go deep in our religious lives. It is temping for me to think that if I simply learn enough, I will be at peace or become a better person; that if I just start getting all the facts straight, I’m well on my way. We Unitarian Universalists are pretty good at getting the facts ?we tend to be very curious people, people who yearn after new knowledge. But it seems like the temptation for us, our easy route in religion is to believe that the whole reason we are here is to get those facts.

A teacher of mine once challenged me to ask three questions in all of my spiritual life: “What, So What, and Now What?” We UU’s have the “what” part of the equation down. Also, it is getting much easier to gain information in our world. With every portable electronic device imaginable, we can carry libraries in our pocket. We can “Google” almost anything. It is going to be hard to take that new information we gain and ask, “So what?”

How will my life be transformed by this knowledge? How might this help me to fashion a life of justice or grow to better love and trust this world? An easy move in our religious life is to believe that our community, which calls us to self expression, values that above understanding and compassion.

I can believe that my highest virtue was sitting strong in the face of someone’s anger, or really proving myself to friends or family that disagree with me (and these can be great things). However, the challenge for me, in the face of that same anger or disagreement, is going to be asking, “How is that they are hurting?” A responsible religious life calls me to see the fear in defensiveness and the pain behind ego. It calls us to bringing what the Zen Buddhist, Suzuki Roshi called a “beginner’s mind” to our relationships and to the world. In terms used commonly in the Unitarian Universalist world, a search or truth and meaning that is both “free” and “responsible” is going to take some radical new forms of understanding.

I think that one of the most profound and yet simple examples of this type of depth in religion came from a man named Krister Stendhal, a recently deceased Swedish theologian who formerly served as the dean of the seminary I attended. In 1985, as a response to much opposition to the building of a Mormon temple in Stockholm, Stendhal developed a brief set of guidelines to use in responsible ecumenical and interfaith work. Now, since almost everything we do in a UU church is in a small way “interfaith,” it seems like these might be valuable for us in many ways. He called them, “Three Rules of Religious Understanding.”

They are phrased in very simple language and some appear to be self evident, but I think they leave no room for the easy road in religion. Here they are:

1) “When you are trying to understand another religion, you should ask the adherents of that religion, and not its enemies.”

Our society has lately become one that is more and more comfortable with black and white, right and wrong, with little shade of grey. How much confusion, misinformation, and fear might have been avoided in the last seven years if the majority of our citizens learned about Islam, for example, from Muslims, instead of cable news or emails form a friend? I am afraid that we religious liberals have not been immune from this infection of polarity and simplicity either. I wonder how much of our understanding of traditional Christianity, for example (especially the evangelical sort), has come to us from its enemies and critics, and not its followers.

2) Stendhal’s second “rule of religious understanding” is this: “Don’t compare your best to their worst.”

I think this is probably the rule that I have the most trouble following. I think that we have a lot of “best” here. In fact, if I didn’t think that this was the best religious tradition I could be a part of, I would be somewhere else this Sunday morning. I am so proud of the history of our tradition – that the Universalists were the first denominational body to ordain a woman in this country, that we have led the pack in our support and inclusion of the GLBT community in our religious life, that we have made great efforts toward anti-racism and social justice, and so many other things.

However, how many of us (myself definitely included here) start off our definitions of who we are by saying what we are not? How often do we introduce this place by saying, “As opposed to religion X where they tell you that you can’t to this or that, we say”… Many of us are fresh out of another religious home, or trying out a spiritual community for the first time in a long time, and it’s completely understandable to define ourselves somewhat by some distance from this past. But as we grow together in our religious journeys, it will be easy to continually say, “I know who I am, because I am not one of “them.” When we begin taking responsibility for our religious development, it will be challenging to say, “I know who I am, because this I know, this I believe, this I have experienced – we know who we are because we believe in life and the radically transformative power of love, inclusion, and justice.”

3) Stendhal’s third rule of religious understanding goes like this: “Leave room for “holy envy.”

By this, he means to find some part of another’s tradition that you admire and wish was incorporated into your own. For me, the easy path often looks a lot more like holy pride than holy envy. During my least admirable moments, I can get so caught up in the excitement of being in a community of like minded people, of finding a place where I can be authentic and religious, that I sometimes catch myself thinking that we might somehow be more evolved, more human, than others. Anybody else?

I catch myself thinking that I’d just assume never have to talk to one of “them” again because, as we know, they don’t talk to anyone who disagrees with them. This is when I begin to use my holy pride to build up walls, and it is very easy to feel safe inside them. I have to say that I think Krister Stendhal’s rules could be pretty helpful in understanding ourselves as well. Ask the adherents, not the enemies, don’t compare your best to their worst, and leave room for holy envy. I wonder what it might look like during a period of overwhelming self-doubt or criticism to turn those rules around and say, “When you are trying to understand yourself, ask your supporters and not your enemies – count the “yes” votes in your life, not the mistakes. Don’t always compare the best of others to the worst in yourself, and do leave some room for holy envy, but don’t think that what you stared off with isn’t sacred already.

The responsibility that comes with a free religious life is certainly no simple thing, and it is definitely not easy. Nowhere in our literature or our history do we find a promise of an easy answer or a simple journey together.

I find it very interesting that in the narrative of the Hebrew Scriptures, the Israelites wait exactly one verse after celebrating their release from the Egyptians before complaining about their newfound freedom. In Exodus 14 and 15, Moses has just led this small group of escaped slaves out of their camp, miraculously through a parted sea that swallowed their foes, to celebrate with song and dance at their new location. At their camp the people sing a celebration hymn that reads, “With your unfailing love you lead the people you have redeemed. In your might you guide them to their sacred home.”

They begin their journey in the first verse of chapter 16, and the second verse reads, “There, too, the whole community of Israel complained about Moses and Aaron. “If only the Lord had killed us back in Egypt,” they moaned. “There we sat around pots filled with meat and ate all the bread we wanted. But now you have brought us into the wilderness to starve us all to death.”

This freedom and responsibility in religion and in culture is hard. How much of our society has felt like it might be easier back in Egypt lately, where there are many more constraints, but more security also? In our community here, too, how many of us have longed sometime for a simpler faith where at least we all agreed on what it is our church believes? But we know that it wasn’t better in Egypt, and we have chosen together a free religious life. The word “heretic” merely means one who chooses. We have chosen to walk together in a place (like the invocation often says) where questions are more profound than answers, where we have cast off the security of the simple fix in religion, to seek new truth every day, and to affirm that we “need not think alike to love alike.”

My friends, what this community, what this history and this free religious vision has to offer us will not be easy. I know that for any visitors here today, I am not offering you a simple sell on our religion. But I can tell you, it is worth it. This free and responsible spiritual life calls us to be transformed by participating in it, and to therefore transform the lives of others. It calls us, not to simply throw away the old stories of our religious past, to define ourselves by what we are not, but to reuse and recycle that past, to retell those stories in a way that makes meaning for us now. It calls us to use our freedom, not to build walls, but to go deep and dig wells from which we can all draw – to see the best in others and ourselves.

In this tradition, no minister, no denominational figure, no staff person or district official bears the responsibility of coming up with answers, with a statement of faith. It is not that one person is responsible for the future of a free religious life, every person is, and each of us has enough of what is sacred inside us to play a significant role.

I’ll conclude today with the words of the UU minister, Rev. Rebecca Parker. They might be familiar to some of you:

“Your gifts, whatever you discover them to be, can be used to bless or curse the world. The mind’s power, the strength of hands, the reaches of the heart, the gift of speaking, listening, imagining, seeing, waiting,”

Any of these can serve to feed the hungry, bind up wounds, welcome the stranger, praise what is sacred, do the work of justice, and offer love.

Any of these can draw down the prison door, hoard bread, abandon the poor, obscure what is holy, comply with injustice, or withhold love.

You must answer this question: What will you do with your gifts? Choose to bless the world.?

My friends, in a free religious community, it is the responsibility of each of us to offer such a blessing. It is not easy, but it is ours to make real.

What better time than now?

Amen