Unitarian Christianity

Davidson Loehr

21 September 2008

PRAYER:

When people or experiences become doorways or windows, let us learn to look through them.

When someone or something in life opens us to the possibility of a life with more understanding, compassion or wholeness, let us gather our courage and step through that opening, from a world of the habitual into a world of the possible.

When we feel the pull of authenticity, let us bend toward it, that it may draw us into lives of greater integrity, love and joy.

Life is a series of pushes and pulls, too many trying to push us toward selling out, settling for too little from ourselves, pushing us toward the dissipation of our spirits.

But not all of life is against us. If we live among angels and demons, and have been frightened by the demons, let us remember there are angels as well: messengers from Life, from places of trust and empowerment, from a healing kind of truth and hope.

Those angels. Let us walk with those angels, in whatever guise they appear. Sometimes they even appear among those who love us. We hunger for messages of wholeness and hope. Let us listen for them, answer them, and be prepared to be transformed.

Amen.

SERMON: Unitarian Christianity

I want to spend some time this fall making us more aware of the rich history of honest religion. By “honest religion” I mean a religion that is open to all critical questions and doubts, and whose truths must be grounded in life itself, not merely the dogmas and ideologies of this or that church or cult. Last month, I talked about that spirit in the story of Gilgamesh, which is the world’s oldest story, going back 4700 years. Today I want to jump 4500 years and talk about Rev. William Ellery Channing. Most of you may never have heard of him, but he was the man most responsible for making Unitarianism into a separate American faith, nearly two hundred years ago. He did it through a very influential sermon delivered in 1819 called “Unitarian Christianity.” It’s ironic that the seeds he planted were neither Unitarian nor Christian, and would eat away at the foundation of theism and Biblical religions.

It’s a little tricky when we look back to an outstanding person who happens to have some connection with a label we also claim. Is it just mindless hero-worship? Worse, is it a kind of slobbering narcissism? “Well, they were spectacular and Unitarian. And I’m a Unitarian, so I must also be spectacular!”? That’s kind of like wearing a Longhorns t-shirt and thinking we must therefore be a nationally-ranked athlete. I have a Longhorns t-shirt that I wear to the gym, but I’m a rank athlete, not a ranked one. It’s a big difference.

Another approach to history’s gifted thinkers is to say, “Here was someone faced with the same kinds of life questions that face me, who found a way to look beyond the habits of their time, and respond to them by tapping into something timeless and life-giving. I want that too; maybe I can learn something here!” That’s what I want to do this morning.

So I want to start by backing off and describing what the spirit of honest religion is about, so we can see this William Ellery Channing fellow in the right context, so we can see how any of this might be useful in our own search for honest religion. Some historians have said it’s too bad that American Unitarianism was ever called Unitarian because it’s the wrong name – and I agree with them. “Unitarian” was the insult name assigned it by those who hated it two hundred years ago. But it was never about how many gods we should count. It was about a style of seeking honest religion, and it was the same style that has been there in all times and places, whenever the spirit of honest religion appears.

There are many ways to put this primal spirit of honest religion. One is that it is about coming alive, seeking the truth and healing our world. Another is summed up in ten magnificent words from the Christian scriptures: “Examine everything carefully, hold fast to that which is good.” (I Thessalonians 5:21, NASB). Those ten words are also a pretty good summary of the scientific method, and of how we all try to make sense of things in our lives. We all try to examine everything carefully, holding fast only to what looks good, don’t we? We could say it’s just about waking up, as the Buddhists do: that we are mostly trapped within illusions we create through our odd ways of putting things, and there is a freedom in facing ourselves and our world as we really are, and finding the kind of real-world happiness that is there only for those awake enough to see it.

In every flowering of the spirit of honest religion, there is a kind of trinity that underlies their faith. And that trinity is there in the Unitarianism of William Ellery Channing as well, which is another reason it’s too bad what he was doing was called Unitarian. This trinity isn’t about gods, and it can’t be fit inside of Christianity or any other religion. It’s much bigger. It’s the enduring method of doing honest religion, a kind of three-legged stool on which the business of trying to take ourselves and life seriously always stands.

1. The first leg is grounded in our experience here and now. Religion has to relate to you and your actual life, or it can’t be your religion. And we’re seldom served very well by living someone else’s religion. Religion isn’t top-down. We don’t learn the truths we need from someone with a loud voice and a lot of arrogance. We learn it from the inside out. Our inside out.

2. The second part of honest religion’s trinity is that our reason and intuition are to be trusted, and no religious teaching should ever be accepted if it doesn’t make sense to us. There is a kind of mysticism about this, because we believe that the reality inside our hearts and minds can be trusted to have something to do with the reality outside of us. When you think about it, if that weren’t true, all our knowledge would be useless in the real world.

3. The third leg of this method is the belief that we need to find a center, a focus, that we believe can guide us toward living more wisely and well, because this is about the quality of our life. We want a way to live that will let us look in the mirror in five or fifty years and be able at least to say, “You know, if I only get one shot at this, I’m glad I lived the way I did.” If you can say that, you have won. It can take many forms, this center. It can be gods and saviors, rituals and civic duties, relationships, the psychological experience of conversion, or just waking up, as the Buddhists say. But we will worship something, and we will tend to take the shape of what we worship, so what we put at the center of our lives is most important.

The timeless quality of this spirit of honest religion is what’s behind the experience of so many visitors to churches like this. People will come for the first time and say, “My God, I’m home! This is what I was before I knew it existed. It’s what I’ve been looking for all my life. I didn’t know churches like this existed! My head and heart are at home here.” That powerful thing you’re relating to is not Unitarian Universalism, which was only turned into a religion during the 1980s – and what a sad mistake that was! It is also not Unitarianism (which is less than 200 years old in the U.S., and less than 500 years old in any form). It is not Christianity or even theism, but something far deeper and older: something primal. It’s that primal power, that primal and honest connection between ourselves and the world around us that life-giving religion is about.

Now I don’t want to get too spiritually precious about this, because you can find this spirit lots of places besides religion – there are plenty of people who’ll say you’re only likely to find it places other than religion. It comes from our yearnings, just as our gods and religions do.

I just finished reading a trilogy called His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman, the British writer who wrote these teen fantasies for an audience of young people from maybe age 12-18 or so. When the first volume, “The Golden Compass,” was made into a high-budget movie last year, I read about some evangelical groups protesting because he was an atheist. At the time, I thought, “Oh, evangelical groups are always saying things like that!” But after reading the books, I think they grossly understated the power of his assault on religion. It is subtle, brilliant, deep and complete. I think the books can plant seeds of healthy skepticism about religion in many of the young people who read them – in older people, too. It’s an attack on authoritarian religion in the name of our deep human need to seek the kind of truth that makes us come more alive and become more whole.

Now this garden of the spirit of life is the garden from which the spirit of William Ellery Channing grew. His vision was not as deep or broad or ambitious as that of Philip Pullman, who had the advantage of writing a century and a half later. And Channing was no revolutionary; he disliked controversy, though he was drawn into much of it through his writing and preaching. But Channing was brilliant. He graduated from Harvard at the top of his class at age 18, in 1798. In the early 1800s, he was regarded as the best preacher in America, and was one of the people interviewed by Alexis de Tocqueville for his classic work on Democracy in America.

Channing was not a pioneer. He followed several generations of American Congregationalist preachers who taught that Jesus was just a human, that we all had a “likeness to God,” and that the creeds and rigid beliefs of the churches distracted us from the deeper message that was concerned with changing our lives here and now.

And Channing, no less than the Christians, had a trinity. But his trinity was that trinity of honest religion in all times and places:

1. He had faith in our dignity rather than our damnation. That faith in our inherent goodness rather than a crippling sinfulness is at the heart of the impulse toward honest religion in all times and places.

2. He trusted Reason, and exalted it above scriptures and religious teachings. He said if we couldn’t trust reason, then we also couldn’t trust the reason of those who try to teach us what is true.

You can shatter the creeds and orthodoxies of every religion in the world just through these first two methods.

Here are some of his words on this, so you can get a feel for his style:

“It is always best to think first for ourselves on any subject, and then [to look] to others for the correction or improvement of our own sentiments. . . . The quantity of knowledge thus gained may be less, but the quality will be superior. Truth received on authority, or acquired without labor, makes but a feeble impression.”

“Our leading principle in interpreting Scripture is this, that the Bible is a book written for men, in the language of men, and that its meaning is to be sought in the same manner as that of other books.”

“And we therefore distrust every interpretation, which, after deliberate attention, seems repugnant to any established truth.”

He objected to the Christian trinity both because it was irrational and because it never appeared in the Bible. Like Jesus, he said, he worshiped only God.

He also found irrational and insulting the idea that Jesus came to save us from God’s wrath, or that his death would somehow change God’s mind. No, he said, Jesus didn’t come to change God’s mind – think what a juvenile concept of God that involves – Jesus came to change our minds.

He granted that reason can be used badly in religion as in all other areas, but asked people to look back through history and decide whether more harm has been done by trusting reason, or by forbidding it. The historical record is dramatic and clear on this point.

3. The third part of his trinity was God, but even here he meant something very different from orthodox Christians. Here are some of his words. You can hear that spirit of honest and timeless religious inquiry coming through, and that he’s talking about something much more primal than any god:

“We cannot bow before a being, however great and powerful, who governs tyrannically. We respect nothing but excellence, whether on earth or in heaven. We venerate not the loftiness of God’s throne, but the equity and goodness in which it is established.”

“By these remarks, we do not mean to deny the importance of God’s aid or Spirit; but by his Spirit, we mean a moral, illuminating, and persuasive influence, not physical, not compulsory?.”

Can you hear that these words take him completely beyond the God of the Bible? He’s talking about high ideals and noble moral qualities, and his ideal version of them is called, by habit and convention, “God.” That’s fundamentally different from “believing in God,” as you can feel.

He spoke of a “zeal for truth,” but didn’t think it showed up often enough in religion, and wrote that “On no subject have people injected so many strange conceits, wild theories, and fictions of fancy, as on religion.” The kind of truth he sought was what he called “purifying truth” that could make us more godlike.

He also said, “In my view, religion is another name for happiness, and I am most cheerful when I am most religious.” (Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805-1900 [Wesminister John Knox Press, 2001], p. 15) He is not speaking as a Unitarian or a liberal Christian here. He is speaking from a far deeper and more primal place, as you can feel.

Was Channing a Unitarian? That’s hard to answer. He called his sermon “Unitarian Christianity,” though what he really brought to his liberal Christians on that 5th of May in 1819 was a kind of Trojan Horse: a gift containing forces that would eventually destroy the foundations of Christianity, theism, and Biblical religion for many. His sermon contained ideas whose logical implications would lead beyond Unitarian Christianity, the Bible and theism. That’s the sermon that all students for the UU ministry are required to read. And he later wrote other pieces defending his Unitarian Christianity against the orthodox versions, saying it was more honest, and helped form better people. But what he meant was the method of honoring reason and experience, examing everything carefully, discarding what doesn’t hold up, and holding fast only to what is good. And then, when the American Unitarian Association first began in 1825, he would not join it, and never supported it. He thought people should seek to develop themselves within local churches, but that an organization like the Unitarian Association would probably just be an agent of unneeded mischief. He said there is “no moral worth in being swept away by a crowd, even towards the best objects.”

(http://www25.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/williamellerychanning.html) “An established church,” he said, “is the grave of intellect.” (Dorrien, p. 17)

When he used the word “God”, it meant excellence that made rational and moral sense – anyone must believe in that! To put it in his language, he believed we were created in the image of God, that God gave us reason and expected us to use it, and that any faith that denied this, or that could not stand up to the critiques of informed reason, was unworthy of us, and of God. In the language of our time, he was very close to what we would call religious humanism, as all varieties of liberal religion through the ages have been.

I’ve always identified with a lot about Channing, including his deep distrust and rejection of any national organization that was bound to become a kind of club, offering a kind of second-hand religion, as our modern UUA does. But I like him mostly because he was one of the people whose vision transcended the beliefs of his time and place, of the vast majority of his colleagues and parishioners, and caught a glimpse of the kind of honest religion that really does seem to be timeless.

The insights of honest religion transcend all the gods and religions. Not because we’re bigger than the gods, but because Life is, and it is Life’s longing for itself that comes alive in us and drives us to examine everything carefully and hold fast only to that which is good.

If you’ve never heard of this preacher from the early 19th century and wonder if you should be writing his name down in case there’s a test, don’t worry about it. You don’t have to care about William Ellery Channing. And while we’re at it, you don’t have to care about Jesus or the Buddha, either. Don’t let mean and arrogant preachers scare you: religion isn’t about the gods, the teachers or the preachers. The best of them are all windows opening us to visions of life so honest and big that they might beckon to us, might lure us into following them down a richer path. To use one metaphor, they are like rainbows, suggesting that if we could only follow them, there could be a pot of gold at their end. Or in another metaphor, they’re like recipes, saying if we can add our ingredients, figure out the missing instructions and imagine how to cook them up about right, they could help us make a better life. It shouldn’t be so hard. There are just the three known ingredients, at least they don’t change much. First, we must bring our life and our experiences, the happy ones, the proud ones, the raw ones, and those times we went off the road. All of them. They’re the stuff we need to wrap into our life. Then we need to trust our reason and intuition, how it sounds and feels, whether it feels like there’s a harmony of thought and action. And then the Center. What do we tune to? What will we serve? Where’s the focus around which we want to be in a kind of orbit; the kind of center that gives us a calling and an integrity that keep life from just becom-ing one damned thing after another?

We’re going to end here before it’s cooked, because finishing the recipe is our job in our own lives. And so we leave here, as we often do, half-baked. We leave carrying some of our parts in bags or buckets, still unassembled. But we kind of know how they should go, how they need to be put together to make a whole being, our whole being.

Wouldn’t it be nice to be that? A whole being? The essential parts put together with integrity and feeling, serving a Center of Life that gives us life, learning how to walk, to dance, maybe to sing?

That wild, enticing, nearly impossible-feeling task is what we’ve always been about in honest religion. There are no secrets, we have good materials to work with in ourselves, and it can be done, step by step by step. But it can’t be done in just one week. That’s why we meet like this, every Sunday.