Faith for UUs

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
March 4, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

When some people use the word faith, they are talking about faith in a personal God, or faith in the trustworthiness of another person. When someone refers to “the Unitarian Universalist faith,” what are they talking about?

Call to Worship
Alfred S. Cole

Go out into the highways and by-ways
And give the people something of your new vision.
You may possess only a small light, but uncover it and let it shine.
Use it to bring more understanding to the hearts and minds of men.
Give them not Hell, but hope and courage.
Do not push them deeper into their despair,
But preach the kindness and the everlasting love of God.

Reading
By Max Kapp

Often I have felt that I must praise my world.
For what my eyes and ears have seen these many years,
And what my heart has loved.
And often I have tried to start my lines: “Dear earth,”
I say, And then I pause.
To look once more.
Soon I am bemused. And far away in wonder.
So I never get beyond “Dear Earth.

Reading The Rock of Ages at the Taj Mahal,
Meg Barnhouse

ALL WILL BE WELL

All will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.” This is one of the mantras used in the Christian meditation tradition. Don’t think it comes from a dewy-eyed Pollyanna. The woman to whom it is credited, Dame Julian of Norwich, is the same one who, when her mule got stuck on a mountain road in a rainstorm, dismounted, shook her fist at the sky, and shouted, “God! If this is how you treat your friends, it’s no wonder you don’t have many!”

Lately I have been experimenting with repeating, “All will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.” I try it out in different situations. Sometimes I feel stupid affirming that all will be well. What about things that aren’t well and don’t look like they’re ever going to be well? It’s hard to see the whole picture from where I stand at this moment in my life.

There is a story of a Chinese farmer who had a fine horse show up in his pasture one day. “How marvelous!” all the neighbors said. “Maybe,” said the farmer. His son tried to ride the horse and the horse threw him, breaking the son’s leg. “How awful,” said the neighbors. “Maybe,” replied the farmer. Then the Emperor’s army came through town to draft young men for war. The farmer’s son was spared because of his broken leg.

I can’t tell, in the grand scheme of life, whether things are turning out well or not. To affirm that “all will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well” is difficult for me. There are child abusers and torturers and AIDS and oil spills and a multitude of other horrors in this world.

Here is what I do know. I know that I have a choice between hope or despair when viewing the world and my future. Each choice has equal evidence in its favor. Each is affirmed and underscored by my life experience. How do I decide between them? I choose the one that brings the most joy, the most healing, the most compassion to my life and to the world. In despair I’m no good to anyone. I stop functioning well, I drag through the days, I deal with horrors that haven’t even happened yet. I don’t enjoy my children, food, sex, or any of the other dazzling pleasures of my life.

When my mother was dying of cancer, she said to me, “Meggie, everything that happens to me is good.” That was a statement of her faith. I was a cynical twenty three year old seminary student. My mother’s faith sounded naive and silly. I was in despair over her suffering, but she was not in despair, and it was her suffering. Suddenly, it seemed presumptuous to despair over her suffering when she was choosing not to.

As I experiment with this mantra and risk feeling stupid, which is a feeling I despise, I ask myself, “Which is more stupid: to despair my whole life just in case things aren’t going to end well, or to live in joy and hope my whole life, whether or not things turn out well” I’m going to keep singing this mantra to my fears. All will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.

Sermon

Faith struck me at the beginning of such a Christian word. I think that is because I grew up in a Christian background. Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen, the writer of the book of Hebrews says. The more I thought about that the more I didn’t understand what it meant. Faith, I always used to teach, is acting as if. Acting as if something you believe to be true is actually true. I act as if I have an inner wisdom that guides me. I act as if the truth will ultimately be revealed. I act as if the other drivers on the road are relatively sober during the day.

UU writer Jeanne Harrison Niewjaar, in her book Fluent in Faith, talks about faith has something on which you comfortably rely, a place or an attitude in which you feel at home. She tells the story of a rabbi who asked a school full of students at the synagogue whether they believed in God. No one raised their hand. When he asked have there been times when you have felt close to God? Many hands were raised. And the church I grew up in, the Apostles Creed, which we said every Sunday, started by saying I believe in God the Father Almighty, Etc. It was a list of things Christians, Protestant Christians were supposed to believe. These are not things in which I felt particularly at home, not things on which I comfortably relied. I never thought about it that way. I thought I just needed to try harder to think those things were true. Is believing different from knowing? Does faith necessarily imply something which cannot be proved? I don’t think so. I know that Carl Jung, when asked whether he believed God, answered “I don’t believe — I know.” Or is faith a choice?

Maybe Unitarian universalists can reclaim the word faith by thinking of it as something we rely on with our bodies and our spirits, something were we act as if it’s true, whether we know it for sure for sure or not. Maybe we think of it as a choice of what world we want to live in. I choose to believe that all will be well. I choose to believe that there is a spark of the Divine and every person, every animal, every rock and tree, every grain of sand, every atom. This requires me to consider that there it’s the Divine in the cancer cell. That is hard for me. I don’t know if you all know Peter Myers song Everything Is Holy Now, but I want the world I walk around in to be a world in which that is true.

On what do you rely? In what do you have faith? The goodness of other people? Until they show you otherwise? The goodness in yourself? The Ring Of Truth? The senses of your body? Most Unitarian Universalist would say that we have faith in the community. If we take that apart a little bit, it is not just in gathering next to each other that we have faith, even though Rabbi Jesus said where two or more of you are gathered there am I in the midst of you. There is something quite powerful about gathering together. Yet it is not just in gathering together, but it is in a shared and living mission that we find power, and shared effort, and shared experience, and shared word and song, enjoyment, ritual, conversation, it is in shared history. There is power in sharing our stories together. There is power in striving to refine and strengthen our spirits. There is power in nourishing one another’s souls. There is power in transforming our own lives, the lives of others, and the culture of Institutions that there is power where we make an effort together. There is power in US. One of my Bedrock articles of faith is that, in order to make the world the one that we want to be living in, we must expand our sense of who is included in that word “us.”

Look around you. This is us. But there are people who are not here today. They are also us. What about the people who used to come but now have moved away or go to other churches? Are they still us? Are UUs in other churches across the country us? What about the people who will belong to this church in the future? We are here. My faith and my experience tells me that we will still be here 10 years from now, 30 years from now, 50 years from now. Some of you have been with this church for 30 years. (maybe ask people in the congregation how long they have been coming, on and off or steadily)

The UUA has issued an invitation to think about leaving our legacy. Leaving a part of our treasure to us. To the us that will be here in fifty years. We want to see our values transmitted to the next generation. And yet my wife Kiya, the resident scholar in our house, in her master’s work for her Master’s in cultural studies, wrote that each generation hands to the next their precious treasure. The generation they hand it to smashes it to pieces, then puts it lovingly back together in that generation’s way. We may grieve that, but we may also have faith in that. I want to ask you the question — Do you have faith in us?

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