Where Do We Go From Here?

May 21, 2006

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER

Let us have the fortitude to hear the truths we need to hear, the vision to see what to do with them, and the courage to do it.

We pretend, to our own amusement, that we’re not afraid of anything, that we’re certainly not afraid of anything that’s true, and that we want to build our lives on the foundations of those truths.

In some non-threatening ways, that’s true; in others, it is not, and we find a hundred ways silently to let other people determine what we should hear and know and do.

But we can live with second-hand truths and second-order visions for so long that we live second-hand and second-order lives. And nobody wants that.

And so. Let us have the fortitude to hear the truths we need to hear, the vision to see what to do with them, and the courage to do it. Here, now, today, tomorrow, always.

Amen.

SERMON: Where do we go from here?

Three weeks ago, I was the keynote speaker for the annual district meeting of the Ballou-Channing District in Southeast Massachusetts, and was asked to talk about where we go from here. It was a one-hour speech, on where liberal religion and liberal culture are today and how they got there, some critiques of the UUA – and I’m not sure many of you would be interested in hearing all that. If you are interested, you can read the whole speech on our website. But for this morning, I want to focus on some things that might be more useful.

The reason for asking questions like where we go from here is because, like all mainline religious denominations, ours has been losing members steadily for the past half-century. Though, since we’re much smaller, we’re more vulnerable. How small are we? Well, a recent Gallup poll showed that over fifteen times as many Americans believe they have been abducted by aliens than believe they are Unitarians. That’s small – though there may be some overlap in those figures. We might want to get a task force to study those aliens’ methods.

As to where we go from here, this has answers – very different answers – at three levels.

First, we can consider the largest, broadest context, and ask “Where do we go from here as the UUA, as a small international religious movement?” Second, we can ask, more locally, “Where do we go from here as our local church in Austin?” And third, we can ask, “Where do we go from here as individual seekers in the liberal religious traditions?”

A. First, where do we go from here as the UUA, as a small international religious movement?

One answer must be, “perhaps nowhere.” Everything seems to point to a commitment to denial and a contentment with just dwindling away, not with a bang but a whimper. It’s a very real possibility.

More than half the churches in the Unitarian Universalist Association now have fewer than 100 members, so couldn’t pay a full-time salary to a minister. Yet new ministers are graduating from seminary with an average of $40,000 in educational loan debt from just the three-year seminary education, and need fulltime employment. I spent seven years in graduate school to get a Ph.D., and graduated owing only $17,500. But times and economics have changed. Today, a Ph.D. could cost students between $80,000 and $100,000. The ministry doesn’t pay well enough to cover such debts and have a decent standard of living, so very few students are likely to get PhD’s rather than just the 3-year seminary educations.

Last year, men and women were preparing for the UU ministry in 75 different institutions. That means that virtually all of our future ministers will simply be educated in Christian seminaries, learning the metaphors, symbols, and thought games of that religion rather than preparing for the post-Christian, pluralistic world we’re living in. That doesn’t look promising. Without having educational institutions that actually educate our ministers, we have no means of teaching a unique perspective, even if we could articulate one. I don’t see any way past this. How long do you think Roman Catholicism would last if 95% of their priests were educated in Buddhist schools?

Even the quarterly publication called the UU Voice – easily the most candid and self-critical of all our publications – may have to stop publishing, after forty years, because it costs $6,500 a year to publish it, and subscriptions aren’t covering it.

For these reasons and more, I think one serious answer to “Where do we go from here as the UUA, as a small international religious movement?” is, “Nowhere. From here, we just continue to fade away.”

B. Where do we go from here as a local church?

This is more hopeful. People who study churches say that, as money gets tighter, the most vulnerable churches are the mid-sized churches. Large churches that have learned to operate as well-run businesses usually have big enough budgets, not only to weather storms, but also to hire the necessary help (as staff or consultants) to react pro-actively. Small churches of under 150 that exist as “family” churches can have the “familial” cohesion to stick together, with or without a minister. But mid-sized churches no longer have the simpler “single-family” cohesion, and lack the budget of larger churches. We are at the very low edge of what’s considered the “large church” category, needing about 200 more members and $200,000 more in our budget to be in a safer place.

Another answer at the “church demographics” level is that white-haired congregations are visibly grounded in the past, as churches with younger hair colors are more likely to be invested in the future. There is much talk within the UUA of a “commitment to growth,” and all seem to mean by this a desire to attract more younger people. But younger church cultures are very different. Young people have different priorities than older people: spiritually, socially, and economically.

I think it’s fair to say that a church structured for the future will be more comfortable for people in their 30s and 40s than it will be for people in their 60s to 80s. Small churches operate a lot like social organizations, in which The Guardians define the boundaries of both thought and behavior to fit their own comfort zones. Unless they can grow past that, they’ll never be very good or very stable large churches. This is one of our challenges in this church.

C. Where do we go from here as individual seekers in the liberal religious traditions?

Here, the picture can be as intelligent, informed and optimistic as the individual seekers are.

The search for a religious center doesn’t have to start from scratch. Even a cursory study of the world’s great traditions shows us that religion does have an enduring subject matter. Its insights measure the quality of our lives and our worlds, for better and worse, whether we “believe in them” or not. Most of these truths do not seem to have changed much in recorded history. They seem to be species-specific traits and norms that most peoples of most times have recognized as inviolable, and which we also recognize as inviolable – though we seldom articulate these facts:

— Religion is a human enterprise, and a human invention. It is one of the ways in which we try to learn and practice ideals that can help us become more fully human. We can do it in god-talk or without using God-talk.

— The Way we seek is older than the gods, as Lao-tzu said.

— We want to learn how to relish the transient pleasures of life without becoming limited and defined by them, and how to nurture our life-giving circles of friends – as the Epicureans taught 2400 years ago.

— We know that neither we nor any supernatural agencies can control what life brings our way, so we should learn how to control our responses to life – as the Stoics taught.

— Most of us believe in “salvation through understanding,” as the Buddhists have taught. This is another way of saying we don’t want to check our brains outside the church door. We don’t want to check our hearts there, either.

— We need to be reminded – in the Roman Seneca’s magnificent phrase – that we are all limbs on the body of humanity, and we must learn to act accordingly.

— We know, but want to be reminded, that if only we could treat all others as our equals, our brothers and sisters, as “children of God,” that we could transform this world into a paradise – as Jesus taught in his concept of the “kingdom of God.”

All this requires boundaries a lot bigger than anyone’s comfort zone. It isn’t easy. It takes personal work. And world religions all think it’s hard – that there are hard demands, and that few are ever willing to do the work:

— Islam teaches the path as the razor edge of a sword stretched across an abyss.

— Jesus talked about the narrow way that few entered.

— Hinduism also speaks of the path as razor-edged, and has so many stories about how many lives you”d have to live, in order to get it right.

— Buddhists teach how hard it is just to wake up, to outgrow the comforting illusions of “our kind of people.” It’s at least as hard today, especially when the illusions of our kind of people provide the only clear “home” for most in liberal camps.

— And for Jews, the notion of being God’s “chosen people” meant God demanded more of them than others, not that they were special.

That personal hard work is how those traditions raise our sights to see and hear what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.”

Salvation by Character

Another answer to “where do we go from here?” comes from understanding religion as the search for a healthy kind of wholeness, to become a blessing to a world not made in our image. And from the start, the salvation story of most of the best prophets and sages has been the story of salvation by character. We are trying to become better people, partners, parents and citizens, and believe that doing so will make life more worth living, for ourselves and those we love. We are trying to get reconnected with a healthy kind of wholeness. This is about personal authenticity, the kind of authenticity that rejuvenates the world.

You can’t get that second-hand. You can’t get it by joining a club, a denomination or a church, or putting fish named “Jesus” or “Darwin” on your car trunk. You only get it by doing the self-examination and the personal work. The gifts of all the world’s great prophets and sages are free, but they aren’t cheap. They can cost us our artificially small identities, and the comfort that comes with them.

We have never looked back with pride on religious liberals who didn’t go forward into new and uncharted territory during a crisis of religious expression. We don’t remember the names of the vast majority of Unitarians, Methodists, Presbyterians and Baptists who stuck with “the old ways,” or got lost in their era’s religious fads. Those in the future will look back to assess us in the same way.

I consulted with some colleagues in preparing these notes, but didn’t get many promising visions from them. However, I did get a comment from the Rev. David Bumbaugh, who is Professor of Ministry at Meadville Lombard Theological School in Chicago, and it’s worth sharing:

“I believe we are confronted by three essential and inescapable questions: What do we profess? In whose behalf do we act? To whom or to what are we responsible? The first question requires that I continually seek to be as clear as I can be about the fundamental convictions that drive my actions and not settle for platitudes–either traditional responses or the seven principles. The second question drives me to broaden the scope of my concerns beyond the horizons of my comfort zone to include the lost, the marginalized, those who are least like me. If ministry is to be anything more than chaplaincy to those who can afford me, the answer to the second question – “In whose behalf do we act?” – must continually expand.”

David’s third question is the theological question, of what we are serving that transcends our own wishes, our own kind of people, our own time and place, and how we are to speak of it. Three hundred years ago, the reflexive answer would have been, “Well, religion is about God, of course!” But the world has changed. Now we are charged with trying to serve the spirit of life by once more looking not to the past but to the future, and offering a structure or style of religion that can build bridges to a bigger future rather than walls around old comfort zones.

Some have compared our times to living in The Wasteland, and that’s an interesting term. In the Middle Ages, when the Arthurian Grail Legend was born, they also described their times as the Wasteland. And what they meant by living in the Wasteland was living an inauthentic life, a second-hand life with hand-me-down beliefs and not enough information to know or even seek the truths we need. Their church and their ruler decided what information they could receive, which is one way to keep people powerless.

This is why heresy and courage are so important today. There can’t be any questions or inquiries that are forbidden.

I had breakfast and spent the morning with Norman Lear this past Friday. It was a treat because he’s been an idol of mine ever since he wrote and produced the “All in the Family” TV series 35 years ago. We talked about religion, and his concern that religion is failing us as a society. “So many devastating things are going on,” he would say, “why are all the pulpits so silent about it? Why are they all so afraid?” Bill Moyers and Bishop John Shelby Spong have all asked the same questions, and we don’t hear much from religious voices, unless you count Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.

But it’s not enough to indict preachers. Not many people trust the media to tell us the truths we need to hear, either. And even fewer trust politicians or preachers to tell us unpopular truths.

We live in a time of fearful truths. Global warming, peak oil, our illegal invasion of Iraq built on stories we now know to have been lies, the reduction of our civil liberties, stories of our government eavesdropping on our phone calls, important questions about what happened on 9-11 and who was really behind it, stories about how fragile our economy is, how we are no longer respected by many of our longtime friends in the world: on and on. This web of unexamined truths is the Wasteland in which we live now, and it takes uncommon courage actually to want to hear some of these truths.

Yet the only hope we have for moving forward from here is having unrestricted access to all questions, all inquiries, and the courage to hear and deal with hard truths.

I don’t mean to point fingers, or to imply that we, of course, are all courageous and don’t fear anything. That isn’t true. We each have lines past which we simply become uncomfortable. And sometimes, we wish we could keep from hearing fearful truths. This is true for every one of us.

The religious myths of Western civilization are crumbling, and though scholars have written about it for over a century, it’s uncomfortable for many people to understand that the symbol God may not be useful or even coherent any more. Or that there’s no heaven, no afterlife, no supernatural magic as we were almost all taught as children. Don’t some of these things make you uncomfortable?

Maybe the Da Vinci Code doesn’t bother you when it suggests that Jesus and Mary Magdalen were married – and, as one scholar I know adds, that they had two children before they divorced and Jesus remarried.

But other stories can make you uncomfortable. This week, for instance, a respected member of this church sent me a news story about Morgan Reynolds. Reynolds was President Bush’s Labor Department Chief Economist and the former director of the Criminal Justice Center. He gave a speech to a standing-room-only audience of over 1,000 at the University of Wisconsin two weeks ago (6 March). He’s Emeritus professor of economics from Texas A&M, and doesn’t sound like a left-wing nut case. But he said that 9-11 was an inside job, and fingered Bush, Cheney and others for the murder of nearly 3,000 Americans on 9-11, as part of their plan to transform America to a command-and-control government, restrict civil rights, wage their imperialistic war in the Middle East, and the rest of it. (A reference link to milwaukee.indymedia.org was included here, but this linked page is no longer in existence (PR 1/19/2013.)

He said he believes some government insiders will come forward soon to tell their stories, that the information had been kept so compartmentalized that few had any idea of the scope of this administration’s plans for 9-11. If this proves to be true, it might be the most fearful truth in US history, and I think it would make every single American very uncomfortable and frightened. Though we may not find out whether it is true in our lifetimes.

Do you really want to know? Or would you rather be protected from these truths, if they do turn out to be true? Who would you trust to limit your access to this knowledge? The politicians? The media? Your neighbor? Anyone?

It was only five years ago that enough old government documents became declassified, including military communications from 1940 and 1941, to show pretty conclusively that Pearl Harbor was not a surprise attack, that FDR wanted it to happen and helped it happen, sacrificing 2400 soldiers in Pearl Harbor, in order to rouse our country to enter World War II. That has made me very uncomfortable, and I can understand why the government and the media have not wanted to spread this story widely. (Robert Stinnett, Day of Deceit: the Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor [Free Press, 2001]).

But without these truths, we have no chance of understanding what is going on and how the strings are being pulled that move our world. Who would you trust to decide what you can’t hear, can’t know, can’t discuss? Anyone?

I hope not. Because where we go from here, as individuals, as churches, and as a society, can only have a hopeful future if we have the courage to hear fearful truths, and then together to figure out how to respond to them.

We really have a proud heritage, both as Americans and as religious liberals. We stand on the shoulders of giants who have pushed people to deal with truths they didn’t want to know, to cross over past their comfort zones when they didn’t want to. We look back to them with gratitude for the courage they showed when it was their turn.

Now it’s our turn. Where we go from here will depend on the quality of our understanding and our courage. As we move into the future, we need to spend less time worshiping history and more time making it.

Now see, you came here hoping to hear a safe talk about where other people might need to go from here. And now you find out that it was about you, all along. Welcome to our church!