Who Are We?

SWUUD Spring Conference

Friday 25 April 2008

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

READING: Who are you?

A woman in a coma was dying. She suddenly had a feeling that she was taken up to heaven and stood before the Judgment Seat.

“Who are you?” a Voice said to her.

“I’m the wife of the mayor,” she replied.

“I did not ask whose wife you are but who you are.”

“I’m the mother of four children.”

“I did not ask whose mother you are, but who you are.”

“I’m a schoolteacher.”

“I did not ask what your profession is but who you are.”

And so it went. No matter what she replied, she did not seem to give a satisfactory answer to the question, “Who are you?”

“I’m a Christian.”

“I did not ask what your religion is but who you are.”

“I’m the one who went to church every day and always helped the poor and needy.”

“I did not ask what you did but who you are.”

She evidently failed the examination, for she was sent back to life. When she recovered from her illness, she was determined to find out who she was. And that made all the difference. (Anthony de Mello, Taking Flight, p. 140)

PRAYER

We pray not to something, but from something, to which we must give voice; not to escape from our life, but to focus it; not to relinquish our mind, but to replenish our soul.

We pray that we may live with honesty: that we can accept who we are, and admit who we are not; that we don’t become so deafened by pride and fear that we ignore the still small voices within us, that could lead us out of darkness.

We pray that we can live with trust and openness: to those people, those experiences, and those transformations that can save us from narrowness and despair.

And we pray on behalf of these hopes with an open heart, an honest soul, and a grateful reverence for the life which has been given to us.

Amen.

HOMILY: Who Are We?

That parable about the woman who didn’t know who she was beyond all the secondary identities she’d worn raises the most basic question of liberal religion, perhaps the most basic question of all religion: who are you, beyond the hand-me-down identity of your sex, race, social and economic class and political biases? These are add-ons. Who is inside? Who are you?

This is an especially good question for us, because you know that most people have heard of us – if they’ve heard of us at all – through Garrison Keillor’s jokes about us. Before I was called to Austin in 2000, I served a year as the interim minister at Unity-Unitarian Church in St. Paul, about five blocks from Garrison Keillor’s mansion, and I heard a slew of those jokes from church members, some of whom knew him.

It seems a shame to start a conference like with without some humor, so I’ll share two of those with you. The first was when I heard him tell of the Unitarian missionaries of the 1960s and 1970s, who came to Minnesota and tried to convert the Ojibway Indians through interpretive dance.

The second one is by far the better known, and is my very favorite. It’s the one about what you get when you cross a Unitarian with a Jehovah’s Witness. You get someone who knocks on your door for no apparent reason.

The reason the jokes work is because it isn’t easy saying who we are, or what we believe that has the depth and power to be a gift either to our people or to the world around us, beyond our second-hand identities of social class and political biases – or, on a much more local scale, the Seven Principles, also known as the Seven Dwarfs or the Seven Banalities. Some of you may know the history of how these came to be born, but I suspect many of you don’t know the history. The first church I served played a part in that history, so it’s a story I was made aware of as soon as I entered the ministry in 1986 – the year after those Principles were adopted at General Assembly.

In the late 1970s, some people began saying – and I usually heard it in these words – that “The problem is that our children don’t know what to tell their friends they believe.” I had just started graduate school in 1979 when I heard this, and remember thinking, “No, the problem is that neither our members nor ministers know what they believe that matters any more.”

It was – at least in an ideal sort of world – time to ask very hard religious questions. These would have included questions like, “What’s worth believing? What beliefs are necessary for forming people of high character? What gods (where “gods” means “ideals or beliefs”) are worth serving, and can lead us toward lives worth living?” To be fair, I don’t know of any denomination that asked such questions – and at least all the liberal denominations needed to be asking them by at least thirty years ago. But we didn’t either.

Instead, we took a poll. The UUA asked some churches – I don’t know how many, whether it was more like thirty or a hundred – to hold discussion groups. The purpose of these discussion groups was to find out what people who happened to come to our churches, and happened to like discussion groups, happened to believe. The first church I served was one of these churches.

What the results showed – and when you think about it, all they could show – was the generic biases of America’s cultural liberals in the early 1980s. That’s not useless. It does show – still pretty accurately, I think – the demographic slice from which our people (including me) come. It’s a sociological and semi-political sort of orthodoxy, though of course not any sort of a religious orthodoxy. We”ve always been against that.

However, the social and political biases of liberals became our real orthodoxy, as it pretty much is to this day.

Taken together and framed and hung on pink posters throughout our churches – including this one – they have the look and feel of a kind of de facto creed, a religion manufactured for our masses, and while the UUA is clear that they do not speak for the beliefs of our masses, they’re still there, and many think they look like they must. No one, I hope, would suggest that they belong alongside some of the timeless teachings of the world’s great religions – the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, The Eightfold Noble Path of Buddhism, the insights of the Hindu Upanishads and Bhagavad-Gita or the rest. But if these aren’t high, noble, first-rate timeless beliefs, are there any that can and should command all decent people? If so, from where? Under what authority? Who says? Is that all there is? Who are we? The principles are a good guide to the general demographic from which our members come, meaning the generic beliefs of America’s cultural liberals. So their creedal feel is kind of a rough sketch of America’s social and political liberals, at least from the early 1980s. In most of our churches – to our credit, I think – we’re not terribly judgmental about what a person’s individual religious beliefs are. You can believe in a god, a goddess, a whole slew of deities or none at all, and you’ll fit right in unless you’re too evangelical about your beliefs. But if you step very far outside of our social and political orthodoxy, you might have trouble getting many people wanting to engage you in serious and respectful conversation at coffee hour. Here are a few of the ways I’ve thought of that you could do it:

– By wearing a pro-life button

– By wearing a pro-Bush button (in at least the vast majority of our churches)

– By wearing one that says “I’ll give up my gun when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers.”

– Or one that says “Evolution is wrong” or “Science is only a bad guess.”

You get the idea, and you can amuse yourself this weekend when you get bored by thinking of other buttons or signs that would mark your visitors as among the Unclean, the Untouchables, the Damned.

All these are examples of people exercising free choice of both belief and expression, but they would make you as unwelcome here as signs with the opposite message might make you at your local megachurch. The difference is that at the megachurch, they would be able to give you some specifically religious beliefs they said they regarded as sacred and commanding – something beyond the generic biases of social and political conservatives. In my experience, that would be much, much harder to do in nearly all of our churches.

But if the current assigned ideology of the social and political left doesn’t speak for our beliefs, or for the mission and purpose of this little non-moving movement, what does? Because we’re in trouble.

We have about the same number of members we had in 1961, while the country’s population has increased by about 70%. Any business consultant would say that a business that’s lost 70% of its market share is in dire straits. Are we simply doomed, is it time to pass out the razor blades and poisoned Kool-Aid, or is there hope? If there’s an answer, is it a really easy one, that wouldn’t require us to do anything, like, hard? And if there is an answer but it’s hard, are we really interested in it?

The basic assumption that has helped to frame this weekend’s programs is that there is an answer, it will take work, some re-definition and digging beneath merely superficial understandings of religion, but it is exciting work that can reconnect us with the ancient and life-giving spirit of liberal religion – a spirit which, as I’ll show you in tomorrow morning’s worship service, goes back to the very oldest story we have, a story from before the beginning of recorded human history or the appearance of any of the world’s current religions. It isn’t limited to the biases of Democrats, the Green Party, or whatever the current Politically Correct habits are. It is not about walking in intellectual or actual lock-step to some agenda that’s really just about us – whether it’s an official creed or seven “principles” created by a few hundred people over a quarter century ago – people who meant for them to be a snapshot of their times, not a prescription for ours.

It’s about becoming more aware of that spirit of liberal religion that has been with us, and has been whispering in our ears, since the dawn of written history. It’s about learning about more of the forms that spirit has taken through the world’s great religions and philosophies and lives. Then it’s about nurturing the spark of that spirit until it becomes a flame in our own lives that can illuminate and enlighten us – two of the key prayers of all religion – and which can finally command and transform us.

You may know much of the story, but I hope those guiding religious, intellectual and emotional spirits that have always characterized the soul of liberal religion – I hope those spirits will be present within and among us this weekend. Because they are the spirits – spirits probably older than our human species – best able to help us answer some of those questions more profound than answers: like “Who are you? Why does it matter? What do you offer to the world?” or “What does the world need from religious liberals?” The spirits that answer these questions have given life abundant to millions and millions of people for thousands of years, all over the world. They can do the same for us, if we will let them in. This weekend together, let’s let them in.