September 11, 2005

Rev. Henry Ticknor
Unitarian Universalist Church of the Shenandoah Valley

Unitarian Universalism for the 21st Century

One of the best-known Unitarians in our pantheon of Unitarian and Universalist saints is Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Emerson was the son of a mild Unitarian minister (six generations of ministers, in fact) who was both liberal and humanist, Emerson grew up in a very modest household where money was scarce; he had to share an overcoat with his younger brother.

His father died when he was eight years old, and his father's sister, Mary, came to live with the family. Mary Emerson proved to be a great intellectual influence on young Waldo.

Entering Harvard at the young age of 14, Emerson didn't exactly distinguish himself, graduating 30th in a class of 59. After college he tried teaching at a girls' school in the Boston area but soon tired of it and returned to Harvard Divinity School to pursue the family line and study for the ministry.

After a year or so at the Divinity School, he began to guest-minister at various local churches until he was called to the pulpit at the Second Church of Boston.

He seemed to have found his vocation composing and delivering weekly sermons, but there were aspects of the ministry that clearly he wasn't suited for particularly pastoral care. Biographer Robert D. Richardson, Jr., writes about one story of failure:

"Attending the deathbed of an old revolutionary soldier named Captain Greene, Emerson could think of nothing to say. Seeing a collection of medicine bottles on the table beside the captain's bed, he began to talk about glassmaking. "Young man," said the not-yet departed hero, "If you don't know your business, you had better go home."

Something even more powerful than occasional ineptitude caused him to question his call: he found himself challenging the conventional beliefs of most of his fellow Unitarians.

Most Unitarians still held many traditional Christian beliefs--about such things as the miracles of Jesus, the afterlife, the role and structure of the communion service, and the ultimate authority of the Bible.

Very early in his ministry Emerson began challenging these beliefs--at first privately in his journals, eventually in the pulpit. Just three-and-a-half years after being called to Second Church--and a year-and-a-half after the shattering death of his beloved wife--matters came to a head in a dispute over the communion sacrament.

Emerson had by now rejected communion as meaningless: God, for Emerson was imminent in nature and in our individual hearts, and could not be reduced to a presence in bread and wine. Probably hoping to pick a fight that would result in his resignation, Emerson sent a letter to members of his church expressing his desire to change radically how communion was administered at Second Church.

As he expected, church leaders turned down his proposed changes and Emerson resigned his first--and only--ministerial call.

He was not completely finished with Unitarianism or ministry, however. Though he poured more and more of his energy into writing and lecturing, he continued frequently preaching in Unitarian churches.

From 1835 to 1838, he preached regularly at a Unitarian church in Lexington. On Sundays out of the Lexington pulpit he usually attended the Unitarian church in his hometown of Concord. The Rev. Barzillai Frost, a particularly boring and rigidly orthodox minister at Emerson's Concord church, helped finally push Emerson once and for all out of the ministry.

Just as his attacks against the Rev. Frost in his journal reached a crescendo, Emerson decided to quit preaching in Lexington. Fuming about the Rev. Frost, Emerson wrote in his journal, "I ought to sit and think, and then write a discourse to the American Clergy, showing them the ugliness and unprofitableness of theology and churches this day." And he soon had an opportunity to do just that.

Probably Emerson's most radical stroke was when he delivered his "Harvard Divinity School Address."

A nasty scandal ensued when he declared that traditional Christianity had no validity other than as recorded history, that preoccupation with the details of Christ's life--whether or not he performed so-called "real" miracles--was akin to superstitiousness, idolatry. "The word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is a Monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain."

For Emerson, these natural wonders--the blowing clover and the falling rain--their sublime beauty alerting us in a symbolic way to the true spiritual facts, represented the real miracles.

The Christ in Emerson's Divinity School Address was not a deity but an arrestingly beautiful expression of spiritual heights attained, and attainable by all.

The mind--Reason, Spirit--is God. We are all God. The falling rain is God. One's ability to recognize and revere this power (Emerson called it the Over-Soul) in everything and everyone is the true measure of our spiritual lights, not the superficial accumulation of material goods, nor the mindless practice of superstitious rituals or the rote mouthing of doctrine.

In part, here is what Emerson said to the graduates:

"Wherever a man comes, there comes revolution. The old is for slaves. When a man comes, all books are legible, all things transparent, all religions are forms. He is religious. Man is the wonderworker. He is seen amid miracles.

All men bless and curse. He saith yea and nay, only. The stationariness of religion; the assumption that the age of inspiration is past that the Bible is closed, the fear of degrading the character of Jesus by representing him as a man; indicate with sufficient clearness the falsehood of our theology.

It is the office of a true teacher to show us that God is, not was; that He speaketh, not spake. The true Christianity, -- a faith like Christ's in the infinitude of man, -- is lost. None believeth in the soul of man, but only in some man or person old and departed."

And this I believe is the heart of our Unitarian Universalist faith. Revelation, what we might call truth, is open to one and not limited to any one religion or religious or philosophical text.

Like Emerson we Unitarian Universalists continue to believe that religion should not be static but an evolving presence in our lives. We deeply believe that it is more important to believe in the inherent worth and dignity of every person than in the words and deeds of persons "old and departed."

We are a non-creedal, non-dogmatic religion. Rather we are a covenantal religion and by that we agree to come together to promote and affirm certain values which we hold as essential to building world community.

We believe in the freedom of religious expression and we encourage one another to develop a personal theology--from deism to atheism--and to openly present their religious opinions without fear of censure or reprisal.

We believe that the religions of every age and culture have something to teach those who listen.

We believe in the authority of reason and the guidance of conscience. The ultimate judge in religion is not a church, not a document, not an official, but the personal choice of each individual.

We believe in searching for the truth with an open mind and heart.

We believe in the force of love which seeks to help and to heal.

And, too, we believe in the importance of a religious community.

Each Sunday in our Unitarian Universalist congregations, we gather in community to support our individual journeys through life. Sometimes this support comes in the form of everyday practical assistance with the issues each of us faces in our daily lives--issues such as parenting, caring for an aging parent, or dealing with a leaking faucet.

But at other times we need the support of our fellow congregants as we deal with the deeper issues of life--am I a spiritual being? What happens when we die? What is our place in the universe? We are a powerful religious movement because of the questions we ask, not the answers we give.

The word worship has its roots in an Anglo-Saxon word which means to affirm what is of worth. It also means to give shape to something. Thus when we come together on Sunday's in community worship we are shaping that which is already known to be of worth--we are giving shape to our values, our ideals, our beliefs.

As the UU minister Christopher Raible once said, "Although worship can, of course, refer to times of individual contemplation, meditation or reflection, it is common worship that is central to the life of a UU church or fellowship.

And so, we gather on Sundays because we believe, as Emerson did, that our spiritual life is personal -- a relationship between the individual and deity, however you define it. Rather than choose your path for you, our church provides a safe place for you to discover and pursue your own path.

Like Emerson we believe that the sources of revelation--of understanding who we are and our place in the universe--come from many sources. In fact the great passion of many Unitarians Universalists is to go back to all of the many and varied sources of human understanding to seek what is true and to draw what is true out of its hiding places.

Unitarianism as an organized church grew out of the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century CE. It started in Poland and Transylvania in the1560s, and was recognized as a religion in Transylvania within 10 years.

In England, Unitarian ideas were being discussed by the mid 1600s in the writings of John Biddle, and the first Unitarian congregation came into being in 1774 at Essex Chapel in London, founded by a former Church of England minister, Theophilus Lindsey.

The distinguished scientist and minister Joseph Priestley played a key role in bringing the movement to North America. After his laboratory was burned by an angry mob, he came to Philadelphia bringing with him his strong Unitarian faith.

Today, there are over 225,000 Unitarian Universalists in the USA and Canada, and about 1,000 congregations.

For many years, Unitarian Universalism in the United States Unitarian Universalism has been much more 'humanist' than Unitarian churches elsewhere in the world. Recently, however, there has been a movement in the Unitarian Universalist Association to be more accepting of what the Reverend Bill Sinkford, its president, calls the ''language of reverence''. This seems to be the result of the rising influence of a younger generation that is more attuned to spiritual values--or has had fewer bad traditional church experiences.

Today Unitarian Universalism encompasses liberal Christians, Jews, Buddhists, humanists, agnostics, atheists and followers of earth-centered spirituality within its ranks. Ours is a movement that is based on reason and in adopting a hopeful view of human nature rather than seeing humanity as fallen and sinful.

Here's part of a humorous story adapted from the writings of the author and Unitarian Universalist minister Robert Fulghum. It describes a conversation that takes place in a bookstore:

"Mr. Fulghum, is it true that you are a minister?"

"Yes."

"Where is your church?"

"We're standing in it." "But this is a bookstore and it's a Friday."

"Yes, but you might also choose to see it as a cathedral of the human spirit--a storehouse consecrated to the full spectrum of human experience. Just about every idea we've ever had is in here someplace. A place containing great thinking is a sacred place."

Really? Just what kind of minister are you?"

Unitarian Universalist."

"And you hold services in bookstores on Fridays?" You're putting me on."

"No, but I am giving you an example of how Unitarian Universalists think. More than anything else our church is defined by an attitude. An open minded point of view about everything and anything. What we have most in common is an uncommon way of looking at the obvious...."

"You mean there's no party line--no dogma?"

"Yes and no. We agree that individuals must work out their own religious conclusions. We agree to respect these differences. We agree to learn from one another."

This conversation comes to an end when the questioner asks about visiting Fulghum's church. Here's his reply:

"No problem. We don't evangelize. We keep a door open to those who are looking for the company of like minded people. We find there are a great many people who are Unitarian Universalists and don't know it. When we ask most Unitarian Universalists how they came to be members, they say it is because they were looking for a community of people who are liberal in their religious values and active in their commitment to community service."

As I speak to you on this Sunday in September four years after the attacks on the twin towers in New York and at the beginning the third week of the on-going relief efforts along the Gulf Coast I believe that Unitarian Universalism is positioned to become one of the great faith traditions of the 21st century.

I believe, along with others, that slowly, ever so slowly, the great values debate that has so divided our country may be coming to an end as individuals see that issues of economics, survival, housing, and freedom from oppression are in fact the immediate issues we must face as a country.

I believe that in time the debates over who can marry whom and reproductive rights will be supplanted by a conversation about how to ensure the inherent rights and dignity of all people. As this debate changes its focus our movement, our religion, our way of seeing the world will attract more and more people.

I believe that people are becoming genuinely suspicious of the once accepted oracles such as Pat Robertson and they are beginning to seek out a more honest, a more balanced and a more progressive way of viewing the world.

I am not suggesting that in some magical way all Americans will become UUs. No, there will still be Catholics and Jews; Buddhists and Sikhs, Protestants and Pagans; but there will be an increasing number of people who find our message of hope and reconciliation to be far more attractive than the messages of hate and division that we so often hear offered up in the name of religion.

It was Emerson who said, "Religion is to do right. It is to love, it is to serve, it is to think, it is to be humble." And who can argue with this approach to living a religious life?

We have chosen our liberal faith because it encourages us to be active in the world and not to withdraw from it intellectually, or morally or by living in gated communities and educating our children in ways that prevent them from interacting with the world.

In conclusion, I commend these words to you written by the Reverend Stephen Kendrick:

Our congregations freely gather to live out a democratic faith.

Every human being is holy and is called to the tasks and joys of love.

We do not limit the truth of God (even to the "word" of God) but live in openness and belief in human freedom and dignity.

Our creed is kindness.

We celebrate the gift of life, and join in taking on the sufferings of this fragile world.

We are this generation's bearers of an eternal message, drawn from ancient springs, that truth must grow, enlarge, and glow in creative freedom.

Revelation is not sealed. It is lived anew in every heart.

Surely, ours is a faith for the new millennium.

May it be so.