The Story We Share
Watching participants in yesterday's mini-retreat on the Ministry of Fellowship Services as they arranged themselves
on the Unitarian-Church-in-Summit time line, I was remembering my first encounter with this movement. And I realized
this is a special anniversary year for me--not only did I celebrated the fortieth anniversary of my twenty-first
birthday last spring, but it is just forty years this fall since David and I signed the membership book of a little
Universalist church in Ohio. To top it off, it was twenty years this past July since I began my career as a Unitarian
Universalist minister.
Listening yesterday as people were remembering some of the special people they met when they first came here, I
was aware that at some level I, too, was remembering, thinking particularly of one of the very special people we
met when we were first involved with the Ohio Universalists. She was Alice Harrison, youth specialist from Boston,
who came to help us plan and present a summer camp experience for junior high school youngsters. Alice, like so
many of those special Universalists and Unitarian Universalists we first met, lives only in memory now; then, she
was full of her recent experiences with kids at Ferry Beach, a Universalist camp and conference site near Saco,
Maine, that had by then been part of the Universalist summer experience for nearly six decades. She said we ought
to go to Ferry Beach sometime and we said we'd like to. And we did. Eventually. It only took us the better part
of forty years to get there--we were theme speakers for a week there this past August.
Periodically in the experience of a movement, a culture, a career, a lifetime, it becomes useful, indeed necessary,
to focus on the where-did-we-come-from in order to know where we are and "whither we are tending." We
chose to address that focus regarding Unitarian Universalism for the theme speeches at Ferry Beach; and at one
point during the last church year we thought we might involve you in the process in a special UU history series,
but there wasn't enough time. Instead, we spent a lot of our summer reading, researching, writing, preparing. Now,
having made our presentation for the 50 or so folks who showed up (pardon the expression)religiously for
those five sessions at Ferry Beach, it has seemed perhaps unfair not to share with you, as well, the efforts of
our summer's work. So we will be presenting sermonically the five subjects we dealt with this past summer; then,
if there's enough time and interest, we would be willing to offer the original lecture and discussion series some
Saturday mornings, say, in January and February.
1 1 1 1 1 1
Recently I found myself engaged in conversation with a member of the congregation. We were talking about the church,
the changes which had occurred in our congregational life in recent years, what was nourishing about the experience
and what was challenging. She had many good things to say about the support she had received from members of the
congregation, and about times when the Sunday service really reaches her and speaks to her condition, about the
opportunities for significant engagement which the church offers. Then, she smiled quietly and said, "I notice
that you've scheduled a number of sermons that have to do with Unitarian Universalist history. I have to tell you
that I don't really like those kinds of sermons. I'd rather experience Unitarianism than hear it talked
about."
This is not an isolated or uncommon response to an announcement that we intend to focus on Unitarian Universalist
history. People often react negatively to such a proposal. Nor is such a reaction limited to lay people. Years
ago, when I was serving my internship at the Unitarian Church in Toledo, Ohio, my supervising minister decided
that my role in the Introduction to Unitarianism seminar would be to present the history of the movement. Something
about the way he assigned me that task made me suspect that it was a mandatory part of the program he did not particularly
enjoy doing, and it was a part of the program where a clumsy student would do minimal damage, since nobody would
be listening very closely anyway. In subsequent years, as I have supervised interns and mentored students, and
taught seminary courses on Unitarian Universalist history, I have often encountered similar attitudes from women
and men preparing for our ministry.
Now, I have to confess to you that this is an attitude I have never really understood. I admit to a bias right
from the start. History--any kind of history--has always fascinated me. Perhaps it is because in the family and
the community from which I come there was so little sense of roots, of emergence. There was a sense in which we
were of the people; had always been of the people; nothing much had happened or would happen to change our world.
And so, I took refuge in history, trying, perhaps to locate myself in the larger human story. (I must confess that
my internship supervisor found it difficult to regain control of the Introduction to Unitarianism session after
I had launched myself into a recounting of history.)
Over the years, I have sought to know and to understand and to communicate the history out of which we have emerged,
and to relate it my own history in this movement. I have found myself fascinated with the changes within the movement
over time. I have found myself intrigued by the process by which we have become who we are. In reading the history
I know that I would have found Unitarian Universalism as it existed at some times and some places far too narrow
and confining a tradition, and I have been driven to discover how we have become the people we are. How is it that
a tradition which began with arcane debates within Christianity could grow to encompass so much diversity--the
kind of diversity we saw last Sunday, when the response to the sermon drew comments from people who identified
themselves with Hispanic Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Hinduism, all of whom count themselves part of this movement?
Over the years, I have learned that Unitarian Universalism is a peculiar religious tradition in that what binds
us together is not so much a shared theology, or even a shared response to the experience of the sacred, as it
is a shared history. We are one people because of our inchoate understanding of the journey through time which
we share. This is not to suggest that we are always accurate about the history we claim, or that we always understand
the motives, the behaviors, the attitudes of those who have preceded us, but rather that we are enraptured by a
mythic sense of having shared a journey which began by rejecting the conventional view and has been defined by
a continuing struggle toward a personally satisfying understanding of the self, of the nature of the human venture,
of the meaning of existence.
I will admit that most of the heroes in our history speak a tongue we do not fully understand, but they represent
for us a validation of our own experience. Few of us know much of the controversies which bound Michael Servetus
to the stake, or immured Francis David in a cold and drafty dungeon. Our own souls would find little to nurture
us in the theological convictions for which they lived and died. But we know that our ancestors in the period of
the Reformation were heroic souls who went out from the safety of the Roman church, and who tarried only a while
in the confines of more conventional Protestantism, and who dared to carve out a religious response to the times
which reflected their own individual experience. It is this we have in common with them, and it is this sense of
historical continuity which makes of us a movement. (It is also this which tempts us to adopt people who were never
part of our movement but whose personal histories make us think they might have been Unitarian Universalists, or
would have been if they had had the opportunity.)
Because we are defined by a common story rather than a common theology, and because that story has shaped our institutions
in significant ways, it seems important to know whence we have come, by what struggles we have been shaped, what
values have driven us over time so that we may better understand who we are, and whither we are tending. We do
not have a creed; we do not have a common liturgy; we have a story--the story of a quest which continues through
time and in the lives of individual women and men.
The story begins within the turmoil and chaos which was the early Christian movement. However that amalgam of Jewish
teachings and Greek mystery religion came into being, in its earliest formulations there was no uniformity of belief.
It was Constantine, the Roman Emperor, who determined to codify Christian teaching in order to make the church
a unifying force in an increasingly disparate and unruly empire. In the process, the church chose to focus on correctness
of belief, rather than right living. The debate centered around the nature of God and Jesus, rather than what might
constitute ethical and moral living. In that debate, those who were closest to Judaism, with its emphasis on one
God, and upon ethical living, came into conflict with those who insisted upon the deity of Jesus and the importance
of right belief about him. This was the arcane conflict which would recur whenever Unitarians were forced to define
themselves in terms of dogma. For the Unitarians were the inheritors of those who denied the trinity and insisted
upon a strictly monotheistic God.
The Universalists, of course, related to a different debate--one which concerned the ultimate destiny of the human
soul. Early in the history of the Christian church there was a generous understanding that however separated human
beings may be from God, in the end all of creation would be restored to the primordial state of harmony. But the
church discovered this doctrine of the unconditional nature of God's love deprived those in authority of a powerful
weapon for controlling the masses. They argued that those who embraced the wrong teachings, who defied the church,
who refused to bow to authority would be punished not only in this world, but for all of eternity. So in 544, a
council of the church declared the larger gospel of irresistible love heresy. Hell was firmly established in the
teachings of the church, and Universalism became anathema.
When you recognize that it was in the context of these debates that our movement emerged, doesn't it intrigue you,
just a bit, to discover the road by which we traveled to the present moment--to this place, this congregation ,
this time when most of us simply would not get up out of our seats and walk across the room for a good discussion
of the doctrine of the trinity, or a debate about the existence of hell? That attitude is not an invention of the
twentieth century, but has been emerging over long centuries.
When the Protestant Reformation erupted on the European Continent, it was the result of many forces--emergent nationalism,
the rise of a merchant class, disgust at the laxity and excesses of the church, a longing for a more personal and
spiritual approach to religion. In the chaos that was the Reformation, all the great heresies which had ever afflicted
the Roman church were born anew, among them, Unitarianism and Universalism. And men and women endured torture and
death because they dared to embrace an unorthodox view of God. Out of that painful emergence, Unitarianism and
Universalism were changed. In Poland, under the leadership of an Italian refugee named Faustus Socinus, the Unitarians
began to insist that what is essential in religion is not specific beliefs, but rather by pious and ethical lives.
Jesus, said the Polish Unitarians, was not the son of God who bought us eternal life with his death. He was a teacher,
who offered us an example of how to live with integrity.
In Switzerland, reacting to the burning of Michael Servetus because of his heretical teachings, Sebastian Castellio
challenged John Calvin and the world, insisting that love, not correct teaching is the mark of true religion. Sebastian
Castellio cried out, "To burn a man is not to defend a doctrine; it is to burn a man!...Why cannot I live
and say my honest word, and have your love?"
In Transylvania, Unitarians, in control of the government and a majority in the land, decreed religious tolerance,
insisting that faith is a gift of God, and therefore must not be coerced by the state or any other power.
And through all of this, Universalists were among the radical reformers calling for separation of church and state,
insisting upon the church as a voluntary association, believing that no belief should be coerced, that judgment
belongs to God, and that nothing any individual can do has the power to separate that person forever from the divine
source of life. For long years, our spiritual forebears struggled to lead lives of integrity, to embrace a view
of religion which understood that the holy speaks in different voices to different people and that each person
must find his or her own path to spiritual truth, a religion focused on deeds not creeds, a religion which calls
us to reason, freedom, tolerance and compassion.
Once or twice every year we offer a series of discussions and explorations entitled Introduction to Unitarian Universalism.
As part of that program, new people are invited to share their own spiritual journeys. And every year, people describe
the dissatisfaction they have felt with the religions in which they were reared or with the lack of religion in
their lives. Every year, people describe the spiritual yearning for a sense of depth and meaning in their lives
which does not demand that they deny significant aspects of their experience. Every year I listen to those stories,
and something deep stirs in me. The stories are always uniquely their own, but in some indescribable way, they
are my story, too. And they are the story of our movement, of our people, of our history.
I listen, every year, and I hear the great story that is our story: the tale of women and men who take religion
seriously--too seriously to affirm what they do not believe; women and men who are driven to seek a spiritual vision
which is consistent with the world as they have experienced it; men and women who demand a religion which can be
lived in the every-day world; women and men who understand that differences of opinion and diversity of view is
not a threat, but an invitation to be enlarged and enriched.
I listen to the stories with an ear to our history and I hear a resonance which enlarges my story and your story
making them part of a great movement through time, defining us as a people with a history and a promise.
Because we are defined by a common story rather than a common theology, and because that story has shaped and shapes
our institutions we invite you to share our search from now until Thanksgiving to discover what directive there
may be in the history of the movement which some ninety years ago produced this congregation here in Summit, New
Jersey. Imperfect, not subject to outside authority, unconventional and self-gathered those who preceded us here
in this congregation finally formalized this organization some 89 years ago when, after much unproductive debate
and discussion, someone had the temerity to put forth the statement: "Be it resolved that we do
organize the Unitarian Church in Summit."
It was the "nays" that accomplished the task! Just the same, this congregation, like the people and
the movement that engendered it despite a large measure of autonomy, is nonetheless involved in an ongoing process
the direction of which is now clear, now not so very clear.
Is there a directive at work in our collective history that we can perceive which will enable our deeper
understanding and appreciation of this agglomeration of come-outers, alternative thinking, choice-demanding, freedom-seeking
individualists who nonetheless recognize and value the gathered community as the matrix of sustenance and continuity?
What is the story that we implicitly share when we choose Unitarian Universalism? What is the thrust of the tradition
that connects us across time and space and, ever moving on, impels us into the future? There are books and booklets,
pamphlets and journals; biographies abound--anyone may read them when there is time and inclination. But to share
the story and work on it together provides the opportunity for emerging deeper and wider insight.
To that end we invite your indulgence, your participation, your over the next few weeks to these explorations and
discussions of special crisis points in our history, moments that have had the most profound impact on our movement,
that despite our awareness or ignorance of them have made it possible for us to be together here in this place
today. Perhaps in the process, we may discover the deeper meaning of those words from Ernest Sommerfeld, with which
we began our service this morning:
We are one beyond all diversity of thought
above divisive creed and crust of habit,
for chance has made us different,
but fate has made us one.
The sermon in a Unitarian Universalist setting is never the last word on any subject, but rather an invitation to further dialog.
You may want to read other visitors' comments on Beverly and David Bumbaugh's "The Story We Share".
If you wish to add your own comments on this sermon, please enter your name, e-mail address, city, state or province, country, and of course your comments into the following form:
Send questions or comments about this form to Bill Griffeth
Return to home page