Sermon

INTRODUCTION: In the 1740’s, a religious phenomenon occurred in America, the residue of which we continue to experience: a sweep of religious revivalism. Its most pronounced emphasis was hellfire and damnation, meted out by an angry god. Perhaps the most famous sermon from that period was Jonathan Edwards’ “Sinners in the hands of an angry God.” He portrayed his listeners as poor, lost souls, hanging like a spider on a cobweb, over the fiery flames of hell, soon and certain to be consumed.

Along came the Universalists and said, “There is no hell, and God is loving, not angry.” Naturally, this did not set well with the Ministerial Alliance – then or now. In fact, during the American Revolution, which extended from 1775 to 1783, one of the chaplains in General George Washington’s Continental Army, was the Rev. Jonathan Murray, a Universalist minister. The other chaplains found someone who didn’t believe in hell unacceptable to serve with them as chaplain to the troops. So they went to General Washington and protested that Chaplain Murray was unfit to be a chaplain. They insisted he be dismissed. General Washington’s response was quite amazing: After investigating the matter, rather than dismissing Murray, Washington promoted him.

Later, while the Universalists were proclaiming there is no hell and God is loving, not angry, along came the Unitarians. They had an equally controversial message.

n While others were proclaiming the Bible is holy and without error, Unitarians said, the bible is a great book of sacred writings, but different parts have more value than others, and all of it is open to criticism.

n While others were saying that God is a Trinity – three persons in one Being: Father, Son and Holy Spirit – Unitarians said the notion of the Trinity is a really bad idea: First of all, it is not taught in the Bible, it defies all logic, it violates the foundation of its originating Jewish faith, that God is One, as well as the faith of Jesus, the one on whose life and teaching it claims to be founded.

n While others said that Jesus must be acknowledged as not only the Son of God, but the One who died in our place as a cosmic substitute for us all, so as to save our sorry souls from our sins and the wrath of an angry God, Unitarians said, that Jesus was as human as we are, and did not die for us, nor for our sins. The Ministerial Alliance did not like that either.

n And something else even more radical: Unitarians rejected the notion of being “sinners,” that we are sinners by nature, or that we were born sinners.

That was in the 18^th Century and the beginning of the 19^th, when Universalists and Unitarians ran on parallel, but different tracks. It was said that “Universalists believed God was too good to send them to hell; while Unitarians believed they were too good to go to hell.”

In the process of time, Universalism and Unitarianism became closer and closer, so much so that they joined together in 1962, and became the Unitarian Universalist Association, headquartered in Boston…the one in which we are now considering the process of affiliating, which is the reason for this sermon on the first of its principles and practices, namely, “the inherent worth and dignity of every person.”

All of that vocabulary from 225+ years ago sounds rather foreign here this morning in the year 2010 – hell, sin, the Bible, the nature of Jesus, the Trinity. None of us here is really that taken with the issues that were so burning hot only two centuries back. In a Universe filled with galaxies and super galaxies, and in which we are just now beginning the discovery of other planets in our galaxy, there’s almost a quaintness about the whole notion of up and down, heaven and hell.

It seems hard to believe that anyone could accept the notion of God as loving Father, and also believe in eternal punishment by banishment to a burning hell by that same loving God. Ditto that all the populations of the world are born by nature to sin.

The principle of “the inherent worth and dignity of every person,” is a paradigm shift in presuppositions about what it means to be religious. Faith isn’t focused so much on believing what happened 2,000 years ago, but what can happen now 2,000 years later. It’s not how much you can believe about the past, as it is how much we can believe about the present. It’s moving from the mentality that faith is believing six impossible things before breakfast, to believing in our possibilities to make a difference every day. When we begin to think of ourselves and others as potentially good, we are attracted to doing the good, rather than the bad.

To believe in the inherent worth and dignity of every human being means that rather than talking about sin and punishment, we will expound on the awesome blessings we have. Instead of an angry god, why not a blessed Universe? Instead of fallen sinners, why not good people making a difference?

We don’t have to accept a mythological theological system that’s fallacious and cruel, as well as riddled with hypocrisies and rife with notions of certain kinds of believer superiority. Why not instead call for gifts of goodness, affirmation of the things we’ve done right, and confirmation of our belief in the capacity of every human being to transform their lives from concern for me and mine, us four and no more, to one of reaching out to the oppressed, the hurting, and the hungry. We can be lifted up, and be lifted in return, by getting off the railroad track to nowhere and jumping on board the train to somewhere. There is a way out of the darkness and a light shining at the end of the tunnel. We don’t have to wonder about believing the nonsense that diminishes the value and worth of human beings. Nor do we have to dither in doubt and defeat because we haven’t created a creed with every “i” dotted and every “t” crossed. In fact, not to know is the symbol of a mind open to the truth, instead of having reduced the truth to simplistic banal platitudes that have no resonance with the world in which we live.

It’s to know one is on a journey, rather than claiming to have reached a destination. It’s to know that we don’t know where we’re going, and if we said we did know, it would be a mistake. We know that we don’t know, and because we know that we don’t know, we know that we know that we know.

There may have been a time when the best way to describe oneself was as a sinner…and to plead, “O Lord, be merciful to me a sinner.” But that time has passed, and the urgency of the moment is for you and me to rise up from confessions of poor pitiful me, to confirmations of caring, concerned we. We know that we have the capacity to do good. And if we have the capacity and act upon it, then we have in fact been good, done good and are good. We are not bad people who occasionally do good things; rather at heart, we are good people who occasionally make mistakes.

To believe in the inherent worth and dignity of every person is to recognize that we don’t need a saving of sinners as much as we do a discovery of saints. We don’t need a recitation of our failures, as much as we do an appreciation of those things in which we have succeeded.

I don’t know if you saw it, but I read a terrible guest column in the News-Press this past week, written by a law faculty member at the Ave Maria University. A former member of the Judge Advocate’s office in the military, he posed as something of an expert on the importance of keeping the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell,” policy in place. In so doing, he used brutal, hurtful and painful words to describe gays and lesbian. I was terribly incensed by his language, but even more by his presumption that he had the right and the prerogative to demean the worth and dignity of other human beings.

This came at the same time as when we learned about a young violinist at Rutgers, reportedly a shy and sensitive 19 year old, who had been a part of the local symphony for several of his young years. His roommate secretly taped him having gay sex and then sent it out on the Internet to the rest of the world. In response, the young man jumped off the George Washington Bridge to his death. Now three young lives – one dead and two marked forever – by an act of homophobia.

That’s the first principle of the seven principles and practices of Unitarian Universalism. Those of you interested in sociology will perhaps recall the book of another decade entitled, Habits of the Heart. One of the co-authors, Robert Bellah, spoke at a UUA General Assembly in Rochester, New York, that I attended some years back. For his address to the General Assembly, Dr. Bellah made an intensive study of UUs and offered this rather trenchant critique:

1. That which UUs share most is a belief in excessive individualism, by which he means a radical insistence upon individual freedom in matters of faith and practice. It’s not that we don’t believe beliefs are importance; rather, it’s that we don’t believe it’s important for us to believe the same thing.

2. To become a force for good, it is common worship elements that bind a religious community together. It is powerful rituals and sacraments that are decisive in shaping the identity of a religious community.

Let me repeat those two items: On the one hand, he says that which UUs most agree upon and share as integral to their religious identity, are individual rights as to faith and practice. They insist on the right to be different, unique, one-of-a-kind. And yet, on the other hand, Bellah said, that which will be most powerful in shaping the identity of a community is not individualism, but shared rituals and sacred events.

What that seemed to say to us at All Faiths is that while we may think that it’s our emphasis upon the right to believe as we wish that is most important, if we are to be an effective force for change in our community, it will be because of our shared services of worship…the rituals that we practice together each Sunday. It is community and ritual that give identity and strength to us as a congregation.

They do not have to stem from belief systems and creeds; rather, they can come from practices and principles, like the very first one we considered today: to believe in the inherent worth and dignity of every person.

Speaking of heaven and hell caused me to remember one of my fondest memories of my father, when I was a child and had unwittingly caused my dog, Spot, to develop distemper and die. My father was a Pentecostal minister and I had heard a whole lot about heaven and hell. Concerned about Spot’s welfare, I asked my father if Spot was in heaven. In hindsight, I know now that was a tough question for him because he believed only souls go to heaven; animals don’t have souls; ergo, how could they go to heaven? But he loved me and he missed Spot too. So he found a bible and read me the scripture where Jesus said God noted even the fall of a sparrow. Dad assured me that if God knew about sparrows dying, he knew about Spot. That made things much better.

[1] Given October 03, 2010 at the All Faiths Unitarian Congregation, located at 2756 McGregor Boulevard, Ft. Myers, FL, by the Rev. Dr. Wayne Robinson, minister.