"The Meat and Potatoes of Unitarian Universalism"

Rev. Dr. Joshua Snyder, February 24, 2002

Well I want to welcome all you again; it is good to see so many of you here this morning.  Today I wish to talk about the basics, to discuss the core or center of this liberal religious tradition we call Unitarian Universalism.  I have entitled my sermon this morning "The Meat and Potatoes of Unitarian Universalism", but as I thought about it, it occurred to me that this was not very inclusive of the vegetarians among us, so if you prefer, you can think of this as the tofu and cous cous of Unitarian Universalism!  We always seem to need to define and refine, what it is that Unitarian Universalism is all about.  Many attempt to use our history to do this, but I have found that most of the time people are not usually looking for a history lesson.  The meat and potatoes of our religion cannot be fully captured from the past, though that is important.  Rather it is a living faith that springs from our tradition, but looks ahead to the future.

There have been many gallant attempts to articulate what is the heart and soul, the meat and potatoes, the peanut butter and jelly of Unitarian Universalism.  It is not enough to say that we are but one more flavor of Protestant Christianity.  Surly we have much in common with these groups, again due to our shared tradition, but there is so much more to the story.  And yet one cannot go to the opposite extreme and say that there is no there there when it comes to the core of Unitarian Universalism.  In a recent issue of the UU World, the monthly Unitarian Universalist magazine, the minister Forrest Church tried to articulate the meat and potatoes as he saw them.  He turned to the Universalists, and gave a powerful vision of an Universalist theology for the new millenium.  Unfortunately time does not allow me to go over this in detail, but I found it to be a very inspiring document.  This article garnered some interesting responses.  One man wrote that Unitarian Universalism is too fractured, there are too many different groups among us, (The Christians, the Humanists, the Buddhists, the Pagans) for us to have a core.  He saw only differences and could not believe that a center existed.  I think this is a common feeling among many people who become Unitarian Universalist.  However, I believe that there is a there there, a core does exist, and we partake of the meat and potatoes of Unitarian Universalism every single Sunday, indeed everyday of our lives.  There are two foundational concepts, the meat and potatoes if you will, that are not a creed not a prescription, but a description of what lies at the center of our tradition at this time and in this place.  

The first of these is honesty.  Now by honesty I mean more than telling the truth.  Unitarian Universalism is a religion that wants us to tell the truth to ourselves.  You could use integrity or authenticity as synonyms for honesty if you like.  People often say that in Unitarian Universalism you can, "believe anything you want."  In a certain sense this is true, if you mean that there is no one standing over your shoulder, no Church, no minister, and no book, making you conform with "correct doctrine."  Throughout Christian history, creeds have been used to define who is in the Church, and who is outside of the Church.  Our Unitarian Universalist ancestors were consistently the ones on the outside.  Sometimes they were outside for various reasons, but the heretics, the ones who choose, have always been among the heroes of the free faith.  Thus when these people began to form a Church of their own, they did not want to keep drawing these circles tighter and tighter to make their club more exclusive.  They knew how that felt.  Instead they created a non-creedal church, that defines itself through a covenant, a mutual agreement and relationship, and not a creed.  We Unitarian Universalists are heirs to this rather avant garde form of Christianity.  

Instead of telling each other what to believe and how to think, Unitarian Universalism takes the more difficult path.  It may appear easy not having to conform or be obedient, but actually it is much harder trying to articulate your faith on your own using your own resources.  Ours is a faith that we struggle with, because in asking the hard questions, and seeking elusive answers, we renew our faith again and again.  We cherish most the beliefs that we have worked the hardest to define.  Living a life of honest introspection within a nurturing community can only do this.

I remember well the day when I sat where many of you sit now, having first walked into a Unitarian Universalist Church.  I was in college at the University of Michigan at the time, and the Unitarian Universalist Church was about a fifteen-minute walk away from my apartment.  I looked it up in the phone book I think.  I came on an unseasonably warm March day and the worship service was about the coming of spring.  I remember that I fully expected to hate it.  I was disillusioned with organized religion, which I guess is what makes Unitarian Universalism so popular, we are anything but organized sometimes!  I was searching for something, I didn't know what.  There was just this nagging feeling there that I had to fill.  I think it was, as Jean Paul Sartre once put it, a God-shaped hole in my heart.  I majored in religion in order to continue my quest in a formal way.  And when I went into that sanctuary it just felt right somehow, as if I had come home.  There was something there, somewhere in between the hymns and the garden outside the sanctuary window, that just felt right.  I attended the Church regularly for the rest of the year, and sporadically in the summer.  I remember that fall, this was 1993, I was talking with one of my religion professors, and he asked me what religion I was.  I told him that I was a Unitarian Universalist.  The next Sunday I signed the membership book, thinking that if I am telling people I am a UU then I probably ought to actually be one!

I say that I felt at home in Unitarian Universalism.  That is true in the sense that I felt comfortable in that Church, but by no means was I done with my religious journey.  I was still looking for something, and I found Zen Buddhism.  I have been a Buddhist for as long as I have been a Unitarian Universalist.  That is one of the things that I most like about the Unitarian Universalist Church.  You don't have to stop being one thing in order to be another.  For UUs your faith is what it is, and the labels you slap onto it are secondary.  They are really meant for other people.  So you find people who are Buddhist Unitarian Universalist, or Jewish, or Pagan.  Is this a fragmentation as the reader of the UU World put it in his critique of Forrest Church?  Not necessarily.  Yes it is true that the person sitting next to you right now, probably does not believe exactly as you do.  But isn't that just as true in the Methodist Church as in the Unitarian Universalist Church?  Our covenant, our mutual relationship, as a religious community is deeper than our beliefs, it is a relationship that allows us to disagree and still be connected.  That honesty about what we believe is one of the meat and potatoes of Unitarian Universalism.

The other value that is at our center is reason.  If you were to ask me what is the one defining or distinguishing characteristic of Unitarian Universalism from all other religions or spiritual paths, I would have to say the place of reason in the liberal religious tradition.  The early Unitarians argued that God in three persons was both illogical and unscriptural.   They could not believe that Jesus, God, and the Holy Spirit was on the same level, because it did not make sense given the biblical account.  The Universalists protested the doctrine that only a select group of people would be getting into heaven.  They felt that it was both cruel and foolish to believe that God would create humanity, predestine them to fall, and then punish them for all eternity for this act.  The science and rational culture of the Enlightenment intrigued both the Unitarians and the Universalists.  This movement had a profound effect on our tradition.  It said that reason is as important to religion as the Bible, as tradition, and personal experience. Reason has been part of our meat and potatoes for a very long time.

Now of course, anything taken to extreme is bad for you.  We have ha our share of excesses when it comes to reason.  Some have seen this as an accommodation to secularism.  No less than Charles Darwin, whose family was Unitarian, said that the Unitarians are, "A feather bed for falling Christians."  There have been worse things said about us.  Unitarianism is a decompression chamber for people suffering from the "Baptist bends."  Or that Unitarian Universalism is the middle way between the United Methodist Church and golf.  

Reason is a very important means of understanding our world, both physically and spiritually.  We cannot place our religion in a box and put it above the law of reason.  However, we cannot cling to reason to the exclusion of other things.  I remember once in Seminary I took a course on the history of Unitarian Universalist religious education (our Sunday School).  We would often pull our old curriculum from the library and try to understand some of the historical trends of RE.  I remember pulling out a series of lessons that was published back in the sixties I think.  They were a series of small hard cover books and each one was a lesson for small children.  The topics included plants, how magnets work, basics of the solar system, and things of that nature.  Sunday school had literally become science class!  Now of course it perfectly fine to understand science, and even to incorporate scientific insights into our religious understandings, but this class wasn't about that.  It was just straight science.  Reason is vital and necessary to religion, but there is more to religion than reason alone.  We know that now.

Reason must be held in creative tension with the spirit, the emotional, the meaningful, the mystery of the holy.  I like to use the ancient Rabbis as an example of "creative tension" in religious understanding.  The rabbis of the Jewish tradition had many different ways of reading the Bible.  Some of them would actively seek out contradictions in the Bible, where one law would seem to be at odds with another.  For someone trying to live exactly to the codes of the Old Testament, contradictions can cause problems.  There is an episode of the Simpsons in which the neighbor Ned Flanders claims that he "Even did the stuff that contradicted all of the other stuff." Just to be safe.  Instead of getting upset and defensive about this, invoking infallibility and the untouchable nature of scripture, the rabbis took a different route.  They looked for these contradictions and tried to come up with a reason for them.  They began to tell stories, sort of like the story behind the story of the Bible.  When there were two creation stories, one where God creates humans on the sixth day in Genesis chapter 1, and the Adam and Eve story of chapter 2, they created a story about Lilith, Adam's first wife that didn't work out so well.  They used tension between passages as an opportunity to create a new and interesting genre of religious literature, the Midrash.

The tension between reason, and the unknowable mystery that is the holy, is a creative one for Unitarian Universalists.  Who is God?  Where did we come from, and why are we here?  These questions can never truly be known, and yet we constantly search for the answers.  The Reformed Abraham Joshua Heschel once said that the purpose of religion was to ask these profound questions in life, and then to challenge the answers we offer.  There was a saying in Seminary that said, "All theologians believe that God is ineffable, and yet they keep on 'effing'."  Unitarian Universalism urges us to see our life as it is, to look at it with mindfulness and awareness.  We believe, as Woody Allen once put it, "At least half of life, is just showing up."  What do we get when we have this mindfulness?  We see that all of us are connected.  No one here is ever truly alone, because the lives of one effect the lives of all others.  Who can say that they were not effected by the terrorist attacks last fall, the war in Afghanistan, the economic downturn, or the collapse of Enron?  The world is not as large as we once thought it to be, and our awareness of life as it is, is our pathway into the holy.  It allows us to be sensitive and empathetic to others, and this leads to every other virtue.  The mindful awareness of life as it is, and our mutual dependence upon each other, can only come about when we place reason and the spirit in a creative tension.  Without reason we would get a distorted view of our lives, and without the spirit we would become overly enthralled with how magnets work to ever think about how our life touches the lives around us.

People love to ask, "What is the meaning of life?"  I think that Fredrick May Eliot has given us an important clue in this morning's reading.  We find meaning in facing the challenges that life puts before us, and using all of our resources towards meeting that challenge.  Any religious faith, be it Unitarian Universalist or otherwise, must at least be able to do this for us.  The meaning of our lives flows from that attempt to meet the world head on and to persevere.  Honesty and reason, the meat and potatoes of Unitarian Universalism, are two of the key resources that our faith offers us in making meaning every day.  May it be so for all of us.

I once took a history class at another seminary, and during the introductions, the large contingent of Unitarian Universalist seminarians were asked to explain Unitarian Universalism in five minutes or less.  Each person in the group would begin by saying, "Well that's close, but here is what Unitarian Universalism really is…" Only to have the next person in line do the same sort of oneupsmanship to them.  And so I invite all of you, whether this is your first time here or if you have been a member for 25 years, to say to our friends, our newcomers, and to each other, "Well that is close, but this is what Unitarian Universalism really is…" Good luck.  Amen Blessed Be.