"The Second Smooth Stone-Who is My Neighbor?"

Rev. Dr. Joshua Snyder, November 11, 2001

This morning I want to continue my sermon series on the Five Smooth Stones of Liberal Religion put forth by the Unitarian Universalist Theologian James Luther Adams.  For those of you following along at home, these pillars if you will of Liberal Religion are discussed in his essay "Guiding Principles of a Free Faith" in a book called On Being Human Religiously.  It is not easy reading but I commend it to you.  Today I want to talk with you about the second of the Five Smooth Stones.

James Luther Adams writes this "The second major principle of Religious Liberalism is that all relations between persons ought ideally to rest on mutual, free consent and not on coercion."  At first this sounds like a rather ordinary statement.  Any of you out there who are married or in a committed relationship know that if it is going to work out for longer than a month, then the relationship needs to be mutual, free, and non-coercive.  Anything else would not last, or would be abusive.  While James Luther Adams would agree with this rather surface reading of the Second Smooth Stone, I think he intends something deeper when he says that human relations should be mutual, free, and non-coercive.  These three notions that our Unitarian Universalist religious faith is mutual, free, and not coercive require further examination.

So let us begin with the first.  Adams of course is a liberal Christian, but in a very interesting way.  I think that one can find in Buddhism analogies for a lot of his ideas.  The notion that we are all equal in some sense is a very old one in Unitarian Universalism.  Indeed, the Universalists themselves believed that God would save all people without exception and not a small elect.  You see the orthodox Calvinists thought that heaven was sort of a celestial version of Studio 54 in the Seventies; only the very exclusive were on the list.  The Universalists wanted to open up the party to everyone!  They believed that God was all loving and all forgiving.  It seemed preposterous to the early Universalists that God would go through all the trouble of creating humans, predetermine all of their actions including a fall and sin, and then to send them to hell for it.  It defies both reason and conscience.  Universalists believed that we are all God's children, as the cliché goes.  This was of course back when Universalists were more Christian than some of us are now, but it bears looking at their ideas to show that this Second Smooth Stone is rooted in our history.  If all of us are children of God, then we all share in the image or likeness of God.

Now the Unitarians also believed that everyone is equal, but they got there from another direction.  There is an old joke, and I mean from the nineteenth century, that goes, "The difference between a Unitarian and a Universalist is that the Universalist believes that God is too good to damn his soul to hell.  The Unitarian believes he is too good to deserve damnation."  The Unitarians did not like the Calvinist beliefs about humanity.  John Calvin once said that humans are five foot, or now six-foot, long worms in the sight of God.  Or as we might say today, "We are fallen and we can't get up."  Nothing about a human being is worth anything, unless God put it there, in the view of Calvinism.  The Unitarians disagreed.  They said that there is the potential for all of us to reach goodness, happiness, truth, beauty, compassion, love, and mercy.  It may not be actual in many people but it can be done.

It is at this point that the Unitarian Christians would say that Jesus is the example that proves that a regular human is capable of amazing things.  But really this is much closer to Buddhism than anything ever written in Christianity.  The Buddhists believe that the Buddha attained enlightenment.  This proves that a normal human being has it within their capability to be enlightened.  One of us did it, and that proves that all of us could do it.  There is no difference between Siddhartha Gautama and me other than he accessed something within himself that I have not yet got in touch with.  This is what the Unitarians mean by mutuality.

Now in light of recent events in our country, this may be a hard pill to take.  Does this mean there is no difference between Osama bin Laden and Mother Theresa?  Well no.  There is equal and then there is equal.  Notice that Adams is claiming that everyone has equal potential to do some wonderful and holy things in this world.  That is not to say that people actually do them.  The key here is the difference between the actual and potential.  What you are potentially capable of doing and what you actually wind up doing are two different things.  Everyone has the potential for goodness, truth, beauty, service, justice, and compassion but how many of us act on it?  How many of us live out these things in our lives.  This is what the Unitarians called themselves to do.  They said that we are saved only by what we can put into practice and make actual in our lives.  This they called salvation by character.  Again, Buddhism lends itself to comparison better than Christianity.  Practice compassion and wisdom and you will be a Buddha.  Stop practicing these things and you will suffer and likely cause other to suffer.  The Choice is up to you.  You have the freedom to make actual either your potential for good or your potential for evil.

This leads us to the second aspect of human relations, that they ideally are free.  Freedom, Adams claims, is the hallmark of liberalism.  Now the term liberal can be a tricky one because it is used in so many different contexts.  There are social liberals, political liberals, religious liberals, and so on.  These may or may not contain the same group of people.  Furthermore, the word liberal means something very different today than it did a hundred years ago.  That aside however, I will stay within religious context of the term liberal.  A religious liberal is one who chooses to do religion differently than the orthodox.  We have freedom from creeds, books, bishops and so forth.  The word "Heresy" comes from the Greek word "to choose."  A heretic then is the one who chooses.  Freedom to choose in matters of religion is what marks the religious liberal.

So here we are, James Luther Adams has given us all this freedom.  Now what do we do with it?  How do we know our potential for being great souls and how do me make this actual.  Adams says that free inquiry is the process by which we come to some understanding about our religion.  We can see this in Humanism particularly.  Humanists also emphasize the search for truth and justice as a part of our religious journey.  We actualize our potential through struggle.  Struggle to understand ourselves, to make meaning out of our lives, to have a vision of the future, and to work for a just world.  To be a Unitarian Universalist is to take the hard road in religion.  It means not taking any religious assertion for granted unless we have demonstrated that it is worthy of our convictions. As the subtitle to Robert Richardson's biography of Thoreau put it, we are committed to the "Life of the Mind."

Unitarian Universalism is a free faith, but with that freedom comes responsibility.  I believe that all freedom comes with a corresponding responsibility.  The freedom of belief that we get with Unitarian Universalism carries with it the responsibility to struggle and think and reflect and test and discuss what it is we believe.  It does not mean you "believe anything you want or nothing at all" as some would say.  The Unitarian way can be very daunting.  I have told many times the story of my call to ministry.  I beg the patience of those of you who have heard this story before, but here is an added twist.  One evening when I was in college, the UU campus group had an interfaith dialogue with the Reformed Jewish group on campus.  Our minister and their Rabbi talked for about an hour, and then we had a more open discussion.  This energized me.  I had been Unitarian Universalists for about two years, and I loved talking about it with people who had never heard of Unitarian Universalism before.  I was so excited by this that I began to think about ministry.  However, my friend Ann was not so pleased with that evening.  Ann had been raised Unitarian Universalist her whole life, and had gone through all the RE curricula of the eighties.  But when it came to this dialogue she felt at a loss.  She felt that her faith was empty and insubstantiative.  She told me she was jealous of the Jewish tradition because it knew what it was. There was a book, there was a language, there were rules, and there was history.  She experienced a kind of lazy man's Unitarian Universalism.  No one says I have to believe anything so I won't.  This is not the case.  We are called to find a faith that is authentic for each person, and will be different just as each person is different.  We are unique because we celebrate the freedom to have that uniqueness and do not try to suppress it.

In addition to the religious struggle, freedom also brings with it the responsibility of seeking justice in an unjust world.  We are free as individuals and responsible to the common good of our community.  The prophets who spoke out for justice and against idolatry are our forbears.  We recognize that the first class cabins on the Titanic sank as surely as the cheaper ones did.  Rich or poor, black or while, male or female, we are connected and our prophetic call is to recognize and live by this fact.  Therefore Unitarian Universalism is committed to the public life.  We feel that talking things our openly is the best way.  We respect the opinions of others.  Religious Liberalism is the commitment to the free and open conversation among a diverse people.  It is our commitment to the conversation that is our covenant, not the doctrines of what is said.  This is what holds our unity amidst our diversity.  So the question of who is my neighbor, who am I responsible to takes on universal scope.  We should strive to be as good as listeners as we are talkers.

This brings us to the final ideal aspect of human relations; that they be non-coercive.  Unitarian Universalists do not coerce their neighbor into their point of view.  Some Unitarian theologians, called Process theologians, have a very strange in interesting understanding of God.  In fact "God" is probably the wrong word.  Their ideas are closer to the beliefs of Taoists or Buddhists.  They believe that God is not omnipotent. God cannot force or coerce the world into being.  Rather these theologians say that every moment is free to become what ever it will.  God or the Tao is there as a voice calling and cajoling each moment to greater love and harmony.  And while this rather peculiar God feels all things it cannot control them.  It can only persuade us to live our lives to the best of our capability.  
In many ways this is the moral of the parable the Buddha tells in the sixteenth chapter of the Lotus Sutra.  The parable of the sick children is very important to Sino-Japanese Buddhism.  The sons in this story are all of us.  Our poison is all of our actions that cause us to suffer: our greed, our hatred, and our delusion.  The Buddha of course is the wise and benevolent father who tries to get his sons to take the medicine, which is to practice the Buddha's teachings.  The Father, the Buddha, resorts to many different tricks, some of which work for some but not all of his sons.  Then he pretends to die to move his remaining sons to take the medicine.  What does this story mean?  Well one thing it trying to tell us is that it is explaining why the Buddha died.  It strongly implies that the Buddha still abides in the universe in some capacity.  Is this a Buddhist version of God or the Tao?  Some have said so.  This is known as the "Eternal Buddha" in among some Buddhist groups.  The Eternal Buddha, much like the God of Process theology, cannot force us to take the medicine.  Whatever spiritual path we walk down, we must do it ourselves; no one will do it for us.  God, the Tao, the Buddha, whatever you wish to call it if anything, is non-coercive.  We have the freedom and the capacity for our own salvation.  God then is the cosmic cheerleader, consoling us in the bad times, and celebrating with us in the good times.
Adams says that Liberal Religion is a protest against all religious hierarchies and pecking orders that would coerce salvation onto its members.  Leaders should be persuasive not coercive.  Unitarian Universalist religious leaders should be people who start conversations and get people on board through the power of their ideas and shared vision.  In contrast, orthodox religion claims that one person, book, or council is the infallible and unchanging source of "The Truth."  He points out though that in order to identify something as infallible, you yourself must also be infallible!  Orthodox religion is a proclamation of truth, while Unitarian Universalism is a dialogue, and mutual search for truth.  It is a discourse where I try to persuade you and you try to persuade me.  No one bonks another person on the head and says, "I am right and that is the end of it."  If they did then it would be hard for this person to claim to be Unitarian Universalist in an authentic way.
Who then is my neighbor?  The question is a social one: how then should we act towards one another.  James Luther Adams, in this Second Principle of the Free Faith, gives us three ideals: mutuality, freedom, and non-coercion.  In these we can see not only the values of our history, but also the resources to be in dialogue with other religions.  I would say to my friend Ann that Unitarian Universalism does have all of the things that she longed for in Judaism.  We have a history, with have a tradition; we have ideas and examples from our past.  We do not have to reinvent the proverbial wheel of our spiritual lives.  James Luther Adams is one of those people that give us some resources.  Certainly they are non-coercive, we must wrestle on our own, but we know that we are not alone here in this place.
May our interactions be all that we wish them to be.  May we struggle to find meaning with our full hearts and minds ready for the task.  May we too see the other as our neighbor.  Amen Blessed Be.