Rev. Joseph Boyd
It has been said that our church belongs in the liberal tradition. This is not the same meaning of liberal in the way we usually use that word in terms of politics, economics, or social attitudes. It means we are liberal theologically. Most people, including Unitarian Universalist ministers, don’t spend much time thinking and excavating theology, so it would make sense that for most of the people who come to our church, they have no real idea what that means. The short definition of someone who is theologically liberal is that they use their reason and experience to discern what is true and worthy, rather than creeds or passed down tradition. It’s a commitment to the discoveries of the Enlightenment and the Protestant Reformation ideas, that we can discern what is ultimately worthy in life through our reason and firsthand experience and we don’t need to have an intercessor or someone to think and interpret for us.

During that time, this meant that clergy as they were then known were seen to embody a different kind of sensibility. Instead of people coming to clergy and expecting them to have some special relationship with God that any normal person couldn’t have, they saw the clergy as another human being just like themselves whose role was to use their reason and experience to help people discover what is ultimately worthy.

There was a kind of special naiveté that was taking place during this time that must have been very exciting. The naiveté was the unspoken assumption that if anyone could present a reasonable argument, that could change the way someone lived their entire life. In the period we are in today, we have dissected that assumption down to its nub, and have often left only a husk. We have become so enamored with the individual power to discern truth for themselves, we take that so much for granted, that now you have at least 8 billion truths out there, at least one for each person. If each person has a couple different truths, we are talking sixteen billion truths. If each person has three truths, we are taking 24 billion truths. You get my point. We are inundated with so-called truths. We live in a time when we love commentary on commentary, and then commentary on that commentary. Anybody with a social media account can now be what is called an “influencer,” someone who influences how people think and live. We live in a time when expertise of any kind is inherently suspect, even medical expertise. Anyone with an opinion can challenge centuries of science and medicine. A tweet can be more powerful than any medical discovery.

We live in a time that loves, loves, propaganda, promotion, and entertainment. We binge watch, we read, we scroll, we find memes, or we do none of this and listen as other people tell us about all the binge watching, scrolling, and tweet reading they’ve done. We live in a time when the ultimate truth about living a life is best expressed in a limited amount of characters, because otherwise no one will read or notice it. We live in a time of rampant self-promotion or like fans with a sports team we root for one person over another, one opinion over another, one personality over another. In this country, we are easily seduced by a cult of personality, no matter our social orientation. We love someone because they seem calm and smart or we love someone because they “tell it like it is,” and are not concerned with antiquated notions like respect, decency, honesty.

So given this cultural backdrop, the idea of a liberal tradition that says you can find the truth for yourself is really hand in glove with what is happening everywhere. One person’s sense of what is reasonable and true is in conversation with someone else who uses a different rubric of reason, or who has no rubric, and nonetheless believes they have the right to their tightly held opinion. And in our culture, they do. And we no longer believe that anyone should or could have the authority to judge what is true and not true, real and not real, worthy and not worthy, so we are left with a culture of over information, propaganda selling their own perspective, and commentary on commentary on all this over information. We live in a culture that trusts the individual to discern for themselves what is true and not true, worthy and not worthy. And often the result is a choosing of a perspective where we can surround ourselves with people of that perspective, and try to live a somewhat coherent life.

We now know enough about so-called “reason,” to see how much of what is considered reasonable is a product of the manners and prejudices of their time. We have seen science used to justify advanced militarism, a sense of superiority of one group of people over another, justification of cruelty and complacency. Religion is probably the worst. We’ve seen religion used to do the most cruel and stupefying things imaginable. Each of these had their own system of so-called “reason” or justification for why they did what they did. Where it gets even more insidious, is the ways churches and every secular institution imaginable has justified their own lack of action or accountability, usually rooted in a kind of hubris where they see themselves and those in their group or organization as basically good and without significant fault.

So I’ve now come to the conclusion that while I’m grateful for our church being described as traditionally “liberal,” valuing the use of individual experience and reason, this liberal orientation if it is to have power and significance in our time must be connected to that which is liberating. What I’m saying is an openness, an intellectual freedom is crucial but not enough. There are a couple of you who may be familiar with the term liberation theology, which emphasized that our life must be about liberation of the poor and the oppressed. Some of my mentors have been in that school of thought, including Dr. James Cone, who wrote Black Theology and Black Power, seeing how religion could be transformed seen anew through the movement for Black power. But I’m not talking about adopting another school of thought. What I’m talking about is more about an attitude rather than a prescribed way of thinking. I’m coming to the conclusion that the most important attribute of being a fully alive human being is an aspiration for liberation. It’s the aspiration that is most important to me, and that I think has the power to transform the way we live and engage with our life. See, the problem is, too many people think they are already liberated. Too many people out there think they are already free. They think they belong to the land of the free, and by nature of living here, they must be free. But if we continue to nurture the aspiration for liberation, we remind ourselves there is always more our humanity can grow into.

What do I mean by an aspiration to liberation, an aspiration to freedom? Freedom from violence? Yes. Freedom from debilitating guilt and self consciousness? Yes. Freedom to be who you are without economic qualifiers? Yes. Freedom from resentment? Yes. Freedom from fear? Yes. Freedom from hatred? Yes. And here is a tricky one. Freedom from our narrow views of liberation? Yes. For me, the aspiration to liberation is the whole of liberation. The path is indeed the whole of the way. For each of us liberation may on the surface look different but there is a fundamental similarity: freedom to live our life without qualifiers, needing to prove or justify our existence to ourselves or others. When we do this, we naturally discover compassion, and seek to share this aspiration with others. An aspiration for something liberating is about social movements, but is also about much more than social movements. It is about the whole of life, and in this life you cannot separate bondage of another from bondage of ourselves. You cannot separate spiritual conditions from social conditions.

I am talking about a synthesis of our liberal tradition with an aspiration for that which is liberating. I still consider this part of the liberal tradition, but it’s an evolution, a needed one I think. It is liberal because I don’t want to tightly prescribe what your aspiration of liberation should look like. For me, the attitude is the most fundamental point. When we continually aspire for liberation both for ourselves and all other people, our life opens up in a transformative way, and hope is always available. Not hope in the prescribed sense, but hope that as long as I aspire toward liberation, liberation is available here and now. I just have to notice it, practice it, and live into it. There is no end to liberation, in fact you could wonder if the whole of our existence is a kind of liberation, a freedom of spirit that is consistently renewing itself with or without our participation. But we get to participate in it. That is the joy. We can experience the joy of participating consciously with this freedom of spirit, a freedom from the innumerable ways we oppress ourselves and each other, often without even realizing it. But we get to realize it. That’s the joy. And when we realize it, we get the opportunity to do something about it. And we don’t do something about it so we can get liberated, and then move on to other things. There are no other things. This is it. Keeping the aspiration for liberation at the fore of our mind and living will open up new vistas, open up the possibilities of new relationships, open up alternative realities and creative expression. This is without end, and this is actually something to be grateful for. There is no end to this fundamental freedom of spirit.

We can live into it our entire life without exhausting its full potential. The aspiration is the most important thing, I think. It is the whole of the path, the whole of the meaning, the whole of what our church is fundamentally about. If we think we’re already free, we are most definitely not free. If we lose that aspiration for liberation, we’ve lost all of it. If we think that we are oppressed, and will never be free, we’ve also lost the entire point. The aspiration is the key. It is all I try to do on a Sunday morning – try to ignite the flame of aspiration in myself and in those who are receptive to it and want it for themselves. This is why I think our church is justice oriented. It is why I think our church is love oriented. It is why our church is committed to peace and mutual understanding. We have the aspiration of liberation. We want to be free, and we want the earth and all her children to be free from bondage, bondage of the spirit and bondage of the flesh. There is a great release when we consistently with regular practice recognize all the ways we bind and hold ourselves back from being who we are. And when we recognize this, the aspiration for liberation is ignited, and we are right where we need to be even if it’s still difficult and challenging. With time, we quit looking to other people to tell us whether we are worthy and we quit trying to chase things that we think will make us more worthy. We quit justifying injustice as just part of what it means to live in human civilization. We quit being satisfied with low level dread, cynicism, and complacency while we read commentary on commentary justifying our own inertia. We start to see we can really live, and not live in some distant future, but right now, today. In aspiring toward that which is liberating, in aspiring toward a freedom from pain, a freedom from history, a freedom from prescribed answers and foregone conclusions, a freedom from cynical weariness, a freedom from intellectual superiority or inferiority, a freedom from hubris, a freedom from judgement, a freedom from hatred, a freedom from certain belief, and a freedom from crippling doubt, we are set free. We are set free in that moment we aspire to be free. And I want you to be free. I want you to be free from a culture that tries to tell you how much you’re worth based on your gender, color of your skin, your abilities, and your salary. I want you to be free from a narrative that you live in a place of little value or possibility based on a limited, violent capitalist mindset. If you aspire to be free from that violent oppressive view, if you wish to be free from that certain belief which is fundamentally incorrect, if you wish to be free from all your excuses, if you wish to free yourself from pain and trauma as the defining characteristics of your life, if you wish to be free to live and die as a beautiful child of this earth, well my friend, you are already there.