Sermon – Walking the Broad Path

On Church

I’m glad you are here at church today! If only for the sake of your physical health and longevity, It’s true! A number of studies have shown that people who attend church are healthier and live longer than those who don’t. Attending church boosts the immune system and reduces blood pressure.[1] And people who attend church tend to have fewer issues with depression, and are more likely to find sustained happiness.[2]

Indeed, one twenty year long study of middle aged women showed that those who went to church regularly had up to a 33% lower risk of dying during that period.[3] But of course, this was a study of nurses, not everyone overall, and we know that correlation does not equal causation, so we don’t know if there is a deeper factor that touches both longevity and religiosity. In fact, anthropologist T. M. Luhrmann, who has studied churchgoing and belief, wonders if there might be some ‘placebo’ effect going on here.[4] While we don’t understand the placebo effect, we know it is real, and often as powerful as expensive pharmaceuticals and even surgery in providing healing.

But you’re here today, we hope becoming healthier, happier, and we’re glad.

You’re here today, with us, at this church that has this unpoetic, difficult to remember name of Unitarian Universalism. We sometimes get confused with other U-named-churches: Unity, Unification, Universal Life, Universal Gym, University of Phoenix, whatever. Where did we get this name?

Our History in Three Minutes

Let me give you the three minute version of our history of belief. First, you should know that our name comes from two belief ideas. Unitarianism is the idea that there is one god, not three, not Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Universalism is the idea that a loving God would never damn people to eternal suffering in hell. These two ideas have popped up from time to time almost since the beginning of Christianity, but they have been suppressed again and again as heretical ideas.

Now Unitarianism finally got solidly established in Europe and has survived continuously in, of all places, Transylvania. Just to be sure, Vlad the Impaler, Count Dracula was not a Unitarian.

In America, the emergence of Unitarianism is equally strange. Remember the Puritans, those religiously straight and narrow folks with their stocks and scarlet letters? By the early 19th century, they become less rigid, but only so much so. A split occurs when conservative Congregationalists push the more liberal churches out of their movement.

These rejects form their own association of Unitarian Christian churches. Now, things really begin to get radical.  In just a few decades, Transcendentalism emerges out of those churches. Emerson, Thoreau, and other Transcendentalists pull their  one God out of heaven and into the world around us.

A few more decades, and freethinkers begin to question even the existence of a God. Then, Humanism arises, moving the focus from god to humanity itself.

Meanwhile, Universalism grows to become perhaps the sixth most popular form of Christianity in America in the mid 19th century. In the 20th century, Universalists explore the idea of universal religion, seeking the core elements common to all major religions.

These two movements merge in 1960, becoming Unitarian Universalism, and they continue to make space for other beliefs, accommodating Buddhism, Judaism, Paganism, Islam, among others.

That is the 3-minute story of our history. Did someone keep time?

The Wide Path

So the narrative plot-line of this history is this: The thread of belief is not broken. Unitarians and Universalists never cut off their past, but absorbed it, widening to make space for more progressive strands alongside more traditional beliefs.

You might say that rather than insisting that people walk the straight and narrow path, Unitarian Universalism has created a broad path of faith, one wide enough for Christians, Muslims and Jews, spiritualists and Humanists, theists and atheists, Buddhists and Pagans, to all walk together on our religious journeys. 

Now, this wide path is not for everyone, and it might not be for you. You’d certainly be in good company.

In his book “Dreams from My Father,” Barack Obama mentions his maternal grandparents Stanley and Toot. Obama writes:

In [Stanley’s] only skirmish into organized religion, he would enroll his family in the local Unitarian Universalist congregation. He liked the idea that Unitarians drew on scriptures of all the great religions. “It’s like you get five religions in one,” he would say. Toot would eventually dissuade him of his views on church, [saying] “For Christ’s sake, Stanley, religion’s not supposed to be like buying breakfast cereal!”[5]

Belief and Belonging

But for most of us here today, the wide path is what we yearn for. It’s inspiring to be surrounded by people with many beliefs and ideas. And yet, how do we walk the wide path? How can we remain in community with people who hold such varied beliefs?

One part of the answer is that most of us hold a kind of humility about the nature of our own beliefs. For many of us, we’ve held strong religious beliefs at some point in the past. We became overcome with doubt, and abandoned or modified those beliefs to accommodate those doubts. A few of us have been through this belief-doubt-belief spin cycle more than a few times.

So out of these experiences, we come to have a certain degree of humility about our beliefs. We know that beliefs can grow, and change, and they can die, and all this is ok.

We also come to have a kind of open curiosity about other people’s beliefs. Even though we have no intentions on adopting other people’s beliefs — even when they are trying to proselytize us — we can be curious: How did they come to have those beliefs? How do they live them out in everyday life?

Perhaps it is because we know our beliefs are bendable and malleable, and not rigid and fragile, we’re quite comfortable interacting with others who have different beliefs. We’re not scared of them. We know that there’s little chance of someone offering an argument so compelling that it turns our world upside down as we think it out. We’ve been around awhile, and know those rationalizations are rare. And for that matter, if there was such an argument, bring it on, we’d gladly hear it, consider it, and even change our own views to meet it.

Politics and Belief

As an aside, I invite us all to apply the same kind of open curiosity to our current political campaign. If you are a Hillary fan, can you — humbly and respectfully — talk with your Trump supporting friends to try to understand their values and world-views? If you are a Trump supporter, can you — humbly and respectfully — engage your Clinton supporters and former Sanders supporters, to learn what motivates them?

Again, in either case, we’re not necessarily trying to convince, or evangelize, or proselytize, but to understand. Because we are all, under our skin, Americans, bound together by a common culture and history.  And we are all, at our very core, human, bound by common origins and carrying common worth and dignity.

The Cathedral of the World

As Unitarian Universalists, when we speak of faith, we do not mean belief. We draw on the word ‘faith’s’ older meaning, which is ‘to trust’. We trust that our way of moving through the world, discovering ideas, and experiencing belief and doubt, will lead to good ends.

One lovely metaphor for such faith is the image of the cathedral of the world, so poetically described by Rev. Forrest Church in our reading[6]. The windows of the cathedral, representing the various religions, sects, and beliefs, captivate us in their variety:

“some abstract, others representational; some dark and meditative, others bright and dazzling. Each window tells a story about the creation of the world, the meaning of history, the purpose of life, the nature of humankind, the mystery of death.”

But we have a sense, only an intuition,because we cannot actually see it, we have a trust, a faith, that there is behind these windows, a common light. The windows are where the light shines through.

This metaphor honors multiple religious approaches, offering their adherents both breadth and focus. Now Rev. Forrest Church notes that:

“it only excludes the truth claims of absolutists. That is because fundamentalists claim that the light shines through their window only.

But…

“Skeptics draw the opposite conclusion. Seeing the bewildering variety of windows and observing the folly of the worshippers, they conclude there is no light. But the windows are not the light. They are where the light shines through.”

And so we, all the rest of us, of any religious tradition, find:

“that we can encompass with our minds the universe that encompasses us is a cause for great wonder. Awakened by the light, we stand in the cathedral, trembling with awe.”

We each trust in our own experience to inform our faith in various religious teachings or belief systems, what ever ones they may be.

Now this breadth of belief begs the question, “How can we get along together, with people who don’t believe as we do?” “Can we still get along?”

“Can we still get along?”

Wedding vows

One of my roles as a minister is to officiate weddings. As part of the wedding planning, I encourage couples to write their own wedding vows. The responses are varied. Some couples want to stick with traditional vows, words like:  “to have and to hold …, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and health, until death do us part.” Others return having crafted amazing vows, short, moving, poetic — words that will get every dry eye tearing up in the ceremony itself.

But occasionally a couple will return to me with draft vows that read more like a contract, longwinded, detailed, down to how the couple will deal with the big questions in life. A bit like the Marriage Contract of Joseph and Sarah that Becky told us about earlier[7]. How does one squeeze the toothpaste, from the end or in the middle? Who sorts out the recyclables? Who picks which set of relatives to visit on Christmas Day? They think they’ve got it all worked out, and it’s great that they’ve given these things good attention. I gently remind them that perhaps the marriage service is not the place to go into such detail.

I now wonder if the actual vows are that important. As one who recently celebrated my 25th anniversary with Liz, I’m not sure I could lay my hands on the wedding vows we used all those years ago. Though I’ll admit that Liz could probably find them handily.

I think it is less the words than the underlying sentiment.

Marriage and Covenant

Some years ago, a marriage researcher named John Gottman began to study couples trying to understand why some stayed healthily married, and others divorced. He used videotaped interviews as a primary  research tool, and found that over time, he could predict with over 90% accuracy which marriages would fail[8]. He didn’t even have to have to listen. He could just watch the video for the signs: the eye roll, the smirk, the shrug. These signs indicate contempt, criticism, defensiveness, stonewalling — negative qualities that indicate a marriage is in trouble. Gottman and others realized that to save these marriages, the couples must be willing to change their behavior to more positive behaviors toward each other. The couple may still disagree on whose family to visit on Christmas Day, but they at least approach the disagreement in a different way.

Communities and Covenant

As a small faith movement, the Unitarians and the Universalists together, have struggled with this question almost from our beginnings centuries ago:

“How do we get along?”

The method that our ancestors found, one that we’ve sometimes forgotten and then rediscovered, is called covenant. Now that may be a stuffy, Old Testament sounding word, because, well, it is. After all, our forebears were Puritans!

Our method — covenant — is about the vows, the promises, we make with one another. Covenant is about how we deal with those promises in real life.

Jewish theologian Martin Buber tells us that as human beings, we are “promise-making, promise-keeping, promise-breaking, promise-renewing” creatures. To be human is to be in relationship with others, and to be in relationship is to make promises.

But covenant is less about the promises themselves, than it is about what we do when we break our promises with each other. In the world of covenant, we make promises, realizing we are imperfect, and even at our best, we will at times fail. It is how we attempt to repair our relationships after we fail that is the essence of covenant. For the practice of covenant is how we make amends, forgive each other, and go forward with greater clarity and understanding.

At the core of covenant is love. We create covenants because we are in a loving relationship with each other, and we are in a loving relationship with something larger. Perhaps that something is our desire to accomplish great things together in this world, to embrace a larger truth, even one we cannot fully see or grasp. Perhaps that something is our yearning to become better people, and create a better world around us. But it is the steady presence of love that holds us together as promise-making people, the place where we can stand together, living out the covenant we have made together. 

Notes

1 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/21/opinion/sunday/luhrmann-why-going-to-church-is-good-for-you.html
2 http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/going-to-church-has-a-positive-long-term-effect-on-mental-health-for-elderly-10445364.html
3 http://www.cnn.com/2016/05/16/health/religion-lifespan-health/
4 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/21/opinion/sunday/luhrmann-why-going-to-church-is-good-for-you.html
5 Barack Obama, “Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance” p. 17
6 Excerpted from Cathedral of the World. Copyright 2009 by Forrest Church. Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press, Boston. http://www.uua.org/re/tapestry/adults/newuu/workshop1/cathedral
7 The 120 Marriages of Joseph and Sarah L” from Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
8 https://www.gottman.com/about/research/faq/