Sources of Our Faith: God is One

Rev. Jennifer Owen-O’Quill

I was at our monthly Chicago area ministers meeting this week and a few of us were talking about the church my husband wants to start here in Chicago. One of the colleagues asked if he wanted a group of folks from our churches to come together to start this church he dreams of.

“No,” he said. “I am going to gather a core group of folks as I meet them. I doubt most of them will be attending any church before we get started. I want to welcome people into Unitarian Universalism.”

That’s my husband, the Evangelist. He loves our faith so much, he wants everyone to know about it.

Rev. Levante Csaki, the minister of our Partner Church in Kenos, Transylvania, Romania, has been our guest these past two weeks. He loves our Unitarian faith this same way. He said to me this week, I think half the world is Unitarian and doesn’t know it.

I sure hope he’s right. That is a lot of people that can join David’s church when he gets started.

But, back to my story. One of the colleagues who was with us couldn’t believe David didn’t want a group of long time Unitarian Universalists with him. This colleague, who shall remain nameless said, “I could never start a church without a lot of other long time Unitarian Universalists around to help me. Unitarian Universalism is so complicated, I would need all those people just to help me explain it.”

Now, I may be a heretic, but all this stuff about Unitarian Universalism being complicated is a lot of bunk in my book. This is the simplest religion I know of to explain to others, but for some reason people have a hard time with it. For heaven sake if I have a colleague, who spent years in school and hasn’t figured out how to explain our faith simply, we are in big trouble.

Ideas cannot survive unless the can be communicated, and I believe Unitarian Universalist is a religion whose ideas always need to be communicated well and often …

So over the next 5 weeks I am going to spend some time talking about 5 ideas critical to our faith. My hope is that by next month each person here has a simple, straightforward answer when people when someone ways:

“Do you go to church?” or “What do you believe?”,

and instead of cringing inside while you say quietly, “Unitarian Universalist,” hoping they don’t ask anything more, you might say:

“I’m a Unitarian Universalist. Do you know anything about our church? Well, can I tell you about my faith, and hear about yours …”

Why 5 weeks? Because there are 5 turning points in our history that shape the way we think as religious people.

And this Sunday we start at the beginning. (Not THAT beginning, but a beginning nonetheless: our beginning!)

Unitarianism, you see, came before Universalism, by 200 years. (Yes, our faith is conveniently named in both chronological and alphabetical order!)

Unitarianism is so old, my family tree does not go back that far. Before my great, great great great grandfather was born (all the way back in 1511) there was this man in Spain named Michael Servetus, and he was a Catholic. But being Catholic confused him, because of all the God-in-3-parts stuff. Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Boggled his mind. So he got his hands on the Bible, which they didn’t let people do back then. In fact, if you had one of these [Bible in hand] and you weren’t a priest you could get in big trouble. People were put in jail, and some even put to death for reading the Bible.

If you were not one of the men chosen by the church to read the Bible, you were in big trouble for taking a look. But Servetus liked to live on the edge. He had a lot of zeal, and so he read the Bible. And then he read some more from the Biblical Scholars of his day, and returned to the Bible and studied the Scripture some more. And he decided there was no trinity. There was just one God, creator of heaven and earth. And so he wrote a book, On the Errors of the Trinity.

And he got into a lot of trouble.

But some ministers started to read his little book, and his ideas began to spread. Far away from Spain, all the way in Eastern Europe, in the Kingdom of Transylvania, one of those ministers who was converted to this idea was a man named Francis David. He was a preacher in Transylvania. Francis David was one of the original church shoppers. He started out Catholic, became Calvinist (so Calvinist, in fact, that he eventually led the Reformed Church in Transylvania) … that was when he converted to Unitarianism. As fortune would have it, he was the Court Preacher to the King of Transylvania, and managed to convert his King, John Sigismund.

I imagine the conversation went like this: “You know King, it is simple idea: one God, one creative force at work in the world. I just think it is a lot more complicated for God to have all these parts. God in the flesh of Jesus Christ. God in the Holy Spirit, and God as God’s self. It simplifies things to just believe in one God. Whaddaya think?”

Unitarianism is the belief in the unity of God. “God is one,” is what our Transylvanians sisters and brothers say to this day.

Today, that idea speaks to us Unitarian Universalists in America in this way:

The voice of the Holy speaks in every language.

What I love about our faith is this: it does not boggle my sense of reason with a lot of ideas about the exact nature of Christ and the infallibility of the written word.

We believe in the historical Jesus. He was a man who lived, who did good things to try to bring the human family closer together. We approach the stories about his life as stories that can teach us about how to be better people. They call us be more forgiving and open. They call us to be more generous and welcoming. They give us courage to talk to people who are shunned by society. These stories inspire us.

I like it that I can talk to faithful Christians about Jesus with a reverence for the life he lived, and a sense that he was part of God because I believe we are all part of God. And his life is special because his reach has been so profound and enduring.

My faith teaches me to respect the teachings of Jesus.

It also teaches me to respect the teachings of other great prophets and from other faiths. We all share a Creator. There is a Source of Life, or, as theologian Paul Tillich would say, there is a ground of all being. Some life force wrought us, wrought the plants and the solar systems and the universe.

There is not a separate creator for Muslims, Christians, Jews, a different life force for Buddhists, Hindus, Shintos, or the Incas for that matter.

(And I don’t care how bad the sibling rivalry was in your family or what the Old Testament says, God does not love one of his children more that any other. There is no group that has cornered God’s love and curried God’s favor… but you’ll have to come back next week to here more about that…)

Here my sense of reason leads me. Reason, is what Michael Servetus and Francis David insisted must be a part of their faith, back in the 1500’s. And then our Unitarian fore-bearers in this nation, William Ellery Channing and Ralph Waldo Emerson insisted upon a reasoned faith in the 1800’s. Faith does not defy our rational mind, faith is what lies beyond what reason can apprehend. What you believe in, what you trust in, should not go against what you know to be true. This is why we are a faith that embraces new discoveries in science.

There is a life-force that permeates all of creation, from the smallest dandelion to the biggest sequoia. From the water we drink to the starfish to the humpback whale. From the molten center of the earth to the cockroach. From the mouse to the hawk to the lion. From our mother to our best friend, to those whose betrayal have scorched our hearts.

This life force is not owned by any faith, and no amount of individual human wisdom, or any one church, or any one book can hold all the wonder and mystery of that life force. No science can cover it all, no prophecy can lead us to an answer. That life force cannot be fully explained or understood. But it can be felt and experienced and pondered. That is what makes it so incredible. It can be considered but has never been answered completely. Faith is the trust that comes when we get to the last question and have no answer.

And what I know each time I meet someone of faith, whether they are a conservative Christian or a Buddhist monk, is that this mystery is something we share.

Because I believe that God is one, their God or Allah or Shiva is something I feel connected to, something I feel is a part of me too. My Unitarianism draws me closer to people who have chosen a different faith than I have, and I am so grateful for that sense of connection. For that kinship I feel.

When I sit with my ecumenical colleagues I love to hear them talk about their faith. It is inspiring. A few of them kid me and say when I speak, “You’re not so different from us.”

“Of course I’m not,” I think to myself. “We are all climbing the same mountain, just from different sides.” I am a Unitarian Universalist through and through. I love our faith with a depth and commitment that sometimes surprises me with its ferocity. Where we come together is through an understanding that we are all people of faith.

Our challenge as a human family is that we need to learn to talk to each other with a genuine appreciation for our different faiths. We have to be willing and able to share the story of how our faith has sustained us through good times and bad. And we willing and able to listen to what that experience has been like for others.

The Holy speaks in every language. The Divine reveals itself in all places and times to whoever is paying attention. No one group knows God or has the answer. I believe that God is heard best when we are listening for the holy to whisper from every corner. Each person and every faith has their piece of the truth.

Our job is to listen for how others describe their experience even as we touch the part of the living faith that is within our own reach.

May our journey together be blessed. May our eyes and ears and hearts be open. May we be open to God’s wisdom and Grace and may we learn to be instruments of Love and Peace.

So may it be.