Rev. Jennifer Owen-O’Quill

These past several weeks we’ve been traveling through time, exploring the ideas that shape our faith today. We started in 1511 with our Unitarian heritage which began with the assertion that there was one God, not a trinity and that reason should be applied to questions of faith. Today these ideas are expressed in our conviction that the voice of the holy speaks in every language, and that faith should not require us to deny our rational mind, but rather faith is what springs up when we encounter what flows beyond the last question the human mind can answer.

In the late 1700’s the revivalist movement of the Universalist Church gained popularity for its insistence that all people were created by a loving God, and as such all people would know a Universal Salvation. Today, our faith is buoyed by a trust that a Greater Love underpins all of creation, and we are called to respond to that Love by seeking to incarnate in our own lives a deep and abiding love for each other and the earth we share.

In the mid 1800’s transcendentalism began to impact our faith. Our religious understanding was changed by the idea that we can have a direct experience of God — without the intercession of a priest or through the person of Jesus. We recognize there is a spark of the Divine in each of us, as there is a spark of the Divine beyond us. Our task is to cultivate an awareness of the transcendent that is at work in and through our lives.

Today we come to the beginning of the last century.

Nearly 100 years ago, discoveries in science were reshaping our understanding of human life, challenging our ideas of how the world was made, and when, and pushing the limits of creation beyond galaxies and the universe to an unknown beyond. The industrialization of our society exploited workers, and the changes to our economic and political structures worldwide led to the rise of Communism and Socialism. The First World War had come to an end, ushering in an era of unprecedented economic expansion in our nation. All of this challenged the religious sensibilities of the people.

Religion is famous for holding out against innovation, and the lack of responsiveness to the scientific discoveries and new economic realities of the time tested the patience of many. It was in this context that in 1933 a group of American professors, writers and ministers signed and published a statement called A Humanist Manifesto.

Its preamble states:

“The time has come for widespread recognition of the radical changes in religious belief throughout the modern world. Science and economic change have disrupted the old beliefs. Religions the world over are under necessity coming to terms with new conditions created by a vastly increased knowledge and experience …

Religion itself remains constant in its quest for abiding values, an inseparable feature of human life …

Man is at last becoming aware that he alone is responsible for the realization of the world of his dreams, that he has within himself the power for its achievement.” (excerpt from the Humanist Manifesto I)

With lofty language and high purpose, the Manifesto sought to reconcile science and religion, to dispel the notion of a supernatural, intervening God, and to call people to a religious life grounded in works aimed toward the good of all people.

It further asserted that we are saved not by some commitment to a doctrine that leads to an eternity in paradise, but instead asserts that our call is to save this world we live in: each day we can act to save this creation and the human family as we know it.

Humanism changed the landscape of our faith by focusing our attention on saving this world today, not ourselves for some future time and place. It is not that an afterlife is inconceivable, but humanism has made the question of an afterlife non-essential in our religious tradition.

Previous to the humanist influence on our faith preaching about an afterlife in heaven, and about sharing in paradise with our loved ones when we die were not uncommon themes preached from Unitarian and especially Universalist pulpits.

You really won’t here me talk about life after death except to remark that we don’t really talk about it.

I personally live with a confidence that if there is in fact another place, one of the interview questions will be, “How well you did taking care of the last place you were?”

To tend to the here and now world, to strive for love and justice, to be good stewards of this creation we all share is the work our faith demands.

We believe we confess our faith by our actions in the world.

I served the year of my ministerial internship in a church in Portland, Oregon. Marilyn Sewell is the minister of that congregation, and many of my hopes and dreams for Second Unitarian Church and for Unitarian Universalism were forged during my time in ministry there. She has written and edited numerous books, including 2 excellent anthologies of poetry. In her anthology, Cries of the Spirit she shares these sentiments that resonate with our humanist heritage:

“… hope is real and change is indeed possible. How does change come? Through the sensitive and loving concern of persons, each for the other, and a willingness to do the hard work of organizing and planning to change society. We must witness by voice and by deed… . do not stand aloof from problems, but instead accept [your] own complicity in what is, and take the responsibility upon [yourselves] to make a better world than we have yet made.” (i)

Following this passage is a collection of poems that reflect this message. I have chosen two of them to share with you this morning. The first captures the nature of our work in the world, and second expresses the shift in our notion of what salvation means.

First, “The Low Road” by Marge Piercy

What can they do
to you? Whatever they want.
They can set you up, they can
bust you, they can break
your fingers, they can
burn your brain with electricity,
blur you with drugs till you
can’t walk, can’t remember, they can
take your child, wall up
your lover. They can do anything
you can’t stop them
from doing. How can you stop
them? Alone, you can fight,
you can refuse, you can
take what revenge you can
but they roll over you.

But two people fighting
back to back can cut through
a mob, a snake dance file
can break a cordon, an army
can meet an army.

Two people can keep each other
sane, can give support, conviction,
love, massage, hope, sex.
Three people are a delegation,
a committee, a wedge. With four
you can play bridge and start
an organization. With six
you can rent a whole house,
eat pie for dinner with no
seconds, and hold a fund raising party.
A dozen make a demonstration.
A hundred fill a hall.
A thousand have solidarity and your own newsletter,
ten thousand, power and your own paper,
a hundred thousand, your own media,
ten million, your own country.

It goes on one at a time,
it starts when you care
to act, it starts when you do
it again after they say no,
it starts when you say We
and you know who you mean, and each
day you mean one more.

The second poem is called “To a Milkweed” by Deborah Digges

Teach me to love what I’ve made, and judgment
in that love.

Teach me your arrogance.
With each five-petaled horned flower teach me

how much blossoming matters
along roadsides, dry-

beds, these fields no longer cleared.
Teach me such patience at each turning, how

to live on nothing but will, its milky
juices, poison

to the others, though when its stem is broken,
bleeds. Teach me to

need the future,
and the past, that Indian summer.

Let me be tricked into believing
that by what moves in me I might be saved,

and hold to this. Hold
onto this until there’s wind enough.

Here ends the readings.

Message

James 2:14-17

“What does it profit, my brethren, if a man says he has faith but has not works? Can his faith save him? If a brother or sister is ill-clad and in lack of daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what does it profit? So faith, by itself, if it has no works, is dead.” (RSV)

We believe, like James, we confess our faith by our actions in the world. The hard part is that it is all of our actions that count. The good ones and the not so good ones.

We just aren’t completely good and earnest. This is part of the reason religious community exists at all: to encourage us to try again, to do better next time, to keep working at it. The community is here to keep our despair at bay, and to foster a sense that something larger, more hopeful, more loving is possible. Yet we can make choices with terrible consequences.

Is there something, hidden deeply in your heart, something you yourself have done, something you may never have told anyone else about, for which you carry great shame?

There is one event from my childhood that, when I replay it, brings me to my knees in repentance. How could I have been so cruel? What was I thinking? The pain of that wrong sears my soul to this day.

Each one of us has crossed the line at some point in our lives.

I was watching a TV show this week. My favorite show: Numbers. Did you know you can save the world with math? In the show, two brothers and a dad form the central relationships in the show. One brother is an FBI agent (his part is responsible for the excitement). The other brother is a mathematician. (Who knew that scenes with someone staring intensely at a blackboard and then scrawling possible formulas across them could be so dramatic?)

The Dad, he is just wise.

The scene begins with the FBI agent coming into his father’s house after work: “I just don’t want to go home right now.” He announces as he flops himself down on the couch and tucks a pillow under his head. One of his agents had been kidnapped by a suspect and he’d moved heaven and earth to get her back safely. In doing so he’d crossed some lines he never thought he’d cross. He was suffering, and he’d scared himself. He said to his dad, “I crossed some lines today. I can’t believe how far I was willing to go to get Megan back.”

His dad asked, “Yeah. How far were you willing to go?”

A meaningful look was all he got from his son in response.

His dad thought for a little while about what that look meant before he replied. “Oh, that far,” was all he said.

After a little while his son asked, “Once you cross those lines, can you ever come back again?”

At this point dad leaps into fatherly action. He pulls up a chair next to the couch his son is on and says to him, “Son, if you wrestle with your choices once you’ve made them you can trust that your good sense will return.”

Guilt, unease, and regret can serve a purpose when they help us re-aim our lives toward the ways that bring more hope than fear, more love than alienation, more compassion that apathy into our world.

We all fall short and need forgiveness. In Judaism they celebrate Yom Kippur, a time of year when people reflect on their own wrongdoing in the past year and atone for their sins and ask forgiveness. And the Islamic season of Ramadan is a time when people are asked to stretch their spirit to be able to grant forgiveness for all those transgressions that have been made against them.

To be able ask and offer forgiveness reveals our spiritual maturity, and brings the flow of grace into our lives, and our spirits are made even larger in the process.

I find a hopeful message in our faith when I paint our humanism on the canvas of our Universalism. We seek to show our faith by our works, we seek to redeem some portion of the world by our own right action. We seek to lead a religious life - one that brings love and justice into the world. And when we undoubtedly fall short, we are forgiven. Though we fail to extend our love as far as we might, we are still, ultimately, loved.

I like to think of it this way: our humanist roots indicate we can participate in the salvation of the world, but to think we can achieve such a reality ourselves is idolatry. We are not gods walking the face of the earth, we are the human family: flawed and broken.

One of the shadows of our faith, with its universal Love and its call to do good works, is that it can fail to account for the depth of human evil present in the world. Surely with holocausts, genocides and torture chambers we are not advancing as a people upward and onward forever.

We must confront our own dark places and truly see our capacity for sin. With this fuller reality, we are able to shape a faith that can sustain us for a lifetime.

Annie Dillard writes:

Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? or who shall stand in his holy place? There is no one but us. There is no one to send, nor a clean hand, nor a pure heart on the face of the earth, nor in the earth, but only us, a generation comforting ourselves with the notion that we have come to an awkward time, that our innocent fathers are all dead - as if innocence had ever been - and our children busy and troubled, and we ourselves unfit, not yet ready, having each of us chosen wrongly, made a false start, failed, yielded to impulse and the tangled comfort of pleasures, and grown exhausted, unable to seek the thread, weak and involved. But there is no one both us. There never has been. (excerpt from Holy the Firm)

However we come to our faith, whether it is faith in humanity, or in the Divine, or in the world around us, may we find in it miracle enough to inspire in us the resources we need for a lifetime of toil in this world: seeking to restore the creation to wholeness, to protect our earth and the life that shares our planet with us, and to reconcile the human family to one another. So may it be. Amen.

• i. Marilyn Sewell, Cries of the Spirit (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991) 157.

Copyright © 2006 Second Unitarian Church