Opening Words
by
Peter Raible
We
build on foundations we did not lay.
We
warm ourselves by fires we did not light.
We
sit in the shade of trees we did not plant.
We
drink from wells we did not dig.
We
profit from person we did not know.
This
is as it should be.
Together
we are more than any one person could be.
Together
we can build across the generations.
Together
we can renew our hope and faith in the life that is yet to unfold.
Together
we can heed the call to a ministry of care and justice.
We
are ever bound in community.
May
it always be so.
Sermon
There
hasn’t always been and there may not always be a religious movement known as
Unitarian Universalism. There hasn’t
always been and there may not always be an organization known as the Unitarian
Universalist Association of Congregations.
If we were really honest with ourselves, we’d also understand that there
hasn’t always been and may not always be a church known as the Shawnee Mission
Unitarian Universalist Church. However, as
long as there has been religion and as long as there is a human species, there
has always been and there will continue to be something called liberal religion
and people who are religious liberals.
The
signs at our new facility announce that our church is coming in 2012, and the
signs prominently display a tag-line that reads, “Liberal Religion for Johnson
County.” I want to ask us, are we all
clear on what liberal religion means?
And, even if we all are clear, is the greater Kansas City metropolitan
area clear on what liberal religion is?
When it comes time for us to occupy our new building, I’m fairly certain
that it will be necessary for us to offer some bold declarations and powerful
articulations of what, exactly, this thing called liberal religion is. My words this morning are in that vein.
I’m
reminded of a conversation I once had with a person my own age. I introduced myself as the minister of a
Unitarian Universalist Church. The
person wasn’t familiar with our tradition, which is not surprising. My first clarification was to say that we are
a liberal church. The response I received
was unexpected. “Oh, so you have a rock
band and you wear blue jeans on Sunday.”
This person had associated liberalism with a style, not a theology. And, is it possible that some of us make
assumptions of a similar nature? If we
meet a person who says that she goes to a church with a rock band, do we make
assumptions that the theology is conservative?
When I talk about liberal religion, I want to be clear that I am talking
about the message not the medium, the content not the container.
So,
what is it that is most essential to communicate when we use term liberal
religion? Unitarian historian Earl Morse
Wilbur wrote that what sets liberal religion apart is our commitment to freedom,
reason, and tolerance. Freedom, reason, and tolerance. However, self-critical Unitarian
Universalists have critiqued making these three qualities, together or
separately, the core of liberal religion.
Doug Muder writes, “None of the three will get you out of bed in the
morning.” Taking them separately, there
is no denying that our willingness to embrace reason and science as ways of
approaching truth is an incredibly important aspect of our tradition. Reason we can keep as a core element of the
liberal religious project. Tolerance? Well, tolerance is certainly better than
intolerance. At least it’s got that
going for it. But, tolerance is also a
passive quality. Tolerating your
neighbor is different than loving your neighbor.
This
leaves us with freedom. Freedom seems
important as a core religious principle.
But, freedom can be a bit problematic.
Freedom is a word that you would find prominently in the speeches of
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and prominently on the dust jacket of a book
by Sarah Palin, and prominently in the platform of the Libertarian Party. Freedom is the reason for the existence of
the NAACP and freedom is the reason for the existence of the NRA.
So,
when we say that freedom in religion is at the heart of Unitarian Universalism,
what exactly do we mean? My colleague
Rev. Tom Schade puts it like this, “I think the question out there, especially
among the younger people, is, ‘how are we not like every other church/religion
organized around its self-importance?’…
The most important thing that I think people should know about us is
that we have been struggling and even dying for a spirituality organized around
freedom and liberation for a long time.
We’re not done yet.”
What
my colleague wrote is absolutely right in some respects. Religious and spiritual freedom and social
liberation have always been central to us.
Michael Servetus was burned at the stake for his practice of free
religious inquiry. In Transylvania, a
Unitarian king enacted an edict to guarantee religious freedom. The early American Unitarians and
Universalists followed their conscience away from the orthodox creeds. The last person imprisoned for the crime of
blasphemy in the United States was Abner Kneeland, a Universalist minister
sentenced in 1838 to sixty days in jail for publishing statements about his own
naturalistic theology. Intellectual freedom
led to the embrace of humanism in the early twentieth century. And, our commitment to human liberty led to
support the abolitionist cause, women’s rights, the civil rights movement, and equality
for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people, just to name a few of the
ways we’ve promoted the cause of freedom.
These
efforts and many more, large and small, to promote spiritual and religious
freedom and social liberation have been edifying. However, it cannot be denied that freedom can
have a shadow side. Too often, the
understanding of what freedom actually is stays stuck at its most immature,
adolescent, and reactionary levels. Have
you ever experienced a child throwing a tantrum in which certain declarations
are made about the future? When I am
older, I’m going to eat dessert for dinner every night. When I am older, I’m not going to have a
bedtime. When I move out, nobody is
going to tell me what to do. A juvenile
declaration of independence. Maybe your
children have said something like this.
Maybe you remember saying or thinking something like this. All of this is naïve and annoying and perfectly
developmentally appropriate. And, all of
this is something that we hopefully grow out of through responsibility and
maturity. In time we learn that our
actions have an impact on others, that freedom needs to be balanced by
responsibility. We learn that there are
all sorts of ways that we are accountable to others, and not just to our own
desires and whims.
Liberty,
liberation, liberal, liberalism, liberal religion. What exactly do these words mean? What is the relationship between religious
liberalism and religious freedom? And,
what do we mean by liberal religion?
***
Last
month I read a newly published collection of essays by Marilynne Robinson. Robinson teaches creative writing at the Iowa
Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa, and is the author of three novels
and four works of non-fiction. For her novel,
Gilead, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. Robinson is a liberal Christian and is active
in the United Church of Christ. Each of
the ten essays in her most recent book could easily inspire its own
sermon. This morning I want to mention
just one of those essays from the heart of her collection. The essay is entitled, “Open Thy Hand Wide:
Moses and the Origins of American Liberalism.”
Robinson
remarks, “The fact that words have different meanings in different cultures,
that ‘liberal’ is itself a word with very different meanings in American and
European contexts, for example, never seems to influence discussion as it ought
to.” Robinson explains that in Europe,
the word “liberal” changed its meaning between the time of the Renaissance and
the end of the Enlightenment. In the 1800s,
liberalism became synonymous with political positions, especially the politics
of the French Revolution. Liberalism’s
meaning, which continues to this day, became associated with freedoms having to
do with equality and human rights and with resistance to political, religious,
or economic authorities that deprived people of their rights and civil
liberties. Liberalism became equated
with freedom, reason, and tolerance.
Marilynne
Robinson reminds us that liberalism had a somewhat different meaning a couple
hundred years earlier, when liberalism was associated with scriptural
commandments having to do with generosity.
Consider the following translation of a passage from the Bible from four
hundred years ago,
“The
nigarde shal no more be called liberal, nor the churl rich. But the nigarde wil speake of nigardnes, and
his heart wil worke iniquitie, and do wickedly, and speake falsely against the
Lord, to make emptie the hungrie soule, and to cause the drinke of the thirstie
to faile. For the weapons of the churl
are wicked: he deviseth wicked counsels, to undo the poore with lying words:
and to speake against the poore in judgement.
But the liberal man wil divise of liberal things, and he wil continue
his liberalitie.”
Robinson
goes on in her essay to cite several theologians and religious writers in
Europe in the 1500s and 1600s, and in America in the 1600s and 1700s. These theologians wrote at great length about
the scriptural commandment to be liberal and they greatly emphasized this
point.
Writes
one European theologian, “True liberality is not momentary or of short
duration. They who possess that virtue
persevere steadily, and do not exhaust themselves in a sudden and feeble flame,
of which they quickly afterwards repent…
The Lord exhorts us not to momentary liberality, but to that which shall
endure during the whole course of our life.”
And, if that wasn’t enough, this writer made notes in the margin of his
scholarship that read, “Thou shalt be liberal!”
On
the American side, Robinson writes of a great American preacher from the 1700s
who liberally poured the word liberal into his sermons. In his writings we find, quote, “a recurrent,
passionate insistence on bounty or liberality, mercy and liberality, one being
kind and liberal, liberal and bountiful...
These phrases are all [his] and there are many more like them.”
***
It
may strike you as odd and actually a bit backwards that I should elect to
preach on generosity at the end of April, as we’re bringing our annual
stewardship campaign to a close, and not, say, at the beginning of March. To that I say, yes, you’re absolutely right. It is a bit backwards. And, I offer two responses. First, as you’ll notice on the giant
thermometer in the foyer, we’re still a good ways off from reaching our
goal. That fact should and will probably
engender some conversation and dialogue over the next several weeks and months
as we prepare for the coming church year.
[You can still make your pledge.]
But,
more importantly, if Marilynne Robinson is right, and if generosity is actually
a liberal religious virtue, then there should be no calendar to constrain the
discussion of generosity. And, for that
matter, if generosity is actually a divine virtue, then it deserves better than
being something that our religion asks us to calculate on a Excel spreadsheet or
the back of a napkin once a year.
Generosity belongs with love, justice, compassion, trust, hope, and
forgiveness. It is a virtue for all
seasons.
So
I want to argue and I want to suggest that what makes liberal religion liberal,
at its core, is not just, not only, the Enlightenment concept of liberality,
which stands for freedom, reason, and tolerance. What makes liberal religion liberal, at its
core, is also an older Renaissance and Reformation understanding of liberalism
that equates liberalism with generosity.
Take,
for example, our sources. We list on the
back of the order of service the seven principles, but the document in full is
a list of seven principles we affirm and promote and six sources that feed our
religious life together. Those six
sources include: direct experience of
the holy, the prophetic witness of women and men, wisdom from the world
religions, Jewish and Christian ethical teachings, reason and science, and
nature-based wisdom. I consider the
fullness of that list to be a statement of liberal generosity.
Or,
take justice work. Martin Luther King
once said, “One of the great tragedies of [our] long trek along the highway of
history has been the limiting of neighborly concern to tribe, race, class or
nation.” Our justice work would have to
be characterized as generous, broad, expansive, and wide. Its fullness is liberal.
Or,
take our religious forebears, the Universalists who believed in a God whose
love was expansive, liberal, and unbelievably generous, and the Unitarians who
had a most generous and liberal view of humanity.
When
we say that we Unitarian Universalism is a liberal tradition, that we are
religious liberals, that the Shawnee Mission Unitarian Universalist Church is a
liberal church, what exactly do we mean?
When we say that we are liberal religion for Johnson County, what exactly
do we mean? I would argue that whatever
else we mean, we also mean that we are liberal in the older meaning of the
word, which is to say radically generous.
Thou shalt be liberal.
