Discovering Our Chosen Faith

1. Discovering Our Chosen Faith Introducing Unitarian Universalism

2. Arriving • Unitarian Universalism is now, by and large, a Chosen Faith. • Most Unitarian Universalists are come outers – they came out of another faith tradition. • What is your story? Briefly share how you came to choose this faith or what led you to be here today.

3. Awakening • UU’s are not concerned with “the supernatural, but with the super in the natural.” • Many people “tend to accept the traditional definition of religion: a subscription to some fixed combination of doctrine and practice,” but UU’s are proud heretics. A heretic is someone who hasn’t given up the right to choose what to believe. • “Offering religious security blankets and heavenly insurance policies, many faiths base their considerable appeal on denial of death.”

4. Awakening • “We need not think alike to love alike.” • - David Farenc (Francis David), Heretic • Transylvania 1510-1579 • Responsible for the conversion of King John Sigismund to Unitarianism and the Edict of Torda, establishing religious tolerance in Transylvania in 1568.

5. Experience • John Buehrens tells people who don’t believe in God: “Tell me about the God you don’t believe in. Chances are I don’t believe in Him either.” • What do you think Rev. Buehrens means? Rev. John A. Buehrens

6. Deeds not Creeds • “We are a liberal church community which has not only dared to preach freedom but to live in freedom as well, which has not only prophesized a more just day to come but has dared to live prophetically right now.” – Rev. Mark Belletini • “The principle sin besetting many of us today is the sin of philosophical resignation. For many of us, self-improvement (both physical and spiritual) has displaced the transformation of society as our principal moral concern.” – Forrest Church

7. The Cathedral of the World Forrest Church suggests “ a new theological model in which one light (Unitarianism) shines through many windows (Universalism) in various, telling ways.” “This has its dangers, for we may trivialize the faith of another by trying to appropriate its essence, but as long as we remember this, by remaining open to the insights of others we may augment our own cherished traditions and expand the scope of our faith.”

8. The Cathedral of the World • Forrest Church’s Universalist Cathedral Theology: • There is one reality, one Truth, one God • This reality shines through every window in the cathedral and out from every eye. • No one can perceive it directly, the mystery being forever veiled. • Yet on the floor of the cathedral and in the eye of each beholder, refracted and reflected through different windows in different ways, it plays in patterns that suggest meaning, challenging us to interpret and live by the meaning as best we can. • Therefore, each window illumines Truth in a different way, leading to different truths and these in different measure according to the insight and receptivity of the beholder.

9. Dialogue • “I have one problem with the image of the “Cathedral of the World.” Within the cathedral, no one seems to be talking to anyone else.” – Rev. John Buehrens • To belong to a Unitarian Universalist congregation, is to be involved in an interfaith dialog. • Among us you will find Christians, Humanists, Jews, Buddhists, Pagans, Agnostics, Muslims and Hindus and others – many paths and one faith. Our is a religion that demands discussion and dialogue.

10. Dialogue • Take a minute to think about your previous experience with people of other faiths and religious beliefs that are different from your own. • Do you find that you expect others to be sensitive to your religious sensibilities or are you able to do religious “translation” and hear how someone else’s spiritual perspective might apply to your own? Discuss.

11. Neighborhood • The Judeo-Christian heritage is our heritage as well as Unitarian Universalism has roots in the radical Protestant reformation. • Our theologically diverse religious association sprang from the liberal Christian church of 18th and 19th America. • The ministers and theologians who formed the theology on which this movement was based revered both Jesus and the Bible, but not as a God and not as infallible. • “There are bible-thumpers and bible-bashers. We are neither.” – Rev. Thomas D. Wintle

12. Neighborhood William Ellery Channing was minister of Boston’s Federal Street Church. His 1819 sermon “Unitarian Christianity” preached at the ordination of Jared Sparks in Baltimore has been called a “Party Platform” of Unitarianism by UU church historian Conrad Wright. Channing defends God’s unity and rejects the trinity as non scriptural. Channing defends the emerging, reason-based historical and literary criticism of the Bible: “We feel it our duty to exercise our reason upon it perpetually to compare, to infer, to look beyond the letter to the spirit, to seek in the nature of the subject, and aim of the writer, his true meaning; and in general to make use of what is known for explaining what is difficult and discovering new truths.”

13. Neighborhood Unitarian minister Theodore Parker was an activist, abolitionist and transcendentalist. His sermon The Transient and the Permanent in Christianity offered a solution for those who want to “mine the Bible for its wisdom without sacrificing our critical faculties.” Parker argued that much of the Bible and Christianity is time-bound and thus of little relevance, but there are eternal truths which can always enrich us. “The solar system… is permanent though the notions of Thales and Ptolemy, of Copernicus and Descartes, about this system prove transient…So the Christianity of Jesus is permanent though what passes for Christianity with popes and catechisms, with sects and churches, in the first century or the 19th prove transient also.”

14. Neighborhood • Forrest Church notes that “fundamentalism of the right has its whiplash in fundamentalism of the left. When the true believer proclaims that the Bible is the unique word of God-to be accepted without question- the true unbeliever responds by dismissing scripture as a figment of demented imaginations.” • It’s been said that 19th Unitarians and Universalists liberated the spirit from her Christian captors. Do you think this was so? Is it so? Or is this the whiplash fundamentalism Forrest Church speaks of above?

15. Expectations You Can’t Always Get Want You Want But if you try sometimes You just might find You get what you need

16. Expectations • “Whatever expectations you bring to a UU congregation,” John Buehrens says, “expect to have them upset by us, at least in part.” • Some of us are quite unconventional. • Some of us are shockingly traditional. • Atheists will develop transcendence. • Conservative pietists will develop a social conscience.

17. Expectations • You will be stretched beyond your comfort zone, sometime, somewhere, somehow, by someone(s). • You will be asked to get involved at church and in the community. • You will be asked to take up spiritual practices of your own choosing. • You will be asked to contribute financially to the congregation.

18. Expectations • Some, none or all of this may be what you were expecting. • So, what were you expecting? How has your experience so far differed from or matched your expectations?

19. Beyond Idolatry • UU church historian Earl Morse Wilbur identifies three principles of liberal religion: Freedom, Tolerance and Reason. • Forrest Church writes that our problem today for most people is not bondage, but bondlessness. “We don’t need more freedom. We need the resolve to employ the freedom we have responsibly. We need to invest a little of our precious freedom and bond ourselves to others in redemptive community.”

20. Beyond Idolatry • Unitarian Universalism is not a faith where “anything goes,” in matters of belief or practice. • Our congregations tend to attract people, as Forrest Church points out, who are “free spirits, hell bent on fighting the evil of an organized anything. They are champions above all else of their own precious freedom.” • Forrest Church calls such people “religious adolescents” who “strive to censure any word or action that might offend their brittle and reactionary sensibilities.”

21. Beyond Idolatry • Unitarian Universalism is sometimes mistakenly thought of, even by Unitarian Universalists, as the religion where you can “believe anything you want.” What responsibility comes with the freedom of belief?

22. Mind & Spirit • Unitarian Universalism is a both/and not an either/or religion. It’s a religion of contemplation and action. It’s a religion of the mind and the spirit. It’s a religion of the individual and the community. • “Far from having nothing to say, religious liberals have to proclaim, over and over again, against both religious and secular adversaries, the good news that the future remains open and Fates are not in control.” - - Rev. Gene Reeve • “We only know two things for certain: ‘I am’ and ‘I will die.’ Religion is our response.” - Rev. John Buehrens

23. Mind & Spirit “I often describe myself as a biblical humanist. I find the religion about Jesus often distracting and divisive. But I am persistently drawn toward the spirit, example, and religion of Jesus. The spiritual disciplines I have cultivated include service, study, prayer, meditation, and sharing in congregational worship. Like most Unitarian Universalists, I respect those whose spirituality may differ from my own, convinced that what we have in common is likely to be far more important than anything that may divide us.” - Rev. John Buehrens

24. Closing Words “Religion is not merely a matter of belief or affiliation. It is a matter of how we choose to live.” - Rev. John Buehrens

25. Benediction Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? - Mary Oliver

26. Our Chosen Faith