That Doesn’t Count!

Rev. Mark Stringer

First Unitarian Church of Des Moines

“Bring a Friend Sunday”

9/29/02

 

 Call to Gather (Rev. Roger Fritts)

“We gather together at this time and this place to affirm our liberal religious values. 
Here we believe that it is possible to have joy without hysteria. 
We believe it is possible to have morality without inquisitions. 
We believe it is possible to have community without conformity. 
We believe it is possible to have authority without slavery. 
We believe it is possible to have religion without madness. 
We believe it is possible to have worship without idolatry. 
And here we believe it is possible to have love without perfection.  We welcome all who wish to join us in this celebration of life.” 

 

Responsive Reading (Rev. Scott Alexander)

 

In a world with so much hatred and violence,

We need a religion that proclaims the inherent worth and dignity of every person.

 

In a world with so much brutality and fear,

We need a religion that seeks justice, equity, and compassion in human relations.

 

In a world with so many persons abused and neglected,

We need a religion that calls us to accept one another and encourage one another to spiritual growth.

 

In a world with so much dogmatism and falsehood,

We need a religion that challenges us to a free and responsible search for truth and meaning.

 

In a world with so much tyranny and oppression,

We need a religion that affirms the right of conscience and the use of democratic process.

 

In a world with so much inequality and strife,

We need a religion that strives toward the goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all.

 

In a world with so much environmental degradation,

We need a religion that advocates respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.

 

In a world with so much uncertainty and despair,

We need a religion that teaches our hearts to hope, and our hands to serve.      

 

Sermon

Last spring, one of the newer members of our church, Greg Nichols, shared a story with me that I knew would end up in a sermon because it asks one of the most essential questions that anyone who participates in religious community must ask:  Is the community--the home of one’s chosen faith, the workshop of one’s ultimate commitments--worth it or not?

 

Greg told me that the week before Easter, some neighbors had invited his daughter to go with them and their kids to Sunday church services.  This neighbor’s church, apparently, was offering a concert or something glitzy for the kids.  Greg’s wife Dawn told the mother that she appreciated the offer, but reminded her that the family had been attending services at the Unitarian Universalist church and planned to do so that Sunday.  The neighbor’s reply was “Yes, I know, but that doesn’t really count as church.”

 

Greg told me that he heard this dismissal of our church as a call to self-examination and to commitment to what he knew he believed.  Does this church count? How does it count in his life?  How does it count in the life of his family? He began the process of answering these questions by determining that he would become more involved, that he would offer himself more fully to the work of the church to discover--maybe even to prove--that it does, in fact, count. Greg and Dawn officially joined the church a few weeks later and have become active volunteers in our children’s religious education program, more fully committing themselves to what for many has become a life-long quest to answer these same questions.  After all, hasn’t each of us, at one time or another, wondered if this church, this liberal religious community, really does count?  Maybe on a Sunday morning when we might rather stay in bed than go to church.  Maybe on a weekday evening when we are expected to be at a committee or small group ministry meeting but we might rather read a book. Maybe when our lives get complicated and we are uncertain whether or not our UU principles are enough to sustain us?  Maybe when we view the circumstances of our troubled world and we wonder if it wouldn’t be better just to throw in the towel, to choose an easier faith…one that provides more answers…one that might do the thinking for us.

 

It is natural to wonder if this church, if this liberal religious community and faith, really does count in a world like ours.  Not only is it natural, it is important, for to sincerely ask whether or not this church counts in our lives is the first step we can take to insure that it does.  So this morning, I’d like for us to consider the assertion made by Greg’s neighbor.  Does this liberal religious community really count as church?

 

In order to answer this question, we need to have some common understanding of the primary characteristics of a liberal religious community. Many years ago a commission of the American Unitarian Association crafted a document called The Free Church in a Changing World that described four distinct features of liberal religion.  While liberal religion is by its very nature always changing, these four features are a good place for us to begin to think about what distinguishes a community like ours from more orthodox communities of belief.  While more orthodox faiths may share some of these features, the combination of all four is what characterizes a church as liberal.

 

First, a liberal church like ours is focused on this worldly-concerns. While our individual opinions and beliefs about what happens to us after we die may vary, the focus of our services and our collective aspirations are tethered to this world…the only world we may ever know.  A liberal faith therefore says that any meaning our lives hold must be found and fostered in the here and now…not in some unknown world to come.

 

Second, the motivating force of a liberal religious community is not doctrine or dogma but strong ethical responsibility. I have heard this feature described as “deeds not creeds.” A liberal faith, therefore, is one that contends the supreme witness of religion is ethical living. 

 

Third, our liberal religious community has a deep commitment to democracy. The financial records of the church are open and accessible, every member has one vote, and there is no institutional stance taken by this church that has not been approved by the congregation.  Each UU church governs itself, calls its own minister, and answers to its membership.  These independent churches are loosely gathered into the UUA or Unitarian Universalist Association with offices in Boston, but the UUA is simply a resource body that is also governed by democratic process. 

 

And finally, those who have found a home in this liberal church are committed to the understanding that true community is religiously based.

 

Some of us may have difficulty getting our minds around what a religiously-based community is because we have different understandings of what religion is or might be.  Simply put, religion is the human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die. Religion is the means by which we connect with this reality, make sense of it for ourselves, and use it to determine our ultimate commitments.   Throughout time women and men have struggled to make sense of the mysteries of life, and the fruits of this struggle—sweet or sour, ripe or rotten they may be--all fall under the heading of religion. Some of us, after ingesting one of the more bitter fruits of religion, may have believed that religion itself is the cause of our pain and so we have removed ourselves from the table all together.  This is what Unitarian minister Samuel Eliot meant when we said “There are thousands of…people who are wholly alienated from the churches and who, because they have never heard of a rational religion, imagine that they have no religion at all.”

 

I relate to this quote because before I found Unitarian Universalism, I was one of these people. I had little interest in religion because I believed religion to be synonymous with theism, with the reliance upon some kind of God my agnostic faith did not find tenable. When I would go to church with friends or family or because I was in a choir that was singing, I would dissect everything I heard, mentally taking note of all the moments where I disagreed, where I could be discouraged, finding fault everywhere I looked because…well, fault was all I was looking for.  You could say I was a fundamentalist of unbelief. Looking back now, I think I was committed to proving religion a futile endeavor because I didn’t want to give myself to something that would just disappoint me.  I couldn’t bring myself to go all the way to Oz when I believed in my heart that the wizard everyone was there to see was nothing more than smoke and mirrors.  So, I avoided religious community all together.

 

I was a lot like the traveler in this Middle Eastern folk tale:

There was a traveler who after riding the train to work every day for years, one day, finds he has lost his ticket. The traveler fumbles around in his coat pockets, and his pant pockets, and then in other people’s pockets.  He looks in his briefcase, in his bags, and then in other people’s bags.  Finally, the train conductor says to him, “I’ve seen you on this train countless times before, I’m sure you have a ticket.  Why don’t you look for it in your breast pocket?  That is where most people keep it.”

“Oh no,” the traveler replied.  “I can’t look there.  Why, if it wasn’t there, I would have no hope.”[1] 

 

It was a liberal religious community, a UU church, that encouraged me to overcome my fear, to reach deep into my breast pocket, into my heart, the place I should have been looking all along, to find the ticket to my true destination, to what I truly believed. It was a UU church that gave me the space to start from where I was and to work from there. I of course had no idea I would end up a minister, but looking back it’s not all that surprising after all. I owe it to Unitarian Universalism that I got to this place, because this liberal faith I have grown to love not only gave me the freedom to recognize my ultimate commitments, it challenged me to adhere to them.  I was challenged by my need to give myself to what I truly believed.  I was challenged by my desire to fully inhabit my life and to give myself to something greater than my own self-interest. I was challenged by the democratic nature of this community that holds all members equally accountable for the consequences of their action and inaction. And I was challenged by the truly religious component of the UU community. “Religion,” you see, is derived from a Latin word meaning “to reconnect.”  Therefore a religiously-based community is not one that is reliant on a shared conception of God, but one that emphasizes the need to connect and re-connect with others who share our world.  In liberal religious communities like ours we strive to leave room for difference and come to church expecting to build a bridge out of the isolation of our own minds into the minds of others; a bridge from our own piece of the truth to the always expanding universe of belief.  We search for ways to be inclusive, and we encourage a life-long process of learning, exploring and growing together toward an understanding of our world and those who share it with us. 

 

I like how Unitarian Adalai Stevenson put it when he said:  “I think that one of our most important tasks is to convince others that there’s nothing to fear in difference; that difference, in fact, is one of the healthiest and most invigorating of human characteristics without which life would become meaningless.  Here lies the power of the liberal way: not in making the whole world Unitarian, but in helping ourselves and others to see some of the possibilities inherent in viewpoints other than one’s own; in encouraging the free interchange of ideas; in welcoming fresh approaches to the problems of life; in urging the fullest, most vigorous use of critical self-examination.”[2]

 

So does this church count?  Clearly, for me it does, and maybe for you too.  But we should not be surprised that Greg’s neighbor doesn’t agree. After all, those that have been indoctrinated to the belief that there is one “right” faith wouldn’t be true to their brand of religion if they accepted the liberal religious concepts of continuous revelation, freedom of belief, and a sole emphasis on this-worldly concerns. People like this neighbor, who has been taught to believe that revelation is sealed or limited to what she believes, have no other means to prove their faith than by discounting the faith of others.

 

Along these lines, I will never forget my fundamentalist grandmother’s response to my plans to become a Unitarian Universalist minister. Without missing a beat, and with the assurance of one who knows the truth with a capital T, she said firmly, “That’s wrong!”  I said nothing in response for a moment, looking closely at this woman I had known all my life for some glimmer that she might retreat a little in her proclamation that my life direction was a mistake, that she might somehow conjure up enough generosity to give me the benefit of the doubt.  As I quietly looked at her she began to rock a little, shaking her head in defiance of my plans: “That is wrong,” she repeated as if I didn’t hear her the first time. I took a few deep breaths, continued to hold her gaze, and gave her the most generous Unitarian Universalist response I could muster. “Grandma,” I said, “I’m sorry that you feel that way.”

 

And I was sorry.  I was sorry because her narrow view of religion had led her to believe that the only way she could prove her faith was by attempting to deny mine.

 

As we look at the current state of our world, it is easy to see how this kind of dogmatic adherence to one view of the truth is not only dangerous, but destructive.  From terrorists proclaiming their allegiance to God as they kill themselves and thousands of innocent people, to people who would rather worship at the altar of U.S. superiority than face up to the fact that this world is not ours to rule.  Anyone who clings to one vision of truth, to one “right” way of being in the world is surely walking on thin ice because right beside her is someone else who thinks that his way is right and who will jump up and down on that thin ice to prove it.

 

So, again, I ask, does this church count?  Some of you have long ago answered this question with a resounding “yes.”  Some know this church counts because it has been there for you in your darkest hours, providing a community of support when it was needed most.  Some know this church counts because someone you have met or something you have heard or encountered here has led you down a path of self-discovery you might have otherwise missed, or encouraged you to explore ideas that have transformed your lives.  Some know this church counts because it has offered you a place to unravel and embrace your own personal theology…a place to grow your souls, a place to explore the ever-expanding universe of belief and to find your place in it.   Some know this church counts because it has welcomed you when other churches may have turned you away:  Couples of mixed faiths who have found here a place of common ground; Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, or Transgendered people who have discovered here a welcoming congregation that respects the inherent worth and dignity of all its members; refugees from other faiths drenched in patriarchy or dogma or discrimination…or all of the above.  And some know this church counts simply because without it you would not have anywhere else to go to experience religious community.

 

Of course, there are some of you here this morning who aren’t sure this church counts.  Maybe you are too new to this community to believe it has something to offer, or maybe you are too wounded from past experiences with organized religion to believe that this church will be different.  To you I say, “Take your time.  Keep visiting with us.  Get involved.  See if this might be the place for you.  We’ll be here when you are ready.”

 

I also know that there are some of you here today that have been waiting for this place, some who would have been here years ago if only you had known it existed, some who are sitting among us who feel like you have finally come home.  To you I say, “Welcome! We know the feeling. We’re so glad you made it!”

 

For those of us who have found a home here, there is no doubt about it. This church counts. 

 

This church counts.

 

But before I conclude this morning, I suggest that each of us considers one more question…the crucial question that anyone who chooses to embrace a religious life should be asking herself, the question that goes one step beyond “Does this church count?” to an even more important question. 

 

I suggest that we ask ourselves, “What do I do to make this church count?” 

 

Or put another way, “What do I do to make my faith, my ultimate commitments, count in the world?”

 

This is an essential question because if we do not allow our religion, this incubator of our ultimate commitments, to transform our lives, to lead us to act in the world to build a more just, peaceful and loving society, than what value does this religion really hold?  As UU minister Forrester Church has written, “It does not really matter what we may think of the politics or the religion of our fundamentalist neighbors.  All that matters is whether we are willing to live up to the promise and power of our own faith.  Morality not proved in deeds is always betrayed by words, however right-minded, lofty, and sage.”[3]

 

It has been said that “It is in our lives, and not our words that our religion must be read” (Thomas Jefferson). So, when you look at the pages of your life’s religion, what story do you find?   What chapters are still yet to be written?  What are you doing to make this church count? What are you doing to make this liberal faith count? 

 

Our troubled world is waiting for your answer.

 

Closing Words (A. Powell Davies)

“As you have listened to me [this morning], have you thought perchance that this is your religion?  If you have, do not congratulate yourself.  Stop long enough to recollect the miseries of the world you live in: the fearful cruelties, the enmities, the hate, the bitter prejudices, the need of such a world for such a faith.  And if you still can say that this of which I have spoken is your religion, then ask yourself this question:  What are you doing with it?”[4]