"WALKING THE TALK: DO UU'S BELIEVE THEIR OWN PRESS?" by Roger Miller

First Unitarian Church, Des Moines, Iowa

20 October, 2002

 

There are terrorists among us, and some of us have been casualties. Now, before you go tagging me as one of Preznit Shrub's Homeland Security Commando's, let me say that the terrorists of which I speak are not Al‑quaida, and they would feel most uncomfortable to find themselves in a room with Saddam Hussein or Osama Bin Laden.

 

No, the terrorists of whom I speak are Biblical terrorists, and they may live right next door to you, or work with you, or rub elbows in some other way with you every day.

 

Biblical terrorists are the kind of people who use the Bible to reinforce their own very unbiblical world views and impose them onothers ....on their families, on their acquaintances, on their workmates, on anyone they can.

 

Biblical terrorists are the kind of people who say, sometimes in just so many words, "If you do not believe the Bible literally, and more importantly, if you don't believe just like I do, then you are GOING TO HELL, and not only that, Santa Claus is not coming to your house, and you won't get any Christmas presents!" And in our world, they call themselves Christian.

 

Now, that's how biblical terrorists relate to us now, as adults. When we were kids, biblical terrorists were much more insidious; they had so much more power. They were our Sunday School teachers and our ministers and in some cases our parents.

 

And they told us, "This is what you MUST believe! The Bible says so!" And because theywere bigger than we were, or older, or in positions of authority, and we were taught to respect authority, we had to believe them.

 

And they gave us a legacy of guilt and neurosis and anxiety, and they made us feel bad about ourselves and in some cases, they scarred us, and they scared us! And in some cases, they filled us full of garbage that is not even biblical, but we think so, because someone told us it is!

 

A survey of incoming students at an Ivy League Seminary underscored that, when HALF all of the new divinity students tried to name the book in the Bible where one would find sayings like, "God helps those who help themselves." And, "A fool and his money are soon parted." Get it? It's not biblical at all, but rather sayings from Poor Richard's Almanac!But somewhere along the line, I think it was in the late 60's, the world changed. Those of us who were coming out of high school and living on our own and working or going to college, rejected what we had been taught and started thinking for ourselves. We bought into the admonition, "Never trust anyone over thirty!", and we idolized the avant‑garde college professors and instructors that goaded us into thinking for ourselves, and who urged us to "be free!".

 

Maybe we had been thinking for ourselves all along ....wondering about the inconsistencies we found in the Bible, but had not been allowed to ask about them. We just grew up feeling vaguely, or not so vaguely, bad about ourselves.

 

Until we found the Unitarian Church. Here is where we could be accepted for who we are! Here is where we could ask the questions thathad always been on our minds. Here is where we could appreciate each other's friendship and affiliation on the basis of our self‑hood, rather than our degree of holiness in someone else's eyes.

 

This church is the place where we could find favor with each other without having to conform to a set of restrictive and oppressive rules, and we could be ourselves!

 

It was good!

 

So here we all are, most of us having been brought up in a Judeo‑Christian tradition, with all this baggage about the Bible. Here we are, here in this church, a church that, itself, was founded on Judeo‑Christian Principles (Check your bulletins, it says so right there!).

 

And many of us have said, either to ourselves or to each other, "I reject the religion of my parents and of my upbringing, and chooseto think in my own snazzy new way! All that Bible stuff is a bunch of hooey!" And we have built up a defense against our pasts ‑ everything is always alright, UNLESS it has anything to do with the C‑word          Christianity!

 

And therein lies the problem with UU's believing their own press. On the one hand we say we accept everyone, but at the same time, we turn cool shoulders to anyone who tries to use Christian language. On the one hand, we take great pains to avoid offending ex‑Jews and Muslims and Wiccans and Humanists, and nearly every other special constituency, but at the same time, we tell a Christian joke, before we pass the offering plates. At least that was the situation here before Mark arrived.

 

We say, in words both spoken and unspoken, that all religion is fine ...unless it is Christian!And yet, Christmas Eve services here are full to almost overflowing.

 

And to me, that just seems like we are not walking the talk.

 

Frankly, me and Evie, we miss Jesus. And we understand that our participation in services here will necessarily preclude language about Jesus and God talk most of the time. We can do what we need to do for our own spirits, in which we believe, on a private basis.

 

We do not intend to lead anyone to Jesus. We are not here to save anyone's soul. We are not here to get into anyone's face about whether or not they are as holy and righteous as WE think they ought to be.

 

But what boils my potatoes is the fact that all of us in this congregation who consider ourselves Christian Unitarians seem to be painted with the same tarry brush astelevangelists and Pentecostals and Baptists. Not all Christians are like that! Not all of us are like that!

 

I was raised by parents who encouraged me to ask hard questions. My Dad, midway through his life, became a minister himself. When he went to the Drake Divinity School, he would come home and we would discuss what he learned about the Bible that day, in light of the use of what is called the Historical‑Critical Method of Bible study, a kind of Bible study that looks beyond the words on the page and leads to a deeper truth about what the writers of the Bible were trying to tell a specific people in a specific time.

 

In many ways, my old man was a real piece of work, but I always appreciated the approach he took to teaching me how to read the Bible. Especially in an atmosphere of biblical terrorism which wasprevalent in that day. I had a Sunday School Teacher when 1 was about 13, just at the age of asking questions of my elders, who would be teaching along, until one of us asked her a hard question, challenging what she had said .... maybe pointing out logical inconsistencies with what she had taught. Her standard tactic in that event was to burst into tears until we all felt bad and dropped the subject.

 

My liberal Christian religious upbringing enabled me to watch with incredulity as a teenage acquaintance of mine, on church outings and overnight youth gatherings, would go up to a girl and say to her, "God meant for us to be together!"

 

Now, when you are young and not so sure of your own belief system, how do you answer that, especially if the guy is mostly a creep, which hehappened to be? Biblical terrorism rears it ugly head wherever there is gain to be gotten!

 

It seems to me that most of us took the malarkey that was passed down as biblical and rejected the malarkey, and the Bible along with it, and as I myself became a minister, I discovered that to do that was to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

 

Sallying forth with the notion that there is much more to the Bible than meets the eye, I have discovered that the Bible is just as quotable and effective for forming my belief system as any writing from any of the other major world religions, or any Humanist writings, which are also good and inspirational. There is some good stuff in there. It's great literature, but it is more than that. It is a source from which we can learn how to treat each other, how torespect each other, how to care for each other. Notice that I said "A" source, not "THE" source.

 

And if we at First Unitarian Universalist Church of Des Moines, Iowa really want to live up to our press, then it behooves us to walk the talk .... to accept everybody ‑‑ even liberal Christians as full members of the congregation, regardless of where they might have come from.

 

We discussed this at Windbreakers the other night. For those of you who do not know, the Windbreakers is a group of men of the church and their friends who meet once a month and talk about whatever occurs to us at the moment. At the last meeting, I shared with them my charge, and my concern about what I was feeling deep in my heart. And they are the ones who encouraged me to share this with you. This group is fantastic! We relate to each other as friends and fellow church members withoutimposing our own belief systems on each other, and we get along just fine! One thing we do not do is censure any member of the group especially because of the nature of his background. It's kind of like the way all churches really ought to be.

 

And now I invite you to stand up and talk back. Let me know what you think what you may have resonated with or further thoughts on the subject of walking the talk, or biblical terrorism. This time is yours .......

 

END