Sermon Archives : 2005/2006

Singing the Journey

Rev. Jason Shelton  ·  August 14, 2005

What makes our faith worth singing about?

About a year and a half ago I was in Boston for the first meeting of our new hymn task force. We spent a good deal of our time trying to figure out what the songs in our book should be about – what is it about Unitarian Universalism that needs to be sung? While we were eating lunch one day, one of my colleagues asked the question that was at the heart of our deliberations. He asked, “What are our stories?” What he meant by this question was, “What is our guiding mythology, our meta-narrative, the stream of tradition whence we come – what is it we have that’s worth singing about?” But someone replied, “Well, the most common story is that people say they never knew that there was a church like this, and that they’d been Unitarian Universalists all of their lives.”

It was a fairly innocuous exchange, but I think it gets right at the heart of a difficult issue facing Unitarian Universalists today. When asked to tell our story, we have a tendency to respond with my story. We too often fail to see beyond our own personal journeys or that of our particular congregations to recognize that we are part of a grand and noble tradition which informs and supports us as we shape our religious life today. This failure manifests itself in a rabid individualism which threatens to corrupt our souls. For years our leaders and theologians have been warning us that our tendency toward individualism in the extreme is our Achilles’ heel as a movement; that we will pay a price in the public sphere for our “personal freedom at all costs” approach to the religious life.

And when it comes to our theological credibility in the larger community, I think we are already paying that price. We get plenty of press coverage these days, but almost without fail our blurbs in the paper or on the news paint a picture of a group of predictable liberals taking predictable liberal stands on issues of social justice or politics without any mention of the theological heritage which informs our position. It’s as if we want to have a religious voice in the public debate without claiming the theological authority necessary to be taken seriously, and it is to our great disadvantage that we continue in this vein.

Several years ago I attended an Interfaith Alliance breakfast in which Welton Gaddy was invited to speak. Gaddy, president of the national Interfaith Alliance, spoke on issues of church and state. Afterwards I was talking with one of my former professors from divinity school who happens to specialize in these issues. She was saying that we needed to form a broad coalition of religious leaders to address the issues involved. Then she turned to me and said, “But you (Unitarian Universalists) can’t help. Everyone already thinks you’re too secular, and they’re afraid of becoming you.”

The only thing more painful than her words was the realization that she was right. And it’s not that we really are too secular, or that we don’t have a solid theological foundation. It’s that most folks outside of our communities don’t see it, and we haven’t been doing a very good job of claiming it.

Let me frame it another way. When I read in the paper how religious leaders are responding to some issue or another, I generally see two things. First, there is the statement of the church’s position, and then there is a reference to some theological or biblical authority which affirms their claim. To be sure, there are often different positions drawn from the same authority, but nonetheless there is a sense of the position being grounded in something deeper than individual conviction.

On the other hand, when we Unitarian Universalists make statements concerning those same issues, we have a tendency to talk about rights and principles, or about the guarantees of the constitution. We focus on the inherent worth and dignity of the individual, which, to be sure, is good and important. But the ACLU does that, too. My professor’s comment points out that many of our fellow religionists think of us as little more than the ACLU with a choir. And while our constitution or the bill of rights are amazing documents, they are no basis of authority for a religious tradition that wants to be taken seriously by larger community of faith.

Now I’m not saying that we need to go and find or create some authoritative body or book to whom we Unitarian Universalists should swear our allegiance. What I am hoping is that we will be able claim the tradition which is already there, the theological, ethical and moral tradition which is our inheritance as religious liberals.

In most Unitarian Universalist churches you can find a copy of our principles and purposes, which in many cases have been used as the defining statement of our faith. Many of our kids have even memorized the first section – the seven principles – and lots of people have found ways to set them to music in some form or another. But if we look carefully at how they are often used, I think we’ll find that the majority of our congregations tend to focus only on this first section, and that it is primarily used as an affirmation of the individual – of my rights, my inherent worth and dignity, my story – even though such is clearly not the intent of the statement.

But the second section – the sources of our faith – is where we get into our story, and I fear that it’s largely overlooked. Here we claim that our religious tradition draws from many deep wells, and that we embrace the wisdom of Christian, Jewish, Humanist, Pagan and other traditions. Yet we are also very clear that we don’t accept every aspect of those traditions, as not every Buddhist, Humanist or Christian teaching is reflective of our best understanding of what it means to be people of faith. What we claim as authoritative are those traditions which deepen our understanding of the redemptive and transformative power of love. This, I believe, is the theological heart of our faith.

So, when we find ourselves asked to comment about an issue of contemporary public debate such as gay marriage, we can say with clear conviction that “we stand on the side of love.” But we don’t do so just because our individual consciences tell us that it’s right, or because we think the constitution says we should. We dare to make such a bold claim because we believe that the lives and teachings of the Buddha, of Jesus, of Socrates and Micah, of Francis David and Michael Servetus, Hosea Ballou, Olympia Brown, Theodore Parker, Julia Ward Howe, James Reeb and so many more showed us that such a stand is our moral and theological imperative in response to oppression and injustice. While they may never have imagined this particular issue being conscionable in their own time, their legacy enables us to see and celebrate the boundless potential for love to take root in our lives now and in our world today. Our affirmation of love in all its forms is merely the next step on a noble and determined journey toward that great day when love will conquer hatred and fear.

When we kneel at the altar of secularism, when we gush incessantly about the rights and privileges of the individual, when we talk about the problems in our society without even the slightest reference to what draws us together and holds in community, then we justify the fears of other religious liberals who worry that they might become us. When we neglect the sources of our faith and claim only our individual conscience as our guide without talking about what it is that informs our conscience, we give up the authority that gives us theological credibility in the public sphere. And if we do that, what on earth will we have to sing about?

That’s certainly the question we had to deal with on the new hymn resource commission. If you look at the table of contents, you’ll see that the book is divided into six categories – the six sources of our living tradition – with roughly the same number of songs in each. What this songbook contains are pieces of music which address the big and sometimes difficult questions of the journey of faith. And they do reflect our heritage and tradition in lots of ways, reminding us that we aren’t alone in our religious quest – that we sail in a wide stream that goes back thousands of years and embraces the faith and wisdom of countless teachers and seekers of truth.

As Tagore says, it is not time for us to take shelter in silent obscurity. But this may well be our destiny if we are unable to reconcile the fact that my personal story is only a part of our much larger story. Our forebears often risked their very lives to engage in religious questions from a liberal perspective, and we must be good stewards of the tradition they have entrusted to us. While they may never have envisioned that their questions and actions might someday lead to the religious tradition we now claim, or that they might somehow inspire the social agenda which we now work to fulfill, our knowing and acknowledging that we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses will give us plenty to sing about. We know we already have it. But we need to be more passionate about learning it, teaching it and preaching it, so that we will all be better prepared to proclaim it as we go. Perhaps then others will need not fear our having a place at the table, a place that is our inheritance as people of deep and abiding faith.

May it be so. Amen.