Anniversary Sermon

I delivered the following sermon at the General Assembly Anniversary Service in April 2003, held in St Mark's Unitarian Church, Edinburgh. This sermon is also on the website of the British Unitarians .

A Universalist Sense of Ministry


A key unifying factor in our variously named member congregations is that we do not require any formal statement of belief for ministry or membership. We take pride in being a creedless religious community, but we do this because we value individual religious expression and commitment too highly to allow coercion by others. Our aversion to creeds, however, should not be allowed to become an aversion to content. Each of us should have a developing religious perspective whose content we can share with others. Our promotion of the richness of diversity will appear very shallow to outsiders if all we offer is a content-free process. A content-free process is abstract to the point of coldness and while experts can get into a heated argument about how cold the dark side of Pluto is, that heat doesn't make Pluto any warmer.

I have identified with the Universalist side of our liberal religious community ever since I joined 42 years ago in the USA, having had previous contact with the Universalist Church in the village of Oak Park where I was born. Classical Universalism held that the Love of God leads ultimately to the salvation of every individual soul. This was a Bible-based faith that first appeared in Britain and America in "organised" congregations towards the end of the 18th century, slightly earlier than when various radical dissenting congregations were coalescing around the "Unitarian" label. In Britain, the leaders of the Universalist cause joined the Unitarian cause in that time, providing heart and vigour.

My personal creed, essentially Universalism of the old school with modern vocabulary and philosophical foundations, is as follows: God is Love and we are creatures of Love. We are created, nurtured, and fulfilled by creative love working within us, through us, and amongst us creating Truth and Beauty, Healing and Wholeness. Value arises from the activity of God's creative, dynamic Spirit, and value- oriented communities are central to developing individual potential and enabling just communities. Religion is more a matter of spiritual awareness and practical commitment than it is of rational theology.

There is a more recent use of "universalist" to mean universal heritage, unbounded by any particular faith vocabulary. At first sight these two uses of the word seem disjointed, but a closer look reveals that (in the old vocabulary I am no longer completely comfortable with) a loving God intending every soul to be saved provides everyone with insights sufficient for their progressive development. That is, God's care is not limited to those who accept a particular revelation centred on the life and death of Jesus. God's care has resulted in sufficient religious revelation/ guidance that those who have never heard of Jesus will also be saved with minimum need for corrective punishment. The complexity and depth of Reality have to be seen from various perspectives for a fuller understanding. We, from our limited cultural background, have much to learn by serious encounter with other cultures. I believe that it is NOT true that all religions are saying the same thing and it is NOT true that all insights are equally valid. But all religions are struggling with the same mysterious, complex reality and have learnt something unique to share with others. This, at least, is part of the perspective of the Universalist.

Contexts for tonight's service include the war in Iraq; the GA Theme of Removing Barriers; our GA financial difficulties with our concurrent discussion on organisational structure and goals; and even the survey of attitudes towards ministerial roles initiated by Resolution at the 2002 Meetings. I will not be addressing any of these contexts directly, although some of my perspectives may be apposite to some of these issues.

While the first reading was chosen with one eye on our new GA theme, it also reflects my personal approach to practical ministry. The second reading on the glory of God's work in evolution reminds us of the majesty of the process that helped us to get where we are; it also points to a broader degree of sympathetic reflection on Darwinian ideas than we usually credit. The Rev Henry Drummond was a professor of natural science to a religious community that we would normally judge to be illiberal, yet his attempt to harmonise his theological and scientific understandings is a marvellous example of liberalism. We typically distinguish between reasoning and feeling, head and heart. This can be helpful, but it can also take us too far from the real world in which our emotional and rational faculties are more or less integrated into our personalities. One word I have found useful is "sense", used for an awareness with both cognitive and emotional dimensions. My use of "sense" in the sermon title, therefore, points to both an attempt at dispassionate analysis and an expression of passionate commitment.

I'd like you all to do something for me for a few seconds. Look around at the people nearest you - to the left, to the right, in front, and behind. It wouldn't hurt to smile and acknowledge their existence. ......... What did you see? Someone you know well enough to know that they regularly and currently suffer from piles? Or their spouse is babysitting an autistic child so they can be here? Or their cousin/ daughter/ grandson has just been diagnosed as having cancer? Or that they are cheating on their partner and dreading exposure? (This does happen in Unitarian circles.) Or that they are facing the economics of redundancy? Perhaps you looked into the eyes of a stranger. Perhaps you smiled at someone who has a close family member in the armed forces serving in Iraq. Or someone with a physical or emotional impairment that makes "routine" tasks a daily struggle.

Virtually everyone in this building will have private sufferings -- physical, emotional, psychological, or spiritual, that are not readily visible to others. We usually appear OK even when we are screaming inside for comfort or release. Universalist theology starts with a God of Love, but it very quickly moves to an awareness of the reality and universality of suffering and builds its sense of ministry to the world on these twin foundations.

Universalist ministry is the ministry of the whole church to the whole world. Of course there are limitations, set by personality, resources, time, skills, but the goal is to remove barriers and build bridges to overcome what limitations we can. The same universalising process that led the Jews to shift their understanding of God from a tribal war champion to the Creator of the Universe now needs to be applied to our modern understandings of science and nature, whether we are talking cosmology or DNA. The dynamic, creative process shaping our richly diverse universe through billions of years has not chosen a small subsection of Earth's inhabitants for special favour and this is part of the universalist message, whether the context is sociological (confronting the various partialisms and phobias that permeate society) or theological (confronting the claims of special and particular salvation).

The right kind of leadership can enable our congregations to exercise ministry more effectively by providing example, encouragement, sensitive support, special skills and knowledge and training. This can be crucial in taking the ministry of the whole church to greater qualitative depths, where "ministry" means using our lives and resources to assist the creative process and "minister", means someone (including a Lay Pastor or Lay Leader) who is committing their working life (or a substantial part of it) to the special role of helping the congregation undertake its ministry. But members need to have the self-understanding that places them as key players on a team. Whether we are talking about prayer, pastoral care, social justice work in the community, publicity, interfaith contacts, or public worship, if "the minister" is doing it all, neither minister nor members are enabling the church to serve the world properly.

Our hopes, our commitments, our attitudes, and particularly our actions are the arena of our ministry. It's not good enough to say that God loves us, if this has no effect on how we relate to other people. Nor is it good enough to say that God loves the world if this has no effect on how we relate to our environment. Responsible and localised consumption; sustainable development; fair trade; tough curbs on pollution: too many issues for any one of us to focus on, but our faith that "God loves the world", means we will include some such issues in the patterning of our ministry.

Worship is frequently seen as the prerogative of "the minister". They have special training and hopefully special skills in helping congregations to worship but good worship is neither an academic exercise nor a matter of the group following the leader blindly; nor is it a matter of sitting passively and letting the leader "get on with it". Celebrating the spirit of life and love and beauty, focusing on the source of our values, increasing our devotion to a life of value, giving thanks for the bounty of life - all these require preparation and active focus in order to be effective. This ministry of worship is the responsibility of every member.

Carter Heyward has a passage in Cries of the Spirit about practical love where she says: "Loving involves commitment. We are not automatic lovers of self, others, world, or God. Love does not just happen. We are not love machines, puppets on the strings of a deity called "love". Love is a choice -- not simply, or necessarily, a rational choice, but rather a willingness to be present to others without pretence or guile. Love is a conversion to humanity -- a willingness to participate with others in the healing of a broken world and broken lives. Love is the choice to experience life as a member of the human family, a partner in the dance of life, rather than as an alien in the world or as a deity above the world, aloof and apart from human flesh."

We can start with a gloriously general principle like "God is Love". We can then move from the general to the particular: God loves us. We can ponder how, in a particular situation, we can respond to God's love. And when we respond in love and by being where that love is needed, we sense that God's love is present in our lives. We sense that our lives are bridges in the world between sin and salvation, between suffering and healing, between the general and the particular. As Kahlil Gibran put it, rather than seeing God in our hearts we see ourselves in the heart of God, at the centre of this awesome creative process at work in the world.

Personal commitment to a life shaped and guided by religious sensibilities is NOT a duty. It occurs as we reflect and respond to what we believe is valuable in and for our lives. Organising our personal resources to reflect what is valuable to us is an expression of commitment, not some imposed duty.

I now turn to a central practical implication of living out this view -- or not, as the case may be.

I believe that we desperately need a culture shift in our churches. In spite of possible political misunderstandings, we would do well to refer to ourselves as liberal religious communities rather than free religious communities. We say that revelation is not sealed but we often act as if our purses were. Forget the financial problems of the GA for a moment and look at where most of our congregations are - our congregations and our buildings that we say we love so much. How many of our ministers serve congregations where the live income funds a proper stipend for the minister? Simplifying somewhat, a congregation of 100 requires an average annual contribution of 1% gross income from each member to provide the minister with an income equal to the average of the congregation; a congregation of 40 needs an average contribution of 2.5%, and a congregation of 20 needs 5%. And this is just for the minister's stipend, not the cost of the whole ministry of the church.

If we see ministry as hiring someone to do ministry for us because we have some spiritual duty towards the world, this will be very different from seeing the called minister (or lay pastor or lay leader) as joining our religious community tohelp us to do our ministering. One reflection of this difference will be in our valuing of our support of our ministry.

For most of my adult life I have given a percentage of my gross income to charity in planned, regular giving -- the larger part of this going to various Unitarian causes. When I had small children and related responsibilities this percentage dropped to 1%, but is currently back above 5%. The value that each of you places on your local congregation and the situational stretching or squeezing that affects the actual amount you contribute is for each individual to judge, but I firmly believe that our congregations will never thrive until we support our own ministry. In words mostly of one syllable, one reason we are such poor givers is that too many of us see the ministry of our church as the job of someone we call a minister rather than as OUR, personal, ministry.

Fear of losing our congregations is strong, but the force of a positive commitment to share what we consider valuable is even stronger. Universalists proclaimed an end to fear as a primary motivation. We respond to God's love rather than God's wrath.

I close by illustrating what I mean by sharing the Parable of the Compassionate Jug by Idries Shah, a Sufi mystic who writes for "westerners".

In a hot, dusty, and dark hovel lies a man in agony, made worse by his inability to reach water to quench his thirst. A jug on a shelf on the other side of the room sees his plight and, moved by intense compassion, manages to shift itself to within arm's reach of the suffering man. In his thrashing about, the man discovers the jug and raises it to his lips, only to find that it is empty of water. In his frustration and anger he throws it against the wall and it breaks into pieces.

The progress of humanity depends on the productive functioning of value-oriented communities. As Erich Fromm stated in The Art of Loving, "Love is productive"! Our liberal religious approach has a unique gift to share, and we should be able and willing to share it, but to do this effectively, we each have to search our hearts for the lure, the sense of importance and direction that represents our patterning of our lives in response to a God of Love. This patterning includes action and resource priorities. If our churches do not adequately minister, they will be swept aside by some developing form of community valuing (perhaps even by theatre musicals as mentioned earlier in these Meetings) - and will deserve to be swept aside as shards of empty jugs. The answer is not to shift responsibility for our ministry even further onto a dedicated few. The answer is not to expect some other level of organisation to do our ministry for us. The answer is not to crouch in fear of being swept away, rather to commit our individual selves to shared ministry and commit our resources in line with our truly-felt value of our congregations, which we claim to love. Think on it: We are aware of being part of a dynamic creative force whose beauty and complexity stretch from the majesty of the cosmos to the quantum workings of particles we can only see at third hand. And in our fear and partial understandings we pull back from the very commitment that would make us effective ministers to our suffering world and its inhabitants.

In a few moments we will thank ministers and a lay pastor who are retiring and welcome those starting their ministry with us. Our retiring ministers and lay pastor have together given us 139 years of service, in most cases decades of their lives, leading the ministry of our churches. These men and women have given themselves to help us exercise our ministry for our fellow men and women; for the care of our social values of justice and community; for the care of our congregations that nurture and promote those values; and for the love of our world and its protection from exploitation, pollution, and destruction. We have indeed been blessed by their commitment.

We have new ministers, lay pastors and lay leaders coming through training. Three of them are being welcomed tonight. May we be blessed in future years by their commitment and may they find collaborative and supportive communities in our churches.

Amen.

24 February 2010

Reflections on Unitarianism / Universalism in response to an enquiry

The enquiry (Oct 2008):

Being a born Catholic, I've been struggling against my doubts of Jesus being the divine God himself…. I just discovered Unitarianism and Universalism recently only, but it fits so well with my thoughts, feelings and beliefs!

However, my question is, should Unitarian-Universalism be considered a religion? Can I consider myself a Unitarian-Universalist when I disagree with certain rules or principals that define Unitarianism or Universalism individually? Can I consider myself a Unitarian-Universalist if I don't want to go to Sunday worship sessions?

The Sunday worship that is conducted seems to be a very Christian thing to do. What exactly do the sermons or services entail?

My answer (very slightly edited for the Blog):

Whether or not Unitarian / Universalism is a religion or not depends, obviously, on the definition of religion that is used. A definition that requires a specific belief in the practitioner, or a specific system of beliefs, would have trouble including not only U*Us but also other groups which would consider themselves religious but not share the specifics. A definition that merely requires that some specific beliefs are held throughout the community would reject not just U*Us but most groups of sincere people because almost any group has more variety in it than its leaders promote. As you will know from your experience with the Catholic Church, it sidesteps this by having a definition based on acceptance of authority and beliefs are secondary to this. Other definitions focus on practices. Most U*Us choose a definition of religion which focuses on processes, particularly development, and while processes need concrete examples (including beliefs) for illustration, the examples are seen as secondary and changeable during the exercise of the process.

For a U*U, our religion is a community united in search, not a community united by common answers. Of course, there are limits to diversity within any group, but we err perhaps too much on self-expression and sometimes not enough on the community dimension of search. An individual's religion, therefore, is seen in attempts to connect lives with the totality of experience, personal and historical, giving shape and meaning to things like suffering, growth, love, death, integrity, etc.

Most U*Us feel that their own observations and reflections are insufficient in depth or breadth without the benefit of being in a sharing community with this sort of practice built in. I would say that yes, one can be a U*U without wanting to participate in regular worship -- but the qualitative level of one's own experience and the great talent most of us have for self-deception make this course second best, at best.

Sunday services are usually held on Sundays for social reasons -- it is a time relatively free from work commitments and a time that can usually be adjusted to family commitments. But Sunday is not a holy day for U*Us in any intrinsic sense. While the practice varies between societies and between congregations within a particular society, the following elements would be fairly typically included:

Opening

Singing

Prayers/ Meditation/ Silence for reflection

Readings

Sermon

Closing

The Opening is the formal beginning of time together. In recent decades most (but not all) of our congregations around the world will start by lighting a candle/ chalice and saying some words that both symbolise the values to be reflected on and call people together. There are examples from around the world on the ICUU website. ICUU circulates a monthly Chalice Lighting set of words that many of our churches use, although local or national compilations of such words are also very common.

Singing is one non-logical way for participants to participate more fully, i.e. move from being observers to participants. The Non-Logic is important -- not that we turn our minds off totally, but the aesthetic dimension is at least equally close to a sense of purpose in life as the rational. Singing is also a good way of helping the participants focus their energies -- in our practice we almost always sit for prayers or meditation and we almost always stand to sing. Typically hymns are spread through the service and our usual order of service is thus sometimes referred to as a hymn-sandwich.

Prayer/ Meditation: Few of our members seriously believe that petitionary prayer has any effect on the spirit of the universe, but some see value in such prayer as a focus of our thoughts and energies which may affect the way we see and do things. Praise and confession are elements of many prayers that we would find meaning in, although not necessarily the same meaning as other traditions where God is not only personified but anthropomophised. Many of our ministers and congregations have come to use the word 'meditation' rather than 'prayer' during a service, but the word 'meditation' is used rather loosely in this case to refer to a non-petitionary uplifting reading, perhaps with a musical background. Occasionally space is provided under this heading for members of the congregation to contribute during this period. Some churches, particularly in the USA, have a time of Sharing Joys and Concerns (with some slight variations on the name) where people are invited to come up to the front and say a few words about what is engaging their attention in family or world that morning. The Sharing of J&C is usually towards the front of the service and many ministers do not like it because of the difficulty of dealing with members that are enamored with the sound of their own voices.

Readings can be from almost any source. We do not have a set liturgy nor a 'church year' with fixed points of celebration requiring definite readings. Nor do we expect readings to come from 'Scripture'. The readings represent the sharing of the heritage, reminding us that worship takes place in the context of the life of the congregation and not just the moment. It is also a reminder that we have an attitude that the business of the congregation includes contributing to the heritage as well as transmitting it -- "Revelation is not Sealed" is a common phrase with us. Normally the person leading the weekly service chooses the readings with one eye on the theme for the service.

The Sermon, or address, is best when it is a bridge between the heritage and the contemporary concerns of the members, mediated by the personality and talents of the worship leader. This is not always possible. For example, when there is no settled leader and visitors fill the pulpit. A visiting preacher can only look to share their experience in some general areas of life. A sermon should include some tie-in to the benefits (not necessarily the superiority) of the liberal approach to religion which defines our movement, helping participants in their own developing spirituality. It can be theological, or historical, or aesthetic, or about practical action, but should not be a lecture. In most of our churches it is the high point of the service and ministers typically spend 2 to 3 days preparing the sermon.

The Closing is important as an expression of the covenant of the congregation: we are a church where people come together by choice, where our leadership is democratically chosen, where our basis is not common beliefs but a mutual commitment to live the best we can together. The Closing (usually a hymn plus a few sentences and maybe a congregation sung response) effectively is a commission to go out into the world and take whatever inspiration or strength or comfort we have shared to suffering people around us.

There are many other elements that can be part of U*U worship. Some congregations have a brief period of passing the peace (saying 'peace' or similar words with handshake or hug) at the begining, a few do this at the end as part of the Closing. Sometimes we have responsive readings; sometimes we have 'sacred dance' in place of a reading; sometimes the chalice candle is ritually extinguished to indicate the end of the service. There is the physical setting and its aesthetic “tone”. Usually there will be instrumental (normally organ or piano) music. Sometimes churches will have a banner (designed and made locally) which hangs in the church, visible but not the main focus -- at the national or district meetings / events these are brought out and paraded -- perhaps also at local civic events where appropriate.

In summary, public worship is a regular period where we gather as a community to use various means of deepening our conviction to God, although the word 'God' is not necessarily used. This period will normally contain rational, aesthetic, and simple ritual elements to encourage, direct, and foster a deeper commitment in the face of the pressures of the world that pull us towards a more materialistic and in-authentic life style. I would express this as the attempt to bring our lives and our world more into harmony with the divine potential that our faith assures is present in every occasion.

We do not, as a community, have any special Rules imposed on our members. Such rules as we have are only to maintain decent community while we share differences and the usual necessary rules to make democracy work. We have expectations of honesty in our dealings with each other and as much openness as the situation and our personalities can deal with. Naturally, in practice many of us do not live up to these ideals.

One can be a Unitarian by one's self, but it's not the natural way for 99% of us. In today's modern world, however, there are some innovative ways of keeping in touch with others in ways that foster deeper commitment, even when distance is a real hurdle.

John Clifford

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