The Reverend Mark DeWolfe Sermon
DO YOU HAVE TO CALL IT RELIGION?
April 24, 1983
This morning is a special Sunday for us here at the Unitarian Congregation of South Peel. This morning we have asked many of you to join us because you are our friends. We asked you to be here especially this Sunday so that as a group we can show you who we are. This is the first time we’ve taken the opportunity to say to those people who are close to us, “this is our church and this is want it means to us. We ‘ve chosen to do this together because of all religions, Unitarian Universalism is a difficult one to explain; also, because by inviting you to this special “Guest Sunday” we hope you can see how membership in the family of this congregation enriches our individual lives. We also hope that you will see that our doors and our hearts are open and that there are few reasons to remain a stranger when in fact you are our friend.
How do we explain our religious style of life? Perhaps it’s easiest to tell you who we aren’t. Number one: we aren’t the Moonies; that’s the Unification Church. Number two: we aren’t the church that doctorates in the mail; that’s the Universal Life church. Number three: we aren’t the mystic spiritualist church; that’s the Unity movement. Our religion is older than all of those, and yet a way of life that is new with each individual. We are a different church, and a church that makes a difference in the lives of each person who comes here.
To explain how old, we are: the Unity movement, by comparison, is only a little over a century old; the Moonies and the Universal Life churches all began within the lifetimes of us who are gathered here. Our roots go back to the Protestant Reformation; but like a tree, we have grown a steady trunk and sprouted new branches; as branches do not resemble roots, yet belong to the same tree, our faith does not resemble its Reformation forebear yet answers to the same name and has the same genetic characteristics,
Unitarianism began in the sixteenth century, when Biblical scholars in Europe realised that there Is no Biblical reason for believing in the doctrine of the Trinity. To come to this conclusion, they had required and fought for the personal freedom to interpret religion so that it was consistent with what their reason told them they could believe and what their hearts told them they loved most deeply. The early Unitarians recognized that religion is a matter of conscience, and that belief can not really be enforced; therefore, they matched their emphasis on freedom of conscience with an emphasis on tolerance of individual differences.
The other root of our religion is in an eighteenth and nineteenth century movement called Universalism. The Universalist Church taught that the doctrine of hell the idea that God would eternally punish the vast majority of humankind this doctrine was likewise unscriptural; there was not a single Biblical reason for accepting it, The Universalists looked around them and saw a beauty in the world, an order, a mystic harmony, which led them to believe that the world is in Frost’s words, “the right place for love,” not a prelude to endless torment. Like the Unitarians, the Universalists insisted on the right of individuals to come to religious truth on their own terms, in ways that were consistent with their individual consciences. Both Unitarians and Universalists embraced the advancing knowledge of the world wrought by scientific exploration; Darwin, Priestly, and Benjamin Rush all were early Unitarian Universalists. In the early 19th century, the Unitarians became Universalist in their thinking and the Universalists became Unitarian; only in 1961 did the two denominations merge to form our current Unitarian Universalist movement.
That’s a brief summary of our history. 1 could tell you stories of our religious heritage that would keep us here for weeks; but the real question before us is what do we, your friends, find in this congregation that enriches our lives; that leads us to do that unfashionable thing, joining a church; why do we come here week after week when we could be at home reading the New York Times or enjoying a lazy morning brunch?
What brings us here? People who join Unitarian Universalist congregations are marked by two things: the first is a serious interest in what we can only call religious questions. Yet religion is a tainted word: it brings up images of extremists, apologists, and people who turn a blind eye to reality in order to preserve a secure view of the world, and their place in it. What fascinates us are religious questions which crop up in our lives. Let me distinguish what a religious question is:
Richard McBride, a Catholic theologian, sets out the differences in kinds of questions, kinds of intellectual explorations, like this : a scientific question asks who, what or how; a philosophical question asks how or why, but in immediate terms, by which I mean in terms of what is readily perceivable, what we can understand and know, based upon what is immediately before us, our experience. Religious questions concern themselves with “what does it mean?” or “to what purpose?”
To explain what I mean by religious questions I must explain what I mean by religion. When people think of religion, what frequently comes to mind are churches and temples and shrines; hymns and sacred music and prayers; priests and monks, shamans and nuns, rabbis and inquisitions, ritual and sacred books. Those are the artifacts of religion; they are the institutions created out of humanity’s religious impulse. But the religious impulse itself is something different.
The Latin root of the word “religion” is “religare” — a verb meaning “to bind together again”. In connection with religious institutions, we might leap to the conclusion that what is religious is what binds us in, what limits our thinking and feeling, what tells us what we may and may not do. But that’s not how “religare” came to mean “religion”
Think of how you experience the world. Beginning as a helpless infant, a person receives seemingly random impressions of the world. The presence of mother and father is the constant which just seems to organize random experience, to connect experience and action with good and bad feeling. As older children and adults, we look for ideas, principles, concepts which might render what seems random into an ordered, understandable world; we look for ways to change chaos into cosmos.
Mircea Eliade, the dean of historians of religion, demonstrates in his book The Sacred and the Profane how this works in the lives of primitive peoples. In their myths, the world was chaotic until the creator — god entered and ordered it — creating a sense of peace, a north, a south, and east and a west, an up and a down and all manner of ordered space for ordered living. Even nomadic peoples on several continents have this common feature to their myths — they tell how the chaotic world becomes ordered,
The human compulsion to create myths stems from a need to understand the world around us — to find meaning in our experience. Myths and religions emerge out of a need to make our world understandable, to bring the random together in sensible order, to bind together again what seems broken and chaotic.
The religious impulse, then, is not that different from the scientific or the philosophic — all three attempt to render sensible a world we meet as a mystery. Yet the three endeavours are quite different. Science is ultimately a description of how our physical world is put together. It asks “what, and how”, “for what Philosophy attempts to deduce truths about our experience, asking “what can I know?” and “how can I know it”? Neither area can completely answer the question, “what does my life, my experience mean?” t ‘What purpose is there to existence?” “How do I make these experiences make sense?” “Can human life have any ultimate meaning?” These are religious questions : they are questions which ask how we can bind together our disparate experiences into a sensible understanding of the world.
Most religions offer a key metaphor as the one concept which gives meaning to human life. To use two familiar examples, in Judaism, the metaphor is the covenant relationship between god and the people of Israel. In Christianity the metaphor is the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Each metaphor summarizes the root experiences in which the truth about human life is to be found.
Most Unitarian Universalists come to our congregation with no commitment to traditional religious metaphors. Some of us, raised in orthodox religions, have rejected them outright; some were raised without religious training and so have no investment in them. But what brings us together is a common desire to look at the meaning of life; to consider our lives seriously and to ask the hard questions of “what does it mean?”
One thing we have learned is that our understanding of religious issues changes as our lives change. As we grow and develop — and we are all growing and developing regardless of our ages — so do our understandings change, Truth is not to us something static and eternal; truth is something which advances.
Because we see not only our own lives but also human history as a progressive coming to know, we insist on personal freedom to believe what we can believe. Christian history particularly is riddled with attempts to enforce people to believe what their reason and experience told them they could not; for years Unitarians and Universalists were condemned as heretics and burned at the stake, We would not restrict new truth if it were to be found among us, and it is found among us in our own lives every day.
While we have no creed, we do share certain values. I ‘ve mentioned some of these earlier: what has been called “discipleship to advancing truth”; personal freedom in matters of conscience; the sense that our religion should not go contrary to our reason; that we should not only tolerate but respect the differences among us and among all people. We believe the way to truth is not by way of revelation to a selected few called prophets but that truth is there to be uncovered for all of us. We believe that every individual has an inherent worth; in the face of evil we affirm people and their capacity for goodness. We believe that the religion one professes with one’s lips should be professed as well in the way one lives one’s life; hence among us are found a wide variety of social activists. We are people deeply in love with life, despite its confounding moments and its times of deep mystery. These are values we share, not ideas which must be subscribed to. But one last value remains to be examined.
We are people who value our freedom but also who ask religious questions. One can pursue both values without joining a Unitarian congregation. Libraries are full of books on religion; one can in freedom use them to excess. But we join in the fellowship of this congregation because we also value community. We particularly value the community which allows each of us to be him or herself on his or her own terms, a community which values us for who we are in our individual particularity. But most of all we value this community because we find people here who like us face the task of living with questions. We may not have the same answers but we support each other in our questioning. And we learn from each other. In our conversations; in Sharing Time during the service; in classes and workshops and over dinners, the experiences we share, each from our different viewpoints, enlarges the world. The community of a Unitarian Universalist Congregation is special to us not only because it accepts us as we are but also because it enlarges our sense of the world.
This congregation is a group of people who value freedom and community, who value human life and the life of the planet Earth, who seek the hidden reckonings at the base of our experience. This is what it means to be religious, Unitarian Universalist—style. Those for who religion is a matter of disvalue of enforced belief and hypocrisy, of empty ritual and irrelevant preaching, such people ask us why we call what we do “religion”. Why use a word tainted with abuse, a word synonymous with inquisitions and wars of religion? And in a congregation where one is free to be an atheist if one so chooses, do you have to call it religion?
I believe the religious enterprise is the most human. To the best of our knowledge, we are the only creatures on this planet who look at our lives and ask questions of meaning. The religious enterprise embodies our highest aspirations even as it has excused our inhumanities. The artifacts we create to express the questions and the answers — churches, dogmas, creeds — have been perverted into tools of oppression. But the religious impulse is deeply ingrained in our human makeup — hence the effort to make sense out of our lives in ways that do justice to our freedom, our dignity and our complexity, but most of all do justice to our continuing evolution — this effort is religious in its highest sense. It is an effort which gives meaning to our lives. To call it anything less than religion is to demean the attempt.
Religion is for me the attempt to express and put into practice the deep love affair I have with life — with the wonder of men, women and children, the beauty of the seasons, the wonder of the world, I choose to do that as a Unitarian Universalist minister; the people in the family of this congregation choose to express that love in the things they do here. Ours is a religious style of life that is as deep as it is difficult to explain; it is also open, We invited you here so we could tell you who we are and how we operate. We also want you to know that you are welcome here — we are not a mysterious, mind-bending cult, but a community of warm, friendly people — whose door is open.
Reverend Mark DeWolfe
