"Seeing the World Afresh; The First Smooth Stone"

Rev. Dr. Joshua Snyder, October 7, 2001

This morning, and in the next few months, I want to experiment with a different style of sermon.  This is known as the sermon series.  A sermon series is a collection of sermons all pertaining to one topic or theme, but approach it from different angles.  In this case I want to go back to a topic that I have returned to quite often because it is perhaps the central question of our faith: "What is Unitarian Universalism anyway?"  There are probably at least as many ways to answer that question as there are Unitarian Universalists, probably more.  Perhaps the most useful source for me has been the writings of the Unitarian theologian James Luther Adams, who in his book "Being Human Religiously" directly takes on the question of what is Unitarian Universalism through his so-called "Five Smooth Stones" of Liberal Religion.  So beginning today, and once a month I will be presenting a sermon on each of these guiding principles of our religion.  Each sermon stands can stand by itself, but hopefully when one puts them all together you get something greater than its parts.  A good analogy to the sermon series might be the toys you get in a McDonalds Happy Meal.  Each toy is complete in and of itself, but if you keep going to McDonalds every week for six weeks or so, then you can connect all of the toys in a string and they will interact with each other.  Don't ask me how I know this.  Hopefully at the by the time we get to the final Smooth Stone we will have something just as spectacular.

Unitarian Universalism is unique from almost every other form of religion in the West because we do not base our religious life around a central creed or statement of belief.  This presents us with both advantages and disadvantages.  Obviously the advantage is that this form of being religious allows for a great deal of individual and community freedom of belief.  However there are disadvantages as well.  Any of you who have been cornered at a cocktail or dinner party where the question of "So what do you Unitarians believe?" has been put to you.  Why is this so difficult to answer?  Why is it that we feel that there is some onus upon us to explain our religion that does not seem to be there for Lutherans or Methodists even when they may be at equally a lost to explain their religion, as we are ours?  Honestly there is no one comprehensive reason why this is.  It seems to me though that Unitarian Universalists, after years of theological debate and vitality, have deconstructed themselves into oblivion.  Without one statement or creed to tell us who we are, we have forgotten our own tradition.  The result has been either to represent Unitarian Universalism as merely a collection of religious voices from other traditions, or as the lowest common denominator of religious and ethical thought, watered down into a set of "principles" for those who do not really want to engage in a meaningful understanding or our tradition.

The challenge then is to somehow provide an articulation of our liberal religious tradition without making it into a creed.  The temptation to make such an articulation a creed is very tempting.  Although they are coercive and hurtful, creeds give us clarity.  They allow us to say "We believe these things, and if you don't then you are not one of us."  People like the clarity that a creed gives them more than the ambiguity that non-creedalism brings with it.  Indeed, people prefer the assurance that a creed gives them over the ambiguity of non-creedalism to such an extant that they may persecute or even kill someone who is even tempted to blur the lines of who is God's chosen people and who is not.  This can be seen not only in the events of recent weeks in our country but also in history.  The Crusades and the Inquisition were both attempts to maintain the integrity of a creed even at the expense of people's lives.

Fortunately there are those who have spoken out against the coercion of clarity, and have been brave enough to live with some ambiguity.  These people, the early Unitarians and Universalists, were willing to ask hard questions of the religions of their day.  They asked, who is my neighbor when Jesus commands me to love my neighbor?  Is it literal?  Does it include only my fellow countrymen or fellow religious followers?  Or is it wider than that?  Does my neighbor in fact include everyone in the world?

I have given you this rather general history lesson for a reason.  The First Smooth Stone of Liberal Religion that James Luther Adams puts forth is, "That revelation is continuous.  Meaning has not been finally captured.  Nothing is complete, and thus nothing is exempt from criticism."  What does it mean to say that, "revelation is continuous"?  Perhaps it is better to begin from the opposite direction.  The belief that revelation is "closed" is an idea that shared by many religions including Christianity, Judaism and Islam.  This is merely the notion that God, or some other religious authority, has spoken through this holy book and has closed shop ever since.  There will be no new additions or corrections to the Torah, the Bible, or the Qu'ran.  The deadline for submissions has past forever.  All revelation is contained within these books and no other.  Of course this leaves one open to what I like to call "prophetic one-upmanship."  The Jews had Moses as their prophet of the law.  Then the Christians came along and said that Jesus, while containing everything Moses said, added to it in such a way as to make it the one true and complete revelation of God.  But then the Muslims came a long and said the same thing about Mohammed; he trumps both Moses and Jesus.  Then not to be out done, the Baha'is claim that Baha'ullah trumps Mohammed, a belief that has not served them well in their native Iran.  As soon as one person claims that the truth is closed off to everyone else, someone inevitably comes along to claim that they instead received the last edition of God's heavenly newsletter.

If we look at the way the Bible came to be written we see that the reason that there can be no further additions is that there were so many heresies floating around.  In order to gain clarity, and to fight against religious ambiguity, the Christian powers that be picked their favorite books that were floating around the ancient churches, which also happened to be the ones that kept them in power, and stated definitively that these are the words of God.  The same impulse that leads one to creedalism leads one to closed revelation.  

What then does it mean to say, as James Luther Adams, and a number of our other ancestors have claimed, that revelation is ongoing throughout history?  It means that religious truth and meaning can come from literally anywhere at any time.  This is what Unitarian Universalists believe, that very few other religions, certainly in the West at least, would agree with.  We claim that the holy comes forth in our lives through many vehicles including but by no means limited to Holy Scriptures.  I am constantly faced with this reality from a purely functional point of view.  Like many of you I get the "What is a Unitarian Universalist?" question, but I also get interesting permutations of it.  When people find out that I am a Unitarian Universalist minister, one the questions I almost always get is, "So what do you preach about?"  If you are not following a cycle of Biblical passages, when where do you get the content of your sermons?  Definitely a question I have asked myself many an afternoon in my office.  Just as some UUs may be tempted into creedalism, some UU ministers may be tempted to use a lexcionary; it just makes life easier!  What do I preach on: Anything from 2001 A Space Odyssey, to Alanis Morissette songs, to the Dalai Lama, and my job as a grocery bagger after college.  Each and every one of those experiences can be a vehicle for religious insight.  We don't close ourselves off to just one, but rather live in the ambiguity of everything being possible.  This is a very mystical insight in some ways.  Imagine going out of your house some morning and looking at what you see there, smelling the fresh brisk fall air, and being open to it all.  This is seeing the world afresh each day.  It is a deep understanding that all of life speaks to us, and we may or may not choose to listen.  If any of you have ever received an e-mail from me, you may have noticed a quote at the bottom of the page by the Zen Master Dogen that expresses this well.  It says, "To study Buddhism is to study the self.  To study the self is to forget the self.  To forget the self is to be enlightened by everything."

Ralph Waldo Emerson saw this very clearly.  He rebelled against the Unitarian Christianity, which his father and William Ellery Channing, helped to bring into being.  He felt that the Unitarians had become too intellectual and were too worried about Biblical criticism, and were not really getting to the human soul.  He felt that God, or what he would call the Oversoul, was to be found in nature not the library.  God was in the midst of Walden Pond not Harvard Yard.  He longed for a religion that felt truth and not just pondered it.  He wanted a larger God than what the Bible could provide.  For Emerson revelation was in every blade of grass and in the eyes of every person he met.  He and the other Transcendentalists pushed us beyond the comfortable definition of Unitarianism of the Book, and into an Unitarianism of the soul.

Certainly Emerson is who I think of when I read James Luther Adams' First Smooth Stone that revelation is continuos and ongoing.  James Luther Adams believed that all of our ideas, and especially our religious ideas, are dependent upon our time and place in history, culture, and nature.  Our symbols of God or the Holy are contingent upon who and where we are.  Many of you may be familiar with the image of God as the Old Man with a white beard in the sky, or you may know the image of the Devil as one with the hindquarters of a goat and horns on his head.  The former image many scholars believe is a stylized version of the Greek God Zeus.  Zeus is depicted in a very similar way, and it may be that as Christians were converting the pagan Romans that they described God using the symbols and conventions they were already using.  Similarly, the Devil looks an awful lot like the Greek God Pan, best known for playing his flute.  These are symbols that in a given culture point to something deeper than themselves; they attempt to point to a cosmic struggle between good and evil.  We occupy a different time and culture, and therefore different symbols will be appropriate for our understanding of this deeper reality of meaning and truth.  Thus James Luther Adams is telling us that while some symbols for the Holy may be useful at one time, in the future they may need to be abandoned for something that more effectively points to this reality.  In some cases it may be that the word "God" does not express the idea of a creative, sustaining reality in the world, and may need to be replaced.  It may be that the traditional notion we call "God" is an idea whose time has come, and better language is now appropriate.  This is what I believe Nietzsche meant when he said that God is dead.  
We live in an age where we must come up with new language.  Adams believed that there is a creative, transformative; sustaining presence in the universe that is above and beyond any particular version of what one might call God.  Indeed, theology is merely a succession of rough drafts to try and articulate what this reality is for our lives today.  It is an enterprise that strives to make meaning out of life.  Therefore there is never one particular image or story that comprehensively covers what this sacred reality of truth and meaning actually is.  There may be better or worse versions of a story for a given time and place but never one for all time.  Religious Liberals, Adams would claim, understand this and adapt their images of the sacred accordingly.  We have some ambiguity about us and this allows us to adapt to new understandings of the holy.  This could include a modified understanding of the term God for Christians, or Buddha for the Buddhists, or the Goddess for the Pagans, or Martin Heidegger's notion of Dasein for the Atheists.  What ever we call it, it calls us towards greater truth, beauty, and goodness.
The difference between Religious Liberals and Fundamentalists can thus be understood in terms of how we attempt to move closer to truth, beauty, and goodness.  A Fundamentalist would claim that only one sacred text is comprehensive and definitive.  The Religious Liberal would look not only to sacred texts but also to nature, to his or her personal relationships, to their communities and families, and to their minds and hearts, and personal experiences.  I believe that the transformative creative and sustaining power of the universe always challenges our notions of our life and ourselves.  Religious liberals are the ones with the courage to face this challenge.
If it is true that revelation is continuous, then we swim in the being of the Holy.  Then everything we do is worship.  On Sunday mornings we may be explicit about worship, but in reality we worship all of the time.  We are in contact with the sacred when we are at committee and Board meetings, when we greet a friend or new person at coffee hour, and when we clean up and throw away the coffee downstairs.  We are also at worship when we are with our families, at work, or alone by our selves.  In each of these situations there is a deeper reality of truth and meaning asking us to become better people than we already are.  This is what the Christians mean, or what they should mean, when they talk about praying without ceasing.  Buddhists practice sitting meditation to develop mindfulness for the rest of the day. Just as you would practice a piano for the big recital so too should we "practice" our religion so that we emerge from meditation we can meet life with wisdom and compassion.
May we have ears to hear and eyes to see that Holy sacred presence that at every moment of our lives is asking and pleading with us to work for the good, the true, and the beautiful.  May we be open to that revelation continuously so that we may see the world afresh day after day after day.  Amen, Blessed Be.