From Scared to Sacred
A sermon delivered at the 2008 Annual General Meeting of the Pacific Northwest District of the Unitarian Universalist Association by Reverend Dr. Peter J. Luton, Senior Minister of East Shore Unitarian Church, Bellevue, Washington.
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Two hundred years ago in the American Northeast, Calvinism was strangling the life out of faith. Calvinism, with its fealty to the notion of human depravity, with its distrust of the human moral imagination, and with its terror of the erotic, adhesive energy of Love—even God’s Love—Calvinism was choking the spirit of a people who were wrestling to learn to live together even when we did not look alike, think alike, believe alike or dream alike.
Orthodox religion squeezed hard to bring into line a recalcitrant people, a free people, an optimistic and forward-looking people. They sucked the living spirit out of you with the heat of brimstone and the fires of hell. They humiliated you with shame and made you feel like a wart or pimple, an ill-begotten worm within creation. They stifled your mind, your imagination, and your vision with the iron chains of creed and dogma.
Orthodox and established religious institutions maintained control of people’s souls through fear and bully tactics of intimidation and social marginalization. But our spiritual grandparents, the Unitarians and the Universalists, and a few other liberal-spirited, minority traditions like the Quakers and the Free Will Baptists and the Jews and the Deists, these free souls resisted the choke hold of orthodoxy. The liberal religious spirit preached brighter hope and more tender affection.
In 1805, against the iron (though rusting) wall of orthodoxy, Hosea Ballou, a self-educated Universalist minister published A Treatise on Atonement. His message of Divine Love and human kindness shook the foundations of orthodoxy. He declared that true faith liberates the human heart and mind to respond freely to God’s overflowing goodness and truth. Ballou and the Universalists experienced God as a God of Love and Light and Compassion, not a vengeful, judging God to be feared. We are born in love, not in sin. We have it within us to know and freely to choose what is good, true and beautiful. Ballou preached the universal salvation of all humankind. Everyone gets to heaven! Hard-eyed clerics ought not cajole, condemn and scare us witless. Ballou preached, “You are precious, good and worthy.”
And then in 1819, William Ellery Channing, the age’s pre-eminent liberal Christian minister, completed his break with Calvinism. He preached a sermon entitled Unitarian Christianity. In it he pointed to a new way in religion, a way that trusts reason as more reliable than unquestioned obedience to church authority or a particular sacred text. Channing saw spiritual growth happen through practicing virtue and loving kindness rather than mouthing creeds and fearing punishment. He said that we have minds for a reason and the reason is to use them. He said that Jesus’ moral teachings and vision of the just and loving society are compelling because love and justice are compelling. He preached, “You are precious, good and worthy.”
This is our endless sermon. It lures people from fear to faith, from the realm of the scared into the grace of the sacred. We proclaim human dignity, creative divine love, the unity of humanity and the oneness of creation, the interdependent web of all existence of which we are part. Unitarian Universalism is concerned with Life, with the things that make for Life. We preach, witness and act for more abundant Life today, and in our children’s and grandchildren’s tomorrows. And Lord knows our voice needs to be heard.
The human spirit is being strangled today as it was being choked two hundred years ago. (click here to read the entire sermon in a new window)