Pacific Northwest District of the Unitarian Universalist Association
From Scared to Sacred
by Rev. Dr. Peter J. Luton
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.
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. Today we gasp for air in a culture that pummels us with messages of fear and our own inadequacy. We are told: terrorists are going to get you; lead-poisoned toys are going to get you; skin cancer is going to get you; the streets are crawling with criminals and aliens who will get you; the economy is tanking and corporations are going to get you. Society tells us we’re too fat, too ugly, too poor, too foolish, too vulnerable, too uncool, too old, too dark-skinned, too hairy, too emotional, too cold, too pasty-faced, too sick to amount to much of a person…best to flee behind bulwarks of material pleasures: Hey, Martha! Where’s my Viagra and my iPod?We live in a culture of lifeless loneliness. A culture that reveres material wealth and immediate gain, the surface of life. A culture that oppresses and marginalizes the poor, the powerless, in short, anyone who is perceived as different, which equates to bad or dangerous. A culture that divides and sub-divides us into market segments and demographic cohorts, into races, religions and ethnicities. A culture that fears intimacy, that fears the hard work of confronting evil—especially the potential evil that dwells within ourselves.
Our common humanity finds it difficult to shine through the obfuscation and fog of deceit. Our common interest in creating peace and justice for all people is smothered by fear. Our natural desire to connect with others, to love, to transcend boundaries and differences is stymied and overwhelmed in the soulless culture of fear and loneliness.
I think that fear is a much larger element in congregational life than we generally allow. I suspect that our fear inhibits our ability to bless the world and to live out our faith’s promise and potential. As much as we reject the worm-eaten doctrines of original sin and eternal damnation, they still dwell like a nasty virus within us. Who hasn’t wondered at times if he or she really is a good person, a loving, kind and compassionate person? I fully get the t-shirt that prays: “Lord let me be half the person my dog thinks I am.”
I think fear keeps us small by inhibiting our ability to do the hard work of change and congregational growth. Churches that amount to much of anything are crucibles of transformation, communities in which souls grow in compassion and love, communities that bend society toward justice and equality. And for all our wonderfulness—and we are wonderful—too often congregational life sticks to the surface of things. We allow ourselves, in Thoreau’s words, to be derailed by nut shells and mosquito wings. We have to go deep. We have to challenge our comfortable assumptions about what it means to be a faithful person in an inspired congregation. We have to welcome people and ideas that rattle our comfortable cages.
Our religious ancestors used to call the church building a meeting house. People came to the church to meet, not as in committee meetings, but in genuine heart-to-heart, mind-to-mind, soul-to-soul meeting. They came to meet one another, and they came to meet their God. They came to wrestle with the meaning and direction of their lives. They came together and were bound together by their free and voluntary covenant, as they put it, “to walk together in such ways as the Lord shall make known to us.”
Our shared journey asks much of us. It asks us to be not afraid of the inner life, to not be afraid of meeting our own self and of meeting each other’s true, precious, imperfect self. Parker Palmer, a Quaker educator, activist and theologian, says that the way to God is down, not up. We have to go down into our souls and move through pain and fear that we are neither loved nor lovable into a faith and hope which affirms that each and every person is precious, good and worthy. In the oddity of the human spirit, we often resist the idea that we’re actually pretty damn good.
The poet May Sarton says that truly meeting one another requires that we “admit stark need” and share our imperfect, muddy, bloody, frightened little souls. We meet when we face down our fear, name and embrace it so that we can let it go and be free.
Let us go to the rock
Where the beasts hide
And kneeling there, pray
For some heart-cracking shock
To set us both free
From anger and pride.
Can I do it? Can you?
It means yielding all.
It means going naked
No refuge but rue,
Admitting stark need—
Eden after the fall.
from At the Black Rock by May Sarton
Can our communities of faith be that rock at which true meeting occurs? Can our congregations be the sanctuaries in which we are real with ourselves and one another? Can we be today what our religious ancestors were in their day, an antidote to fear, a stone of hope? Can our congregations be places where we learn to love? I believe they can and are.
At our best, acceptance and affirmation pump life through our communities. Our task is to make human worth and Divine Love more tangible. Our religious future calls us to be sacred communities, inspired not by fear but by love and hope. Be bold, be not afraid to look at our shadows and in our soul’s crevasses and see not only the abominable but the good, the worthy and precious core of our being. Timid people in anxious communities are content to carve out nice, cozy islands of refuge for themselves amid oceans of bad theology and bad values. They serve neither themselves nor their world. No more bunker mentality for us.
Our future lies in getting real with one another and truly walking with one another through Life’s valleys and over Life’s mountains. The growth of small-group ministries among us is most heartening to me. In small groups we can explore our own personal story and share it with trustworthy and compassionate people. Honest conversation and shared exploration shine light into the scary attics and cellars of our souls. Zora Neale Hurston spoke truth when she said, “Love makes your soul crawl out of its hiding place.”
It is time to crawl from our hiding places and get on with the ministry of growing souls and bringing peace and justice to our lives and the world. Our work together as a faith community is serious work. If we choose to accept the serious work of going deeper in our spiritual and faith journeys and if we melt our fears with the power of love, we can end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; we can make schools places where young minds grow and character is developed; we can heal the environment’s open sores; we can transform lives of despair into lives of hope, and hearts of stone into hearts of happiness. It begins with you and with me and how we live together, love together, work together, worship, pray, and play together in our congregations. It ends in peace and blessing for all people, everywhere.
We incarnate a powerful, hopeful, life-giving vision for the world in all its beauty and tragedy. We meet. We embrace. We hope. We heal. We love.
As individuals and as communities, we shall shed our fear of not being good enough. We shall embody the Spirit of Love and Life, the God of Truth and Hope in which we live and move and have our being. We shall pick up where the ancestors left off. We shall rattle the cages of oppressive, lifeless culture. We shall shed our scared selves, and we shall exude a sacred light by which to guide the world from its bunkers into the brilliant, clean, hope-filled air of a new day. We shall set the spirit free to Love.
This day and every day, may we know peace.
Blessed Be. Shalom. Salaam and Amen.