The Second Smooth Stone: Persuasion, Not Coercion
A SERMON BY REV LINDA HART
The second of a series of five sermons on the fundamental principles of liberal religion.
It was a chilly night in the springtime. I was out on the street corner only steps from the teen centre where my friends and I hung out at the weekends. It could have been a Friday night or Saturday, and for reasons I can no longer remember, I stopped on our way there to talk with the born again Christians who came to evangelise those of us who had clearly gone astray. In our tattered blue jeans and t-shirts, with long hair, my friends and I were part of the counter culture of the early 1970's in suburban Washington, DC, following the lead of the hippies, convinced that love, rock and roll and drugs were the way in the world. These youthful evangelists must have believed – probably rightly – that we had fallen deep in sin and were in dire need of salvation.
It would be some years before I learned the youth group version of an old gospel song in which we sang ‘We are sinking deep in sin, won’t you come and push us in?’ It was the anthem they were convinced we were singing. But, nevermind.)
I stopped to talk to the little group of people in their tidy clothes, with their leaflets.
The best of the leaflets – they left them around the area where we could find them, so I had seen them many times – were the ones with cartoon depictions of depraved souls who suddenly lose their lives and find themselves cast into a pit of fire for all of eternity. The cartoon bubbles above their heads always included the sinners longing for the cool waters of heaven and regretting their sinful ways. The last page included advice upon how to become born again with the language of the prayer that we were meant to pray after being terrified by the vision of what might come of us, we woeful sinners soon to be lost for all eternity. My friends and I would act out the various parts with appropriate drama, always collapsing in fits of giggles before we got to the main act of praying to have our souls saved.
But this one night, I stopped and began to chat with them, and my friends all carried on to the centre to order the greasy chips that we all loved to eat, play table tennis, and listen to music. It was just me and four of them, and they were determined to save my soul.
I don’t remember much of the conversation, honestly, just the feelings of being pressured, told again and again that I was doomed and needed the love of Jesus to be set free. One after the other they told me of the wages of sin, that I was stained with it, that I had to do this. They told me that they loved me and wanted this for me. I don’t know how long we were there, but in the end, I said the prayer and was born again.
It took some time for the cracks to appear in my apparent change of heart from being a committed Unitarian Universalist pluralist to then seeing that the only true way was a conversion to that particular brand of evangelical Christianity. Wondering about the seeming contradiction between an all powerful God and the suffering in the world – in particular the suffering of innocents – started my return to my first community of faith, the answers that didn’t answer the questions I had continued it, and the disapproval of my ongoing wondering assured my return to my Unitarian Universalist church community where I had been accepted and valued no matter what the content of my belief.
I could not have told you then that I was finding my way back to one of the central principles of a liberal faith, but that’s what I was doing: after submitting to a coercive argument, one that was meant to frighten me, that relied upon exploiting emotional vulnerabilities, and required absolute unquestioning allegiance, in time I discovered that I was not persuaded and could not give my heart to that set of beliefs, could not live within that community. I know that some of you here have had similar experiences in the churches from your past. The answer to your questions, like mine, was simply ‘because the Bible says so’ which more often meant, ‘because I say so’.
It is not enough of an answer.
Liberalism, the liberal way in religion, according to James Luther Adams, asserts that ‘relations between persons should rest of mutual free consent, not coercion.’ In our tradition, there are two intertwining paths that take us to this understanding.
The first has to do with the longstanding history of the liberal spirit seen in those who have taken issue with the church. As Adams notes, liberalism began with protests against ecclesiastical pecking orders. In our own tradition, the dissenters who eventually called themselves Unitarians were wholly a part of this. When it was demanded that they ascribe to a long list of beliefs, many found that they could not in good conscience do so. From their own study of the Bible, they found that many of the details of those beliefs were inconsequential. How much did it matter that Jesus was conceived of a virgin? What meaning was there in the bodily resurrection? And was that truly what was meant by the stories that were told of his death? Our religious ancestors questioned the hierarchy of the church when they insisted upon particular belief. My favourite is likely John Biddle who, while not specifically a Unitarian, is clearly an ancestor. He left his comfortable parish where he was well loved because he couldn’t live a lie. He couldn’t sign on that he believed in ideas that he thought were wrong, and went on to be imprisoned for that refusal. He cared deeply about how people lived their Christian faith, and it was that evidence that he sought. Surely he loved his God, he cherished the teachings of Jesus, but refused to be coerced into those affirmations.
We don’t accept things because that ever present ‘THEY’ say we should, but we accept ideas and beliefs because they illumine the world in helpful ways. We believe what we do because we must: the events of our lives, what we can learn through investigation and exploration is what counts, and while we don’t deny that there are people who are authorities on particular topics, that authority comes not from a position of power, but from the depth of the knowledge and their capacity for insight and explanation. And we know that it is true what Francis David said in that debate in Torda: Faith, he said, convincingly, authoritatively, is a gift of God, and none should be compelled to believe what is not in that gift.
The second, and perhaps even more important is one of the enduring insights offered by the earliest of reformers of the church. It is the recognition that none of us need any mediator to find the divine. We need no priests or ministers, truly, no one to transmit the divine to us, or to explain our human failings and loves to the powers that control all that is. Adams says it so clearly:
All persons potentially share in the deepest meanings of existence, all have the capacity for discovering or responding to ’saving truth’, all are responsible for selecting and putting into action the right means and ends of cooperation for the fulfilment of human destiny.
It’s nearly 20 years since I worked with homeless teens in Chicago, but I still remember that when I went out into churches to talk about our work, and to share with the church the faces of the night-time community, and especially the youth who were at such risk, the hardest thing to remind people about wasn't the hardship or tragedy that those kids had known, and they all knew horrifying amounts of each of those. The hardest thing to remind others – and myself – about was the strength and beauty that each one of those youth possessed. Diagnoses and descriptions of those kids, like the ways we diagnose and describe each other, often robbed them of this very power, this very potential: to share in, to participate in the deepest meaning of existence. She's a lawyer, he’s in banking, look at those homeless folks, look at those drunks over there. None of it captures that fundamental truth about each one of us: we have access to and the possibility of discovering the deepest meanings of existence.
Knowing this, Adams argues, we are best served by pursuing truth by way of free inquiry. It is only this method of discovering, he says, that takes into account ‘both the dignity and the limitations of human nature.’
One more bit from Professor Adams:
The liberal seeks in the words of the prophets, in the deeds of saintly men and women, and in the growing knowledge of nature and human nature provided by science meanings that evoke the free loyalty and conviction of people exposed to them in open discourse.
That was what finally brought me back to my community those many years ago: the trust in open discourse, the trust that we will find a truth that works, that makes sense for now. It is a central principle of our free religious tradition that this is our way in the world: to be assured that each one of us can find what is most true, that we find it best when we are with a community that encourages our open exploration and inquiry.
What matters most isn’t the certainties that we achieve, but the joy of the journey, the discoveries and hopes that enliven our hearts and the dear companionship that helps us along the way. May it be that we know this, trust this, this day and every day.
Amen.
Prayer
Spirit of love and life,
spark of the most holy,
May we see you in all:
you are present
in our questioning,
in our longings and
in the answers we find.
you are present
in the search,
you, our companion, urging us
to explore.
you are present
in each person we meet,
if we might look rightly
to see your light
in her eyes,
in his longings,
no matter if they look like us
think like us,
may we remember that each one
bears your spark;
you are present
even in each mistake,
each mis-step,
each time we get it all wrong;
As we go forth into this week,
let us be reminded,
that we are ever on a journey,
and that the point is to explore,
that we share in our searching with all
who live,
and that with each step we learn
if we pay attention.
May we know that
you are ever with us,
spirit of love, spirit of life.
So may it be,
Amen.