Practical Religion
A SERMON GIVEN BY REV LINDA HART AT RICHMOND & PUTNEY UNITARIAN CHURCH
It is hard to resist certain sorts of jokes, at least it is if you’re me. There must be thousands of stories about a minister, a priest and a rabbi around, my very favourite of which is that the three of them walk into a bar and the bartender says, ‘What is this? A joke?’
Still, let me tell you about the Unitarian minister, rabbi and priest who were having coffee one morning. The priest says, ‘On retreat last week, one of my colleagues suggested that we all work out what our three word eulogy might be. Shall we try it? I’ll go first. I sorted out that mine would be “He lived peace.”’ The other two agreed that such a sentiment would be just right for the priest. ‘I know what mine would be,’ said the rabbi. ‘”He walked justice.”’ The two others considered this for a moment – the Unitarian minister even got a bit of a tear in his eye. ‘Yes,’ he agreed, ‘that is perfectly you.’ The priest and the rabbi then looked to the last in the group. ‘Ah, I know what I would want mine to be, too,’ said the Unitarian. ‘”Look, he moved!’”
If nothing else could be said about us, it is true that Unitarians are a particularly practical people when it comes to religion. Not everyone comes to religion that way.
It became most clear to me some years ago when I was off on a retreat with a group of people I had been in church youth group with. We were out at a camp on a small island off the coast of Washington State. It was night and cloudy and a bit chilly out, even though it was in August. Someone had built a fire, and most of the adults from the camp had been drawn to it. For awhile someone had a guitar and we tried to sing, but no one could remember the words to the songs that we could think to sing and that the guitar player had been playing. We hummed and tried to get it, but it seemed hopeless. So, we stood there, with the conversation flowing from topic to topic. Finally, one seemed to strike a chord with the folks standing in the warm glow. Religion. It’s a topic that I know something about, but I kept quiet as the conversation began to roll.
The discussion warmed as the fire flared up. Most of the folks joining in didn’t have much time for organized religion of any sort. One was a pagan who found the most rewarding of her ritual time to be the time that she was alone, not joined in community. Others had been related to religious organizations at one time or another and had become disgusted because of the politics of the churches, or simply found that it didn’t speak to them anymore. Then one of the men began to talk about religion’s role in suppressing the people, the ways in which religion has been used to oppress the people throughout history. “Religion,” he said, “has been used to divert people’s attention away from the realities of their lives. It’s been the drug that has been used by the capitalists to keep people passive so that profits can be made.” There were empathic grunts around the circle. He kept going, and this thread began to pick up some real steam. Others chimed in on the ways that religion has kept people blinded to the realities of this life while keeping them focused on rewards that would come after, keeping their eyes on heaven while their bodies are abused, while their minds are made into jelly, while they are exploited and wholly unaware of what is being done to them. I stood there silently, waiting for a chance to speak, feeling a bit defensive and surprised.
You see, for me, religion has never been something that was imposed upon me. It was always clear that it was something I chose. I knew from a very young age that my task was to sift through all the beliefs and ideas and to find what made sense to me. As a child, I wasn’t always sure I knew how to do that, but I knew, heart and soul, that was what was required of me. Religion wasn’t something imposed, but something chosen, discovered and taken wholly to heart.
The conversation swirled around, with person after person joining in to add their perception on how religion had nearly destroyed the world.
Finally, I had to speak. “I really don’t get the conspiracy theory of religion,” I told my friends. “It just doesn’t make sense to me that somehow some grand intelligence plotted out that religious belief would serve this end, thus doctrine and dogma were developed to keep the workers in their place. I believe that somewhere, down underneath all of the trappings and creeds and rituals, there is a very human longing for connection to a truth that transcends us all, a longing to be connected to what is most real, what is ultimate. We cannot lose sight of such longings and hopes and dreams because at some times religion has been abused by those in power, or because of some of the history of it.”
It was very quiet for a few moments. “Well, sure,” someone said, finally. And there was some heads nodding in the dim light. Soon, though, we were back to that other conversation, remembering and remarking again and again on the ways that religion was bad. I listened and mostly kept quiet after that.
During the first year of my ministry in Vermont, one of the members made an appointment with me. Her husband, just 38 years old, had a massive heart attack the year before, and because of quick action, and good medical care had survived. The whole family – the two young children they had, Gina and Mark – had all changed their way of life rather radically. They ate a low fat diet very conscientiously. I knew that because I had dinner at their home a few times. They were all very attentive to exercise, especially Mark. He swam every day, played racquet ball with a friend a few times a week. Gina came to talk to me because she wanted to make sure that they were covering all the bases. “What should we do?” she asked me. She explained that in her Catholic upbringing, there would have been prayers to be said, masses to attend, particular duties and responsibilities that she needed to fulfill.
“How are your relationships?” I asked. “Are you setting aside time to be together, working on the quality of your life with your family? Do you speak about love with each other, and has this helped you to know how precious each of you are?” She told me that they were doing well as a family, and family time had taken on a special place in their schedules that they would not negotiate. Their quality of life with one another had gone up in the year since Mark’s heart attack, and yes, they were always sure that they spoke of their love for one another, they knew better than most the fragility of life, and how close they had come to losing Mark, he knew how fragile his heart was, how close death had hovered.
Religion, when it is done well and at its best, is not about grand theories and theologies, but instead, it is about living one’s life well and thoroughly, alive to each moment, alive to the possibility and promise, in touch with the grief and loss. Religion is about connecting the daily movements of our lives to something deeper, something higher than our small lives can attain. It is about living toward something more than we’ve yet known, and finding in the midst of all of it: in the midst of confusion and trouble, of boredom and diffuse focus, of contentment and pleasure, some measure of joy.
This is some of what William Ellery Channing meant, I think, when he said that we were a practical religion. As the first president of the American Unitarian Association in 1825, Channing filled the task of articulating what it was that distinguished Unitarians from the conservative churches in New England. It was in 1819, at the ordination of Jared Sparks in Baltimore that Channing delivered what would become the defining sermon for Unitarianism in the United States, and begin the process of creation of the religious movement of which we are a part. “Unitarian Christianity” was a radical sermon, outlining a liberal’s perspective of scripture and its place in the religious quest. Channing attacked some of what he saw to be the deep flaws in the Calvinistic theology that was preached widely in his day.
When I first read Channing’s sermon in seminary, I struggled with its language and theology. The Unitarian Universalism of my childhood and youth had been strongly humanistic, and we rarely spoke of God and even more rarely of Jesus. So to read this religious forebear of mine and figure out how to decipher his language about the salvation Jesus brought was tricky, though in the years since I first read it, I have come to love his insights and the truth that he holds up for me to see across the hundred and eighty years since he preached it.
Channing was interested in the salvation of humanity, not by some sort of supernatural event, but by the transformation of lives.
We regard [Jesus] as Saviour, chiefly as he is the light, physician, and guide of the dark, diseased, and wandering mind. No influence in the universe seems to us so glorious, as that over the character; and no redemption so worthy of thankfulness, as the restoration of the soul to purity. Without this, pardon, were it possible, would be of little value. Why pluck the sinner from hell, if a hell be left to burn in his own breast? Why raise him to heaven if he remain a stranger to its sanctity and love?
What Channing is calling for here isn’t an ascription to a particular set of beliefs. The worth in religion is precisely what it can do in terms of healing the wounds of our own hearts, and opening us up to that of heaven which may be available to us. He continues:
With these impressions, we are accustomed to value the Gospel chiefly as it abounds in effectual aids, motives, excitements to a generous and divine virtue. In this virtue, as in a common centre, we see all its doctrine, precepts, promises meet; and we believe, that faith in this religion is of no worth, and contributes nothing to salvation, any farther than as it uses these doctrines, precepts, promises and the whole life, character, sufferings and triumph of Jesus, as the means of purifying the mind, of changing it into the likeness of his celestial excellence.
I love this language and the ideas that filter through it. Channing is calling to us to recognize that what we affirm as true in our own lives is meaningless unless it demonstrates itself in our lives, unless we are constantly transformed by those affirmations. Later in his sermon, Channing charges the young Jared Sparks by saying “You will remember, that good practice is the end of preaching, and will labor to make your people holy livers rather than skilled disputants.”
For the Unitarians of the early 19th century, that meant learning to live more like Jesus did, to learn from his life the ways to be more compassionate, to create justice, to cast his life among the outcasts, the diseased, and the suspect. Our task in the closing years of the 20th century is to discern from the buzzing confusion of sources and ideas and religions around us what it is that is the center of virtue of which Channing spoke, and to find how to live our lives in greater alignment with it.
This takes me toward a second meaning of practical religion. John Cummins says well what we often struggle to say when newcomers ask about our church and religious tradition. Let me say it again for you:
When someone says, “I would like to become a member of this church. What must I believe?” I always respond, “Only those things which appear to you to be true. Only loyalty to truth as it authenticates itself in your own mind is asked of you. You can never believe a thing because you are told you must.” . . . Joining this church then [John goes on to say] is not a point of arrival, but a point of departure, an agreement that we shall help one another on our journeys and in what we hope is for each of us a lifetime enterprise.
John points to a different practicality of Unitarian. As with Channing, we hope for belief and affirmation to be lived rather than merely parroted, and those beliefs and affirmations – the truth as John says it – are authenticated by each one of us in our experiences and reflections and own pondering. It is not religion as dictated by some external authority, but as discovered and honed in the living of life, in the practical, daily routines. It’s Gina and her family focusing in on what matters most, cherishing each other in the moments given them. It’s not the grand theories of my friends that night around a campfire, though those do have their place. It is the recognition that for the truth and meaning – the deep centre – of life to come alive, it has to be lived, not only intellectually ascribed to.
Carl Scovel describes that centre as “the Great Surmise” and calls upon us live toward it. I respond to Carl’s description and to his call because it is what I have known in my own life. I, too, have a deep intuition that there is a love that is at the heart of all that is, a love that embraces us each and all with power and tenderness. Like the Universalists of old, I recognize that my task in life is to live ever more in tune with that goodness and love I experience, live that supreme reality. I want it in my life, not in some high aspiration, but practically. It’s how I relate to the others who surround me, it’s where my time and money are spent, it’s the way I seek to respond to the needs of those whose lives have become twisted and lost, it’s to be transformed to something more like that celestial excellence and to know the joy that is there. “Our work on earth is to explore, enjoy and share this goodness, to know it without reserve or hesitation. ‘Too much of a good thing,’ said Mae West, ‘is wonderful.’ Sound doctrine [indeed].
Unitarianism throughout its history – back to Channing, and John Biddle and James Martineau here in England, back even over the centuries to churches in Transylvania, the lost followers of Faustus Socinus in Poland – throughout our history, this church has focused on the practical aspects of religion seeing that salvation can only be understood in the transformation of lives, not in the content of belief. The truth that we affirm, the beliefs that speak to us can only be proven out as worthy and good as they change our lives toward greater goodness. Indeed there can be no other way to know.
And the end that we seek, at least in some measure, is not logic nor morality, as Carl Scovel reminds us. It is not “duty nor suffering, nor progress nor conflict – not even survival...” Rather, it is joy. “Deep, abiding, uncompromising joy.” May it ever be so with us on this journey that we may know, and live joy.
Prayer
Spirit of love and life,
each day we awaken
and find the world:
pleasures beckon,
worries weigh upon us,
beauty spreads before us
there are pains that are known
only in our hearts
and joys that bubble from unexpected sources.
As we sift and sort through all that the day offers,
open us to see
connection and possibility
threading through each moment.
We shall never know
the ultimate truth,
can never wholly name
what abides at the
innermost heart of
all that is.
Let us then seek to know
what of goodness and joy we find,
let us then seek to live it
as much as we can
that the world that we imagine might be,
a world of kindness and compassion,
of justice and peace
is made small act by small act.
May it be so with us and with all the world. Amen.