Remembering Universalist Heritage at Jubilee celebration

The Universalist National Memorial Church held a convocation on October 7, 2023 entitled “Universalist Jubilee: Its Legacy and Promise.”

The video will become available at some point and I will link it here, but in the meantime these are the notes from my part of the service.

Friends, where have we as Universalist come from? A few words. Look to the window to my right. It depicts, or is intended to depict, the Hand-In-Hand, the vessel which brought John Murray from England to America on September 30, 1770. This is the anniversary we remember today: the point from which we mark the 250th anniversary of Universalism in America. By the time he landed at Barnegat Bay, New Jersey, he was already a broken man. His change of faith within British evangelicalism lost him most of his friends and probably successful career. Then his wife Eliza and their son died. He landed in debtors’ prison, and once out we wanted to lose himself in the world, particularly the great American wilderness. That’s why he came here. But even the ship, bound for New York, was off course. The grace — almost miraculous grace — of his encounter with Thomas Potter encouraged him back to the ministry, and back to life. It’s a well-known, oft-told story, too long to repeat now, but it’s a story we need to tell more often. Murray did not plant Universalism here. There existed groups and individuals up and down the Eastern Seaboard who felt, thought and believed as he did: believing in a perfect hope of God’s complete salvation. One such group was the nucleus of what would be the first Universalist church in America, in Gloucester, Massachusetts. And one of those he met was Judith Sargent Stevens, a writer in her own right and today more famous than this minister she would later marry. The irony was that his own theological and homiletic approach to Universalism, the would-be denomination he supported and his lineage of leadership within the fellowship of churches faded in his own lifetime and he was quickly overtaken by others whose names are also a part of our heritage. But Father Murray was as much a model of Christian life and a preacher or pastor. He suffered disappointment, depression and loss. We can understand him, and trust that he would understand us. His faith that God saves, and saves completely returns us to hope. Little wonder this church’s first iteration was a memorial to him. While the vision in and from Universalism was grand, our numbers never were. Numerically, we have been been in decline for generations. In 250 years, will there be Universalists who look through us, to Murray’s landing in New Jersey? The question is not important. Rather, as with others before me, I trust God and trust in God. I trust God will be true to the divine nature, a nature that we profess as love. Not that God is loving, but that God is love itself. And that love will not betray or fail us. Our existence is not a failure in the universe. New people rediscover and reconstruct this faith all the time; it will not die. So I trust in God, that there will always be a witness for the larger faith, whether in our fellowship or another. Occasions change and plans fail, but the providing grace of God endures. Those who will listen will hear the truth. So at this anniversary celebration, we can look back to Murray’s landing and return to life. Behind him we see the Reformation, and the Apostolic church, and back to Calvary where this world was redeemed, and from that to the foundations of the world. There, with the Creator, “whose nature is Love” we find our legacy and our hope.

Correcting resources for very small churches

October 5, 2023.  My post about the Finnish Quakers and their small numbers received some welcome private comment and I want to put this back on the top of my list.

Last month, I proposed ten kinds of resources that might already exist to help very small churches. A commenter suggested an eleventh. I’d like to take a couple of months to start filling in a resource list. If you know of an applicable resources, please leave it in the comments and I’ll review it (for applicability) and add it to the list.

  1. Training manuals and spreadsheets for volunteer treasurers
  2. Resources for accompanying hymn singing without a trained musician
  3. Self-directed spiritual development resources with a group element
  4. Model agreements for supply preachers
  5. Templates for preparing attractive orders of service and newsletters
  6. Recipes and guidelines for easy-to-prepare but delicious (and safe) church lunches and dinners
  7. Model guidance for protecting vulnerable persons in small churches
  8. Resources for the delivery and organization of sermons for novice preachers
  9. Ready-to-print materials appropriate for children who come to services
  10. Trustworthy guidance about “how political” a church can be without disrupting its non-profit status
  11. Computers and internet access; worship without Zoom. (By request.)

Sermon: “Understanding Abraham”

I preached from this sermon manuscript (but departed from it significantly) for the Universalist National Memorial Church, on March 5, 2023 using lessons from the Revised Common Lectionary: Genesis 12:1-4a and Romans 4:1-5, 13-17.


My thanks to Pastor Gatton for inviting me back to the pulpit, and my thanks to you for welcoming me.

I thought I might start with a little German academic joke about Abraham being the ur-patriarch, since he was both the first patriarch and since he came from the city of Ur of the Chaldees. I thought, everyone loves a pun. Especially a pun from Mesopotamian archaeology.

But then I though the better of it, and wouldn’t tell the joke. The fact is that there are a lot of heavy material here: Abram and Sarai as religious figures; their role as the fountainhead of Judaism, Christianity and Islam; the claims and counterclaims between those three religions; the depiction of sexual and personal ethics in the Abraham cycle that make modern people cringe; and then throw Paul into it. The sermon shouldn’t start with a pun, it should start with a content warning. I’ll do my best.

Review of the lessons in context

Today’s texts deal with faith, particularly the faith of Abram (later renamed Abraham) and the theological importance for his heirs, us included.

We will look at what faith means, because most of us have inherited incomplete concepts on the subject. The heirs — as in inheritors — part is as tricky as the faith part. The Abram-Abraham story arc about appears in the lectionary about once a year, so I’ll take this short reading as license to go further. But there are reasons why you don’t get an Abraham blockbuster from the likes of Cecil B. DeMille. (If you know the stories, you know. If not, look it up in the book of Genesis or ask me in the coffee hour.)

Genesis

First, let’s put today’s passage from Genesis in context. We’re right at the beginning of the Bible. Reading though Genesis, we have two versions of the creation of the universe with humanity; the separation of humanity from God; the first murder; the rise of wickedness among the people, ending with the great flood (that’s Noah, his family and the ark). God promises not to do that again, but when the people raise up a tower to God, God scatters them — us — into different language groups.

The following section takes from Babel to Teran, Abram’s father, and with it a change of tone. The mythic explanations of the origins of the world, humanity, sin, violence, and nations gives way to a personal story: one family in a particular place and time that had a particular relationship with one God.

As we know, those earlier mythic tales had parallels in other mythic tales of the ancient Middle East. The biblical revelation, you could argue, comes from how those well-known tales were altered. The theology is in the alteration, and I’ll preach about that at some point. In any case, the pivot to figures with a personality and a back story make Abram — later renamed Abraham — and Sarai — later renamed Sarah — seem like historical figures, and this was long believed to be the case. Except there’s no evidence of this. There’s nothing in the archaeology to suggest it. Genesis, as we have it, was first written down centuries after the events in the Abraham narrative and contain anachronisms. The themes of possession of the land, and Abraham’s bloodline through his second son Isaac being all from his own homeland, seems to claim that Abraham’s heirs had nothing to do with the people of the land of Caanan. It is also a story of origins, and we have to know what was intended to say, so you can see where God is revealed. Read literally, it’s old propaganda and nation building, no better than thinking that George Washington “can not tell a lie.” To heard God speak, you have to read between the lines.

In this case, you have to look at what doesn’t make sense. You might think that God would show blessing or particular favor on someone for a particular reason, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here. And Abram was to be the father of many nations, he would have a land of his own and he would become materially prosperous. And as if to underscore the story, Abram and Sarah had none of these, and no obvious prospect about how to acquire any of these. The lesson isn’t how to become rich land-owners; the lesson is about the freedom God has to dispense grace. Abram’s famous faithfulness was a response to this grace, not its cause. God is the original cause; how we respond is how we show our faith.

If Abram simply did what God wanted, and then got the benefits, it would be as if God had hired Abram for some purpose. This is what Paul was getting to when he wrote “Now to one who works, wages are not reckoned as a gift but as something due. But to one who without works trusts him who justifies the ungodly, such faith is reckoned as righteousness. For the promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith.” It wasn’t that Abram believed the right thing and that made it so, but rather he responded to God and stayed engaged with what unfolded before him.”

Unlike Abram and Sarai, Paul lived in history, and belonged to another era. Let’s review the second reading. Paul’s letter to the Romans is widely loved, with moments of aching beauty. It is also one of the older parts of the New Testament — written some time in the mid 50s, before the Gospels in fact — and widely recognized as being an authentic work of Paul, unlike some others. It’s important to remember that the Bible isn’t a book as much as it is a library. Romans is among the oldest works in the New Testament, but probably written about seven centuries after Genesis was laid down, and Abraham, were he historical would have lived two millennia before Paul, thus just as far as Paul is from us.

And, as I’ve preached recently — and so won’t go into so great detail again — it’s key to discussions about salvation among Christians. Martin Luther propelled the Protestant Reformation from a study of Romans, and later generations of Protestant theologians known for a universalist or “hopeful universalist” view of salvation will start there.

Abram stands as a model of faithfulness. And part of trusting God, looking back from the 21st century, means that each generation back to Abraham and Sarah will view God in a different way than the one before it. Abraham and those who came before him did not seek out the way we do now, yet he persisted not simply accepting God roboticly, but meditating on the visions that God gave him and interpreting them. Abraham’s faith, as we hear it, was dynamic. In the many generations that follow him, faith that it’s best maintains that dynamic tension with the God who speaks without words, who acts without hands and who cannot be seen with the eyes.

Originally, the God we know as God was national and particular, the god of storms and armies. Some of our language of God throws back to these ideas: The God met at the mountain top, God Most High. We have faith and in this God, Who is the same God who spoke to Abraham and those who wrote Abraham’s story. This is the same God, but not understood in the same way. Not understood in the same way, so trusted in the same way, and thus our faith is not carried out the same way. But the interpretation, the tension, the wondering, the waiting: these have not changed. And in the many generations have followed, we have come to know Abraham’s God: universal, ever-present, wise, patient and loving. And this God shared in a great family of religion that includes half of the people alive today both is and is not the same God who told Abraham to go from Ur to Canaan.

What we cannot do is take on every experience unreflectively as a sign of God’s presence, permission or punishment. Let me give you one striking example. As we make the walk towards Holy Week and Good Friday we need to prepare ourselves to overcome old sins. Paul wrote, “What then are we to say was gained by Abraham, our ancestor according to the flesh?” (4:1) And for him, this is a reasonable question? Paul was Jewish, and Abraham would be his ancestor, albeit a legendary one. Christians both of Jewish descent and not had been common in Rome. The religious situation was both different and more fluid then than it was today. Since nearly all of Christians today are not of Jewish descent — not to mention the centuries of Jewish oppression and forced conversions in between — we need to be careful about not collapsing the differences between Paul’s experience then, and our general experience today. The Christian connection to Abraham is spiritual, diffuse and complex.

Christian supercessionism is the doctrine that Christians have inherited from Jews those blessings and promises that God made to the children of Israel. There are variations on the theme, but a typical version is that God cut off the Jews and the Christians were grafted on in their place. Extreme, but still living, variants would go so far as to claim that Europeans are the descendants of the “lost tribes” of Israel (itself a discredited concept) while modern Jews are fraudulent interlopers. A more subtle version of supercessionism talks about the “vengeful God of the Old Testament” versus the “God of Love of the New Testament” implying as though there is something foundationally wrong with Judaism, and ignoring or denying that there can be (again!) any development in how we understand who and how God is: whether from the time of pre-Temple Hebrew religion, through two Temples, the Babylonian exile and the development of rabbinic Judaism, or (frankly) from the age of the apostles to the church today. Indeed, speaking of the Old and New Testaments can suggest that one is finished and the other replaced it.

Christian supercessionism has been a key weapon for justifying anti-Jewish oppression and violence for centuries. Since anti-Jewish oppression is alive and well, it is our moral responsibility to highlight and renounce it. But even if the threats of Christian supercessionism against Jews were squarely in the past, it deserves to extirpated because it blisteringly bad Christian theology, and as Universalists we’re prone to feel this with particular strength.

Covenants endure

The relationship between God and Abraham is based on a series of promises, sealed in his own day with sacrifices, called covenants. And when the human parties to a covenant fails in the relationship, they are restored to a right relation through a change of behavior. Take, for instance, the worship by Israelites of other gods. (Now that was a juicy lurid scene in The Ten Commandments with the golden calf and the earthquake and Charlton Heston getting all grrr.)

The idea of God developing from a storm god and a warrior god, to the chief god, to the one God to the exclusion of all others did not happen evenly. What scripture describes as backsliding — and recall these texts were recorded centuries after the fact and after being theologically processed — what scripture describes as backsliding was probably the development of how the people saw God. But the important part is that God didn’t give up on them; instead the Israelites changed, repented and returned.

When the prophets introduced an ethical concern for the poor and despised, they identified the Israelites’ misfortunes as a God’s disfavor for their abuses, the solution was change, repent and return. But but not abandon.

And this is what we, as Universalists take seriously and take to heart: if God would abandon Israel the beloved, even when it failed, what hope would the rest of us have? But God was faithful then, and God is faithful now. And the details of this trust have to be seen by careful and not casual review of how God moves in our lives, both in the good times and bad, in moment of clarity and unresolved confusion. This is the what the church for.

We can imagine ourselves as Abram in those moment when have moment of decision directs us in an unexpected or atypical direction. We can image, or remember if we’ve had those experiences,

Nancy Byrd Turner, wrote a poem in 1935, used as hymn (“When Abraham Went Out of Ur”) but so far as I know, only used in one hymnal: the blue one that came out between the red and gray ones we use. She wrote:

As Abraham saw dawn, remote and chill,
Etching old Ur along the lonely north,
And bowed himself to his loved earth, and rent
His garments, cried he could not go… and went.

His faithful response told him to go. If and when that moment comes, may we do likewise.

May God bless our paths, wherever we may go, this day and forever more.

Online services list?

Is there a list of United States and Canada Unitarian Universalist churches that still have services online, or even better, recorded services on YouTube or the like? I’m particularly interested in smaller and lay-led congregations. Hoping to see some samples of worship to get an updated sample of styles and operating theologies or outlooks.

Where are the Unitarian Universalists?

I’m doing my best to avoid that cliche, pamphlet-fodder question, “What are the Unitarian Universalists?” It may not be a meaningful or knowable question anymore, and the answer usually says more about who’s answering than it ought. Instead, I’ll ask other questions; first, where are they found? Where is this community found?

Conventionally, this would answered in three ways:

  1. In congregations, which communicate and cooperate with one another.
  2. In the systems of the Unitarian Universalist Association, which supports the congregations and takes on work too difficult for a particular congregation to do, including gathering large deliberative and collaborative meetings. (More about that later.)
  3. In purpose-driven special-purpose organizations, though most of these perished after the UUA purge of the independent affiliates in 2007. Professional organizations continue, as do some of the “independent disaffiliates” though it’s hard to read their strength. I’m guessing the musicians and the camps are in the best shape.

Historically, there’s been a shifting balance of power between the churches and the central denominational body. The Universalists formally had a strong center, but didn’t seem to exercise it (perhaps it couldn’t) while the Unitarians were more decentralized on paper but had very strong, central leadership, down to matters of ministerial recognition and settlement, even church building designs. My point is that the relationship and relative strength between these three pillars changes, often having to do with finances.

But as I was thinking about this article, two other locations for Unitarian Universalists came to mind:

  1. Those churches that do their own thing and have their own ways and you never hear from. (I belong to one of those.) 24 Farnsworth might be sucked into a black hole and it would take months or years for these churches to notice. It’s easy to imagine they’re like the maineline UUs, but my own experience with the Christian version of this phemomenon tells me this isn’t so.
  2. Those “shadow Unitarian Universalists” who show up on surveys of religious affiliation, who if the numbers were to be believed would be as numerous as those recorded in UUA-member churches. Still not sure what to make of that, but they shouldn’t be forgotten.

YouGov and the Unitarian Universalists

I was scrolling through Reddit last night; one of the subreddits (themed communities) I read is called r/DataIsBeautiful. One post had a ranking of the favorability of United States religions and the Unitarian Universalist came out quite low: net negative 10%, nestled between the Falun Gong and the Seventh-Day Adventists. Oof.

So I went to YouGov and pulled up the data breakout. (PDF) Depending on how you look at it. I don’t think the results aren’t quite as dire as the chart suggests: a third had neither a “favorable nor unfavorable” opinion of Unitarian Universalism and more than another quarter were “not sure.” You can find a larger version of the same chart used in the subreddit, too; see, too for the partisan breakout, mentioned below.

I did think it was interesting in the data (page 32) was that disapproval in Unitarian Universalism increased with household income, which cuts against our our folk wisdom of having the burden of being comfortably well off. The partisan split was more clear, with modest approval from Democrats, but strong disapproval from Republicans at a level comparable to atheism, Islam and Wicca. Hispanics, women and persons aged 30-44 tended to have more favorable opinions. The poll has a margin of error of 3.4%.

Maybe the win was making it to the survey in the first place.

Unitarian Christians in Germany and Austria

I’ve recently learned of a group Unitarian Christians in German-speaking countries. I can’t quite get a sense its theological center, but based on its links seems to fall in the “biblical Unitarian” camp, which is more conservative than the American Unitarianism in living memory. This focuses on biblical proofs of the unity of God, an interest in the theologically-Socianian Racovian Catechism (their version in German) and a recognition of the Christadelphians.

It’s only a few years old, but has centers in the north and west of Germany, and two churches that meet occasionally in Linz and Salzburg in Austria. Much of the activity seems to be online. Best wishes to them.

Sermon: “Divine Image, Human Purpose”

I preached from this sermon manuscript for the Universalist National Memorial Church, on July 17, 2022 using lessons from the Revised Common Lectionary: Colossians 1:15-28 and Luke 10:38-42.


Sermon

I would like to thank Pastor Gatton for inviting me to the pulpit and you for welcoming me. I’ll keep today’s comments brief. I will only look at today’s two passages, consider the practice of preaching, human approaches to both revelation and science and delve into the heart of the universe. This should only take a few minutes.

A conventional way of preparing a sermon is to look at the world around us and try to make some sense of it in the context of the preaching texts. This is a liberal approach, because it both assumes that believers need to apply their faith to daily life, and that faith should be responsive to the world around us. Historically, this means reading newspapers, but today it probably means obsessing over Twitter. Either way, unfortunately, for the last two, twenty, or two hundred years the news that gets our attention tends to be bad. Some crisis or disaster occurs and so the theological response is one of fortitude, or patience, or endurance or hope. I’ve preached the same myself. I’ve preached the same from this pulpit. So you would be forgiven if you expected to hear something about the January 6th hearings or the drought in the southwest, the war in Ukraine or any number of things, but that’s not ultimately what focused my attention this week. There was something else to talk about, and it made me very happy. Perhaps you too.

After many years and enormous cost overruns, the James Webb Space Telescope has given us images of wonder. And by us, I mean the whole world. As with other NASA-led projects, this telescope feels like a global accomplishment, and that’s noteworthy in its own right. But I keep going back to those pictures: the birthplace of stars within nebulae, the cliff-like formation deep in the Carina Nebula and of course that speckled image with the multitude of galaxies all found — and here’s a phrase that will enter the vocabulary of wonder — in the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length. (Quotation from NASA) Something that seems so small yet holding multitudes. There is so much out there and so much yet to be found. The telescope will produce data which will take lifetimes to process and analyze.

But since most of us aren’t astrophysicists and astronomers, why the popular interest? I suspect many of us owe a debt to Carl Sagan and other popular scientists who gave us a language of wonder when we look up into the heavens, a position formerly held by theologians. (So if NASA would like to invest billions into theological exploration I wouldn’t say no.) And it is theological, because the questions the James Webb Space Telescope raises, even if it cannot answer, come as close to public theology as we have today. What is our place in the universe? And by extension, our purpose? Is all the life in the universe found on the crust of our small blue world? Are we alone, or are we awash in an ocean of life, not knowing what else exists because of the great expanse of space, the limitations of our understanding and the shortness of our lives? The stellar portraits are important and not simply beautiful because I express our wonder in the vastness and grandeur of the universe.

Of course this is not the first time human beings have looked up to the heavens and marveled. We look into the night sky, and cannot reach those lights: a metaphor for the Divine which carries over from generation to generation and beyond. Whether astronomy or astrology, now or thousands of years ago, with the naked eye or an observation platform literally a million miles from here, the stars and heavens are an ideal context for our questions, and an ideal dwelling place for the unknowable reaches of God.

Our reading from Colossians is full of such imagery. Angels, rather than galaxies, are the multitudes. It is the seat of God, and the place from which Christ arranges creation. It’s not clear if the apostle Paul wrote it. He may have dictated it to someone who changed his particular style or it may simply be attributed to him. It does come from an early period of Christian thought. Here Jesus the humble preacher in Judea is recast as the image of the living God, the agent through whom all things are made and the keeper of deep primordial truths. I think I understand why. It has to do with how God’s truth is presented to us. Universalists have long professed the presence of revelation within Scripture. We make reference to it in our declaration of faith, which is itself derived from earlier denominational professions. So at one level, yes, we can find truthful and personally meaningful texts within scripture, but there are other levels. For example, there’s a kind of development within scripture. As human beings change, our understanding of God changes, for example. It’s hard for us to imagine as God as anything but a universal spirit now, but that’s not how God is always depicted in scripture. The author of Colossians expresses Christ’s role as a bridge between humanity and divinity in cosmic language.

Revelation isn’t just about what’s written, but it informs our approach to knowledge, and gives us guidance about how we interpret our response. Revelation is not just what is given to us in scripture but what we find when we try to understand it. It shows us what the value. Revelation includes the a-ha moment that helps us be more truly and deeply human in the best sense. It’s the same sensation as when we are touched by great art, natural beauty and those awe-inspiring images from the James Webb, but with an added dimension of morality. What do we do with these great and wonderful feelings? Once our awe of the universe turns back to Earth, what do we make of the life we see around us? You and I might not be as exciting as extraterrestrial life, but we are here, and our life together makes demands on us.

These demands are the focus of our reading from Luke. I’m personally conflicted by today’s gospel passage, probably because I’m a Martha by nature. She does all the right things and works her hands to the bone, but Mary becomes the hero of the story. Martha was busy, but Mary heard the truth and responded to it, accordingly Mary knew the true value of discipleship. Or as St. James (2:18) put it, faith without works is dead. It’s not enough to be busy, you have to discern what is worth doing and treasuring.

And this brings us back to some bad news. (There was going to be some bad news, wasn’t there?) When I started in the ministry, I served a small church in Georgia and supplied the pulpits of other churches, including two in South Carolina. This involved a lot of driving. To mix it up a bit, I would visit roadside attractions, and the quirkiest of these was something called the Georgia Guidestones. It was a vaguely Stonehenge-like monument made of granite, set in a field outside of Elberton, Georgia. But no one knows who paid for its construction in 1980 but the reason it was there was obvious. That part of Georgia sits on an enormous exposure of monument-grade blue-gray granite. The industry, in short, is headstones, and so the material and construction skills were nearby. The Guidestones, far from being massive headstones, had advice inscribed upon them in a number of languages, for example Prize truth — beauty — love.

Like the funder, the purpose of the Guidestones was unclear but the internal evidence of the writings and their location provided a plausible answer. The site is near a river, the Savannah, but far enough from population centers to survive a nuclear war. Presumably future survivors might use the Guidestones has a foundation to rebuild and recover. Like Stonehenge, the Guidestones even had grooves cut into the stone so they could act as a solar observatory. From here too, future generations could look up into the heavens. 

At some point, persons with extreme opinions considered the Guidestones to be Satanic, possibly by misreading the population goals as a mass elimination of today’s population. One candidate for governor even made it a part of her platform to have them destroyed. And earlier this month, persons unknown blew up the Guidestones; the county demolished the rest as the remains were deemed a safety hazard. It just makes me sick to think that something that was probably meant to help humanity by being put in a remote area was destroyed because it didn’t belong to anyone to be properly tended. Better that the space telescope is a million miles away….

All of this serves as a warning. American democracy, our climate, a peaceful world order and stable food supplies seem particularly fragile now. But so is our grasp on the truth. I believe a liberal approach to theology is ultimately stronger for individuals because it is less fragile to contradictions and shocks. But it takes a lot of work, too. Seeing different points of view, gently holding contradictions in tension, using imagination joyfully, being patient but firm towards ignorance… all of these take a lot of work. And when we are feeling stressed, it may not feel like it is worth the trouble. When you’re hunkered down. It might seem like an unaffordable luxury. If the news rattles you everyday, it’s easy to be stuck in the moment and not take the longer view. Remember Mary and Martha. Stay cool, and remember what is important. Our days are not the accumulations of individual tasks, but a living out of God’s purpose which involves greater and higher things. Instead. Let us look into the heavens, the depth of eternity to explore their depths, ask those questions and find greatness and truth.