To Walk Together
Reverend Janet Parsons, Gloucester UU Church
February 28, 2021
There comes a time, when a person has started attending seminary, that attending parties starts to become a little bit weird. Old friends aren’t quite sure what to say to you, so they ask you about your kids, over and over. Others are afraid they’ll accidently swear in front of you. Or else, they feel a need to challenge you theologically, standing between the cheese ball and the shrimp cocktail.
There was my next door neighbor, the Christian evangelical, who watched for me every year at the neighborhood holiday party so that she could grill me about Unitarian Universalism. I would try to avoid her gaze but eventually she would appear at my elbow and say, “So I’m curious about something.” One year she continued, “In Unitarian Universalism, who decides who’s right?”
I could have tried to share our fourth principle, that we affirm a free and responsible search for truth and meaning. Something tells me that had I said that, I’d still be standing there, embroiled in a discussion, watching others scooping up the shrimp cocktail, refilling their wine glasses. But sometimes in these moments the Holy Spirit descends upon us and enables just the right words to flow effortlessly from our mouths. And this time, when I opened my mouth, I heard myself ask in return, “Why does someone have to be right?”
Why does someone have to be right? It’s an interesting question, and we will give it some thought this morning.
This month our theme has been Beloved Community. We have worked to define that: using expressions such as the creation of heaven on earth, or an orientation of the heart, or a spiritual or religious discipline requiring us to practice unconditional love, or agape. We have talked about social justice and the Civil Rights Movement, and have also talked about how we create the Beloved Community in our hearts and in our own lives. But until now, we have not really considered the relationship between Beloved Community and our church community.
In working to establish a church community that is oriented toward the ideals of Beloved Community, we have to look closely at what forms us, at our foundation. As Unitarian Universalists, we are different than congregations that form around shared beliefs. We recite no creeds. We can have very different ideas about the nature of the Divine, or about the afterlife – what happens when we die. My brother-in-law once approvingly commented that the priest at his church stated one Sunday that “this is what we believe, and if you don’t share these beliefs, then why are you here?”
We won’t tell you what to believe. In fact, we often don’t even ask one another. As I told my neighbor, one side, one person, one belief, does not have to be right.
The next question, then, is what holds us together? How do we create religious community in the absence of shared beliefs? Why are we here?
We say that we are joined by covenant, meaning that we have an understanding of how we approach church together, and how we treat one another. We are joined together by covenant, we say; by an abiding sense that we are more together than we are separately. We are here because we need one another and our loving relationships in order to navigate life, in order to have a sanctuary, a safe place to return to when we have failed. We need our relationships to create a safe place where we can study and explore, and still feel at home even if our beliefs might change over time.
Covenants go back all the way through human history. The Hebrew Bible is essentially the history of the covenantal relationship between God and the Israelites. We hear familiar verses, such as this example from the Book of Exodus: “I will take you to be my people, and I will be your God, and you shall know that I am the Lord your God, who has freed you from the burdens of the Egyptians.” (NRSV, Ex. 6:7)
Because of our emphasis on the importance of creating covenants, Unitarian Universalists claim our religious lineage in the United States from the Puritans. This often surprises us: of all people, the Puritans, of Scarlet Letter fame, with their rigid beliefs. We remember the comment by H.L. Mencken, that “Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” That doesn’t sound like us!
But the Puritans, already secure in their shared beliefs, focused more on how they would live together in community. They would ‘walk together’, as their covenants frequently stated, joined by love for one another and by a hope for the flourishing of all the members of the community. We know this, because church records still contain these original covenants. And we also have the records of the First Church in Dedham, which began to organize itself back in 1637. There in Dedham, the 30 or so settling families decided to meet weekly to discuss what they wanted their church to be like. They met for a year, carefully choosing a topic for the next week’s conversation, sometimes reaching out to a neighboring community to seek their guidance. What shaped their decisions on how to organize themselves was not their religious belief. What shaped them were their hopes for a free church, which they thought would help to bring about their concept of Beloved Community. The questions that they ultimately tried to answer were not about religious belief, but questions such as: to what will we remain faithful? To what will we remain loyal? What sort of organization would enable us to remain together, to walk together, to create heaven on earth? It is this idea, the establishment of a free church that would hold its members together in community, that has been passed down all the way to us, here in the 21st century. (drawn from Our Covenant: The 2000-2001 Minns Lectures, by Alice Blair Wesley.)
After I was confronted by the question: “who decides who’s right?” I thought about it frequently. And as I entered the ministry, and came here to serve this congregation, I realized that I didn’t really care. If your heart responds to the teachings of the Buddha, or those of Jesus, it doesn’t really matter to me. If you have no sense of a personal God, or a belief in the afterlife, or if you do, I am completely comfortable with that. What I look for here is relationship, and a commitment to the life of this religious community; a commitment to the well-being of each other. As you have heard me say from time to time, it is far better to be in relationship than to be right. I care about seeing you work to maintain your relationships, to offer kindness and compassion to one another.
Now, somewhere along the road from the 1630’s to the present, we Unitarian Universalists got a bit sidetracked. Since we do not emphasize our shared beliefs, we came over time to believe that church was intended to fit our own individual needs. In her essay the Reverend Cheryl Walker put it this way: “I was like a kid in a candy store. Me, me, me. My faith, my journey, my religion. It’s all about me.” (“The Power of Community and the Peril of Individualism,” in Turning Point, Fredric Muir, editor, p. 45.). Reverend Walker went on to talk about her discovery that in fact, very little was asked of her in this new religion. She noted that what we were creating was individualism – worship of the individual. (Ibid., p. 46.)
She enjoyed the feeling that she was right. But did she know to what her congregation was loyal? What mattered most?
Somewhere along the road we Unitarian Universalists encountered a speed bump. Often, we blame, of all people, Ralph Waldo Emerson. As he progressed along his own faith journey, Emerson could not be constrained by organized religion. He moved rapidly from helping to shape Unitarianism as it developed in the 1820’s and 1830’s, to finding it too limiting. Emerson believed that each human’s own thoughts and feelings were most important, not the community. He famously wrote, in his essay, “The Oversoul”: “Let us learn the revelation of all nature and thought; that the Highest dwells within us, that the sources of nature are in our own minds…I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than the will I call mine.” Mine. My will. Me, me, me.
And so, we see the difficulty here – the great challenge – of being part of a Unitarian Universalist congregation. We have a tradition of creating our own community, based on our love for the community itself, our loyalty to it, and our belief that together we create something greater than ourselves. Our gathering, our walking together, as the Puritans put it, can be one of the best opportunities to realize the vision of Beloved Community. And at the same time, we fiercely cherish, we are loyal and dedicated to, the free and responsible search for truth and meaning. For ourselves. We want our religious community to suit ourselves and our own beliefs.
“True Community,” wrote Cheryl Walker, “doesn’t happen unless everyone is willing to give up some of their identity as an individual to take on the identity of the group…it means that we move individualism from the center of our focus and replace it with a new concept of shared community, in which everyone gives up a little so that we can gain a lot.” (op. cit., 47.)
Who decides who’s right? Nobody. That, in fact, is one of our deepest held values, and the easier question for us to answer. But then we must look at the harder question: what is the basis of our covenant with one another? Where are our loyalties? What do we value? To whom or to what do we hold ourselves accountable?
If we are here on Sunday mornings only for ourselves – only to sing our favorite hymns, for example, or only to see our friends at coffee hour – then our experience, and the experience of everyone else here, is diminished. We will not be able to come together in a way that fosters Beloved Community. We will never develop a sense of purpose, of mission.
But if we can share our vision of what a religious community can be, even if it means that we sometimes have to put others first, let’s imagine what can be gained. We gain in wisdom and understanding by listening to one another. We strengthen the bonds of unconditional love that is the ultimate goal of Beloved Community. We feel supported by one another, and feel safe, because the community is healthy and strong, and can hold us when we need its arms around us. We are empowered to go out into the world, to foster a wider community that all can call Beloved.
My friends, we have inherited a rich religious tradition, and a complicated one. We are the descendants of people who believed so strongly in the power of the free church that they were willing to leave behind all they knew and cross an ocean to have a chance to establish it. At the same time, we are the spiritual descendants of seekers, of restless people who wanted the freedom to continue on their own religious journey, wherever it took them. And so, today we try to balance these two conflicting needs, and to learn to come together in community, over and over again, failing and trying again, by agreeing to create covenants to support and nurture our communities. We sense, as did our Puritan forebears, that living together in covenantal community is a way forward toward the goal of Beloved Community, heaven here on earth. May we always remain accountable and loyal to this community, and to the shared values that help us to sustain it.
May it be so, Amen.
