"The Entire History of the Unitarian Universalist Movement and Institution in Twenty Five Minutes Flat"

Liturgical Materials for Sunday the 28^th of November, 1999

Mark Belletini, Minister First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, Ohio

Opening Words [Next] [back to top]

We are here
poised between the great autumn holiday
and the great winter holidays to come,
to worship, to open ourselves to deeper loving,
to risk growth and grace, to learn and unlearn,
to remember that we ourselves are history alive,
and that our lives are, each of them, significant,
gifts we share with each other and with all.

The First Lesson [Next] [back to top] comes from an essay written about Duke Ellington by Stanley Dance, in an English collection of essays about the great composer put together in 1958.

Duke's music is essentially an expression of himself, and as such meets his conception of jazz. "Jazz," he says, "is above all total freedom to express oneself. He writes, "Our inspiration is derived from our lives, and the lives of those about us, and those that went before us."

His friend Ned Williams says, "Duke is a deeply religious soul." And John Hammond described him thus, "His disposition is without rival among artists, for he has never been known to lose his temper or do conscious ill to anyone. He suffers exploitation with Olympian calm."

Said Ellington, "I don't believe in telling people who are grown ups to do things, things they should have learned when they were six years old. I have to respect them as people. And that means I can't be rude to them."

His tolerance is enormous. His faith in the Bible should not seem incongruous...it is the human element which exercises such fascination for him.

The Second Lesson [Next] [back to top] is a poem by Jane Hirshfield, written just three years ago, with the terrific title "The Heart's Counting Knows Only One."

In Sung China, two monks, friends for sixty years, watched the geese pass. Where are they going? one tested the other, who couldn't say.

That moment's silence continues.

No one will study their friendship in the koan-books of insight. No one will remember their names.

I think of them sometimes, standing, perplexed by sadness, goose-down sewn into their quilted autumn robes. Almost swallowed by the vastness of the mountains, but not yet.

As the barely audible geese are not yet swallowed, as even we, my love, will not entirely be lost.

Sermon: "The Entire History of the Unitarian Universalist Movement and Institution in Twenty Five Minutes Flat"[Next] [back to top]

"To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to never grow up."  Those strong, unequivocal words written at the top of your Orders of Celebration are from Cicero, and I agree.

Now, in order to grow up, I have observed that most babies have to get past something which some parents I know call "the terrible twos." It's a time when "No" is the only consistent response. "No, I won't." "No, I won't go." "No, I won't come." It's an important time of differentiation for the child. It's a way of building an identity separate from that of the parents and other adults.

But no child can stay in the "terrible twos" forever. In order to continue to grow up, a child has to come to some far more basic "yes" to life. You see, life is not just about me. It's not just about my experience, my family, and my needs and wants in the present. It's about learning about my shared past, and how my live is woven into the lives of many who came before, my "inspiration" in Ellington's words.

Thus, studying shared history is one of the best ways to grow past our admittedly first important stage of growing up... the "spiritual terrible twos,"  where we say "no!" to religious expressions that no longer make sense to us, and toward mature and healthy adult religion, where we are free, like jazz musicians, to express ourselves freely yet cooperatively. Studying shared history means to say "yes" to a Stream of Life and Light greater than our own. It means to accept our limited part in the flow of time. It means to cease imagining that we are the final triumph of human history. It's to realize that history is made by folks not unlike us, who, though in different cultures, in different languages, and different styles, asked some of the same questions we ask:

"What is the source of our common world?"

"Is there something that unites us all despite our differences?"

"How do we know what we know?"

"What, if anything, has final authority in our lives?"

"What is fair and just?"

"What is the relationship between fallible humanity and the Sublime or the Good?"

"How then shall we live our lives?"

These are grown-up questions, questions that are difficult, and not given to easy answers, or in some cases, any final, once-and-for-all-time answers at all. Questions such as these have been asked by many people in the history of the world, but many of their names are forgotten. All of us, I'd guess, will one day be forgotten. In a thousand years, who will make in their mouths the sound that is our names?

But the poet Jane Hirshfield does not despair. She writes of two Zen Buddhist monks sitting and watching the geese fly away for the winter. One of them asks the other: "Where are the geese flying?" but the other, in all honesty, cannot answer, despite the fact that this question is much simpler than any of the great questions I posed above. And so they sit in silence, those monks, their quiet friendship enduring, she says, even now, not even swallowed up by the everlasting mountains.

Folks such as these make up the bulk of our history. Nameless, their lives are nonetheless solid as this chalice, as bright as this flame. I am aware that all history, religious or otherwise, is strangely selective, and that only a very few names are remembered, too often the eccentric or the terribly cruel. But I maintain that the terribly cruel and the eccentric are far rarer than history texts would suggest, and that the bulk of human history, and our own Unitarian Universalist history, is made up of fine and gracious people who did the best they could with the knowledge and opportunities they had.

Our ancestors...the famous and the forgotten both... were religious in the way that Duke Ellington seems to have been religious. When they read the Bible it was the human element than concerned them from the very beginning, not the metaphysical. They were tolerant toward other folks, including even people who were not terribly tolerant to them. They were not ashamed to dream of a better, more just world, but they were also only willing to deal with grown-ups as grown-ups... not as big babies stuck in their spiritual "terrible twos."

They expected people to claim enough freedom of expression for themselves to become adults, to find a way to "yes" and to move past pouts and resentment.

With that as a preface, I offer you our common history. This church would not be here today save that all of these things happened before we were born. There is a lot here...just take in what you can take in now, and study the rest later...

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Once upon a time, before we were born, we were rooted in the Mediterranean basin, the Middle East, and North Africa. There were many prophets, teachers and philosophers who lived there, in the lands of Greece and Israel and Egypt. Some of these teachers, like Pythagoras and Epicurus, founded congregations that survived them for hundreds of years. Others, like Herakleitos, Zeno, or the Hebrew prophets Micaiah and the Egyptian Ptah-Hotep, are survived by just a few of their authentic words. In the days when Rome lost a bit of its dignity and became a brutal Empire, some similar congregations were founded by the friends of a Jewish teacher named Yeshu', or Iesuos Khristos, as the Greeks called him. These congregations...half Greek, half Jewish.... spread like mushrooms after a good rain, and covered the Mediterranean world. They shared meals in common and sang and were famous for their pacifism. They were called Christians after their Teacher. This is the fertile soil in which we grew.

Thus, once before we were born, we were called Arians. This is not the malevolent racial Aryanism of the Nazis, but religious Arianism, spelled with an "i," not a "y." Arianism was simply a particular way of looking at the mysteries of creation, based on the teaching of a man named Arius around the year 300 of our era. In far Alexandria he lived, Arius. He was a presbyter, or preacher, in a suburban church of the largest city on earth in those days.

When he meditated on the very adult question "What is the source of our common world?" he refused to answer either Father, Son, or Holy Spirit, which were the expected answers, but rather, he said this amazing thing: the "Agnostikos Anarche" in Greek or "The Unknown Unbegun" is the source of all things. More than that we cannot say. If the human prophet Jesus referred to God as loving Parent, it was only because he was speaking to his audience, who, after all, were not scholars from the university, but humble peasants for whom a loving parent was a high value. Metaphors are not reality...they are only metaphors.

His bishop was not happy with him, and he was eventually driven from the church. Arius died a rejected man, and the church even created its first "Creed" to make sure he would stay out.

Once, before we were born, we were called rigenists. We were called that after another North African, Origenes, who lived a century before Arius. When Origenes meditated on the grown-up question "What is the final authority in our lives?" he answered: "The human heart, after being educated in every possible way." When people protested and said "The Bible is the final authority, and education from any other book besides that Holy Book is dangerous and arrogant," Origenes said, "Nonsense. Study science, philosophy and astronomy. Study history and other religious systems. And when you read the Bible, by all means read it humanely, not literally. The real Mt. Sinai is not a mountain down in the desert, but the heights inside your own heart. Miracle are metaphors. Taking the Bible literally only hurts people. Such a book is a gift for the educated and compassionate heart, not the sentimental or authority-drunk mind." And when Origenes meditated on the grown up question "What is fair and just?" he answered, "Only something that will apply to all people equally. Thus, there can be no eternal hellfire, and all people universally must come into wholeness."

When he eventually died, we were call Origenists for a time, but around the year 500, church authorities voted that Origenes and all that he taught should be forgotten for all time. And, sadly, they almost succeeded, but not quite.

Before we were born, we were call Pelagians, after an Irish monk named Pelagius. Pelagius came to Rome in the mid- 400's, and heard that there was a man named Augustine of Hippo going around saying that when babies are born, they come into this world with "sin." They are born bad, and they stay bad, until God stoops to rescue them, even though they don't deserve it. "Original sin," Augustine called it. "And," he continued, "when human beings went bad, death itself entered the world, every calamity and suffering." That's right. Augustine actually said that before human beings "fell" into their misery, there was no death and no suffering on earth. They said that nature was once different from what it is now, without either scorpion or thorn.

Pelagius heard Augustine's ranting with considerable anger. Nonetheless, he set his anger aside, and chose to meditate on the grown- up question "What is the relationship between humanity and the Sublime, or the Good?" And when he had thought it through, he answered: "Babies are born neither good nor bad, just human and free. Original sin is a hurtful idea. When babies get older and become adults, they may do bad things, but not because some original sin is forcing them to do so. And furthermore, death and suffering are just part of the way things were from the beginning. Nature has always been just the way it is right now."

Augustine and a guy named Jerome made Pelagius' life miserable. He died feeling pretty rejected. Nonetheless, some theologians who do not like us very much still call us Pelagians after this poor man. They think to insult us by saying so. But I'm afraid I am not terribly insulted.

Before we were born, we were called Erigenists, after Johannes Scotus Erigenus, who lived at the time in the Middle Ages when Arius and Origenes were forgotten. Erigena meditated on the questions, "What is the origin of our common creation?" and "What is just and fair." and came up with the same answers as Arius and Origenes: "The Unknown Uncreated is our source, and it's where we will all end up, too. And when he meditated on the question, "How do we know what we know?" Erigena concluded, "We know anything worth knowing through reason, not personal revelation." When he died, church authorities voted to never speak of him again, and they almost succeeded in making him disappear, except for the few of us that read his banned works anyway.

Before we were born, we were called Heretics. Heretic is a Greek word which means "someone who chooses not to conform." In the Middle Ages there were many who called us Heretics, because for them, to choose not to conform was a terrible thing. The Brothers and Sisters of the Free Spirit joined some University of Paris professors who had read Erigena in meditating on the questions "What is the relationship of humanity to the Good," and "How then shall we live our lives?" and came up with different answers than those who chose to conform. They said "We must live our lives freely, without coercion, reasonably, not simply taking things on authority, and trusting in the human heart. Sex is not something bad, but something to be celebrated; every single meal eaten with thanks is holy communion, and heaven and hell are not places, but metaphors for states of the human heart." Many of us died for saying such things, died in the flames, or in prison.

One of the last of the great Heretics was a Spaniard named Servet, a physician who had a personal dream of world community and harmony between Jews, Christians and Muslims, all sharing a simple faith no longer confused with ideas like the Trinity. But the Protestant warrior John Calvin in Geneva tried to burn that idea out of him at the stake. In the end, it was not heresy that died, but only a poor man Calvin called a Heretic.

Before we were born, we were called Anabaptists. Anabaptists were radical Christians who said that religion cannot be spoon fed and given like a drug to children. Religion must be a grown up choice of a free mind. To baptize a child who is still learning how to choose makes no sense, they said. They meditated on the question, "How then shall we live?" and they came up with this answer. " By taking our adult questions seriously, and taking our answers seriously. If our teacher Jesus told us it was best not to go to war, and told us that lying never fooled anyone, and that goods should be shared, not hoarded, then by God, we should take such a way of life seriously. Do we practice what we preach or not?" Many of us died for saying such things, died in the flames, or in prison.

Before we were born, and for several hundred years, we were called Socinians. We were called that because of a man named Sozzini, from Siena Italy, who moved up to Poland and settled in an Anabaptist village there. He joined them in their pacifist Anabaptist teachings, but also suggested to them that maybe Jesus was not the same thing as God after all, and that maybe God was not an all powerful being in charge of everything. Maybe there was no all-powerful being in charge of everything, and maybe "God" was growing and stumbling along like us. When these people meditated on the questions I listed, they came up with answers that made everyone around them mad as hatters. They said we should live by reason, not rage. They said that human beings had to do sublime work on this earth, not waiting for God to intervene with miracles, most of which, they said, like Origenes, were just literary parables, not real events.

The Jesuits came to Poland 150 years after the Socinians formed their communities. They convinced the government to send them away from Poland and Lithuania and Ukraine, and scattered them over all of Europe. Many of them died of broken hearts. Some, however, settled in Holland and influenced life there.

Before we were born, we were called Unitarians. There once was a man named David Ferenc, or Francis David, from a Hungarian speaking land called "On the Other Side of the Forest" or Transylvania. He considered Jesus a human prophet, mortal like all of us, and said that God was One, not three. When he meditated on the question "What unity underlies our diversity?" David answered, "We need not think alike in order for us to love alike." For a while his preaching was so famous that the royal court itself came to believe what he preached, which they eventually called Unitarian, to distinguish them from the "Trinitarians," that is, those who believed that Jesus was God. But, after a while, when the King and Queen Mother died, and a non-Unitarian came to the throne, David was thrown into prison for his beliefs, where he finally died. Still, there are many hundreds of churches in the land of Transylvania. When they meditated on the question, "How then shall we live?" they answered, "With complete integrity, no matter what the cost." And the cost was high in the days of the fanatic Ceaucescu of Bucharest, who harassed the Unitarian villages under his power until he himself lost his life.

Before we were born, we were called Universalists. Some Christian radicals began to read suppressed works like the works of Origenes and some Heretics. They began to take their simple form Christianity and transform it with the doctrine of Universalism, the idea that Love is always greater than Judgement, and that no human being is exempt from that love. This religious revolution began in Holland and Germany, but blossomed in England. An English preacher, John Murray, brought this religious optimism to the American colonies, and it spread like wildfire, largely due to Murray's excellent preaching and his wife Judith Sargent Murray's excellent writing. Abraham Lincoln once wrote to Thomas Starr King, the Universalist minister for whom my former church was named, that the only sermons he ever read and enjoyed were Murray's sermons.

Among the great Universalists on our continent: Benjamin Rush, who signed the Declaration, is called the "Father of American Psychiatry." Hosea Ballou wrote the most influential book on Universalism, a book that rejected the painful idea that Jesus' bloody death somehow did something good. Universalists Adin Ballou and Abner Kneeland, when meditating on the question, "How then shall we live?" suggested utopian communes, similar in some ways to planned communes. Diverse schools such as the California Institute of Technology and Tufts University were founded by the Universalists, revealing their commitment to broad education, on the model of their hero, Origenes. Meditating on the question, "How do we know what we know?" the Universalists answered, "By our reason." Thus, they accepted Darwin's theories first among religions. Clara Barton's social concerns were her expressed Universalism; Universalist women everywhere supported universal suffrage, and the abolition of slavery, since they answered the grown-up question "What is just and fair?" in a very mature way: "Justice can only be a reality when all people have the right to be who they are and also enjoy power in fair balance with everyone else."

Before we were born, we were called Unitarians. Some exiled Socinians made it to Holland, and spread their ideas to England, where some of them caught up great minds like Joseph Priestley, the great scientist and Unitarian minister. English Unitarians of note include folks like Beatrix Potter, the creator of Peter Rabbit, the writers James and Harriet Martineau, and Sir Adrian Boult, the great champion of the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams.

On this continent, Unitarianism arose from a Puritan Calvinism, primarily on Pelagian issues, affirming both free will and the dignity and worth of every human being at birth. For example, the church founded by the Pilgrims became Unitarian in 1801. Priestley moved to the New World after his lab was burnt down by the citizens of Birmingham impatient with his liberal politics, and befriended Thomas Jefferson, who fancied himself a Unitarian without a congregation. But it was not until William Ellery Channing in the 1820's that North American Unitarianism gained an unequivocal voice. His famous sermon in the early 1820's claimed the word "Unitarian" with pride. Others followed in his bold tradition: Theodore Parker, and even the famous Ralph Waldo Emerson, who for a time served a Unitarian Church in Boston as a minister. Meditating on the great grown up questions, Unitarians both in the States and in Canada answered that "reason" is our source of knowledge, that we must live with "integrity and honesty, un-coerced by external authority and totally free." They preached that human beings are responsible for doing the divine work of Good on the earth. Waiting around for miracles to save us was, in Emerson's strong language, simply "monstrous." And so abolition, suffrage, children's rights, temperance, education, animal rights and health issues became Unitarian concerns, our history lit by the great stars Dorothea Dix, Henry Witney Bellows, Horace Mann, Elizabeth Peabody, Susan B. Anthony, Julia Ward Howe. The literary arts simply glowed with Unitarian fire...the Longfellows, Bret Harte, Louisa May Alcott, Ambrose Bierce, James Russel Lowell, Oliver Wendel Holmes and in our own era, May Sarton and many, many others.

The Transcendentalist movement championed by Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Thoreau, etc. changed Unitarianism so that it did not appear so much as a reformed Christianity as a more universal religion, stripped of traditional ordinances and rites. This trend continued into the Twentieth Century, when men and women like John Dietrich and Sophia Fahs changed the face of Unitarianism once again, so that it answered all the ancient adult questions in a more humanistic way, with science, poetry, art and culture displacing many of the exhausted debates on the nature of God and Jesus. Universalism changed in the same direction, due to folks like Clarence Skinner, so that the two great movements merged in the early 60's. And thus today, each of us who are members of North American congregations are no longer Unitarians or Universalists, but are now become Unitarian Universalists. The word Unitarian by itself no longer exists except historically. Words like "reason" and "inclusivity" and "freedom" and "love" are still good answers to some of the great old questions, but even "I don't know" is encouraged in us as a great and powerful religious answer to adult questions. Of course, Arius, at the very beginning, said that the Agnostikos, or the Unknown, was at the center of everything, so maybe, in some very strange way, we have come full circle in our own day. One thing I do know is that the grown up questions won't go away, and that each of us, streams in the great river of our living tradition, will somehow find a way to live out lives answering "yes" to the last adult question, one I have not posed till now: "And will our children also know the freedom, reason, love, and inclusiveness and inspiration that are dear to us?"

Once we were Arians, or Origenists, or Pelagians, or Erigenists, or Heretics, or Anabaptists, or Socinians, or Unitarians, or Universalists, and now we are Unitarian Universalists. I wonder, how shall we be known in a hundred years? In a thousand?

By whatever name, they too will read about us...not by our personal names, but as the nameless supporters of the bright lives that shall carry our good news to the generations that follow us. I only hope they will be as grateful for us, as we are for those who came before us.

Prayer: Spoken Praisesong [back to top]

Oh Freedom, I speak of you.
I praise you in public.
Sometimes I understand what you mean,
Sometimes I do not.
Sometimes I am afraid of you.
Sometimes I do not think I have ever known you.
Yet you, everlasting Word, will last longer than I will,
and mountains will echo your praises even as they wear down into valleys.
Praise to you.

Oh Reason, I speak of you.
I praise you in public.
Sometimes I understand what you mean.
Sometimes I do not.
Sometimes I think it's all just a cold, heartless game.
Sometimes I think it's dead serious in deed, and quite beautiful
Yet you, everlasting Word, will pour your oil on the stormy waters of this world long after the sea itself has turned into a desert.
Praise to you.

Oh Love, I speak of you.
I praise you in public.
Sometimes I think it's all just empty air.
Sometimes I think I would die without you.
Sometimes I believe the ignorant world, and think you are weak or sweet.
Sometimes I am terrified of your demands on my life, my heart, my mind.
Yet you, everlasting Word, will beat in the heart of people who live
a million years after I am dust, and thus I turn to you with this song of praise.

hymn 105

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