A Simple Faith

Liturgical Materials for Sunday the 5^th of January, 2003

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

Opening words [Next] [back to top]

We are here
with the stubborn gray rain and white snow
to claim and name once again
our heritage and hope in gathered community.
We know our failings and our disappointments
but nonetheless we come here freely,
heartened by the principles and practices
which call us to savor and save the world.
And, at the end of our time today

(together) And may our reason and our passion keep us true to ourselves, true to each other,
and true to those shared visions of what we can together become….

Sequence [Next] [back to top]

The great game is won,
and local hearts know uplift and joy.
The trumpets of war are sounding,
and many hearts around the world
stew in worry and fear.
Human hearts brim with feelings, high and low
even more at holiday times, on days of transition.
Memories of sadness and happiness bundle the
heart in their quilt of emotion. But all of these
memories are personal and local and singular.

But hopes for peace and a justice that prospers
are the similar all over the world, no matter the culture, language, religion, world-view or station.

To pito O te Henua they say on Rapa Nui,
Easter Island.
Szczesliwego Nowego Roku they say in Crakow,
in Polska, or Poland.
Saadetler dilerim they say in Istanbul, in Turkey.

Many sounds! Many lands!
Cold lands, hot lands,
mountain lands and lake lands.

Masaganang Bagong Taon, they say in Tagalog on the streets of Manila, in the Philippines.
Propero Ano, they say on the sun-warmed lanes of Rio in Brazil.
Na bloavezh Mat, they say at St. Michel in Breton, the ancient tongue still used on the north coast of France.

Full of good wishes! Full of good will.
Dreams of happiness. Visions of peace for all.

Kurisumasu Omedeto, they say in Tokyo,
Subha Aluth Awrudhak Vewa, they cry out in Columbo, Sri Lanka.
Ojenyunyat osrasay! they murmer in Québec among those who still speak a smattering of Iroquois.
Or maybe they say cheerfully, Bon Année! Or even if they speak English, Happy New Year.!

And we say it too. May our year be happy, not as a gift owed to us, but because we have the courage to live it with honor and honesty.
May our year prosper us with surprising joy,
not as a blessing but as an opening in our hearts.
May each person on the earth know a good year. No matter the language, the culture, the station,
may all human spirits be faithful to their
dreams of freedom, their visions of peace,
their celebration of honesty and truthfulness.
Blessed is the arrival of the New Year,
which is any day when human beings in any language say yes to life, love, freedom, honesty and peace.

silence

And as the New Year begins, may we bless the ones we love, and who have loved us, by remembering them into this place and hour,
by naming them, inside the sanctuary of our loving hearts, or aloud, in the midst of this loving community.

naming

Now let the new year begin again at this very moment, a whole new world beginning…
beginning like music begins…
with intention, decision, practice and beauty.

First Reading [Next] [back to top] comes from a book about our Reformation Era history in Poland, by Stanislas Kot, called Socinianism in Poland, 1957. No matter if you don't know what Socinianism is…you will by the end of the sermon. These folks were also called Ariani, rational Anabaptists, and by several other names, but it's the word Socinian I will use this morning.

The personal sacrifices of individual adherents of the faith were without influence on the nobility in general. Society considered them eccentrics and treated the noble visionaries with increasing scorn. Jan Niemojewski, (yon nyeh-moh-YEF-ski) Siemianowski, and Brzezinski sold their estates in Kujawy in order to distribute the money among the poorer brothers and sisters. General opinion, however, laughed at them as eccentrics. Witness one contemporary author:

We saw at city of Lublin a certain important noble named Niemojewski, a most stubborn adherent of this faith, in a simple gray garment, without sword, without wallet, without attendant, rebaptized just a few days before. The local Cardinal of the Catholic Church, Hosius had long conversations with him several times, trying to turn him from this delusion, but he steadfastly insisted that the doctrine that he confessed was true…

So, no longer having a common language with their neighbors who ridiculed them, these rational Anabaptists associated mostly with one another…

But their social practice was remarkable nonetheless. Samuel Przypkowski, for example, recognizing that his serfs in the villages of Upper Przypkowice, were, with him, creatures of one Creator, did not wish that these serfs of his, along with their sons and daughters in the villages, should live forever in servitude and bondage, according to the general law of the crown. So he freed these peasants and serfs and their posterity from all burdens. At the same time, he gave these folks permission to leave his land and to dwell wherever they will; and moreover he renounced forever his right to prosecute them, or at any time to demand their surrender by judicial means. He no longer asked to know whom they visited, or where they were going. He set them free to live their lives.

Second Reading [Next] [back to top] is a New Year poem by the late Denise Levertov, written 21 years ago. It's called, simply enough, "For the New Year."

I have a small grain of hope-
one small crystal that gleams
clear colors out of transparency.

I need more.

I break off a fragment
to send you.
Please take
this grain of a grain of hope
so that mine won't shrink.

Please share your fragment
so that yours will grow.
Only so, by division,
will hope increase,
like a clump of irises, which will cease to flower
unless you distribute
the clustered roots…. unlikely source-
clumsy and earth-covered-
of grace.

Sermon: A Simple Faith [Next][back to top]

I guess you could say I was something of a geek when I was a kid.

Oh, they had other words for it in those days, but "geek" seems to be the prevailing word this last decade, so I have a better chance for making myself clear. "Geek"

You know. I wore glasses from the age of 4, a reality which no peer wasted any time in ridiculing without mercy back in the glorious 50's. So I was a geek. I did not want to play Little League, so again I was a geek. And most of all, I read weird books…tons of them…from the library. You know, weird books, like science fiction or books on yoga. This really made me a geek.

When I was eleven, and still a geek, my mother, brother and sister and I went on our twice-yearly trip downtown to all get our eyes checked. Somehow I wheedled permission from my mother to go to the downtown branch library just down the street. I wanted to get some books to pass the time while my sister and brother had their eyes dilated and had to sit still for an hour or so in the waiting room.

Geek that I was, I went right to the science fiction section and took out a few musty books and set them down on the table. I opened the first book to the table of contents, and scanned down till I found a story I thought I might like.

I found one that looked promising. I read it through, totally captivated by its mysterious story. By the time I finished reading it, I realized that it was one of those things that I would later deem, as an adult, a "life-changing event."

Now of course I have to tell you the story, even if forty odd years has distorted it a bit. I assure you I had to reconstruct part of it at least. And of course there are those in this room who simply HATE science fiction stories. But I must ask you in good faith to hang in there with me. And for those of you who are sci-fi fans, and who wish to know the author and title, I can't help you. For many years I have tried to find out the author of this story so I could re-read it. But to no avail. The great sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke wrote me back that he thought it was "a very fine story indeed," but that he hadn't a clue as to who wrote it.

So here is the little story that changed my life one afternoon in a dusky downtown library in Detroit.

The time is five hundred years in the future. A great space ship from earth is cruising through a solar system far, far away, making planetary charts. They find an Earth-type planet inhabited by human being-like creatures. It was the same size as earth, had similar continental structure, and even its year was almost the same to the day as it orbited around its own sun. It had just one moon of similar size to Earth's, too.

The anthropologists on this great space ship note to the captain that people on this planet are at a state in their development comparable to the twentieth century on Earth. There are major cities and road-ways. But there is pollution everywhere. And the whole planet is divided up into competing nation states and conflicting languages, religions and cultures. The two largest nations have a rudimentary form of atomic energy and are beginning to send communication satellites into orbit.

The captain of the space ship decides that contact with this civilization is premature. She says to the crew, "It's just too early in their development as a civilization. They are still in their very early stages of maturity. Worse, they are still on the edge of blowing themselves up with atomic bombs or killing each other off with biological weapons, like we almost did. I say, better to wait a couple of hundred years, and then come back. Then we can meet them, and if they are ready, we can even welcome them into preliminary membership in the United Planets Association."

All the requisite reports were made and filed.

And then the space ship went home.

Two hundred years later, a different space ship and a different captain came to visit. They had read the reports, and were back to offer the folks on this planet, if ready, membership in the United Planets Association.

But as they returned to the site, they were shocked. There had been many changes. First, they noted that there were two moons, not one. This really confused them. Second, as they got closer to the surface, they could see that all the great roads and cities had vanished. In their place, thousands of villages, great and small, with gardens and orchards surrounding them. No more agribusiness, just local produce. The towers of the cities had crumbled back into the earth. There were no signs of radiation either, or germs, no signs that the population was just coming back after a terrible war. It looked as if they had deliberately dismantled everything that once had been.

Totally perplexed to the point of distraction, the captain decided to land and find out what happened. This didn't fit any of the expectations in the great books of planetary sociology and anthropology.

So he brings the ship down near the largest village, the only village, in fact, that had something which looked like a large public monument made of stone.

Some of the villagers stroll up to the ship totally unperturbed, clearly not shocked by something so technically advanced as a great ship floating down to the surface on a pillar of blue fire. The captain lowers a translation device onto the ground and then climbs down himself with members of his crew. Through the translation device they converse with the elders of the village.

"Oh," says one of them, "you need to talk with Merit, who is our historian. She can tell you why we live the way we do."

So carrying a portable translator, the captain and crew visit Merit, an elderly woman with a bright, but also terribly wise, smile. They ask her what happened to the cities, the roads, the airplanes and pollution that only two hundred years earlier had gilded the planet.

"Oh, that," she smiled. "I think I know what you want to know. Yes, we had cities. We also had war and conflict and poverty and rage and lies. We had pollution and deforestation. We had hatred between religions and nations. But, perhaps unlike your own world which seems to have taken a technological bent during your crisis years, we looked inward. We are, captain, an introspective people. So we turned our energies toward study and the building of computers. We united our world by all agreeing to a single world-wide project. That moon you see up there, our second moon, the silvery one, is the result of our project.

It is a single computer mind, solid circuitry, over three thousand kilometers thick. Into that vast computer we put all the books and music and bibles of the ages. We put in our poetry and war diaries, and, in the end, we put in electric copies of the mind and memories of every single person alive on this world at the time. Then we posed the great Mind two questions. 1. Who or what made the universe? and 2,What is the purpose of it? The great machine, which we designed to be infallible in reason and passion both, hummed for twenty years to answer those two questions. Let me show you the answers."

She led them up the marble monument in the center of town, a temple-like affair with columns and a gabled roof. Inside the temple was a table, and on the table, a simple computer print out, under glass. "Bring your translator over here, captain, and I will read the text so you can hear the answers to the two great questions."

She lifted the glass off the printout, and lifted it carefully in her hand. "Who or what made the universe?" was the first question. Here's the answer: "No one made the universe. The universe just happened." And "What is the purpose of the universe?" was the second question. Here's the answer. "The universe has no purpose. It just is."

And so, knowing that this is the truth, we asked ourselves why we fought so much and struggled so hard, why we amassed such fortunes and worshipped our gods so fiercely. We knew that our way of life had been foolish, and so, together, we ended it. We tore down our cities. We stopped the pollution. We live in peace with the land and with each other. We love each other and support each other and share everything we have with each other. We have no war, no crime, no beggars, no anger. Do you understand, captain?"

"Yes, I think I do," said the captain, frowning. And within the hour, the captain and crew had taken off, deciding to quarantine the planet, lest their toxic ideas leave the surface and spread everywhere round the galaxy to ruin it.

Now when I first read this story I believed strongly in complex and deep religious things. I believed in a two-tiered universe with spirit and matter in different places. I believed in an omnipotent God who tampered with history, picked favorites, and had a desire that my life would follow some design He (and He was a He!) thought best. I believed that much of what I did made God unhappy, that the priests had power to change things for the better, be it the soul or a wafer of bread. I believed that cruel people would suffer in hell or at least purgatory. I believed that Christ had been God on earth, that miracles were not strange in the least, and that those damn atheists over in Russia were ruining the world.

The sci-fi story I read in the library didn't undo all this concrete religious faith just like that. But the logic of the story got me hooked into the possibility that maybe things were not as I thought. And, the biggest surprise to me in the story was that the simple religious answers to the two questions did not make these people on that planet rowdy and cruel, like I had always been taught would happen by the nuns. "If there is no God," said Dostoyevsky, "then all things are permissible." How often I heard the nuns quote that great sentence from the great Russian novelist. But in this story, the purposelessness of the universe actually gets people to behave better, not worse, more kindly, not more cruelly.

As a minister, and as a citizen with friends outside the church, I often hear folks telling me that they are "not religious" because they no longer believe in God, or Christ or the Bible, or in the authority of rabbis, priests or ministers. They no longer think that sacraments or ordinances or miracles make sense. They no longer think that paying dues at the synagogue is sensible, and they think that Peter and Paul are both robbers. They tell me that the churches, synagogues and mosques are filled with hypocrites and fools who believe, in the immortal words of Lewis Carroll, "six impossible things before breakfast."

But I wonder, who said religion has to be complicated and filled with impossible doctrines in order to be truly religious? Who made up that silly rule? Who says that big religions get to define terms and discussions for small religions? If I let that happen, aren't I still agreeing that these large churches do indeed have the authority I claim no longer to follow? Isn't that a little two-faced?

Our ancestors in Poland and Lithuania had a very small religion back in the 15 and 1600's. They also had simple faith with very thin theological doctrines. Because of this, they were lambasted as "atheists" by their peers. They didn't think of themselves as atheists, though their view of God was certainly not orthodox in the least. They simply called themselves the Minor Church. And modern historians call them Socinians after their great theologian Faustus Socinus, or Fausto Paolo Sozzini in the original Italian.

They were ridiculed for their practices and beliefs because they were so simple, so supposedly unreligious. They didn't believe that Jesus was God, just an ethical and most human example for us to follow. They didn't believe that God was an omnipotent being in charge of everything, but a growing being, limited and not all-knowing. They gave up the sacraments of the church, except they allowed themselves a symbolic rebaptism as a way of noting church membership, and they celebrated communion in their own way, four times per year, promising at their simple table of bread and cup to keep the values of "the sermon on the mount."

Yes, the sermon on the mount, you know, that ancient summary by the Jewish teacher Jesus of what it looks like when we put the Torah into practice, the Torah which tells us in Leviticus, "You shall love your neighbor as you love yourselves." Yes, that sermon on the mount. You know:

Love your enemies. Do not return hurt for hurt, but resist humiliation by turning the right cheek when your left has been slapped as if you were a slave. Give freely to those who ask of you. If a soldier by law forces you to carry his baggage for a mile, walk with him two miles instead. You cannot at the same time mount two horses, or shoot two bows. You have to make choices. Stop fretting about what to wear or what to eat. Only the destitute are truly innocent after all. Shaping your life by anger alone is foolish. Peacemakers are God's family. No secret is forever…everything is made known in the end. The realm of God is here, now, not later. Carry neither sword nor wallet on your journey. Do not go around expecting to be waited on. You have to ask in order to receive an answer. You have to knock before the door will open. The table of God serves everyone except those who refuse to come. Learn to love those who are different from you. Judge for yourselves…don't wait for me to figure things out for you. Be gentle as doves, yes, but clever as snakes. You have heads, use them.

Yes, that "sermon on the mount." The shorter maxims and teachings of Jesus gathered up by a later editor and jammed into a few Chapters in Matthew and Luke. Jan Niemojewski was one of our famous ancestors who took these ethical maxims seriously. He was a well-to-do noble who heard the preaching of the minister Martin Czechowic in his city of Lublin, and was deeply changed by it. He gave up his fancy clothes and wore a simple gray gown, much like my robe, which, 25 years ago, I designed in honor of his amazing decision, and because I wanted to know the kind of faith he had in his life, in my life. He resigned his judgeship in Lublin because he no longer believed in capital punishment and could not in conscience order it. He followed the teachings in the "sermon on the mount" thoroughly, refusing to promote war for any reason, refusing to be unmoved by the poor or sick or marginalized. He sold his huge landholdings in Kujawy to support the poorer members of the congregation. And like Przypkowski after him, he set his serfs, aka slaves, free, centuries before our Lincoln was born. Socinians like Niemojewski were famous for their peaceful conduct, their respectful manners and their love of education. They taught hard science, including the science of the heretic Copernicus, in their religious colleges. They argued for religious pluralism. And the whole time they were ridiculed for their simple faith, by their neighbors, damned as atheists, and persecuted.

Socinians, like Niemojewski, had a deep and simple faith. It was not cluttered up with all sorts of metaphysical speculations. But Niemojewski was wonderfully religious. He was not ashamed of being religious…it was his life, his mode of living. He did not let Protestant and Catholic critics dictate the terms of the conversation…he did not define himself as "no longer Catholic," or "no longer Protestant," or "no longer theistic," which ultimately are reactionary self-identities. No, Niemojewski defined himself by his life of peace and justice and love and care. He defined himself, not by ancient creeds, Pentecostal emotional release, or other questionable emblems of authority, but by his steadfast faith that it was actually possible in this world to live out the ethical truth of the gospel without shame.

When I first read about his life, he reminded me at once of those people in that sci-fi story I told you, who themselves had discovered a simple faith, and lived it. Not a traditional faith or course…just as ours is not very traditional either. But it is a faith, that is, a way of moving forward in the world with integrity and character and conviction.

Our Socinian ancestors lived simple lives in their villages along the Vistula in Poland, or up in Lublin, or on the tree lined streets of Cracow. They lived lives of peace, gentility, shared resources and mutual support. Like the waitress in the children's story this morning, their way of relating to other people was not grand, but consisted of homely practices of ethical hope by which they treated each other kindly and lovingly. Some bread, some wine, some kindness and truth-telling. These little pieces of hope sustained them over the years until the Polish legislature, influenced maliciously by Jesuit missionaries, passed laws to run them out of Poland and into exile. Like the fragments of hope shared in Levertov's poem, "please take a grain of hope from me so that mine won't shrink," like her irises which bloom despite growing in the inelegant muddy earth, our religious ancestors grew a fragment, a flower of principled and ethical religion in an unlikely and violent era. Their simple, lived out faith has always been one of my chief inspirations, and that inspiration is probably why I am not the most sympathetic minister when someone tells me that he or she thinks our religion is not really a religion, because we do not share common metaphysical beliefs.

Ah, but we do share one singular belief. We share the common belief that it's possible for people of varying spiritual ideas and practices to weave a community of love and support and challenge that enables us all to bring a measure of hope to a hurting world. If we did not believe that, this church would not, in any way, be possible.

Now, you personally may not turn to the sermon on the mount for your spiritual sustenance, like the Socinians did and I still do. You may not like science fiction stories from the pulpit or even in the library. You may find history wearisome to read. All of that does not matter. What does matter is that our lives show our faith to the world so clearly, so evidently, that no one ever has to ask that silly old question of us, "What does your religion teach?"

Because, even if they did, all we'd have to say by way of answer is, "Just watch."

A Simple Prayer[back to top]

Spirit of Life, Great Mystery that I am powerless to name…I at least name myself:

I am a child of the earth
rooted in its dark and rich loam.
You, however, are probably
a lot more like the wind,
blowing where you will,
unseen save when the branches bend.
So look, I require no miracles of you, no favors,
no special cancellation of laws on my behalf.
I only want to be more like you,
like wind that is free and powerful and gentle,
like you, not obsessed with where I come from,
like you, not obsessed with where I am going.
I want my yes to mean yes, my no to mean no,
and I want my tongue to praise more and
cut less. I want to uproot the violent images
which the social world presses into my heart,
and replace them with images of children at
play in the sun. I want to face the unspent wrath
which breeds in my soul when I do not pay attention to what I feel when I feel it.
I want the beat of my heart to hurt no one.
I want peace in all cities and in all villages
and in all hearts and in me. Amen.

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Last update: 02/16/2003