The Common Call of Unitarian Universalism
Rev. Mark Hayes
November 4, 2001

Reading: The Common Call of Our Faith at the Opening of the 21st Century
              The “Fulfilling the Promise” team of the Unitarian Universalist Association

         The Unitarian Universalist Association consists of freely covenanting faith communities serving a religious legacy of truth, freedom, and love.  As member congregations, we join together in association to support the health, growth, and witness of our congregations and to promote and advance Unitarian Universalist faith.  Our covenants both bind and empower us.

Preamble

         We are grateful for a 400-year-old, living tradition which enriches and ennobles our faith.  Valuing this past, learning from its triumphs and shortcomings, and confident of a dawning future, we unite to deepen our understanding and expand our vision of the good life as a people and as congregations in the Unitarian Universalist Association.  We come together to bear witness to a spirituality of wholeness and mutuality.
         We have inherited a tradition of religious freedom that continues to affirm a radical respect for the dignity and moral agency of each person.  Our forebears challenged a world of dogma, superstition, and widespread ignorance with this faith which remains rooted in freedom of inquiry and expression, tolerance for the multidimensional character of truth, and the fullest exercise of reason in religious life.  Our vision has inspired people and changed social customs more than we may know.  Yet at this moment in history we must go further than our forebears imagined.  Out of a sense of religious calling common among us, we offer the world our declaration of interdependence and challenge ourselves to deepen our religious practice.

Our Common Call

        As Unitarian Universalists, we join hands and hearts to answer this call, that we may fulfill our promise.

Sermon:
     I am a heretic!  That’s right.  I’m a heretic and proud of it.  In fact, Unitarians and Universalists have always been heretics.  In a pamphlet on Unitarian Universalist origins, Mark Harris says that we are heretics, not because we desire to be rebellious, but simply because we want to choose our faith.  Indeed, “heresy” in Greek means “choice”.

     Early Universalists chose, in the face of prevailing Christian doctrine, to believe in a God too full of love to condemn his children to eternal punishment.  Early Unitarians chose, sometimes at the cost of their lives and freedom, to believe in the unity of God and the humanity of Jesus.

     Over the history of American Unitarianism and Universalism, the range of religious choices deemed acceptable has grown ever broader.  There was a time when Unitarians and Universalists held in common the path of Christianity.  No more.  There was a time when Unitarians and Universalists held in common a belief in a supernatural deity, watching over and guiding them.  No more.

     We now find Unitarian Universalist Christians, Buddhists, Jews, agnostics, atheists, pagans, and mystics.  I’m sure that list is not exhaustive.  If I didn’t include you, forgive me.  We’re often characterized as the religion where you can believe anything you want.  I would assert that that is not quite right.  While we recognize no single authoritative source of religious truth, there are constraints.

     One of the best formulations I’ve found is attributed to the Rev. Don Vaughn-Foerster.  He says “For Unitarian Universalists the source of authority is individual experience refined through reason and spirit and tested in the community.  Therefore we believe not what we are told to believe, nor what we wish to believe, but what we are compelled by conscience to believe.”

     I believe that the combined involvement of reason, spirit, conscience, and community is what brings responsibility to our free and responsible search for truth and meaning.  Of course one of the challenges that comes with radical freedom of religious belief, is to discover, articulate and understand what it is that we hold in common.  What it is that binds us together as a religious community and a religious faith.  Can we agree on anything more than the willingness to disagree?

     Throughout the history of our movement there have been attempts to articulate what it is that we hold in common.  There have been Universalist Professions of Faith.  There have been proclamations of “What Unitarians Believe.”  In the mid-nineteenth century, for example, Unitarian James Freeman Clarke enumerated “The Five Points of the New Theology”:


    The most sweeping, comprehensive attempt in our recent history led to the adoption of our seven principles as a part of the By-Laws of the UUA in 1985.  Those principles are generally understood not as a set of religious beliefs, but rather as a framework of values within which we can each develop our particular religious understandings.  It may be helpful to think of ours as a religion characterized not by a set of beliefs, but by a process for discovering or developing a set of beliefs.  Our principles lift up the importance of the individual, of equitable relationships, of spiritual growth, of the quest for meaning, of community, both local and global, both human and encompassing all of existence.  With those common values as our guide, we have the tools to create a close-knit, interdependent, and yet incredibly diverse, religious community.  When that works, it’s a thing of beauty.

     There have been numerous other recent attempts to define our common core or center as Unitarian Universalists.  Most of them I’ve encountered have been lists compiled by UU ministers.  I haven’t constructed my list yet.

     One example is the little wallet card that you may have seen.  It contains the Rev. David Rankin’s take on “What Unitarian Universalists Believe”:

  • We believe in the freedom of religious expression
  • We believe in the toleration of religious ideas
  • We believe in the authority of reason and conscience
  • We believe in the never-ending search for Truth
  • We believe in the unity of experience
  • We believe in the worth and dignity of each human being
  • We believe in the ethical application of religion
  • We believe in the motive force of love
  • We believe in the necessity of the democratic process
  • We believe in the importance of a religious community


    •      At General Assembly last summer, I attended a workshop called “Two Perspectives on UU Identity and Theology.”  The Rev. Daniel Simer O’Connell suggested that our identity is based in part on the ideas that:

  • We acknowledge many scriptures; i.e., religious wisdom is available from many sources
  • Our focus is on the here-and-now rather than on the hereafter
  • We rely upon freedom, reason, tolerance, and love as guides
  • We emphasize deeds over creeds
  • Our theology is evolutionary; i.e., revelation is not sealed


    •     O’Connell’s counterpart, the Rev. Lex Crane noted that most religions are defined by a shared set of beliefs.  But Unitarian Universalism is defined by an underlying unity of tacit assumptions, commitments and values that must be inferred through inductive intuition.  He says these include the assumptions that:


         I found  another formulation just this past week on a ministers’ chat line that I read.  The Rev. Mark Christian listed what he identifies as “Core Revelations of the Liberal Tradition.”  These include:


         For a religion that doesn’t believe anything, those are a lot of beliefs!  It’s been said that if you ask ten Unitarian Universalists what UU’s believe, you’ll get ten, or maybe even twelve different answers.  I believe I’ve just demonstrated the grain of truth in that observation.  But you will notice that there is a fair amount of overlap in all these various lists.  And so perhaps there is an elusive common core of values and convictions that provide a basis for our identity as Unitarian Universalists.

         When a congregation wants to put its finger on what it is that binds it together and makes it distinct from other communities or organizations, it often engages in a visioning and missioning process.  We have done that, with the provisional results that Sara shared with us earlier this morning.  The key to that process is participation by the entire community, or at least a significant part of it.

        I suppose we could post a couple hundred individual vision and mission statements on our walls.  That would certainly reflect the breadth and diversity of our community.  But there’s something magical about stirring together all those individual visions and coming up with one statement that somehow captures the essence of the entire group.

        Over the past several years, the Unitarian Universalist Association has engaged in a comparable process.  The Fulfilling the Promise program set out to give voice to our movement here at the dawning of the twenty-first century.  The result is the “Common Call of Our Faith” that I shared earlier this morning.

        There’s a lot packed into that relatively short statement.  Before considering briefly the nine components of the “Common Call,” I’d like to call attention to a couple of important ideas contained in the Preamble section.  First is the use of the phrase “living tradition.”  That means that our tradition is dynamic, not static.  That which lives, grows and continues to evolve.  Thus, even if this “common call” captures our core for today, it won’t do so for all time.  As individuals, as congregations, as a movement, we will continue moving and growing.

        The other phrase that catches my attention is “a spirituality of wholeness and mutuality.”  For me that captures an important spiritual truth.  We each seek to be healthy and whole persons.  But our wholeness can find fulfillment only in the context of mutuality, by being in relationship with other whole persons and with the world around us.  It is the recognition and celebration of those connections of mutuality that feed the spirit.

    Finally, a few brief words about the elements of the “Common Call”:

    We affirm the value of religious community
         I’ve probably said enough about this one already.  It simply calls us to recognize that there is both comfort and strength in numbers.  To recognize that we need one another and enrich one another in times of both sorrow and joy.

    We affirm the inherent value of persons within community
     This is the individual wholeness that is the basis for our mutuality in community.  Each person makes an individual contribution to the character of the whole, and is not simply swallowed up by the whole.

    We link our hearts and minds for mutual edification and the continuing discernment of life’s truths
         We do that as we reflect on religious issues on Sunday mornings.  We do it as we gather for Religious Education programs.  We do it as we converse, discuss, debate and struggle with one another informally at Coffee Hour or elsewhere.  Those truths discerned in the crucible of human interaction are likely much richer than those we might conjure up on our own, or those handed us by unchallenged authority.

    We pledge to support each other, in humility and with forgiveness, to deepen our religious practice
         That is, we encourage one another to spiritual growth.  The small group ministry program that will begin here in January should provide an excellent vehicle for such support, as we seek opportunities for deep sharing about what really matters in our spiritual and everyday lives.

    We come together so that we may strive to heal brokenness in ourselves, among people within and beyond our congregations, and in the larger environment of our planet
         Indeed healing is needed at every level.  But how can we hope to heal the planet if we are broken ourselves?  And so, we come together to bind up one another’s wounds, to gather our collective strength to move out into the world as a force for love and healing.

    We will offer love to the loveless, hope to the forlorn, and speak truth to power
         We can use our voices to speak for those who have no voice.  We can offer our love in the form of time, money, and one-on-one compassionate engagement.  In the words of one of the covenants included in our hymnal, “Love is the doctrine of this church and service is its prayer.”

    We will move beyond tolerance into constructive engagement with others from all walks of life and forms of faith expression
         If we accept that no single religion has a monopoly on wisdom, then we are led to seek out those bits of wisdom inherent in each, through such constructive engagement. We can also reach across faith boundaries to acknowledge common values and goals, and to work together to achieve them.  We do this here in State College through the Interfaith Mission, the Interfaith and Community Coalition Against Prejudice and Violence, and the Gay Affirming Interfaith Network.

    We will seek justice for all, work to transform institutions that oppress and dehumanize, and commit ourselves to be makers of peace
         We do this with our voices, with our votes, with our spending habits, with the examples of our very lives.  We commit ourselves to notice injustice wherever we encounter it, to try and understand its roots, and to be the justice and peace that we seek.

    With others we will seek a spiritual foundation to support a pluralistic, democratic, and sustainable community on this earth, our home
         By building a pluralistic, democratic religious community right here, and building a pluralistic, democratic religious movement across the continent, we have the potential of modeling the kind of sustainable community that is possible for our world.  That is a noble calling indeed.

         So there you have the latest attempt at voicing our common vision and call. I’m sure many of you have found some points of agreement and some points of contention.  That’s a part of the terrible beauty of this faith we call Unitarian Universalism.

         Finally, in closing I’d like to quote the Rev. Jack Mendelsohn from one of the pamphlets that we often give to newcomers:
     

      For those who, like us, cannot accept dogmatism and creedalism
      the basis of their religious life, and who yearn for a religious
      expression stressing reason, freedom, justice, spiritual growth,
      and the transforming power of love, Unitarian Universalism is
      an open door to a nurturing community.