November 13, 2011
“But if our hearts turn away so that we will not obey, but shall be seduced and worship . . .
other Gods our pleasures, and profits, and serve them; it is propounded unto us this day,
we shall surely perish out of the good Land whether we pass over this vast Sea to possess it. . .”
- John Winthrop
The reception of new members into the church is a reminder to us that it is people who must embody Unitarian Universalism if it is to have any impact on the world. It is people who are the church, who not only occupy the pews but who, by their participation in the machinery of its governance, make it go. It is people who live its ideals, and do its good works. It is people who pay the bills. It is hard to believe that we could ever take any of that for granted.
Yet, in our Unitarian Universalist tradition, the church as an institution has sometimes received short shrift. The pendulum of our emphasis on the individual has sometimes swung so far that the church has been treated as hardly important at all. This was the case with some of the Transcendentalists, and with Emerson in particular.
I personally love Ralph Waldo Emerson, but it is really inappropriate to name churches after him, as we are fond of doing, since he was mostly an anti-institutionalist. Emerson left the ministry of theUnitarianChurch. He placed responsibility for religious authority upon individual conscience alone, as in his famous admonition, “Acquaint thyself at first hand with Deity.” He had more respect for individuals than I suspect we deserve.
Fortunately for us, not all Unitarian Universalist ministers—not even all Transcendentalist ministers—felt as Emerson did. It is fortunate for us that there have always been a few institutionalists among us, people who keep the churches going when idealistic ministers and wayward congregants decide to go off tilting windmills, as they so often do.
I mean the kind of people who stick by a church through thick and thin, who stay even when they disagree with the minister, who work, often thanklessly, to keep the liberal church going for the rest of us to enjoy and benefit from. I mean those people who sit through interminable committee meetings, and who work on rummage sales, auctions, book sales, and May Breakfasts. I mean people who serve as canvassers during the annual pledge drive.
Because it is easy to forget that the institutional church, for all is faults and shortcomings, embodies our liberal religious tradition and values. Disembodied souls wandering aroundWalden Ponddo not preserve traditions, or create sanctuaries from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
I happen to believe that the preservation of our liberal religious tradition is important. We can’t afford to take it for granted. We need to remember that it is by institutions such as the church that the riches of ages, the experience and wisdom of humanity, are handed down. We have something precious here, something which demands our love and support.
For it is our ongoing tradition which bridges the gap between our past and our future. It is our tradition which holds meaning that is transformed to meet the needs and challenges of today. Our tradition shows us the progress of the liberal impulse in religion: it is what we live by. And by way of synthesis with our present, personal faith, we are enabled to live better and happier and more meaningful lives, and perhaps to make better sense of the difficult and confusing world in which we live, and which we hope to serve.
The ideal church and commonwealth to which John Winthrop’s sermon [“A Modell of Christian Charity”] points is an extremely loving and helping community, a place where all are called to be ministers to each other on their spiritual journeys and in their daily lives. How far the contemporary situation falls from this ideal is, I would argue, one of the primary motivations behind the Occupy movement.
Winthrop called upon the undocumented immigrants to the Massachusetts Bay Colony to “always have before our eyes our commission and community in our work, our community as members of the same body,” in order that they might keep “the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace.” That’s good advice for both churches and secular communities, which forWinthrop, of course, were inseparable.
His sermon is a reminder that for the earliest settlers on these shores, behavior was at least as important as theology:
. . . We must be knit together in this work as one person, we must entertain each other in brotherly affection, we must be willing to abridge ourselves or our superfluities for the supply of others’ necessities, we must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience, and liberality, we must delight in each other, make each others’ conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together. . . .
Winthrop didn’t just say it, he tried to live it. Samuel Eliot Morrison, in his classic Builders of the Bay Colony, wrote that, “In his private affairs Governor Winthrop was not what New Englanders would call a good manager. He consistently neglected them for the public business. For many years he refused a salary, spending the proceeds of the sale of [his English estate] in public concerns, when there was no money in the colonial treasury. He gave generous hospitality as befitted the station of the chief magistrate, although so temperate in his own habits that his friends called his attention to Paul’s precept to Timothy: ‘drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake.’
“He was almost recklessly charitable, and died ‘land poor.’
What goods he had he did not spare;
The church and Commonwealth
Had of his Goods the greatest share,
Kept nothing for himself
declares Perciful Lowle with truth, in his ‘Funeral Elegie on the Death of the Memorable and Truly Honorable John Winthrop Esq.’” Morrison continues,
A dishonest agent in England embezzled the Governor’s property there; and a rascally steward of his Ten Hills estate on the Mystic, diverted to his own use the profits of the Governor’s crops and cattle. Winthrop did not mind these losses at Ten Hills so much as the discovery, after the steward was sacked, that the neighbors had taken advantage of the man’s unfaithfulness to make some very questionable bargains [by way of full disclosure, one of those neighbors was the Rev. Ezekial Rogers of Rowley] . . . . There is no better summary of the Governor’s life than that of William Hubbard, the earliest historian of Massachusetts: ‘A worthy gentleman, who had done good in Israel, having spent not only his whole estate . . . but his bodily strength and life, in the service of the country; not sparing, but always as the burning torch, spending. . . .’
When redressed by small-minded neighbors (possibly the same who had swindled him, as mentioned before) for failing to prosecute a man caught stealing wood from his woodpile,Winthropreplied that he had cured the man of stealing: he had simply let him have all the wood he needed.
How refreshing such honesty and generosity and wisdom seem in the face of so much that passes for government and religion these days!
In 1936, the Unitarian Commission on Appraisal characterized the mission of the liberal church in this way:
The members of a church are held together not by the common belief that it is well to be reasonable, but by an ardent desire to help each other and the world . . . . The measure of unity and efficiency which the church is to achieve will be determined chiefly by the intensity of its religious life.
To help each other and to help the world: that is to be the service which our churches render, and we are told that the success of this service depends on the living of “an intensely religious life.” What might this mean for Unitarian Universalists today?
I believe it means that in order to fulfill the church’s role of service in the community at large, we must first of all assure that our churches are the kind of places where the intensely religious life can be lived. This is not about selfishness; rather, we must first respond to the spiritual needs of those within our churches, and the rest—service to the world beyond our doors—will follow.
It is this radical being together as a community that I see as the prerequisite to the true ministry of service in our churches. If we expect people to stay within our fellowship, we must provide a home for them in which they can freely grow and develop as faithful, dedicated, and generous persons. We must be “ministers one to another.”
Fortunately, the excessive emphasis on the individual in our movement has given way in recent years to a greater appreciation for the value of the communal aspects of religious life. For what had been missing in some understandings of religious liberalism was any sense that spiritual growth takes place in community, a reality which had been recognized and celebrated in the past. In 1936, the Unitarian Commission on Appraisal had defined the central role of the church as “nourishing the spiritual life of its members and . . . disseminating through them the highest form of religion that it knows, in the life and atmosphere and constitution of the community which belongs to us all.”
In recent years Unitarian Universalists have begun to question a narrow emphasis on “self-fulfillment” and to rediscover the importance of the institutional church as a place where spiritual growth may be encouraged and nourished with and among others, and where “service” truly is “its prayer,” as we say in our Affirmation of Faith.
Perhaps naively, I still believe that our liberal church can be a “city upon a hill” in the sense that the gospel of Matthew and Winthrop speak of it. To become so, we must be a church which reaches out into the wider community, a refuge meaningful and accessible to all those who would join with us. As a church we must do all that we can to encourage social and economic and racial and intellectual and sexual diversity in our membership. The task which lies always before us is to locate our theological message firmly in the midst of a community that cares and world that needs. Too often, we have heard stressed the negative and individualistic aspects of liberalism, while sacrificing the unity and community necessary for effective service.
Author Peter Marin tells of a conversation with a young man who was much taken with New Age trends and with a kind of other-worldly mysticism. It was all very attractive, but the young man said desperately to Marin that he was troubled. “I know there is something outside me. I can feel it is there. But what is it?”
Marin replied, “It may not be a mystery. Perhaps it is the world.”
The world is out there, people. And it needs us. Winthrop’s vision still awaits fulfillment. To build that city upon a hill, we must begin with love and courage. If we can be a truly caring community of faithful persons, we will already have cast our communal light abroad in the world. In the words of our closing hymn,
These things shall be, a loftier race
Than e’er the world has known shall rise,
With flame of freedom in their souls,
And light of science in their eyes.
New arts shall bloom of loftier mould,
And mightier music thrill the skies.
And every life shall be a song
When all the world is paradise.
Amen.
- The Rev. Harold E. Babcock
Reading: from “A Modell of Christian Charity” by John Winthrop
