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Sermon Index

WHAT ARE YOU LEARNING?

by the Reverend John Parker Manwell
at the First Unitarian Church of Baltimore
on the 24th of September 2000

Colleague Suzanne Meyer tells of a young man named Adam who had recently moved to her city, just out of college. His parents urged him to check out the local UU church. So he started to attend. Then one Sunday, after she had finished greeting people at the door, my colleague headed for the coffee hour, only to find Adam in the aisle, obviously disturbed.

Unitarian Universalism isnt much of a religion, he said, accusingly. Its all made up, or borrowed. We dont have any real beliefs. We dont have any rules. We dont have any spirituality of our own. We just take from other people. Theres really nothing here.

Meyer started to object, to explain. He cut her off. Whats the difference? he asked. And he walked away. class="1">

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class="1">Adam had grown up in a UU Sunday School. He never learned what a UU church is about. I have no doubt that we, too, sometimes turn out young people who dont really know what we are about. I have no doubt that we, too, often lose adults who come for awhile maybe even take the newcomers class, and sign the membership book and then fall away, never having really understood what were about; feeling cheated, perhaps, concluding that because we have no creed, no agreed theology, theres really nothing here.

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class="1">I can accept that some people, after learning what we are really about, will decide its not for them, and turn away. But it saddens me to think that we lose people because they have never really learned what we are about. And to be honest, I think one reason is that we ourselves dont always understand it, or cant put it into words.

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So here I am this morning with a question: How can we deepen our religious understanding? And how can we sum up who we are?

Novelist, playwright and director Herman Wouk is best known for his literary work. But in one of his earliest books, This Is My God, he explains with power and passion his decision to become an observant, orthodox Jew. Now, in his 80s, he has published a second religious book, provoked by a historian friends remark that American Jewry is dying. Wouk understands his friends pessimism Jews are being absorbed into the larger secular culture, or marrying out of the faith, in increasing numbers. Yet at the same time, Wouk sees a growing interest among secular Jews in recovering a sense of their Jewish identity. He is more optimistic.

He ends his book with an admission that if there is to be a revival of what he calls yiddishkeit among American Jews, it will come not from his own orthodox community, with its increasing self-isolation, nor from the Reform or Conservative communities, which he sees as more reactive than pro-active, but from the existing body of strong secular Jewish leaders, now involved in Jewish social services and in support for Israel. It can come, he says, and it will come, if these leaders, as individuals, become, not necessarily religious, but more knowledgeable about their history and culture. The thing is to make a start, he says.

Compared to [a] personal commitment [to learning], listening to weekly Sabbath sermons, or to lectures on Judaism by people like me, are of small account. Such passive experiences leave little or no residue. Reb Moshe Feinstein [an old rabbi friend] stamped on my spirit this urgency of personal commitment. Years might pass before I would see him, but whenever I did, he would ask straight off, What are you learning? . . . If I happened to be slacking off, as was too often the case, I would feel the gentle query like the flick of a whip.

In a flight of vision, he imagines these leaders, at meetings of their secular organizations, beginning to challenge each other as they meet old friends, with that rabbinic greeting: What are you learning?

My friends, that is also my vision for us. No, were not dying, but one reason we are so small, why we lose people like Adam, is our tongue-tied understanding of our UU identity, perhaps even our shallow understanding of our history and of the larger world of contemporary religious thinking.

I will accept my own share of responsibility. Im not a drum beater. I assume that if I preach about the great questions about how we live, about theological issues, about the kind of world we want for our children, you will understand that all this says something about who we are as Unitarian Universalists. But what may be obvious to me as a birthright UU may not be obvious to those who have come from other traditions, or none. You may not connect it with our UU identity.

Therefore this morning, I want to do two things: First, to sketch out what for me is the core of our religion the sort of remarks that Herman Wouk says are of small account compared with what we can learn through our own study; and second, to invite you, as we launch our new program of adult religious growth, to become intentional about your own study not just a course or two, but a lifetime of religious study.

If a significant number of us make this commitment, our small group of initial course offerings will grow manyfold. We will, in fact, become each others teachers. We will want far more courses and small covenant groups in which we can satisfy our thirst together. Well want a library here at the church, open every Sunday, with hundreds of volumes on the great issues of religion and life. In time, well look back on this Fall, on these first few courses and covenant groups, as a time of sowing seeds. And do I dare to dream? perhaps well begin to greet each other, on Sunday mornings, at weekday meetings, with the eager question, What are you learning?

So what is this religion of ours? Is it really empty, with nothing of its own to show for our generations of searching? Are we frauds?

Adam said its all borrowed. Think about that. Turn it over. One core element of our religion is respect for the inherent worth and dignity of every individual. Youll find that this is in fact the first of our seven consensus principles, in our denominations formal Statement of Principles and Purposes. A corollary is that each of us is entitled to think for ourselves, and no one has a monopoly on the truth.

So turn this around. If were all worthy of thinking for ourselves, then truth lies all around us. So we must look to all the great traditions, as well as to philosophy and science and the lives of men and women everywhere, for insight and of course, we look to ourselves as well. So we borrow, not because we have nothing of our own, but out of our respect for the human capacity to think and understand. This respect is a core element of our faith.

From this bedrock trust in the human capacity to learn and grow comes a second core element of our religious outlook a fundamental optimism about humanity. In this broad sense, we are all humanists: our world is human-centered. This is not to reject God, but to insist on a God of love the loving God of our Universalist ancestors. It is not to deny the human capacity for evil, but to insist that great as this is, we still have the capacity to overcome evil with good.

A third core element of our religion is a trust in the human capacity for reason. Its an insistence that humans have the right to look at what has come down to us and expect it to make sense. Were not iconoclasts. On the contrary, our conviction that there is truth to be found everywhere requires that we take tradition seriously enough to understand it, in enough depth to appreciate what is timeless and what is transitory, what is substance and what is form.

Historically, freedom and tolerance also have been core values in our tradition. Now, they are so well established in the West that we can afford, most of the time, to move beyond them to learning a positive appreciation for other traditions and cultures. It is from these historic values of freedom and tolerance that our present commitment to ever-broader diversity of membership has grown.

I want to mention just one other major strand to our tradition. It is called the free church tradition. Another name for it is congregational polity that is, congregational self-government. This, too, is a corollary of our basic assumption of every persons value and capacity for reason. It means that we come together in congregations that are free from any higher religious authority. Tradition, yes, but not hierarchy or creed. Sometimes, coming from hierarchical traditions, or secular life that may see the church as just another kind of public service, we take our church for granted. But the free church tradition means that no one is going to do it for us. We call and dismiss our own clergy, provide our own lay leadership, set our own membership standards, own our own property and raise our own budgets. We are responsible for ourselves.

But we are not alone. We recognize our sibling congregations as part of a shared religious tradition and community. We respect their independence, value their wisdom, work together on things that need a joint approach (thats where the UUA comes in), and help each other out when times are tough.

These, for me, are the five core elements of our faith: first, trust in the worth and dignity of every individual; second, a fundamental optimism about the human capacity for good; third, trust also in the power of human reason; fourth, an insistence on religious freedom and tolerance; and fifth, acceptance of the responsibility of running our own congregations. All these have led us to reject creeds, and to a compassionate embrace of people of every kind and culture.

Empty? These values constitute our truth. We share them, often, with others. We have no monopoly on truth and goodness. Its not the values that make us unique, but their combination, and the setting in which we pursue them. Adam, Im sorry we didnt convey them to you. But I hope that no one here today will ever again worry that we have no content, nothing of our own. For me, these are powerful and sometimes scary affirmations, worthy of a lifetime of committed pursuit. I invite you to join me in understanding them, in the context both of our UU history and the larger world of which we are a part. Join us, this year and every year, in our Journeys of the Mind and Spirit.

In this lifetime of study, I want to leave us with a goal: not just to learn and appreciate our history, not just to learn and appreciate other traditions but to make them all our own.

Does that sound impossible? Listen to Raimon Panikkar. Panikkar grew up in Spain, raised by a Hindu father and a Catholic mother. He became a Roman Catholic priest. Yet he does not see his religious outlook as either/or. Now retired, he has devoted his life to interreligious understanding. In an interview with the Paris newspaper Le Monde, he was asked how it is possible to combine his dual Hindu/Catholic heritage. He answered this way:

I was brought up in the Catholic religion by my Spanish mother, but I never stopped trying to be united with the tolerant and generous religion of my father and of my Hindu ancestors. This does not make me a cultural or religious half-caste, however ... I consider myself 100 percent Hindu and Indian, and 100 percent Catholic and Spanish. How is that possible? By living religion as an experience rather than as an ideology.

Hear that carefully, for its exactly what our religious ancestors insisted upon: by living religion as an experience rather than as an ideology. That is to say, how we live is more important than the words we use to describe our religious experience. More important than any creed.

Panikkar can help us, too, in getting away from understanding our UU identity as consisting in our differences from others. This is a challenge for Catholics, he says, but not for Hindus, whose sense of religious identity is based firmly on their sense of a divine mystery that is not separate from but immanent in humanity, so that it cannot be lost. Therefore, other religions are no threat. We, too, need to ground ourselves in the universe so firmly that other theologies are no threat.

Again, Panikkar invites us to understand that dialogue among those who follow different religions is possible only as we are willing to open our hearts and see that the other is not another but a part of myself who enlarges and completes me. That is to say, the real dialogue occurs within ourselves; we are called to discover within ourselves the terrain where the Hindu, the Muslim, the Jew and the atheist may have a place. And for us, I might add, the Christian and the pagan.

Each of us, he says, participates in the truth. Inevitably, my truth is the truth that I perceive from my window. And the value of dialogue between the various religions is precisely to help me perceive that there are other windows, other perspectives. Therefore I need the other in order to know and verify my own perspective of the truth.

My challenge to all of us this morning, then, is to see our entry into this congregation and this tradition not as arrival at our religious destination, but as a departure, boarding a ship for a lifetime journey of learning. Learning, first, about our own history and identity. But learning, also, about the worlds other great religious traditions, and making them a part of us. And in the end, opening within ourselves a great religious dialogue, in which we no longer are walled off, but literate and comfortable in the larger world of religious thinking.

May we become so engrossed in our study that when we gather on Sunday mornings, when we meet at church activities, we greet each other with questions: What are you learning? What are you reading? What are you excited about?

When that day comes, anyone who comes among us will know, without any doubt, that ours is a tradition of learning and thinking and respect for others. Even Adam.