The Promise of Free Religion

October 14, 2007

Rev Arthur Lavoie

CALL TO WORSHIP #436

We come to this time and this place

            To rediscover the wondrous gift of free religious community;

To renew our faith in the holiness, goodness, and beauty of life;

            To reaffirm the way o f the open mind and full heart;

To rekindle the flame of memory and hope; and

            To reclaim the vision of an earth made fair, with all her people one.

RESPONSIVE READING  #466, by Vincent Stillman

Let religion be to us life and joy.

            Let it be a voice of renewing challenge to the best we have and may be;                                            let it be a call to generous action.

Let religion be to us a dissatisfaction with things that are,

which bids us serve more eagerly the true and right.

            Let it be the sorrow that opens for us the way of sympathy,

            understanding and service to suffering humanity.

Let religion be to us the wonder and lure of that which is only partly known and understood:

            An eye that glories in nature’s majesty and beauty,

and a heart that rejoices in deeds of kindness and of courage.

Let religion be to us security and serenity because of its truth and beauty, and because of the enduring worth and power of the loyalties which it engenders;

Let it be to us hope and purpose, and a discovering of opportunities to express our best through daily tasks:

Religion, uniting us with all that is admirable in human beings everywhere;

            Holding before our eyes a prospect of the better life for humankind,

            which each may help to make actual.

SERMON

If I walked around the sanctuary with a microphone and asked all of you why you were here this morning, what would you say?  It certainly isn’t mandated by law that everyone goes to church.  So, why is it that you freely choose to be here?

Some of you might say that you’re here to worship God, to honor the sacred source of life.

Some of you might say that you’re here to gain insight and inspiration from word, and music, and silence.

Some of you might say that you are here for some kind of religious instruction for yourself and your children.

And some of you might say that you’re here to carve out a moment in your busy lives for reflection and prayer.

All good answers, and there might be others that you would share.  But you can do all of these things on your own.  You can worship and pray; you can teach yourselves and your children, and you can gain insight and inspiration in lots of different ways.  So why do you come to church?

I would suggest that there are 2 answers to this part of my question.  The first is for the discipline of our worship, prayer and study time.  Most of us would not do these things on our own.  This hour on Sunday morning gives us the opportunity to explore our spiritual and moral life on a weekly basis and the regular discipline of engaging in that exploration is part of what we seek.

The second answer is that we come for the community.  The kinds of questions and issues that plague our souls or give us wonder are things we need to explore with each other.  It can be crazy-making to have all of this churning in our minds and hearts without sharing it with each other.  As Raymond Baughan has written:

“We deceive ourselves if we think we can be grasped by life’s meaning, or a sense of the holy, before we find and are found by our fellow human beings.  There is no sense of the sacredness of life, no sense of the holiness of sheer existence that does not come first through another person.  Religious community is people reaching through all the facades people carefully place around them—people embracing people where they live and struggle . . . When we are most alive, we are in the presence of someone or something intensely with us . . .  Nothing is experienced except in relation.”

Ok, so we come here for worship, and prayer, and reflection, and learning, with some regular practice with others who accept and welcome us.  But, now I want to ask you, why this church?  There are many churches in Dorchester.  Why do you come here to the First Parish Church, Unitarian Universalist?   What would you say then?

It is my assumption that most of you would say that you have chosen this particular church because of some measure of religious freedom that you enjoy here.

Here you are not given a creed and told what it is you must believe.  I might share some of my beliefs and some of the ways our thinking as Unitarian Universalists has evolved over the years.  But I find myself more often asking questions, sometimes probing, sometimes provocative; asking each of you to look at your own experience of life and of the sacred and discern what lessons, beliefs, and values have emerged for you.

Here, hopefully, you have found both affirmation and challenge; affirmation of your current beliefs and values and challenge to continue to listen deeply to the wonderings of your hearts and souls and share them with the rest of the church community. 

For those of us who cherish this type of religious, spiritual and moral examination, this way of doing religion is a profound and liberating experience. 

Religious freedom, the opportunity to discern for ourselves the path of the sacred that has been made known to us, and the challenge to create meaning out of the stuff of our living and dying.

In 1991, I attended a Unitarian Universalist church for the first time.  I hadn’t gone to church in many years, except for weddings and funerals.  I felt alienated from the religious tradition of my birth.  I had lost any sense of belonging there when I could no longer assent to the rigid creed that was expected of all true believers.

But I continued to long for the experience of deep spiritual communion and community, and I was unsure that I would ever find it again.  It was a revelation and a blessing to find in Unitarian Universalism such a theologically open and welcoming religious tradition.  There are probably some among you who share some version of this story.

I quickly became involved in this local UU church, the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence, Massachusetts.  I worked with the worship committee, I took and adult education class and then co-taught that class the following year.  I was elected treasurer and served in that capacity for two years.

And, I was very happy in my Unitarian Universalist church, single church, small uu.  And then two things happened that changed my thinking about church.  I started to feel called to become a minister.  It was an old feeling that I thought had died when I left the church of my birth.  But here it was again and, in that call, I had to look at my church in a different way.  I had to think about the larger context of Unitarian Universalism, what it meant to me to be part of this denomination or movement that was larger than my local church.

The other thing that happened is that I attended the North East Leadership School in the summer of 1994.  This is a week-long regional training for UU lay leaders that is conducted every summer. 

(I now happen to be on the faculty of that school, and will be teaching UU theology again this summer.)  It was at leadership school that I met and made friends with other Unitarian Universalists from throughout New England.

When I joined my local UU church, I felt a sense of empowerment knowing that I was not alone.  Now I learned that we were not alone.  I learned that my church community was joined through history, and faith, and practice to an association of other churches and fellowships.  And this association goes back to the founding of our church and before.

When our spiritual ancestors came here in 1630 one of the things they yearned for was a measure of religious freedom.  But for them religious freedom was very different from our experience today.  There was not, in 1630 a freedom of individual belief, but there was the freedom of each individual church community to govern itself without higher ecclesiastical or political authority.

What they longed for was freedom from, what they saw, as the idolatry of the Church of England.  They abhorred the pomp the wealth, the meaningless rituals, the rigidity of ceremony and creed that was more about pretense than it was about worship.

When they read in the Bible, and they read it often, they saw there accounts of the simplicity of the early Christian communities and wanted to mirror that in their own lives.  They saw the ways that members of the community cared for each other and held each other in high regard

So they set up these independent churches in the early 1630’s.  But then things started to get a little messy.  There were conflicts in some of the churches, and some communities needed various forms of assistance.  More and more people emigrating from England and it was difficult to have a sense of what was going on in all of these churches.

 They realized that there was a need for some greater organization within and among these different church communities.  Yet, they also knew that they did not want to set up an ecclesial structure with bishops and popes because they could find no biblical basis for that structure.  Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe writes:

“In May 1646, in response to a number of religious issues both internal to New England and pressing from across the Atlantic, the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony called the churches of New England to send pastors and delegates to gather in Cambridge as a Synod.  The mandate was to compose and agree upon ‘one forme of government and discipline for the New England churches . . .’  The Synod met in three sessions, September 1646, June 1647, and finally August 1648.

Delegates selected a draft document by pastor Richard Mather of Dorchester, (that’s right, our own Richard Mather) . . . and after some polishing, approved it unanimously.”  “A Company of Professed Believers Ecclesiastically Confederate:” the message of the                                                       Cambridge Platform; address by Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, October 28, 1998

Covenant was central to the Cambridge Platform.  The Puritans saw themselves as the New Israel, hence the importance of relationship, of covenant with God and among themselves. 

In the Cambridge Platform, the early churches affirmed the right of each individual congregation to own property, to determine the criteria for membership, and to call and ordain its own minister.  They affirmed that the members themselves were the gathered body of saints, none more important than another, because all were believed to be part of God’s elect.

In addition they specified the ways in which the individual churches should be in relationship with each other.  Here we can see the roots of our present-day association.  No church was to dominate another.  Conrad Wright says:

“Chapter Fifteen of the Platform defines six different ways by which the communion of the churches is to be exercised, such as concern for one another’s welfare, or recommendation when a church dismisses a member to reside elsewhere, or relief and succor when poor churches stand in need of assistance.  Most crucial . . . is the second way of communion between churches, by way of consultation when a question arises on which a church may benefit by disinterested advice from without.  The term “synod” is used in this connection; later that term was restricted to meetings in which the churches considered greater problems of concern to all the churches, while a meeting to deal with a problem confronting a particular church . . . was termed a council.”

Conrad Wright, History of UU Polity, Chapter 1 – downloaded from the UUA website

The churches maintained their autonomy, as do our churches today.  Yet already there was recognition that there might be issues of concern to the various congregations that could benefit from wider input.  They also saw that an individual church might need help from her sisters, and believed that churches that were able should reach out and provide that help.

Freedom, individual freedom and religious freedom is a promise that can only be actualized over and over again in our lives, our churches and our communities.  Freedom always brings with it the awesome responsibility to see that these freedoms are shared.  The more we are free, the more we have to be in community, for we can accomplish far more together than any one of us can accomplish alone.  And we can vision far more deeply together than any one of us can vision in our own little worlds.

The Rev. Gary Smith from Concord tells the story about the time he and his wife were traveling some of the back roads in Maine exploring where generations of his mother’s family lived and were buried.  “Along these same roads,” he writes, are so many old Universalist churches, some open a week or two in the summer, too many now clothing boutiques, restaurants and gift shops.”

“Without each other,” he continues, “the congregations we are privileged to serve are only a generation away from extinction.  We need the ties we have, the umbrella under which we promote justice and peace, under which we instill our values to our children, keep our ministry strong, lift up our voices in common song, [and] carry forth into our communities our witness to the world.”

AMEN

BLESSED BE

Janet Bush, our Ministerial Intern, was to share this service and sermon with me this morning, but she had to fly to Atlanta for a family funeral. Most of the section of the sermon that deals with the Cambridge Platform of Church Discipline was written by her.