Glorious Revolution A nation coming apart at the seams. Shared reality that held a people together despite differences -- no longer shared. Widespread distrust of the basic institutions of society. Heretofore reliable truth rejected. That was 17th-century England. The Civil War that produced the execution of King Charles the First in 1649 was as much about forms of worship as it was forms of government – as much about the polity of the church as the polity of the state. After 11 years of Commonwealth, the monarchy was restored. Charles the Second was succeeded by James the Second, England’s last Catholic monarch. The general anxiety about his Catholicism, combined with outrage when James prosecuted seven bishops for seditious libel, ...

Our faith has never been about individual spiritual growth. Salvation, we know, having heard it in Unitarian Universalist theology and having learned it from each other, is collective, not individual. Ain’t nobody saved until we all saved. Ain’t nobody free until we all free. ‘Cause there ain’t nobody – apart from everybody. One example of what Unitarian Universalist faith accomplishes in this world was last year’s nationwide effort among Unitarian Universalists called “UU the Vote.” We built voter engagement, voter registration, voter turnout. It was more than our denomination had ever tackled before. And it was massive, and it was awesome. Folks were ready to give generously of their time and resources because our value...

Gaudeamus Hodie (let us rejoice today) – for we are alive, and we are together, and we are embodying the good life. The good life. In the 320-year history of Yale University, no class has been as popular as Psych 157: Psychology and the Good Life, taught by Professor Laurie Santos. It was offered in 2018, and 1,200 students enrolled for the lecture course. That’s a large class. As a former professor myself, my first thought was: that’s a lot of papers to grade. Fortunately, Dr. Santos had 24 Teaching Assistants for the class. That 2018 class was the only time it was offered in-person. Coursera made a 10-week version of the course available to the public, attracting 100s of thousands of on-line learners. Then came the lockdown of Ma...

John Biddle What happened in Britain in 1615? John Biddle was born, known as the father of English Unitarianism. Queen Elizabeth’s 45-year reign had ended a dozen years before. She was succeeded by King James. The ground for Unitarianism had been laid by four key influences. 1. The Bible – in English translation. 230 years before Biddle’s birth John Wycliffe produced the first English translation of the Bible. The slow, seeping influence of English translation Bibles bolstered the idea that the only authoritative reliable guide to doctrine was the Bible itself – and thus that doctrinal matters not specifically dictated in the Bible – such as the Trinity, the precise nature of the communion bread and wine, infant versus adult Ba...

6. Activism is not, most fundamentally, about producing outcomes, but about living as who we are. Grace has its own way of shaping what our hearts bequeath it. The toil of body and soul, we offer up to the universe, and what the universe makes of it is not ours to say. Is the world making any progress to being more fair, more just, more kind? I don’t know. The Covid pandemic made a number of the fault lines in our society more vividly evident. Whether there will be lasting progress, however, is unclear. It may be disheartening when desired outcomes have not been achieved. It is less disheartening if we understand that achieving desired outcomes is not the main reason for activism. We inherit a Western philosophical tradition that has s...

Today we’ll pay a visit to Jeremy Bentham, drop in on a certain ethics seminar in 1990, allude to an episode from my dating life, and then go to Nazi-occupied Poland. We’ll entertain the notion that activism is not, most fundamentally, about producing outcomes, but about living as who we are. We’ll consider what Eastern traditions have to say about that, and visit a scorpion-stung swami by the banks of the Ganges. We’ll give a wave to Mary Oliver’s wild geese, and then stand for a moment on the side of the Misty Mountains with the Fellowship of the Ring that had just emerged from the Mines of Moria. Finally, we’ll join A.J. Muste in the 1960s, on the sidewalk just outside the White House. As always, it’ll be a ride – and ...

Stranger Churches The first of England’s Stranger Churches -- Protestant churches for foreigners – started in 1547, led by Bernardino Ochino of Italy, (whose name just keeps popping up in our story.) A few years later, 1550, the Dutch Stranger Church of London received a royal charter and was incorporated by letters patent. Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, supported the Stranger Church for two reasons: The Stranger Church provided a possible model of how a reformed Protestant Church might work in England, and it also served to help suppress those heresies that went too far – such as Unitarianism. For instance, in 1551, Dutch surgeon George van Parris of the London Stranger Church, was executed by his fellow Dutchmen for de...

In 1534, England’s Henry VIII maneuvered parliament into declaring him, “Head of the Church in England,” independent of Papal authority. Yet there was no change in doctrine, liturgy, or practice – at least, not at first. Protestant ideas gradually began infiltrating the Church of England from Protestant refugees flocking into England, which Henry was obliged to welcome because, having alienated his Catholic allies, he was now dependent on fostering alliances with Protestant powers. After Henry’s death in 1547, Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, was keen to bring Protestant Reform to the Church of England. He invited Protestant scholars from the mainland – which is what brought Bernardino Ochino and Lelio Sozzini (Laeli...

Go to part 1 I have an ask. Every year, I ask you – your denomination asks you -- to read one new book. Last year, it was Roxane Dunbar-Ortiz, Indigenous People’s History of the United States . The year before that it was an anthology of essays called J ustice on Earth: People of Faith Working at the Intersections of Race, Class, and Environment . Every year since 2010, the Unitarian Universalist Association has selected a Common Read book for all UUs across the land to read and talk about – a text to engage together. Over the last 11 years, we Unitarians have read together, cried together (and, yes, laughed together in the shared joy of conceiving justice together) with: Margaret Regan, The Death of Josseline: Immigration Stories ...

A couple haiku from Kobayahi Issa: “Children imitating cormorants Are even more wonderful Than cormorants.”And: “Even on the smallest islands, They are tilling the fields Skylarks singing.”Imani Perry’s little book, Breathe: A Letter to My Sons , begins with these two Issa haiku. ("Issa" -- coincidentally or not -- is also the name of one of Perry's two sons.) She then offers a poem of her own: “Through good, nothing, or ill, your mother stands Behind you, in front of the looking glass. The boy standing before his mother blinks. And there is another, stalk high. Seeing a child, and another I know and do not know. My own and belonging only to himself And to himself. Smuggling truth off the well-worn and decent corridors. Mothe...

Go to part 1 It’s not up to you to try to make yourself a more trusting person. That might not be a good idea. Williams Syndrome is a rare neurodevelopmental genetic condition that features mild learning or developmental challenges and also a markedly outgoing personality. People with Williams Syndrome have a high level of sociability, very good communication skills, and are very trusting of strangers. And that’s not always a good thing. If you get an email from a Prince of Nigeria asking for your help transferring some funds – or an email purporting to be from me asking for personal help – don’t trust it. Making ourselves more trusting in a world that is often untrustworthy is not the issue. What we can do is be on the lookout...

“Do you trust me?” says Aladdin, as he holds out his hand to Jasmine. What would you do? It happens twice in the 1992 Disney cartoon movie. The first time, he’s a street urchin, and she’s in disguise as a commoner. The second time, he’s in disguise as a prince and she’s in her element as a princess in the palace. Neither time does she have any reason to trust him. But she says yes – and takes his hand. Both times. It’s a risk. She might get let down, hurt – maybe killed if she falls off that magic carpet when it takes a swerve. She takes the risk. Why? We don’t know. I don’t think she knows. Trust. Sissela Bok says: “Whatever matters to human beings, trust is the atmosphere in which it thrives.”Jasmine’s world...

Go to part 1 Mark is the earliest Gospel – written around 70 CE, say most scholars. It’s also the shortest gospel: at under 15,000 words, it’s less than two-thirds the length of the average of the other three gospels. There’s no miraculous birth in Mark – in fact, no birth story at all – and no doctrine of divine pre-existence. No Christmas story, and a truncated Easter story. It begins with Jesus’ baptism by John the Baptist – and it ends, like this: When the sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. They had been saying to one another, “Who wi...

I’ll share with you a Zen koan, and talk about ordinariness as salvific: the reliable quotidian rhythms. Then we’ll look at the larger scale hopes for social and political liberation – in the foreground of the Passover story and in the background of the Easter story. We’ll note how the four gospel accounts of Easter are different. In part 2, we’ll take a deep dive into the Gospel of Mark, and see if can emerge with a context for both the ordinary, everyday resurrection and a social liberation that we have not yet seen. I will end with a question, rather than an affirmation, so I won’t be saying Amen at the end this time. Here we go. A friend of mine is a United Church of Christ minister. We met at the Zen center where we both...

Go to part 1 Hypocrisy has a prominent place in Western moral discourse in no small part because Jesus invoked it so often. In Luke 6, Jesus says, “how can you say to your neighbor, ‘Friend, let me take out the speck in your eye,’ when you yourself do not see the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.”In Matthew 6, Jesus says, when you give alms, when you pray, and when you fast, don’t do it as the hypocrites do. Don’t sound a trumpet before you so you may be praised by others. Give alms in secret, not letting your left hand know you’re your right hand is doing, and your Father who sees in secret will reward yo...

England: Wycliffe to Henry VIII Our story now makes its way to England, which has its own very distinctive church history. Antitrinitarian thought had popped up in the British Isles at least as early as 1327, when Adam Duff O’Toole was executed outside Dublin for denying the Trinity. Later that century, John Wycliffe had headed a reform movement of sorts, questioning the privileged status of the clergy, the luxury and pomp of local parishes and their ceremonies, the veneration of saints, the sacraments, requiem masses, transubstantiation, monasticism, and the legitimacy of the Papacy. Wycliffe, together with supporting associates, produced the first translation of the Bible into the English vernacular of the time – what we call Middl...

The Dissipation of Socinianism The Minor Reformed Church, that is, the early unitarian church, began in Poland because Poland in the 16th century was tolerant enough to allow it. But in the 17th century, Poland proved not tolerant enough to allow it to continue. In the half-century after Fausto Sozzini’s death in 1604, oppression increased and worsened until, in 1660, the Socinians were forcibly expelled. Some went to Transylvania where Polish-speaking unitarian churches were then established -- these eventually assimilated. Some exiles went to Konigsburg, Prussia, where, for another century, Socinian congregations survived. The Socinians who made it to Holland established the congregations that endured the longest. Fausto and Elizabet...

Here’s the roadmap. We’re going to go through Browning, the nature of art, and why hypocrisy, as commonly thought of, isn’t a problem. We’ll swing briefly by Mary Katherine Morn, and then go to ancient Greece. We’ll see that integrity and belonging are really the same thing, and drop in on Brene Brown. In part 2, we’ll hang out with Jesus for a while, see what spiritual practice is for, and how we answer our call. It’ll be fun. We ready? First stop, Browning. “Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?” wrote Robert Browning in 1855. A woman’s reach should exceed her grasp. A person’s reach should exceed zir grasp. We should aim higher than we can actually attain. Browning is describing t...

Go to part 1 I’m reminded of how democracy is a skill. The habits of hearing diverse viewpoints, of weighing other people’s interests and perspectives with our own, of running meetings, and participating in meetings so that your voice, and all voices, are heard without your voice or any voice dominating, of reaching decisions efficiently when they have to be efficient, and of taking time to consider more complicating factors when efficiency isn’t so pressing, and of being able to discern the appropriate weight to give to efficiency – these are all skills: skills we can learn and skills we can improve. Meeting in committees is how we learn and hone those skills, and a populace that has come to find committee work onerous, that inc...

Go to part 2 Integrity. That’s our theme of the month for March. One of our Journey Group facilitators pointed out to me that there’s something a little odd about having integrity month. If you’re only doing it for a month, it isn’t integrity. Having a consistency and steadiness through the years is part of what integrity is about. The concept, "integrity," has three features, according to standard dictionaries. My first question for you – the first question offered by this month’s Journey Group packet – is what ties these together? What gives integrity to the idea of integrity? The three features are: Adherence to moral and ethical principles; soundness of moral character; honesty. The state of being whole, entire, or undi...

Roots Intertwined with Mennonites Fausto Sozzini’s Racovian Catechism outlined the basic tenets of what was beginning to be called Socinianism. The Ten Commandments and Christ’s teachings were to guide personal and social behavior. Christians may hold public office and bring suit in court. Common swearing is forbidden, but civil oaths are permitted. Self-defense is permitted, but not the taking of human life. Ownership of property is permitted, but not the accumulation of wealth above one’s needs. Self-denial, patience, humility, and prayer” are the primary responsibilities. Only one sacrament is recognized, that of the Lord’s Supper. Baptism, while having no regenerative power and inappropriate for infants, is recognized as an...

Rakow, and the Racovian Catechism The town of Rakow, Poland is 120 kilometers northeast of Krakow and 190 kilometers south of Warsaw. The antitrinitarian Polish Brethren, also known as the Minor Reformed Church – founded Rakow in 1569, 10 years before Fausto’s arrival in Poland. Rakow was founded specifically to be a place of religious tolerance – illustrating once again the connection between critique of the Trinity and religious toleration. In 1602, the Socinian Racovian Academy was founded there, based on the ideas of Fausto Sozzini. Although Rakow, Poland today is a small village of 1200, in the 1630s, its population had grown to 15,000, with faculty, students, and businesses centering on the Academy, and the Minor Reformed Chu...

Sozzini Feels the Love -- and the Hate In 1583 -- four years after Fausto Sozzini’s arrival in Poland – the Jesuits established a center in Krakow, and began assaults on the Minor Reformed Church. Enemies were becoming suspicious that Sozzini had indeed authored the works he published anonymously – notably “On Jesus Christ the Savior,” completed in 1578, the year before his arrival in Poland, where Sozzini had argued that Christ is our Savior because his teaching and his example show us the way of salvation, not because his death paid off our debt of sin. Sozzini was also under attack because: “Sozzini insisted that the command not to kill is clear and without exception for Christians. Therefore, Christians could not engage i...

Sozzini and the Minor Reformed Church This church in Secemin, Poland, 90 kilometers north of Krakow, is where, in 1556, Peter Gonesius issued Poland’s first challenge to Trinitarianism. Twenty-three years later, in 1579, Fausto Sozzini moved to Poland. He investigated the churches in the area. And he liked the antitrinitarian Minor Reformed Church best. They were the most liberal game in town. They weren’t all that liberal though, then. They required that he be baptized as a condition of membership. So he never joined. He offered to be baptized “on the condition that he first could state publicly that he believed baptism unnecessary and that he was participating simply for the sake of closer fellowship. His proposal was rejected, a...

Our Socinian Roots Four and a half centuries ago, in 1579, Fausto Sozzini – in Latin, Faustus Socinus – migrated to Poland. He was a 40-year-old Italian of mild manner, saintly and scholarly. He became a friend, but not a member, of the antitrinitarian Minor Reformed Church there. In writings and public debates, he became the Minor Reformed Church of Poland’s principal defender and the chief explicator of its theology. After his death, the Minor Reformed Church – also called the Polish Brethren -- maintained publication of his prolific writings, and thus the church came to be called Socinian. It is to the Socinian church that we trace the origin of the Unitarian half of our institutional history. Michael Servetus did nothing to f...

Antitrinitarianism in Poland: The Minor Reformed Church As you’ll recall – 1517, the Protestant Reformation began. At first all the Protestant churches were called Reformed, as opposed to the unreformed Roman Catholic church. Then, within the Reformed Churches, a big fight arose over the communion – the Lord’s Supper. One side held that the body and blood of Christ are present in the bread and wine; the other side said the bread and wine are symbols of Christ’s body and blood. The first side, followers of Martin Luther, began calling themselves Lutheran. The other side, followers of John Calvin, kept the name Reformed. In Poland, the first Reformed – i.e. Calvinist – Church service wasn’t until 1550, near Krakow. Within 1...

"Go to Part 1" When Thomas Jefferson imbibed John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1689), and summarized Locke’s philosophy in this country’s foundational document, The Declaration of Independence , Jefferson made one crucial emendation. John Locke had said that people have inalienable rights – rights based in a foundation independent of the laws of any particular society – and Locke listed these rights as life, liberty, and property. Jefferson’s tweak was to say that all are endowed with “certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” -- replacing "property" with "pursuit of happiness." I appreciate Jefferson’s impulse to dig a little deeper, to ask, what is property fo...

“I just want them to be happy.” It’s a sentiment commonly expressed by parents about their children. But a life of meaning – a life that feels real – is more important than happiness. Parents who say they just want their child to be happy may be talking themselves into letting go of some expectation. Secretly they were hoping the girl would go to medical school – or that the boy would become a teacher – or that their child would one day take over the family business -- and when it becomes clear that’s not going to happen, the parents coach themselves into accepting that alternative career paths are fine. So they say: “I just want her to be happy.” Or him. Or zir. If meaning is more important than happiness, then why d...

Go to part 1 The longing for belonging, we have seen, can be the enemy of true belonging, of resting in the awareness that it is impossible for you NOT to belong, that your belonging is inalienable. But the longing arises nonetheless, doesn’t it? We have noted that your belonging does not depend on everybody knowing your name. You belong even if no one knows your name. Yet it still feels nice to be known, to be seen, to be respected, doesn’t it? Take, for example, the neurophysicist that Brene Brown interviewed for her work on belonging. He told her: “My parents didn't care that I wasn't on the football team, and my parents didn't care that I was awkward and geeky. I was in a group of kids at school who translated books into the Kl...

Go to part 2 OPENING WORD “A Blessing Called Sanctuary” by Jan Richardson You hardly knew how hungry you were to be gathered in, to receive the welcome that invited you to enter entirely— nothing of you found foreign or strange, nothing of your life that you were asked to leave behind or to carry in silence or in shame. Tentative steps became settling in, leaning into the blessing that enfolded you, taking your place in the circle that stunned you with its unimagined grace. You began to breathe again, to move without fear, to speak with abandon the words you carried in your bones, that echoed in your being. You learned to sing. But the deal with this blessing is that it will not leave you alone, will not let you linger in safety, i...

Poland before Fausto Poland, when the 40-year-old Fausto Sozzini arrived there in 1579, was already a land with the beginnings of Unitarian thought. Diversity brings reason and tolerance, the central themes of Unitarianism, to the fore, and medieval Poland was a place of relative cultural diversity. Catholics, Jews, Eastern Orthodox, and Moslems coexisted in general harmony. Among Catholics, Priests could marry; the Mass was conducted in Polish rather than in Latin. The monarchy was limited. The king was elected by a group of nobles, and the nobles met in council to make the country’s laws. Polish woman Katarzyna Weiglowa professed the unity of God, rejected the trinity, and refused to call Jesus the Son of God – for which blasphemy ...

Fausto in Transylvania Fausto Sozzini, also known by the Latin form, Faustus Socinus: at age 38, in Basel, he finished “On Jesus Christ the Savior,” which argued that Jesus saved us not by dying, but because his example shows us how to live. Sozzini’s previous works had argued that reason is an authority equal to scripture, that Jesus was divine by office rather than by nature, that the soul was not immortal, and that scriptures were historical texts. Meanwhile, in Transylvania, where Ferenc David, Giorgio Biandrata, and King John Sigismund had established Unitarianism, the fledgling religious movement was encountering setbacks. King John had died [in 1571], Biandrata faced charges of immorality, and David had gone a little too far...

Fausto Sozzini: Early Years When Lelio Sozzini died in 1562 at the age of only 37, he left behind little more than a trunk of books and manuscripts – inherited by his nephew, Fausto Sozzini, age 22. Young Fausto had begun early to reject orthodoxy. Three years before, at age 19, he’d been denounced by the Inquisition. He’d fled to Zurich, and it was there that he received his inheritance: his uncle Lelio’s papers. Fausto Sozzini studied his uncle’s legacy with care. From those manuscripts he discovered an insistence that reason is an authority equal to scripture. Within months of encountering his dead uncle’s works, he wrote an essay, his first published work, in which he took the antitrinitarian position that Jesus was divin...

2021-01-05. UU Minute #25. The Empire Strikes Back Italy in the middle of the 16th- ...

UU Minute #24. Doctrinal Innovation in Venice As noted last time, Church Reformation in Italy had a more Renaissance and intellectual flavor ...

The Reformation in Italy European Unitarianism emerged from the Protestant Reformation zeitgeist of the 16th century. This took various forms in different regions, and all the forms had influence on the burgeoning Unitarian movement. In Germany, where Martin Luther began the Reformation in 1517, there was a pre-existing resistance to Catholic Church power. Medieval Germany – called the Holy Roman Empire, though it wasn’t Holy, wasn’t Roman, and wasn’t an Empire – resented the financial demands from the Roman church, resented foreign influence from the Pope -- and Holy Roman Empire kings had been pushing back for centuries before Martin Luther came along. Luther’s success lay in harnessing this resentment against Papal power a...

Our Holiday Unitarian History makes clear that Christmas is the Unitarian Holiday! Prior to 1850, Christmas celebration was "culturally and legally suppressed and thus, virtually non-existent. The Puritan community found no Scriptural justification for celebrating Christmas, and associated such celebrations with paganism and idolatry." (Wikipedia)Then, a radical transformation of Christmas began, and Unitarians were at the forefront in most of the transforming. Christmas today means putting a tree indoors, and decorating it. That was a practice in Germany, brought to the United States in the early 1800s by the Unitarian minister Reverend Charles Follen. Christmas means Old Ebenezeer Scrooge’s heart opens up to compassion and joy. In 18...

Transylvanian Unitarianism Down to this Day The Unitarian Church in Transylvania was first recognized by the 1568 Edict of Torda, which also established religious toleration among the four allowed religions: Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist, and Unitarian. In its early years, the Unitarian Church attracted members in large numbers, and grew to 425 parishes. Still the Catholics as well as both Protestant churches reviled the Unitarians as heretics. Transylvania’s King John died in 1571, just a couple years after officially converting to Unitarian himself. Having no heirs, he was succeeded by Istvan Bathory, a Catholic. The press of Gyulafehérvár was taken away from the Unitarian control. The Diet of 1572 did not dare to repeal the Edict ...

The Connection: Reason Unitarians have been around 450 years, and our history is rooted in two ideas: rational critique of the trinity, and tolerance of diversity of opinion. Is there a logical connection between them, or is it an accident of history that these two ideas happened to come in the same package? Actually, there is a logical connection: reason. It was the exercise of reason that produced the rational critique of trinitarianism. And the proper function of reason depends on the freedom allowed by tolerance. Any ideology that isn’t rationally defensible can only rely on authoritarian coercion to secure adherents. Ferenc David, the Transylvanian theologian and King John Sigismund’s court preacher, was an impassioned advocate ...

The Edict of Torda “...in every place the preachers shall preach and explain the Gospel each according to his understanding of it, and if the congregation like it, well. If not, no one shall compel them for their souls would not be satisfied, but they shall be permitted to keep a preacher whose teaching they approve. Therefore none of the superintendents or others shall abuse the preachers, no one shall be reviled for his religion by anyone, according to the previous statutes, and it is not permitted that anyone should threaten anyone else by imprisonment or by removal from his post for his teaching. For faith is the gift of God and this comes from hearing, which hearing is by the word of God.” (Edict of Torda, 1568)The Edict of Tord...

King John Comes Around King John Sigismund’s rule of Transylvania began in 1559 when his mother, Isabella, died. He was 19. John, like his mother, was unusually interested in religion – both as a tool of statecraft and from a genuine interest in discerning the truth for its own sake. Born and raised Catholic, John converted to Lutheranism at age 22. At age 24, John switched to Calvinism and appointed Ferenc David as Court Preacher. David and Giorgio Biandrata, John’s physician and trusted counsellor, now at court together, began collaborating in the development of the two ideas that would be central to Unitarianism: criticizing trinitarianism, including rejecting the deity of Jesus Christ – and upholding religious toleration. Kin...

Ferenc David and the Unitarian Mind Ferenc David was born in Transylvania, in 1520. He was raised Catholic – went away to the University of Wittenberg to study Catholic theology. Wittenberg, you’ll remember, is where the Protestant Reformation began in 1517 when Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church door there. David returned home in 1551, at age 31, having been exposed to Lutheran ideas, but still a Catholic: rector of a Catholic school, then a Catholic parish priest. Lutheranism grew in Transylvania, and, along with it, hostility toward Catholics. A number of Catholic clergy switched over, and Ferenc David joined them. He became a Lutheran minister and then Lutheran bishop. David gained a great reputation as a brilliant...

Biandrata and David Meet People meeting each other for the first time is a common event. Some first meetings turn out to be historically notable. The day Eleanor Gordon and Mary Safford first met – it was around 1860, and the two were children. They would both grow up to become Unitarian ministers and the nucleus of the Iowa Sisterhood movement in Unitarian history. The day Curtis Reese and John Dietrich first met – it was 1917 at the Western Unitarian Conference. The two would work together spearheading the Unitarian Humanist movement. Another pivotal first meeting was that of Giorgio Biandrata and Ferenc David in 1564. If you had to pinpoint the day Transylvanian Unitarianism began, your best answer would be: that day. We’ve ment...

Biandrata Impresses the King Giorgio Biandrata: doctor and theologian. His 1563 arrival in Transylvania was a return to the country. He had first come there in 1544 and lived eight years at the Transylvanian Court, the first seven of which he was attending Queen Isabella and her then-four-through-11-year-old son John -- up until Ferdinand deposed them for five years. Biandrata moved on in 1552, and by 1558, was Court Physician to the royal family in Poland, attending Isabella’s mother, Queen Bona. Poland, you may remember, some years before, had put 80-year-old Katarzyna Weiglowa to death for anti-trinitarian views. Queen Bona had been instrumental in that execution, but writings of Bernardino Ochino had liberalized her. Biandrata’s ...

In 1961, when Unitarians and Universalists came together to form the Unitarian Universalist Association, our initial documents included a set of ...

Principles and Promises, part 1 The principles of the Unitarian Universalist association express our covenant, it’s true. The words of Community UU Congregations's mission are also covenantal: “We covenant to nurture each other in our spiritual journeys, foster compassion and understanding within and beyond our community, and engage in service to transform ourselves and our world.”That’s also an expression of covenant. But CUUC was a congregation held by covenant long before 2014 when we adopted our current mission statement, and Unitarian Universalists have been a people of covenant from long before 1985 when we adopted our current set of principles. Before that, the covenant was expressed along similar lines in 1961 in the init...

We are Unitarian Universalists. We are a people of passion and intelligence – of moral imagination, creativity, and engagement. We are a people NOT of creed; we are creedless. In this regard, we are not unique. We have this in common with, oddly enough, the Southern Baptist Convention, which is officially creedless, as is the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). We go a little further in declaring not only that we have no creed, but that, for us, religion itself is not about what one believes. Beliefs are an incidental, peripheral, and ultimately unnecessary aspect of religion, of spirituality. For us, religion is about three things: Religion is about how you live: the ethics and values that guide your life. Religion is about commun...

As Joseph lies in the pit, in his rejection and suffering, the way of forgiveness comes over him. It begins not by forgiving those who wronged him. This does not occur to him. It begins with a prayer that he be forgiven. “Forgive me, he prayed [silently], not to God but to his brothers, though he knew this was absurd. There was no way out. There were no solutions. There was nothing to do, nothing to pray but May your will be done. . . .” (Stephen Mitchell, Joseph and the Way of Forgiveness )It’s a prayer to let go of the ego’s thoughts about what should be, to open fully and unreservedly to reality just as it is. Joseph finds it a helpful device to personify this reality as God. “Not what I want,” he prays, “but what You wa...

See: "Joseph and the Way of Forgiveness: Intro" "Joseph and the Way of Forgiveness: Part 1" "Joseph and the Way of Forgiveness: Part 2" Some people say, everything happens for a reason. It feels to them like there’s a divine plan. They say, there are no coincidences. They like such sayings as: "Everything works out in the end. If it hasn’t worked out, it’s not the end." I don’t talk that way much. It seems to me to make just as much sense to say: "Nothing works out in the end. If it seems to have worked out, it’s not the end." Which sounds like one of those corollaries of Murphy’s Law, but what I mean is: it’s never the end. Whether things seem all neat and tidy or a total mess, it's never the end . And there are coincidenc...

See: "Joseph and the Way of Forgiveness: Intro" I come today to re-tell an old story – to look again at what it tells us about being human and being animal. Before I get into Joseph and his brothers, let me say that I think a lot about stories – how we need them, and what happens when we don’t have them. Stories tell us who we are and make us who we are: individually and collectively. Shared stories make a people a people. “I” and “me” are made of narrative – as are “we” and “us.” In these polarized times, where division rives the land, we don’t have shared story about who we are. This contrasts sharply with the decade I was born in: the 1950s. The 1950s were, in many ways, an awful time. Jim Crow segregation an...

STORY (adapted from Genesis, illustrations by R. Crumb) Jacob had 12 sons -- Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Issachar, Zebulun, Joseph, and Benjamin – and one daughter, Dinah. The eleventh son, Joseph, was Jacob’s favorite. When Joseph was seventeen, one day, after shepherding the flock with his brothers he brought a bad report of his brothers to their father. So his brothers didn’t like Joseph. Jacob made for Joseph a long robe with sleeves. But when his brothers saw that their father loved Joseph more than all his brothers, they felt bad and further disliked Joseph. Once Joseph had a dream, and when he told it to his brothers, they hated him even more. He said to them, “Listen to this dream that I dreame...

Enter Giorgio Biandrata Six years after Transylvania’s first edict of toleration, with conflict between Lutherans and Calvinists growing, the Transylvanian Diet, in 1563, renewed and confirmed its earlier decree, ordering:“that each may embrace the religion that he prefers without any compulsion, and may be free to support preachers of his own faith, and in the use of the sacrament, and that neither party must do injury or violence to the other.”This didn’t help ease the conflict much until the next year, when King John, now 24-years-old, ordered the parties to separate into two distinct churches, each with its own bishop. Transylvania now had three officially recognized religions: the Catholic, the Lutheran, and the Calvinist. R...

UU Minute #14 Literal Body and Blood? Or Symbols? Europe’s first proclamation of religious tolerance came out of Transylvania in 1557 – a product of the Diet led by Queen Isabella.“In order that each might hold the faith which he wished, with the new rites as well as with the old, that this should be permitted him at his own free will.”“The faith which he wished” meant either Catholic or Protestant – there were only two choices. By that time, the vast majority of Transylvania had become Protestant -- Catholic priests had been driven out, church property confiscated or given over to the Protestants -- so it was the Catholics who had more reason to be glad of the protections of official toleration. In fact, the greater and gr...

These are stressful times. Under stress, we are apt to be reactive. Anger, fear, and sadness all have an important role to play in our lives. We wouldn’t want to become unable to feel those things. Anger is fiery energy for insisting on justice. Fear heightens our awareness of danger which helps us stay safe. Sadness slows us down so we can adjust to a loss or disappointment. Under conditions of stress, these feelings overfunction, and go beyond their usefulness. So today I just want to offer us some tools for approaching stressful moments -- because, I know we’re facing them. The first tool is Yom Kippur itself. Make amends. Our relationships with family, friends, and any acquaintance you regularly interact with -- or could interact...

UU Minute #13: Isabella Returns to Transylvania In 1551, Archduke Ferdinand’s Hapsburg forces took Transylvania, banishing Isabella and her then 11-year-old son back to Poland. After five years of exile, Isabella returned to Transylvania when Ottoman troops recaptured the region and invited her back. The Transylvanian Diet officially entrusted Isabella with a five-year regency on behalf of her now-16-year-old son. Meanwhile, Protestantism had come to Transylvania. With religious tensions mounting, in 1557, Isabella signed an edict of religious toleration. Isabella declared, “every one might hold the faith of his choice . . . without offence to any . . . ” – provided, that is, that the “faith of his choice” was either Catholic...

UU Minute #12: Isabella Banished Unitarianism in Transylvania emerged in the turbulent politics of the time, fostered by Isabella, the dowager queen and regent who enacted Europe’s first edict of religious toleration, and her son, John Sigismund, Europe’s only Unitarian monarch ever. As the 16th-century began, the Ottoman Empire covered Turkey, the Balkans, and Greece. In 1526, the Ottoman Empire under Sultan Suleiman crushed the Hungarian royal army in the Battle of Mohács and killed King Louis II. Hungary was then divided into three parts. The Ottoman Empire annexed one part. A second part was allowed to continue as a much-diminished Hungary. And a third part – Transylvania – was granted autonomy under the rule of John Zapolya...

UU Minute #11: Transylvania, part 1 In 16th century Europe, the ideas of anti-trinitarianism and religious freedom went together – and they began to pop up in the thinking of a number of writers. We’ve mentioned the 1527 book by Martin Borrhaus’ De Operibus Dei , the first open questioning of the doctrine of the trinity in print in Europe – and the 1531 publication of Miguel Serveto’s On the Errors of the Trinity -- and Sebastian Castellio writing that “To kill a man is not to protect a doctrine. It is to kill a man.” A smattering of other intellectuals of the time – especially after Miguel Serveto’s execution in 1553 -- were also writing to either criticize trinitarianism or advocate religious freedom – and whichever...

UU Minute #10: Serveto's Double Legacy The roots of Unitarianism in Europe lie in two ideas: Critique of the Doctrine of the Trinity, and Support of religious toleration.  Those two ideas are the double legacy of Miguel Serveto. First, he called into question the doctrine of the trinity. He paved the way for a Unitarian theology of the Unity of God, and also advanced the Universalist notion of the universal divinity of humanity. Second, his persecution and death sparked a movement toward tolerance and religious freedom. On October 27, 1553, Miguel Serveto was burned at the stake in Geneva, Switzerland, with a copy of his book tied to his arm. Thousands of people have been put to death as heretics in Europe. In particular, the Anabaptist...

UU Minute #9: Miguel Serveto (Michael Servetus), part 3 1553. Miguel Serveto is arrested in Vienne, but manages to escape from jail. He plans to flee to Naples, Italy. Yet he shows up in Geneva, which – as you can see – is not along the route from Vienne to Naples. Why he would make this little detour remains a mystery. The Geneva of that time was essentially a theocracy ruled by Protestant Reformer John Calvin. Serveto was recognized and arrested. The trial lasted two months. John Calvin was chief prosecutor, though usually only Calvin’s proxies were present at the trial. Serveto defended his views on the Trinity, repudiated the charges of being a pantheist and of denying immortality, and admitted without reservation his condemnat...

UU Minute #8: Miguel Serveto (Michael Servetus), part 2 Miguel Serveto – also known as Michael Servetus – wrote a book, On the Errors of the Trinity , published in 1531, the year he turned 22. He argued that Jesus’ human nature and Christ nature came into being at the same time – in other words, that the Son was not co-eternal with the Father. Miguel Serveto was bright, and young, and cocky and he seems to have imagined that he would explain to his elders the errors of their thinking, and they would say “Oh, thank you. Yes, I see I was mistaken.” Instead, reaction was rather negative. The Catholics were deeply invested in Trinitarian orthodoxy, as they had been ever since 325 and the Council of Nicaea. The Protestants weren

UU Minute #7: Miguel Serveto (Michael Servetus), part 1 Unitarianism in Europe is rooted in two ideas. One of them was critique of the doctrine of the trinity – and that’s the idea we are named after. The other is critique of religious intolerance – and that’s the idea that’s more central to what it means to be Unitarian. Both of those ideas got a significant boost from a man that I grew up calling Michael Servetus. He went by a lot of names, but the name he and his family probably knew him by best was Miguel Serveto. That’s what he seems to have been called most in his childhood and youth, as he was born and raised in Spain, so that’s what I’ll call him. Miguel Serveto was born in 1509, was eight-years old when -- 2,000 ...

How did Trinitarianism become orthodoxy? That's the question for the next episode of the Unitarian Universalist minute.. *Matthew 28:19. UU Minute ...

UU Minute #6: Katarzyna Weiglowa As women stand up threatening patriarchy and orthodoxy, let’s remember that our Unitarian heritage includes courageous women who have been doing that for almost 500 years. In 1527, ten years after Martin Luther had nailed 95 theses to the church door in Wittenberg, thereby launching the Protestant Reformation, another German Protestant theologian, Martin Borrhaus, published De Operibus Dei -- Work of God -- the first open questioning of the doctrine of the Trinity in print in Europe. Borrhaus went quiet on the subject thereafter and was able to live out his life. Katarzyna Weiglowa, a Polish woman in her late 60s when Borrhaus’ book came out, was less fortunate. Influenced by that book, she began prof...

UU Minute #5: Pandemics, Printing Presses, and Protestants Pandemics are nothing new. They have been a periodic part of human life ever since we’ve had cities. The Bubonic plague in the middle-1300s killed one third of Europe’s population, creating labor shortages, which created pressure for innovation. For instance, as long as there were plenty of people to copy things by hand, it didn’t occur to anybody that a printing press sure would be handy. Even so, it was a century after the worst plague year before Gutenberg’s printing press with movable type came on line. Some sixty years after Gutenberg’s press, in 1517, Martin Luther launched the Protestant Reformation. Coincidence? Hardly. For one thing, the Catholic Church jumped ...

UU Minute #4: Universalism IS Biblical The Council of Nicaea in 325 was bad news for unitarian Christians. Arius argued that the divinity of the father was greater than that of the son. Jesus was divine -- was more than human -- but was not God. This Arian Christianity lost out to the Trinitarian view that father and son were of the same substance: co-eternal, co-equal. But no matter which side had won in Nicaea, the effect of the Council was to emphasize the importance of having the right doctrine, and de-emphasize the ethics and values of living a Christian life. And that was bad news for the other side of our heritage: the universalist Christians. Virtually from the beginning, some Christians had understood that everyone was going to ...

UU Minute #3: How Trinitarianism Became Orthodox Roman Emperor Constantine's reign began in they year 306 when he was 34 years old. His reign would last 31 years, and his administrative and financial reforms strengthened the empire. Six years into his reign [at age 40], Constantine converted to Christianity, becoming the first Christian Roman Emperor after centuries of Christian persecution at the hands of the Romans. The Christianity of the time was scattered and diverse: no central authority, no commonly accepted scripture, no commonly practiced liturgy, no orthodox theology. For Constantine, devoted to bringing administrative order to his empire, this had to be fixed. So, in 325, Constantine convoked the Council of Nicaea, calling all...

UU Minute #1: Heirs of Alternative Voices To start at the beginning: the roots of what we now call Unitarian Universalism lie in early Christianity, which itself emerged from pre-Rabbinic Judaism in various urban centers around the Roman empire. Early Christianity had no central authority, no commonly accepted scripture, no commonly practiced liturgy, no orthodox theology. Early Christians were a scattered and diverse mosaic of different practices and beliefs. And they squabbled about that. In particular, was Jesus of Nazareth the latest in a long line of prophets calling the human community to righteousness and piety? Or was he something more? And, if more, what, exactly? There was tremendous pressure to determine what was the true fait...

OUR TIMES These are our times. This week the party not currently in the White House announced its nominee for Vice-President – and the party in the White House responded with sexist and racist attacks. Said party also stepped up its voter suppression efforts, attacking the credibility of mail-in ballots, and seeking to make cuts to the postal service to reduce its capacity. World-wide deaths from covid-19 in the last week are back up to a seven-day-average of 5800 a day. US deaths in the last week averaged over a 1,000 a day. The households that could be at risk of eviction in the coming months are tens of millions. We did not ask for these times. It simply falls to us to live them – to respond to them as people of compassion and wis...

OUR TIMES -- (HERE) HOMILY 1 The times are changing. The Christian organization, Bread for the World, had had on its Board of Directors the congressman who accosted and levied sexist insults at Representative Ocasio-Cortez and non-apologized for it. Yesterday, though, Bread for the World asked for and received his resignation from its Board. The Christian charity said the congressman’s “recent actions and words as reported in the media are not reflective of the ethical standards expected of members of our Board of Directors.” The group’s statement spoke of “our commitment to coming alongside women and people of color, nationally and globally, as they continue to lead us to a more racially inclusive and equitable world.” You m...

OUR TIMES -- See minister's column, HERE HOMILY 1 Oh, my, y’all – as we say down South. 2020 – the year that means perfect vision – 20/20 – has seen one thing after another that we never saw before and didn’t see coming. Global pandemic. Growing recession and unemployment. Three weeks and counting of protests – world-wide protests – sparked by the George Floyd murder. This last week – well, as one headline put it – it was a bad week to be a racist statue. Confederate Civil War figures were smashed, beheaded, pulled down. In Belgium, they’re removing statues of King Leopold, the 19th-century king who was particularly cruel in colonizing Africa. In New Zealand, protestors removed a statue of John Hamilton, the 19th-ce...

  OUR TIMES segment -- HERE PART 1 I want to talk about presence – being present for each other in an attentive way. Our presence is a fundamental offering. A person aligned with their purpose, who has integrity and wholeness, creates a presence that ripples out through the world. It reassures and empowers others. It changes the world. Henry Nouwen, in his 1974 book, Out of Solitude , wrote: “When we honestly ask ourselves which persons in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in...

Three weeks ago, I preached, “What’s Your Great Vow?” Last week, I preached, “Transforming Your Inner Critic.” Today, I want to bring those two sermons together. In “What is Your Great Vow?” I asked, What is the mission of your life? I talked about noticing what your sources of vow were. You have inherited vows – a sense of purpose you got from parents or other particularly influential people as you were growing up. You have reactive vows – some experience of hurt or injustice that made an impression on you as worth working to stop or mitigate. You have inspired vows – heros, or people you look up to, who inspired you to be like them in some way. I asked you to reflect on those sources of vow, and out of that reflecti...

Invocation: HERE“I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.”Those words of Rabindranath Tagore, and today’s topic of the Inner Critic – the voice inside you that is always telling you what’s wrong with you – and this month’s theme of Joy – somehow combine in thoughts about: Democracy. Democracy is, as John Dewey said: “more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience.”When I was a graduate student in philosophy, I adopted Dewey as a special research interest. John Dewey, born 100 years before I was, helped me see democracy as not “simply and solely a form of government”, but a soci...

Invocation Poem by Larry Robinson, HERE Part 1 Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?If we would know where we are going, we need to know what we are. If we would know what we are, we need to know where we came from. We come from the universe that began 14 billion years ago, and the planet earth formed 4.5 billion years ago, and the life that began there more than 3 billion years ago. We come from the vertebrates that first appeared over 500 million years ago, and from the rise of mammals that was paved by the 5th great extinction 65 million years ago when, probably, an asteroid struck the Earth leading to the extinction of 75% of all species of that time. We come from the order primates that first appeared 55 million ye...

From the spiritual point of view, everything is a lesson – every object, person, or experience I encounter – every cup or pen or rock -- is trying to teach me something. The spiritual task is to listen to each moment. Its meaning is always uncertain – indeterminate. Nonetheless, the spiritual call is to discern – or construct – what meaning we can – to ignore nothing. The poet Kristin Flyntz has been listening for what our current pandemic might be trying to teach. An Imagined Letter from Covid-19 to Humans Kristin Flyntz Stop. Just stop. It is no longer a request. It is a mandate. We will help you. We will bring the supersonic, high speed merry-go-round to a halt We will stop the planes, the trains, the schools, the malls, t...

Act 5 Last Act One of Mary Oliver’s best known and best loved poems is “The Summer Day.” Who made the world? Who made the swan, and the black bear? Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper, I mean- the one who has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down- who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes. Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away. I don't know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I h...

Act 4. Joy, Compassion, and the Big Picture Stop worrying. Seriously, climate anxiety is a real thing. Some people have gotten so stressed about reports of inevitable near-term social collapse due to climate change that they’ve gone into therapy. The American Psychological Association now recognizes “eco-anxiety” as "a chronic fear of environmental doom". I know that fear can be a powerful motivator in the short term. Most of the politicians in office now got there by playing to fear. Fear works, in the short run, but it makes us miserable and stressed. We end up anxious and depressed. Let us take action to mitigate climate change, but not out of fear. We don’t need your fear, your anxiety, your stress, your worry, or your panic....

Act 2 Truths Still Inconvenient It’s been 13 years since the 2006 release of “An Inconvenient Truth” – the slideshow that brought so much attention to climate change that it earned Al Gore an Oscar and a Nobel Peace Prize. The predictions back then are all coming true – in some cases faster than predicted. Through most of the 200,000 year history of homo sapiens, CO2 levels have been around 280 ppm. 350 ppm appears to be the upper limit of what the planet can handle without becoming a very different sort of planet. Above 350, NASA said, you couldn't have a planet "similar to the one on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted." The journal Nature said that above 350 "we threaten the ecological life-sup...

Act 1. Fermi's Question I think often of Enrico Fermi (1901-1954) – the great Italian physicist who died in 1954. He asked an intriguing question. He looked out at the stars and asked: Where is everybody? Number 1: Our Sun is a young star. It's 4.6 billion years old, while most of the 200 billion stars in our galaxy are about 10 billion years old or older. Number 2: There is a high probability that some of these stars have Earth-like planets which, if the Earth is typical, may develop intelligent life. Fermi could only make a rough guess about the number of Earth-like planets in the galaxy. Since getting the data from the 2013 Kepler mission, our current best estimate is that there are 40 billion Earth-sized planets in the Milky Way wi...

Faiths are different. Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Daosim, Confucianism, Sikhism, Jainism, animism and others -- and the variants of these, sometimes numbering into the hundreds -- are all different. This is unavoidable. Religious diversity does raise some problems and challenges for us, but addressing those problems calls for learning how to accept -- and if possible celebrate -- differences rather than suppressing or erasing them. So when I say, "a 'faith' for everyone," I do not propose to lay out some common core that all, or most, religions have, or should have. Instead, I mean to urge a way of understanding what faith is. This understanding may be shared by everyone, regardless of their faith. T...

Things get difficult sometimes. We need the tribal connections that modern life precludes. Thus we are left often alone, “like a motherless child.” And what we do encounter of other people may be negative: there is a fear of difference in the land that is further tearing us apart. We are in a difficult time – have been, really, for about 12,000 years. Here’s the thing: we need a tribe. We crave the face-to-face community – groups of up to 150 where everyone knows everyone else, everyone is accountable to everyone else, every one is known, and everyone belongs. We keep each other in line, which meets our need for connection and interaction, which gives our lives meaning. Here’s part of how it works: “When a person does somet...

Renewal Happens, part 2 of 2 Opportunities for renewal, for starting over, are ever-present. But there's a price for renewal. New beginnings come with loss. All the things that religion is – the ethics and values we live by, the community bonds and the rituals, the experiences of transcendent wonder – all of that: it’s nothing if it doesn’t make us more alive, if it doesn’t open us to the fullness of everything, if it doesn’t prepare us to say YES to all of life, even the hard parts, even the loss. And renewal does include loss of what was before – just as loss of what was opens the space for renewal. We have to say good-bye in order to say hello -- that's the cost of renewal. Novelist Daniel Abraham points out: “The flow...

Renewal Happens, part 1 Marv Throneberry, 1933-1994 With baseball season upon us, I am remembering some of the grand tradition of New York baseball. Let us take a moment to fondly remember Marv Throneberry. Marv Throneberry was first-basement for the 1962 Mets, arguably the worst major-league team ever. Throneberry’s batting was mediocre. Where he stood out -- in a bad way -- was as a fielder and a base runner, where his ineptness rose to legendary heights. As the New York York Times reported in its obituary when Marv Throneberry died: “In a game against the Chicago Cubs, Throneberry hit what appeared to be a game-winning triple with the bases loaded and two outs. The problem was that everybody in the dugout noticed that he missed to...

Crossing the Line, part 2 of 2 Having good boundaries solves the 84th problem. Do you know what the 84th problem is? (I’ve told the parable before -- HERE -- and it's worth re-telling). The Buddha comes to town, and a farmer comes to see him and starts complaining about his problems. His wife this; and his children that; and the ox is sick; and the soil is poor; and there hasn’t been enough rain and, if there were, the roof would leak; and the people to whom he sells his rice are cheating him. The Buddha stops him and says: You have 83 problems. Farmer says: That sounds about right. How do I fix them? Buddha says: You’ll always have 83 problems. Maybe you solve one, or it goes away on its own, but another pops up to take its plac...

Crossing the Line, part 1 of 2 Some lines, it’s good to cross. Other lines are better respected. Edwin Markham (1852-1940) You’ve probably heard the verse by Edwin Markham, titled “Outwitted.” He drew a circle that shut me out - Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout. But love and I had the wit to win: We drew a circle and took him In!In those four lines we see both the good and the bad of the lines we draw – the boundaries and borders we put up. Some lines shut people out. Other lines hold people together. And sometimes: it’s the same line: holding US together and keeping out THEM. Our monthly theme for June is Borders and Boundaries. These two words are synonyms – or they used to be. They both mean the outer edge, the bound or ...

The call to neighborliness is the promise we have made to mystery. I am not entirely clear on what that means – even though it’s my own sentence. Still I felt when I first wrote it and feel still that it is somehow pointing to something that matters. And it gets clearer as I hold that sentence before me and lean into it, and live into it. The call to neighborliness is the promise we have made to mystery. I think that is the call that we – we who constitute Community Unitarian Universalist – answer and aspire to answer. It’s what we do in our being here, in our participation in congregational life: we answer the call to neighborliness and live into the promise we have made to mystery. Today’s topic, “Hope Amid Despair” –...

I served our congregation in Gainesville, Florida for seven years before leaving there to put myself at your disposal. One of my neighbor colleague ministers in Florida at that time was the Rev. Naomi King. At state clergy gatherings where I had a chance to talk with and get to know Naomi and attend some worship services that she led for us, I discovered she is at least as creative as her father. Rev. King’s father’s name, you see, is Stephen. For those who like their theology traditional and settled, the daughter is also scarier than the father. She gave a presentation once and just the title would make the blood run cold if you’re the sort of person who believes the faith of our fathers is not to be meddled with. It was titled,

On Sun Apr 7, I was at Fourth Universalist Society (160 Central Park West, Manhattan) for the ordination of Leonisa Ardizzone, with whom I had a mentoring relationship during 2016-17, while she was a student at Union Theological Seminary. She is a long-time Buddhist practitioner and led a Buddhist Meditation group at Fourth Universalist for a number of years. I was asked to give the "Charge to the Minister," and here's what I said. [Holding up copy of Order of Service] It says here I’m supposed to charge the minister. Wait. Is there a minister here? Where? Who is a minister? Some 15 years ago, the Zen master Ruben Habito and I were sitting face-to-face, cross-legged on the floor, about 3 feet apart – just the two of us in a smallish ...

Humility. I approach this topic with a feeling that a sermon on humility can’t be given. Words about humility can’t be worth saying, for as soon as I think I know something about the topic, I thereby prove that I don’t have it. As the saying goes, the minute you think you’ve got humility, you’ve lost it. I might believe that humility is a virtue, and I might actively seek to cultivate it. But if I believe for a minute my efforts are doing some good, in that minute, whatever good they’ve done is wiped away. Even if you don’t say anything and modestly keep it all to yourself, the ego is working away inside to figure out some way to hijack whatever you do and turn it into a self-glorifying story. There’s a cartoon of a young...

Do you get angry? How do you know when you’re angry? Do you decide to be angry? If you do, isn’t that a little calculating? And if you don’t decide to be angry, who does? If it isn’t you who decides to be angry, the who is it, really, who is angry? Do you think about questions like these? Do you decide to think about them? Back to anger. How do you feel about your own anger? Is it embarrassing? Do you wish you had less of it – that, however it arises or wherever it comes from, it would visit you less often? Anger comes to visit us uninvited. Unless we’re stage-acting, it’s uninvited. Yes, we can decide to suppress it or not. And we can decide what to do with it if we don’t suppress it. Overall, we can decide to adopt prac...

Part 1. So. Desire. But WHICH desires? Have you noticed how many of the seven deadly sins are desires? Lust, gluttony, greed. Envy is a comparative desire: comparing myself to others, I desire as good or better than what they have. Vanity is a sort of reversal of envy: it’s conviction that others must envy me -- rooted in the desire that they do so. And anger – that’s what you feel when a desire is thwarted. That’s six of the seven deadly sins that are malfunctions or excesses of desire. Pope Gregory I in the 6th century delineated these seven deadly sins. Calling them sins probably only encourages judgment, self-judgment, and repression -- which millennia of Christendom’s experience show don’t work all that well. “The Retu...

Seven weeks ago, on December 23, I preached a sermon, “Reality Amid Ideology.” The ideology at issue was exceptionalism – the sense of being God’s favorite and under a special divine blessing. US exceptionalism goes back to John Winthrop, the Puritan governor in 17th century New England who told his fellow Puritans they were creating “a city set upon a hill.” The Monroe Doctrine articulated in 1823 declared that the Americas were off limits to any further European colonization – effectively ensuring US hegemony over two continents. Theodore Roosevelt’s imperialism acquired the Philippines and reached into Korea, Japan, and China, driven by a sense of uniquely American Manifest Destiny, and the racist conviction that Asian...

Our country has a profound need acknowledge loss, to give voice to grief and thereby relinquish our clinging to an imagined past. Giving voice to grief, to sadness about loss, is a key task of the prophets. The prophetic voices today come from our poets. Herewith, four examples: In “How Much Faith?” Al Staggs grieves about the rising economic insecurity of the middle class. So how much faith do we possess? From where does our financial security come? The economic crisis has deeply touched both our emotional and spiritual lives and we are compelled to ask deep questions. If our lifestyles are radically altered; that is, If our houses, cars and most of our possessions are lost and our savings and retirement accounts become depleted and...

I was intrigued to learn that the word desire comes from the Latin de sidere . “Sidere” is the root of “sidereal,” meaning “of or relating to the stars.” The suggestion is that our desires are “written in the stars.” We are fated to desire what we desire. We don’t choose our desires, nor are they rationally determined. Freedom means that you can do what you like. But you don’t decide what you like. Brian Magee puts it this way: “If I am ordering a meal in a restaurant, I may be free to choose whatever I like from among the alternatives on the menu. But I am not free to choose what I like shall be. I cannot say to myself: 'Up to this point in my life I have always detested spinach, but just for today I am going to li...

On Friday a couple days ago, one of our congregation’s members posted on the Facebook “CUUC Forum” a helpful bit of information (HERE). He wrote, “How many times have we all been in the situation where the answer to this question just doesn't flow off the tips of our tongues?” The question at issue, in large letters at the top of the graphic he posted was: “Where does the word Unitarian come from?” Of course, you can’t trust anything you read in a Facebook graphic (starting with the fact that they are called "memes" when, in fact, they are graphics, not memes.) But this one got it right. It says: “Its roots lie in the Reformation of 16th-century Europe, when Protestant Christians read and interpreted the Bible for thems...

When Martin Luther King Jr called for a world in which people were not judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character, he didn’t mean that we wouldn’t see the color of their skin – or that we’d pretend not to. I’m not sure he knew all the details of how it would work, but I don’t think he’d have wanted people’s identities erased, who they are rendered invisible. His primary task up until he died 50 years ago last April was addressing overt racism. Today we know we must also address subtle cultural matters. It may once have counted as progress to treat minority cultures the same. But we must do more than that. We must respect and honor and stand ready to adapt to the ways cultures are different. An...

Simplicity, part 3 Simplicity Approach #3: Self-provisioning. Be a Do-It-Yourselfer. Have a garden that provides some of your food. Do your canning. Eat out less. Sew and knit – make your own clothes. Cut your own hair. Make your own bread. Hang clothes on a line instead of using the dryer. If you need a bookshelf, try making one (if the ones available at thrift shops -- often cheaper than the supplies for making your own -- are not the right size, shape, or style). This approach to simplicity is a helpful support for number two – reducing consumption. The more you make for yourself, the less you have to buy. On the other hand, setting out to do more self-provisioning might increase your stress. If you take on Do-It-Yourself projects...

Simplicity, part 2 Since what we own also owns us, some care in selecting what to buy and own is warranted. Some helpful questions: Does what I own or buy promote activity, self-reliance, and involvement, or does it induce passivity and dependence? Do I buy and own things that serve no real need? How tied am I to installment payments, credit card debt, product maintenance and repair costs, and the expectations of others? What impact does my purchasing have on other people and on the earth? Would the beauty and joy of living be greater if I had less, consumed less, and my life was based more on being and becoming and less on having? Duane Elgin’s Voluntary Simplicity also looked at what he called human scale. Have our living and working...

The Amish Ordnung – their set of rules – prohibits or suing in a court of law or running for political office, though it generally allows voting. Public electricity is prohibited, though most groups generate their own from diesel generators or batteries – or, increasingly, solar panels -- for limited purposes that include home lighting and running the motorized washing machine, which almost all Amish allow. Automobiles and radio and TV are prohibited, and the Ordnung requires a particular style of clothing, hairstyle, and carriage design. Most Amish allow chainsaws, pneumatic tools, and running water for the bathtub and inside flush toilets – though 30 percent of the Amish population live in church districts that forbid these. Ha...