What They Dreamed Be Ours to Do: A Celebration of the 1961 Merger
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- Created on Sunday, 24 October 2010 01:00
- Written by Jenny M. Rankin
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I’d like to thank my colleague David Pohl for the sermon title, they are words from a hymn we’ll sing today, words he chose as the headline for our celebration of merger this year. This is the second in a series of sermons celebrating the 50th anniversary of what we call “merger,” the coming together of two traditions, the Unitarian and the Universalist, in 1961. Unitarian Universalist Association was formed.
Gary preached on Universalism on October 4. Today I’ll take up Unitarianism. I remember Gary talked about his grandmother who was a Universalist and about driving the backcountry roads of western Maine where his family lived and where Universalism thrived.
Today, I’m thinking of the Unitarianism of my grandfather who was a minister. and walking the cobblestones and brick sidewalks of Beacon Hill and downtown Boston where Unitarianism first grew up in the 1820s and 30s. I lived there when I was little, we went to church at King’s Chapel, the first Unitarian church in America, and so when I drive in to a meeting at the UUA, walk up those granite stone steps at 25 Beacon St, it feels in a way like I am coming home.
I didn’t know my grandfather till he was elderly and we visited him in the nursing home. I remember his sweater, the smell of his pipe. I wish I could talk to him now.
Harold Greene Arnold
He went to Harvard Divinity School, graduating in 1909. William James (one of my heroes) was one of his teachers. He was a minister for 40 years at a little church in West Roxbury, the church where Theodore Parker started out before becoming famous, controversial. Brook Farm was a stone’s throw away. He helped start the youth organization we know as YRUU. He went to conferences on Starr Island. He travelled to Transylvania in the 1920s, and brought home to my mother, then five, an embroidered dress which she kept all her life,
Packed in tissue paper. I have it now.
He was a quiet presence, I have been told, beloved by his people.
He was not a flashy famous minister but a kindly, steady man
who cared about the people he had been called to served,
Living and moving in and amongst them and their lives and their children’s lives for 40 years.
A few years ago, the Theodore Parker church mailed me the cloth that you see on the pulpit. Embroidered into it is the name of every family in his parish.
Unitarianism is the faith I grew up in, that I left at some point, and that I returned to again. It is the faith that helped to buoy my family over a time of immeasurable loss and sadness. And helped to buoy me as a young woman at a time of feeling lost and adrift. It is a faith you have told me has helped you in your life. You bring your children here to give thanks, you come here to gain strength through a divorce or an illness, you come for a bit of a quiet in a world so filled with noise.
Unitarianism. Where does the story start, I wonder?
In the very first years of the early Christian church, there was no doctrine of the Trinity, no idea that Jesus was divine. We could start with humans quarrelling and emperors calling Councils like Nicaea and Chalcedon to settle the wrangling, Councils that debated and tussled over these theological questions and at the end came out with the doctrine of the Trinity and the idea that Jesus had two natures was both God and Man at the same time.
Or we could start in Europe where questions about the Trinity and the essential nature of Jesus popped up over and over again, the northern Alps of Italy, France, Grisons, Poland, and Transylvania, England.
We could start with Servetus and his book titled On the Errors of the Trinity and how John Calvin had it tied to Servetus’ leg when he had him burned at the stake in Geneva.
But today I am considering American Unitarianism and so best to start with
With William Ellery Channing that brilliant and diminutive Boston preacher whose prayers were so personal that thirteen year old Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, sitting there in the pew, made her think he was speaking directly to God, face to face.
He practiced this same intensity on the sidewalks of Boston as he did in the pulpit. "When Mr. Channing asks how you are, the story went, and you reply that you are well, his next remark, "I am very glad," is spoken as if it were of real importance to him." (Mendelsohn, p. 153)
Channing was called to the prestigious Federal Street church at age 23 but the summer before he started he was so overcome by self-doubt he almost quit. His brother encouraged him to give it a try. Finally, he told himself that if God had wanted angels to serve the church, God would have arranged it that way. He went on to stay there for 40 years!
Channing preached to the Boston Brahmin, China trade shipping families, businessmen and lawyers, in those years when slavery was starting to heat up and Channing felt torn about whether to speak up, how much to speak up, to a congregation that didn’t want to hear what he had to say. When he could, he’d escape to his farm on the shores of Narragansett Bay and just walk beside the waves to revive his spirit. He said he poured out his thanksgivings and his confessions and in the presence of that mighty power and beauty, felt the power within him again. He could return to the brawl of the ministry revived.
It makes sense to start with Channing because he was the one after all, with his landmark Baltimore sermon in 1819, all l l/2 hours of it, made Unitarian Christianity a by-word, really laid out the ideas that liberals were gathering around.
When you read that sermon, you can almost hear the incredulous tone of his voice; can you tell me where in the Bible it says the Trinity? Can you show me where it says that Jesus is God?
Not there—is what he said.
For Channing, it meant returning to the religion of Jesus, not the one about Jesus.
A religion about loving God and loving each other and making this world a better place.
Like Universalism, Unitarianism had its roots in the Radical Reformation but whereas the Universalists wanted to redefine the notion of God—make it a loving God—the Unitarians wanted to redefine human nature. They rejected the Calvinist notion that humans were born depraved, born in original sin.
Yes, Channing said, we are born with the capacity for sin but also for goodness. We can grow and change. We can start again.
A generation later, the Transcendentalists took it one step further. It wasn’t just possible for us to change and grow, it was a moral imperative.
“Whence is thy power?” Emerson asked. The notion that each one of us has personal power, something particular and unique to you, to me. Getting in touch with that power, getting in touch with our own possibilities.
Unitarians believed that if you had been lucky enough to be given the gift of life, it was up to you to make it the best possible life you could.
This was a religion that said human could and should change. And it didn’t just stop with the individual. If that were true for one, that kind of possibility had to be true for all. Social reform was not an option, it was a moral imperative.
Over the next 150 years, Unitarians were in the vanguard of every American social reform movement. Abolition, women’s rights, prison reform, mental illness, birth control, peace protests, civil rights, gay and lesbian rights, environmental leadership today.
It was an entirely different take on religion. No longer damnation, guilt, sin, depravity, trying to figure out if you were chosen or not.
Human possibility. Human potential. Human progress.
What possibility is waiting inside of you, still to be born? Inside of me? Inside this community?
* * * *
Unitarianism is not just a story about then; it is a story about now. It is about you and it is about me.
How did my father, born on a small farm on the prairie in Illinois, how did he make his way East and end up in an old stone Unitarian church on Beacon Hill?
How did your steps lead you here?
What food did you find to nourish you?
Unitarianism is not just stories from the past. It is a living tradition and we are the players now.
To me, it is a faith that gives you life. That gives me life. That gives us life.
When I was a young adult and returned to church, isn’t this what I found, a faith that could lead me back towards life?
When you were in your 30s and both your parents died, way too young, and your footsteps found their way to this place, wasn’t that what you found here, a faith that gave you life?
When you came for your children, and then stayed for yourself, wasn’t it because you found here a faith that somehow fed you? That gave you more life, more hope, more strength for the living of your days?
When you lost your job, when you got the diagnosis, when he moved out,
When your son died . . . .
When she just before dawn on that day . . . .
When the pain got too bad . . . .
When you wanted to start over . . . .
When…..
You fill in the blanks,
When….
There are a hundred stories in this room and more,
A hundred human hearts, a hundred joys and sorrows,
There is wrestling with obstacles in this room right here, right now and there is courage here
There is hope trying to hang on
There are those who are feeling fainthearted this week and others discovering a new found serenity
Gratitude to undergird their days
We are a people with a hundred hearts putting one foot in front of another, taking it day by day.
We come here for a glimpse of a faith that tells us there is something more.
Something more beyond the duties and the details, something bigger, something dipper, something of wonder or beauty or hope.
We come here because this is a faith that give us life.
That is the Unitarian strand of our faith and that is what we celebrate today and we celebrate that it came together with the Universalist side of things.
And so, putting those two traditions together, we get:
God as love, inclusive, accepting
No one left outside the door
Human possibility
An imperative to change the world in which we live
Reason and religion, together, not worlds apart
Freedom, spiritual freedom
Grace happens
Revelation is not sealed
The Spirit speaketh still.
A faith that gives you life
Again and again and again.
Copyright@ Jenny M. Rankin 2010.
Jack Mendohlson, Channing Reluctant Radical, p. 153.