A Progressive Faith From the Inside Out
Reverend John Buehrens
(Past President of the Unitarian Universalist Association)
First Unitarian Church, Philadelphia, PA
READINGS: From If Yes Is the Answer, What Is the Question? by G. K. Beach
An untitled poem from West Wind by Mary Oliver
It's good to be here this morning. When my good friends, like your ministers, were working to get me elected president of the denomination some years ago, one of the things they and my family had to put up with was hearing me constantly referred to as "the evangelical rabbi of liberal religion" -- a title that was bestowed on me, along with an honorary degree, by the seminary where they trained and where I am teaching this fall. It provoked my daughter to send me a card she found with a drawing of a man about my age, hair somehow all loved off on top, wearing glasses, a well-traveled robe, a prayer shawl and a yalmulke - with the caption, "The Velveteen Rabbi." And the question, "So vhen can I go play with the real rabbis?" So here I am, thanks to Holly and Benjamin. Grateful to be here in the City of Brotherly Love, and with friend, in a time when all of us are conscious that we seem to be entering a new epoch of history.
Some fifty years ago, at the start of the Cold War, the last occasion on which Western political leaders found themselves announcing a long struggle ahead, against an inter-national, conspiratorial foe - not terrorism, but communism - the great Jewish sage Martin Buber was asked to address a U.N. gathering in Europe. There he told a parable that I'll paraphrase for you:
At the beginning of the modern world - at the time of the French Revolution, Buber said - the dream was for three ideals to walk hand-in-hand. They were Liberty, Equality, and what was then called Fraternity -- which we might better now call Kinship. But through subsequent revolutions, both West and East, the three somehow separateed, and were changed in the process. Liberty went West, and came here to America especially, where it too often became mere freedom to put one's own interest first, to exploit the land, to exploit others. Equality went East, where it too often became the submergence of the individual in a faceless collective: the equality of the gulag, and of masses all reading the same "little red book." But what became of Kinship? Of the sense that we are all sisters and brothers, children of one Great Mystery, know by many different names and stories? Kinship, which might have re-united the two, because it is the religious spirit, went into hiding, said Buber, kept alive not so much among so-called enlightened elites as among oppressed people. From there it began to emerge. The spirit of universal human kinship, carried by leaders like Dr. King, by movements like Solidarity in Poland, helped the West begin to see how equality at least of opportunity is necessary to make freedom real. Meanwhile in the East concern for material equality has given way to new liberties, both for good and for ill.
Yet now we clearly live in a world with a new polarity. Partly North-South, rich vs. poor. Partly shaped by a resurgence of tribalism, of partial kinship, under the guise of religion. In a book called The New Cold War?: Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State, sociologist of religion Mark Juergensmeyer showed fully eight years ago how terrorism and violence in the name of religion arises from widespread alienation with governments, governments of all sorts, that have failed the spiritual challenge of re-uniting Liberty and Equality through an inclusive sense of human kinship.
Too often progressive people have allowed only religious tribalists to speak for religion. Here in America we have allowed Pat Robertson and company to speak for Christianity. In Israel, only ultra-orthodox zealots to speak for Judaism. Even in idyllic Sri Lanka, a Buddhist culture with significant Hindu, Muslim, and Christian minorities, militant Buddhist monks have assassinated secular leaders and bombed government buildings. The Muslim world, with its failures of government by our so-called allies, has witnessed the rise of hate-filled militants like Osama ben Laden. While India, the world's largest democracy, is now ruled by Hindu nationalists, and has seen mob violence against Muslim shrines and Christian missions.
Last February I went to India, just after the Gujarat earthquake. Bringing aid and support to the human rights groups we work with there through the Unitarian Universalist Holdeen India Program. At the airport in Mumbai, I was met by an activist friend who has won the World Anti-Slavery Award for helping to free more than 15,000 indigenous people from bonded labor. As he greeted me, we were accosted by police and others who began demanding if I was a "missionary." My friend Vivek shouted back, "Yes! Yes! He is a missionary! His mission is universal human rights! His mission is human equality! His mission is freedom of religion! That is my mission, too! Now what is your mission? Tell us, if you dare! We will debate you, right here and now!"
You see, my friends, some people want to build the human future on the basis of narrow, exclusive enclaves of cultural and religious identity. They want to turn the meaning of kinship -- the ancient spiritual wisdom, taught in every tradition, that we are all sisters and brothers - inward on itself. Our mission, yours and mine, is to capture the inner core of the universal spirit of religion at our inner core. And then to work with other people of progressive religious spirit to re-unite that sense of kinship to every society's effort to re-unite spiritual freedom with greater equality of opportunity. For there is no solution to be found just in secular consumerism or nostalgic and oppressive patterns of belief. The only solution is to be found in communities and people willing to reach out from the inside, toward the humanness in people of other backgrounds, toward concern for their rights, dignity, democratic aspirations, and our common future.
Never doubt, then, that we have a mission in this church. To paraphrase one of our great ministers of the last generation, it is to make religious people more progressive and to help progressive people live the religious spirit of doing justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly before that Mystery which transcends us all. To bring them the good news of a progressive form of faith, lived from the inside out, not forced on anyone from the outside in. A form of faith in which we know that "belief is many things; and so is disbelief; but true religion is what happens to us when we open our minds to new truth, our hearts to greater compassion, and give ourselves to the service of justice.
Don't hesitate to invite others to walk this path with you. Or wonder what they might get out of coming here with you some Sunday morning. I remember being a young adult, surprised to find myself going to a church again after deciding I could no longer, in conscience, attend the one I'd been raised in. So I asked the most faithful church-goer I knew, my grandmother, what kept her going back, week after week.
"Why I go to church?" she replied in her Eastern European accent. "Oh, Janni, you know, soul sometime get very empty. Faith small, like mustard seed." I knew enough of her story to have a sense of what she meant. She had been orphaned in Eastern Europe at the age of ten. She came to America through Ellis Island, as a teenager, alone, with only an older sister to meet her when she got to Chicago. There she met and married another orphan. They had four children. But by the end of the influenza epidemic of 1919, she and my grandfather had buried all four babies. Soul very empty indeed.
That was when my grandfather stopped going to church -- when it seemed his wife was going to die as well and the priest wouldn't come to give her the last rites. In the Great Depression, with three more children's mouths to feed, my granddad lost his factory job. The two had to try to scratch a living out of a patch of dry ground in Texas for two years. During World War II, nearly all their remaining relatives in Slovakia died or were killed.
"I go to church," said my grandmother, "and inside my soul I have to be grateful again, just to be alive. I am there with other people. So I don't think just about my own problems. Many have them, just like me. I pray with them and for them. My thoughts then reach out, wider, deeper, higher. Sometimes," she said to me, "it does not even matter if the priest's sermon is not so very good! None of us can see the future, but I pray for you and your cousins and for all young people. Then my hope comes back. I pray for your grandfather, and love returns, too. I go home to show him -- not just by my words -- that is no good in life to stay bitter. I get him to help me do something nice for a child or a neighbor. Dat's why I go back to church every week."
My friends, my grandmother, knew intuitively what we are here to proclaim explicity: that faith is not about believing something in spite of the evidence; it is more like living with courage, gratitude and integrity in spite of life's inevitable losses. And hope is not a matter of knowing that everything will come out all right, either for yourself, or even for all of us together. It is more like pointing one's life toward a point on the horizon beyond which none of us can see, but toward which we all have to move if there is going to be a worthwhile future for our children and our children's children. And Love is no mere Hallmark greeting card sentiment: for each of us, it is more like serving justice, practicing compassion, and walking humbly together. For all of us together, it is like the mother-and-child reunion of liberty with equality through a deep sense of spiritual kinship. That's our mission, yours and mine. The world is waiting. People need us. Let's go give them the priceless good news that that progressive faith comes from the inside out.
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