Running Up That Hill: the State of Unitarian Universalism
Delivered by Aaron McEmrys to the Unitarian Society of Santa Barbara
October 12, 2008
I think I was seventeen years old or so when I first
discovered Unitarian Universalism. I
was living in a conservative little town in rural Wisconsin where I had never
really fit in. I had been raised in one
of the many old-fashioned Lutheran churches that dot the map of small
Mid-western hamlets like flowers made of stone. The people were all very nice, and to this day I have a soft spot
in my heart for Jell-O salad with canned fruit inside, lemon bars, orange soda
and meatloaf, not to mention the whole tables full of homemade deserts with
names like “Jan’s Rhubarb Surprise”, “Marge’s Marshmallow Meltdown” and the
always provocative “Better than Sex Cake” which always set down on the desert
table with a flourish by a woman my Grandma’s age with a saucy and
not-very-Lutheran twinkle in her eye. These were just a few of the things that
threatened to make the old folding tables buckle through all the many church
potlucks and picnics of my youth.
I remember many of those times fondly, but as I got
older it became more and more clear that I simply didn’t belong there. As I grew up and discovered people like
Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., the casual racism, the hypocrisy, the lack
of questioning and most of all the “you are damned, we are saved” theology that
nobody seemed to question all conspired to strip me of the only community I had
ever known. My life wasn’t easy, and as
I entered my teenage years I was as confused as anyone. I needed something bigger than myself to
believe in, I needed a community that would love, respect and support me as I
found my way in the world, I needed to be able to ask questions, even to rebel
– and I needed my religion to make sense, and to be relevant to the world as I
experienced it.
I wanted so badly to believe and I remember being a
little envious of all those good people around me who seemed to believe so
easily, apparently untroubled by the questions and contradictions that drove me
nuts every Sunday morning. But as I
suspect some of us here today have learned, wanting to have faith and actually
having it are two very different things.
And so I gave up, turning my back on the only community and the only
faith I had ever known – but without having the slightest idea how to deal with
the deep yearning I have always had for connection, purpose, wonder, searching
and meaning.
In the days that followed I took special pleasure in
poking holes in the Christianity I had rejected. The hypocrisy, the smug, self-satisfied arrogance, the disturbing
and violent history – I felt myself far above such superstition and there was a
kind of dark satisfaction in feeling superior to all those foolish people who
continued to believe – like my parents, for example. Like all those people I felt had rejected me, although I would
not admit how much that rejection stung.
My beliefs, such as they were, were increasingly
defined not by what I actually believed in, but by all the beliefs I had
rejected. Trying to articulate what I
did believe, finding a positive, affirmative voice was beyond me at that
time. This was not very
satisfying. I still had all the same
questions, all the same longings, all the same needs as ever, and being able to
feel smug and superior in my disbelief didn’t to much to change that.
So one Sunday morning I did something very odd. I got up early, stated up my gigantic and
untrustworthy 1977 Impala and went to the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship a
couple towns over, in Mequon, Wisconsin.
I had heard they were a different kind of church.
The Sunday I showed up was Martin Luther King
Sunday. There was a huge portrait of
Dr. King right up front, illuminated from behind like a stained glass window.
The service was not just a memorial for a fallen hero, but a call to action,
“King’s life, King’s ministry, King’s sacrifice are meaningless”, said the
first female minister I had ever seen, “unless we keep it alive through the
work we do in the world. This is the
work of our living faith.”
If you have never visited rural Wisconsin I don’t
think I can begin to express how truly revolutionary that Sunday morning 20
some years ago was for me. No one seemed the least bit put off by my spiky blue
punk-rock hairdo and combat boots, instead they seemed genuinely happy to meet
me, to know who I was. I couldn’t believe it – I had found a whole community of
people like me, and I felt a profound sense of homecoming, as if I had finally
found the place I was meant to be all along.
Although this is my story, I have heard variations
on this story from countless people who have become Unitarian
Universalism. For me this story
illustrates our religious mission and helps answer the question, “what are we,
as a congregation, for?” We are here to
meet the yearnings of the people that need us.
We are here to welcome the stranger, to ask tough questions, to lift up
all that matters most to us and to work together to live out our values in a
world.
And who are these people, these people whose
yearnings lead them here? They are
seekers like us: longing for answers to the central question in religion, “what
is it all about?” As my colleague
Marilyn Sewell argued in the sermon she preached at my Ordination, “To
answer their longing for meaning, these seekers by and large do not return to
the faiths of their childhoods. Some will go to the fundamentalist
churches, which offer a clear message and an ethical direction, an alternative
to a society that they see as godless and dissolute—and I would have to say
they have a point there. Catholics and Jews are also showing renewed
interest. But for others, the ready-made answers just don’t
satisfy. Denominational loyalties go out the window. If they were
raised in a conventional Christian church that claims that Jesus is the way and
not just a way, they question that belief. They are more tolerant, more
inclusive than previous generations. They want to make decisions
for themselves and to adopt beliefs that have integrity for them. Above
all, they want to satisfy the spiritual hunger that our consumer culture fails
so miserably to satisfy and which conventional religion has failed to
address. These people, my friends, constitute a vast mission field for
Unitarian Universalists. They are the ones who say, after they have found
us, I wish I had known you were here—I’ve been searching for you for years.”1
This longing is
powerful, and the forces that bring people here for the first time are
too. Hardly anyone just wakes up in the
morning and says; “hmm I think I’ll go check out a new church today. Rather they are driven to it. “People come
to church because they need something. A woman comes because she has just
lost her child in a court case. An older couple has moved from another
state, after retirement. A young couple comes, with their child, because
they want to provide some religious education for the family. A young man
comes because he can hardly stand to listen to the news any more. Two gay
men show up because they hope to be accepted as they are. “What now?” all
these people are asking. “Where will I find meaning?” “What can I give
myself to, that has value?” “Where will I find the love and support to
take me through this tough journey called life?” This is why people come to
church. To find, and to serve.”2
In this fragmented, troubled society where more
people than ever are bowling alone, we Unitarian Universalists have a crucial
mission right here, right now.
And yet we struggle. As a movement, our numbers are barely holding steady if not in
actual decline. That is, in a very good year we might actually add enough new
folks to replace those who have died or have left us for other reasons. We are not growing as a movement. Most of our congregations are small, and
getting smaller while the vast majority of our growth is happening in a small
minority of our congregations.
Financially, Unitarian Universalists give less generously to their
congregations than almost any other denomination in America and we also lose a
larger percentage of our youth than most other faiths do. I have lost count of how many UU high
schoolers have told me that they do wish they had a community, but that they
just don’t feel their church community wants them, needs them, or has a place
for them.
We have so much to offer the world, and yet we UUs,
like liberals everywhere seem to have the most amazing ability to sabotage
ourselves. As John Buhrens, the former
President of our Unitarian Universalist Association once said, “I’m not
surprised we shoot ourselves in the foot; I’m just surprised at how fast we can
reload!”
Interestingly, many of these issues came up at the
congregational start-up meeting we had last week. There were about sixty people there to have a conversation about
where we want to see this congregation five years from now. Now we all know that we UUs are an awfully
independent-minded bunch, so I was astonished when all sixty of us found
ourselves in near perfect agreement about what we want to see; I mean come on,
isn’t perfect unanimity among Unitarian Universalists one of the signs of the
Apocalypse or something? It’s gotta be
right up there with a rain of frogs!
But unexpected or not, here are the three main pillars of our shared
vision: we want to be a more vital, growing congregation, younger, and more age
diverse, and finally, a more relevant congregation that helps transform our
world through our ministry of social justice.
Almost every congregation I know says that they want
exactly these things! Growing, becoming
more diverse, making a difference – these are things we all say we want – until
it becomes apparent that in order to do any of these things we will have to
change! And so, instead of actually
doing the hard work of change, many congregations just keep talking about it,
year after year – always planning, always studying, always preparing for next
year, next budget cycle, next, next, next.
Many congregations fill up an astounding number of flip charts that
never lead to action, always bemoaning, always fretting, but never actually
changing, always waiting for the right time that never seems to come.
If we are serious about this – if we truly want to
make progress on these things – we are going to have to commit and we are going
to have to open ourselves up to change.
And let me tell you, friends, I can’t speak for the rest of our
movement, but I know for a fact that we, the Unitarian Society of Santa
Barbara, are up to the challenge.
We can start by being who we are – a religious
movement. Unitarian Universalism is a
religion, not a substitute for religion.
People don’t come to our congregations to hear a lecture, but to be
moved, loved, challenged and inspired.
We are not a debating society or a social club, although we do debate
and we love to socialize. “Churches exist as places where
people can grow spiritually, and then out of that growth, bless the larger
world. That is their unique reason for being. Spiritual
growth. It is when we begin to forget
this that we begin to drift.”3
Uh-oh, was that
okay for me to say, “spirituality?” -
“spiritual growth?” This is
another thing I believe we need to do if our movement is to come into its
potential – we have to get over some of our knee-jerk reactivity to a language
of reverence. We talk a lot about how
open and tolerant we are, until someone uses a word like, ”spirit” or
“blessing” or, “prayer” and then is our tolerance tested! I believe our movement needs to move beyond,
“tolerating” spiritual, intellectual and political diversity in our
congregations and instead begin to relish and to celebrate that diversity. We must learn to love our pluralism, even
though words like science and spirit; reason and reverence can sometimes seem
like the oddest of bedfellows.
Ultimately it is through our differences, not our commonalities that we
grow.
I also believe
we need to develop ever more affirmative theologies – that is learning to
embrace and lift up what we do believe instead of defining ourselves in terms
of what we do not believe. No one can
build a happy and meaningful life out of “no’s” and we certainly can’t invite
the people we love to join a “no-based movement.” We need to become a movement
that says, “Yes!”4
We also need to
strike a better balance between our deeply ingrained individualism and our
commitment to community. The community
must be able to act even when consensus is impossible. If we stick to talking about and acting on
things that everyone agrees on then all our words and all our actions will
sink, again and again, to the lowest common denominator, and we will be
paralyzed at exactly the times our world needs us to step up, speak up and act
up.
The truth is
that our society needs communities like ours more now than ever before as
thousands of families lose their homes every day and we teeter on the brink of
the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression. We are needed more than ever as our world
groans under the weight of wars, genocide, poverty and environmental collapse. We are needed more than ever in a United
States where it is so hard to live lives of worth and dignity, a society in
which cynicism, loneliness and fear run rampant and where the culture of
consumption is primed to turn around and begin consuming us.
And while our
congregation must face some of the challenges confronting our larger Unitarian
Universalist movement, I want to point out that, in many ways, this
congregation is ahead of the curve and well-positioned for the future. It is virtually impossible to open a
newspaper, log onto the Internet or turn on the television these days without
being bombarded by people claiming to be “mavericks.” It’s hard for me to imagine being sicker of any single word than
I currently am of the word, “maverick”, but someone sent me a fascinating story
from the New York Times that has reframed my perspective.
Turns out the
real “original mavericks”
are the Maverick family, “that has been known for their progressive politics
since the 1600s, when an ancestor got himself into a world of trouble for
fighting for the rights of indentured servants. In the 1800s, Samuel Augustus Maverick went to Texas and became known
for not branding his cattle. He was more interested in keeping track of the
land he owned than the livestock on it, Ms. Maverick said; unbranded cattle,
then, were called “Maverick’s.” The name came to mean anyone who didn’t bear
another’s brand.”5
The family has remained proudly active in progressive causes,
especially civil rights, ever since, now led by their fiery and indomitable
82-year-old matriarch, Terralita Maverick.
I read this article the other day and a funny feeling came over me, a
realization that made me smile – my friends – WE are the mavericks around here!
We are the people who won’t bear anyone else’s brand. We are a congregation that embraces freedom
of mind, body and spirit. We are a
congregation that has just finished raising two million dollars for our
facility so that we can reach out and serve so many more people so much more
effectively. We are about to become the
first congregation is Santa Barbara to put major banks of solar panels on our
buildings, not only reducing our own carbon footprint, but also helping other
congregations learn to do the same. Our sanctuary
is full to the rafters with music and fire and commitment and love. We are raising our kids, building small
group ministries, welcoming strangers and walking our talk a little more each
day.
So many congregations are what our own Max Neufeldt calls, “the church
of next year”, but not us – we here at the Unitarian Society of Santa Barbara
are the church of this year, the church of now! Dreaming now, changing now, growing now, acting now! This is who we are, my friends.
We are needed
now more than ever. And this, my
friends, is good news. Because we are
ready, we are the ones we’ve been waiting for! We are a congregation with
lofty, beautiful and challenging dreams, and we can make all of these dreams
manifest. We can be a beacon in this
community, we can be leaders in our UU movement and in the wider world we all
share. We can be a community where all
people of goodwill are welcome and where nobody, of any age, feels like there
is no place for them here.
We can do all
of this. But it’s going to take time,
and we can only do it together. And so,
my sisters and brothers, what are we waiting for?
Amen.