(This homily was written to be presented on July 4, 2010. The service was shared with me by the Senior Minister of the First Unitarian Society of Chicago, the Reverend Dr. Nina D. Grey, who presented Part II.)
Good morning.
This morning I’d like to share a story with you. It’s the story of a people, come from many different lands, different languages and different reasons for arriving on the shores of this country.
It’s not a perfect story. There is a lot of heartbreak involved.
According to archeologists, humans first came to this country after leaving Africa, from the west about 20,000 years ago, over the Bering Straight from what is now Russia, through what is now Canada, through the United States, and into Mexico and the South American countries.
And for a long time these peoples lived isolated from the other 5 populated continents. That is until the Europeans developed boats that could traverse the Atlantic Ocean.
There was a culture clash, and things have been somewhat messy, but sometimes they’ve also been beautiful. Relations between peoples and people have gone well when each person has operated out from a position of generosity and grace.
In 1492 Columbus may have sailed the ocean blue, but the part of the story I want to focus on takes place in a little village called Scrooby in Nottinghamshire in the United Kingdom, starting about 1590.
In that little village, which I visited last summer while in England serving a church near Manchester, has today about 400 people living in it. It’s this tiny, really sort of no-where place. But it’s very important to the history of the modern United States.
In about 1590 a small group of villagers decided that their religious calling was in a different direction than that of the Church of England, which was then the state religion, and remains so this very day. And so they began to meet in secret.
As I said, I went to Scrooby last year. I went as sort of a religious and historical pilgrimage. These separatists from Scrooby eventually become the people who land at Plymouth Rock. So I went to St. Wilifred’s Church, from which this group dissented and formed their own faith community because they are direct ancestors of ours theologically. It was a very moving experience for me.
They broke free from the state religion because they felt there was more to their beliefs than what the established church offered them. And they went to Holland and stayed for a generation, and then moved to America in 1620.
They were engaged in what we call “liberal theology.” I bet you never thought you’d hear the Pilgrims being called liberal! James Luther Adams, Unitarian Universalist theologian, defines liberal theology as one that is open to critique and criticism at all times. The people in Scrooby did just that, and found the Christianity being practiced around them wanting, so they branched off and created a version that spoke to their souls. Literally.
And then they founded their own version of The City on The Hill, in Plymouth, MA, and became orthodox. They stopped examining their theological assumptions and traditions, and insisted that they had the right way to do things. A little later on, others would challenge their system, as they had challenged the Church of England, and the pattern continues to this very day.
So here we have this pattern. People engage with a system. They think about it, they question it and if they think they have a better answer, they pursue it.
I’m suggesting that when people engage with a system they are operating in, they do that because they have a sense of abundance around them. They feel like there is something more out there. And when they act on this hunch, they become reformers, and often they set themselves up in opposition to the orthodoxy, or those who wish to keep the traditions they’re used to.
We, we being Unitarian Universalists, come from a long line of reformers. Both as a People of Faith, and people. You can ask my Mom, I’ve been challenging orthodoxy since I first learned to talk. This self-reflective examination of our place in the world and the way we engage with that which is most sacred and holy to us is a small microcosm of the theological promise of our country.
In our country now we have what’ve been called “the culture wars” going on. I don’t really like that phrase, but it’s convenient. In this clash, we have the reformers on one hand and the traditionalists on the other.
The reformers, like myself, like to think that we are operating from a position of abundance. Of course all people should have access to health care, marriage rights and a whole host of other things, because we should all be equal.
Now, it would be easy, and frankly both intellectually and spiritually lazy to say that the traditionalists are just people unwilling to share the abundance that they already possess. But we’re not going to do that.
Throughout American history we can see that the people in the traditionalist camp don’t like change. They have a view of what their world should be and they want it to stay that way.
Why is this?
I can’t pretend to have a definitive answer, but I have a theory.
They live in scarcity, not generosity.
Traditionalists want to hold on to what they have because they don’t think there’s enough to go around. They are not mean, or evil. They are worried. It is true, though, that sometimes in their worry, traditionalists have done some pretty awful things.
In the 17th Century some of them banished Anne Hutchinson from Boston for her religious views. In the 18th Century some of them imported millions of human beings in a system of slavery. In the 19th Century they claimed states’ rights to uphold human slavery, fought a war over it and denied our Universalist Ancestors the right to defend themselves in court, because we didn’t believe in Hell, and therefore could not be depended on to tell the truth in court. In the 20th Century there was racial violence, codified homophobia and the cold war. In the 21st Century, there is a fight over gay marriage and immigration.
The Reformers, though have not been innocent, so don’t feel too pleased with yourself. Over and over we push the envelope, disturbing the peace with our ideas about fairness and equality. The Traditionalists didn’t fight a war against themselves. We’ve been plenty agitating.
What we Reformers need to do in our quest for equality for all is to remember that the Traditionalists are also part of the equation.
In our heady feeling of generosity, we often forget to be generous with those whose system we are challenging.
Through our spirit of abundance, we must learn to be generous with those Traditionalists. Because honestly, until people in the Traditionalist camps can come to see the Abundance that we see, they will never stray from their camp, clutching onto the few things they think they have, all the while eyeing us suspiciously.
In Abundance and Spiritual Generosity, it is our charge to be gentle with the people who are not yet with us in spirit. To push for change, true enough, but to do it first and foremost with love in our hearts for ALL of humanity, not just those to whom we share a natural, mutual bond.
Afterall, we know, in our heart of hearts, when we are being our best selves, and living the very theology of abundance…we know that there is enough for everyone.
There is enough food
There is enough water
There is enough clothing
There is enough housing
There is enough love to go around so that each and every person feels surrounded by it.
And when the day comes that all people understand this as we do, there will be no more denial of the rights of people, there will be no more denial of the basic humanity of people, no more exploitation of the Earth and her resources.
But that day will only come if we lead the way in love.
