100 Monkeys

100 Monkeys
Rev. Joseph M Cherry
Written for and given to
The Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Stanislaus County
19 February, 2012

Before this morning, how many here had heard of “the 100th Monkey Phenomenon?”

On December 29, 2011, Rev Peter Boulatta, who serves our congregation in Lexington, MA, posted a blog entry called “The Liberal Church Finding Its Mission: It’s Not About You.” I don’t know what it is about shots being fired in Lexington MA, but first there was the shot heard ‘round the world in 1775 and now this one from Peter in 2011. Here I’ll quote the first two paragraphs:

Recently, a fellow who does some work for my congregation was in the building. We had never met before, and so we introduced ourselves and chatted for a while in the church office. At one point he said to me, “You know, I should tell you this story. I have a thirteen-year-old son who has been asking a lot of religious questions lately. I was raised Catholic, but we’re not involved at all, and haven’t really given him a religious education. One day, my son was with me in the car when we drove by another Unitarian Universalist church. He asked me, because he knew that I had done some work for them, what kind of a church it was. When I told him, he asked what Unitarian Universalists believe. So I told him, ‘Well they don’t really believe anything specific. It’s a religion where whatever you think or believe or feel is what the religion is all about.’ And my son said, ‘That’s the kind of church I want to go to!’” And the fellow chuckled and we had some pleasantries about his teenager being a Unitarian Universalist without knowing it.

But my pleasant façade betrayed the bomb that had just gone off in my head. Oh dear God, it’s true. We have institutionalized narcissism. Here was a person that was not involved in a Unitarian Universalist church, and yet knew something about us. As an outsider, the message he received about what we stand for is: It’s about whatever you want it to be about. It’s all about you.

There was so much response from this blog that I thought the internet was going to melt. Like many professional organizations, UU Ministers have a Listserv, which is secure and through which we can seek advice, offer opinions and be in a virtual community with each other. Even though it was no longer Christmas Eve, our listserv lit up like a Christmas tree. Opinions abound. It was actually very exciting.

Peter had touched a nerve.

And many were grateful. He had spoken aloud what many has been feeling for quite some time. There had been a shift in Unitarian Universalism, but no one had dared to speak about it. There are 95 responses on Peter’s post, which is a lot for a minister’s blog, I can tell you. If I get one or two on my blog, that’s something of note.
Peter’s blog entry contains more than just these two paragraphs. He goes on to address things like faith development and lifespan religious education.

Here are a few of the responses:

Kim C. wrote: Religion isn’t about what details you believe, it’s about how you are to live your life in order to be fulfilled. We don’t articulate it all that well, but UUs are, according to our district executive, “Much more honest than average.” That’s a start.

A person called “Republican UU” wrote It is about me And you, too. This is not so hard, people. How you relate to others, your role on Earth. No, it is not just a social club- but it is a community where we are supposed to be free to express our ideas about spiritual relationships with each other. It is definitely not supposed to be an arm of a political party, as this article and some church services would have you believe. The focus is supposed to be Me and You working together to have the world become a better place for all of Us and nurturing our spirit in the process.

And lastly, Rev. Andy Reese commented:

Well said. This will probably become the subject of my next sermon.

I remember when I first discovered this faith back in ’92 that I was trying to explain the attraction to a long time friend. I talked about the great people, the enlightening sermons, and the social justice work. She stopped me cold when she said, “Why don’t you just join the Rotary Club. They do all those things and the dues are cheaper.”

I think it was James Fowler who defined “god” as that understanding of the ultimate and the set of values around which we organize our lives. Our job, as a church, is to help people discover what their god is in this sense, to examine it critically, and to help it grow and deepen over time.

And then other ministers wrote whole blog posts themselves in response to Peter’s blog. Rev. Dr. Victoria Weinstein had a two part, two day response to Peter’s ideas. , . Responding directly to Peter’s blog, Weinstein writes:

“Peter has got it so right. So painfully right. Our religious tradition has placed its faith in the individual to determine their own “free and responsible search for truth and meaning,” and mostly failed to insist that there are faith claims made by historical Unitarianism and Universalism to which we are beholden as congregations and as members. Rather than affirming those faith claims and shaping our worship, faith formation, evangelism and social justice around them, we have spent our time and effort inventing a totally [new] definition of religion, squabbling endlessly and comically about how we will grandly allow each other (and our ministers) to talk about it and then peevishly refusing to see why are not taken seriously and why we do not grow.

We have thus far in our post-merger existence as Unitarian Universalists treated our theological legacy with white gloves: as fragile, faded archival material to be handled as lightly as possible and then filed respectfully away in an attic or basement file cabinet, or as historical curiosities to be peered at curiously over the top of our spectacles, smiled fondly over, and left in the church library to be studied by the few UUs who ask for a key to the locked stacks.

I’ve begun to wonder if I’m the 98th or 99th monkey in this chain.

One of the things that has kept some of us from speaking what we’ve been feeling about this change in Unitarian Universalism is a deep respect for our elders. For much of the middle of the twentieth century, Unitarian Universalism was deep with humanism. This was in part a reaction to the horrors of World War II. Many felt that God had abandoned humanity, which is frankly quite an understandable position to take. Look at the atrocities that took place.

I sort of blame/credit the Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell, who in an article for Huffington Post from June 5, 2011, dared to claim that Unitarian Universalism has a theology . Now I’m joking about the “blame/credit” but it was a daring move.

I personally was quite shocked that someone had the audacity to do this. I encourage you to read her article. It’s terrifically written and it may change the way you see ourselves as a religious people. I’ll tell you what she wrote about a Unitarian Universalist theology. She makes 8 statements of belief, and per usual, the text of this sermon will be on-line in a couple of days, so you can re-read them, her article or any of the blogs I’ve quoted today. So don’t worry about not being able to remember all 8 points when we’re done today. Just take these in:

• We believe that human beings should be free to choose their beliefs according to the dictates of their own conscience.
• We believe in original goodness, with the understanding that sin is sometimes chosen, often because of pain or ignorance.
• We believe that God is One.
• We believe that revelation is ever unfolding.
• We believe that the Kingdom of God is to be created here on this earth.
• We believe that Jesus was a prophet of God, and that other prophets from God have risen in other faith traditions.
• We believe that love is more important than doctrine.
• We believe that God's mercy will reconcile all unto itself in the end.

This is some exciting stuff.

I know that you’re not used to me quoting other people with the frequency and quantity of today’s sermon, but I really wanted demonstrate the idea that something is happening in our faith.

When I entered seminary 5 years ago, I had a sort of feeling that there was a movement, deep in the earth of our religion. But I wasn’t entirely sure. I couldn’t tell it this grumbling quake was just the “youthful” enthusiasm of a new seminarian, or whether something really surprising was happening.

I don’t know the eventual shape of what’s happening to us. No one does, no one can predict the future and I’m not so bold as to forecast like that.

But I do know, like Victoria mentioned earlier, that we have let go of our history. For the life of me, I don’t know why. It’s a rich history, full of hard-working people. People who challenged the system, fought for righteousness, worked for equality and made mistakes.

In Toronto last year I attended a lecture series by Rev. Dr. Robert Lathum, who is our Interim Executive Director here in the Pacific Central District. The series was on growth. Robert Latham included in his lecture information gathered from the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations. He quoted a poll that showed that in our midst: Christians feel ostracized; Humanists feel threatened; Pagans feel oppressed and Mystics feel ignored.

Here’s what I, as a minister, as a pastor, do not want. I do not want the Humanists here to feel threatened. I do not want Christians to feel ostracized, Pagans to feel oppressed and the Mystics to feel ignored.
What all of this blogging and conversations among ministers says to me is that change is coming, yes, but not doctrine. Not creed. No formal test of your theology will ever be required for us to belong here.
To do so would be to turn our back on centuries of history.

What this change can mean is that we begin to refocus the practice of our open theology in ways that foster deep connection to our community and our expression of spirituality. It’s going to require work. It’s going to require a change from the consumer model of church, which is “what can the church do for me?,” or “How satisfied am I with what’s going on in church?”, to a new model, which might look like “What about my life gives it value?”, and “No, even though I’m a natural humanist with strong Buddhist leaning, I didn’t hear anything that ‘spoke’ to me today, does that mean I’m going to be focused only on my needs, or do I consider that someone else, maybe some in a green chair, or one of the pink ones, really heard something that their heart needed to hear today.” And then be truly glad in that?

Change is coming. It’s always coming. And for us, in our liberal religious tradition, that is one of the reasons we are here. The UCC churches have a national slogan they’ve been advertising “God is still speaking.” I love that. We might say it like this “The universe is ever revealing more of itself.”
And this change can be scary and good.

I knew a man, Wallace Rusterholtz, a dear friend of mine, who was excommunicated from the Unitarian Church of Erie Pennsylvania in 1930 because he admitted that he was a homosexual to the minister. I have a copy of the letter of excommunication. I gave the original to Boston to put in the UUA archives.
Don Goodloe was a Unitarian, a good man, who worked hard for the education of African Americans early in the 20th century. He graduated from my seminary, but no Unitarian church would even look at him because he was black.
We lift up our faith’s involvement in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s with great pride. True, there were more Unitarian Universalist ministers in Selma, then those of any other denomination, proportionally. But even that move was a change, and a frightening one at that. Two of our people died there. New to the faith, Viola Liuzzi, mother of 5, drove her white Chevy station wagon from Detroit to Alabama to become a driver, actively taking part in the now famous freedom rides. She was shot through her car window. Rev. James Reeb, upon leaving an integrated restaurant, was beaten with clubs, and died of head wounds. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his eulogy.

When Wallace came out in 1930, it was unthinkable that an openly gay person could be, for example, a minister. When Don graduated as a minister, it was unthinkable that a Negro could be a minister.
Through hard work, though, people in our own faith have re-shaped our own religion for the better. It has never been a direct, pardon the pun, straight line toward a City on the Hill though. There have been set backs along the way. But forward, we do march.
It is our faith that gets us, as a people, through such difficult topics as racism, homophobia, loss of job, loss of home and the death of a loved one. We come in from the rain, into Unitarian Universalist churches where we feel like we’ve found a home, and then we don’t want the home to change. Or we grow up here, and remember a favorite chair of a beloved parent, and we don’t want to let it go. But change we must.
James Luther Adams wrote ““Nothing is complete and thus nothing is exempt from criticism.” Nothing is complete. Change is part of life.
If 100 Monkeys can learn to wash potatoes, than 100,000 Unitarian Universalists can improve the lot of humanity. It will be harder work than dunking a sweet potato into a stream to remove the sand, but the results may be just as sweet.
A Prayer for Living in Tension.
If we have any hope of transforming the world and changing ourselves,
we must be:
bold enough to step into our discomfort,
brave enough to be clumsy there,
loving enough to forgive ourselves and others.

May we, as a people of faith, be granted the strength to be:
so bold,
so brave,
and so loving.

Many blessing to you on this, our shared journey.