Christian Voices In Unitarian Universalism
A Sermon by Rev. Ron Robinson, Executive Director, UUCF
Red River UU Church, Denison, TX and Church of the Restoration, Tulsa
August 13 and August 20, 2006


Due to my UUCF ministry, I get to preach on this topic a lot around the country, but it is always a challenge to try to do so in one sermon, one visit. I envy my former minister, Rev. John Wolf at All Souls in Tulsa, who used to do back to back sermons. One on Why I Am Not a Christian, and one on Why I Am a Christian. So much depends upon which Jesus tradition and ancient path one follows after stepping through the door of that word Christian.

This is nothing new. It has been that way for 2,000 years. In many ways today’s progressive, inclusive Christians of the 21st Century are most like those of the First Century. There have always been multiple voices of how people respond to the spirit of Jesus in their lives and world—that’s why even in the New Testament there are four different gospels, not to mention the other gospels.

Keeping these voices alive in our own historic tradition, giving them room to grow and change, has been one of the missions of the UUCF since it was formed in 1945 in by leading Unitarian clergy and laity in the New England area—including the person who would later become the first president of the UUA in 1961 when the two liberal religious bodies merged. Because at the time UU Christianity was so engrained into the church life of New England, I think it would have been almost unthinkable for those early leaders to imagine that the UUCF offices--which were once in its own building in downtown Boston, and most recently were located for several years in the historic 1635 First Church of Christ, Unitarian, of Lancaster, Mass.—that those offices would someday be located in the Tulsa, Oklahoma, area.

Still perhaps shocking to some today, both in New England and out here. In New England they say about the UUCF “It’s where?” and out here they say “It’s what?”

Of course Unitarian Universalism was different out here too in 1945. In Oklahoma, we had only two Unitarian churches, First Church in Oklahoma City and All Souls in Tulsa. But to give you something of the historical theological lay of the land, both of those churches back then included in worship the Lord’s Prayer. Even a few years later in 1949 when a small Unitarian fellowship was started in Bartlesville, OK, it first identified itself as a church for practical Christianity which was seen as something similar to the term “pure Christianity” upon which the American Unitarian Association was founded in 1825.

I lay out a little of this background as preamble to my sermon title, which comes from the recent Skinner House Book published by the UUA, called Christian Voices in Unitarian Universalism. Now, I expect to some still, both UU and Christians outside of the UUA, that title might be a little shocking or provocative, raising the old old questions of “How can you be X and Y at the same time?” Actually, if I’d been picking the title of the book, I’d have gone with an even more radical reversal of the title and called it “Unitarian Universalist Voices in Christianity.” Catch the more challenging difference?

Let me now give you a glimpse of some of the voices in the book so you can see the diversity, then I will put these voices in context. Their full stories of their journeys, recounted in the book, are amazing but here is a sampler.

From Dave Dawson: --“I share a desire for the freedom to test the outer limits of my Christian faith. Within my church I am not told I am wrong, just looked at quizzically when I say I have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ…I remain a UU Christian as a witness to those in mainline Christianity that, yes, universal salvation is alive and well, and it is a beautiful option for those people mired in shame-based churches.
From Anita Farber-Robertson: --“It was not, however, going to be enough to want Jesus in my life. I was going to have to claim him, and let him claim me. I was going to have to say, “Yes, this is my path. You are my guide, my teacher, and my savior, for without you my soul would get brittle, my mouth grow bitter, my heart hard.”
From Terry Burke: --“My baptism remains central to my religious self-understanding. As part of the confession of faith that Carl Scovel had me write, I said, “I believe that God seeks a loving, dialogical relationship with humanity, and that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ calls us to reflect that sacrificial love in our lives. The cross and the faithful community proclaim that it is more important to love than to survive and that love is stronger than death.”
From Robert Fabre: --“So Unitarian Universalism was, for me, the pathway back to Christianity. No doubt I wouldn’t be where I am today, wouldn’t be the person I am today, without it. Ironically, the longer I’ve been associated with this liberal religious community, the more conservative I’ve become on a personal level. So now I can say, I believe that Jesus was the son of God (not God but the son of God); I believe in the resurrection (not the resuscitation of a dead body but the resurrection); and I believe that I am saved by grace (not because I accept Jesus as my personal savior but because, despite my confusion and my unbelief, despite my shortcomings and mistakes, in a mysterious way, beyond my comprehension and explanation, God accepts me).
From Victoria Weinstein: --“Who is Jesus Christ to me? He is both a teacher of the Way, and the Way itself. For one who has always had a hard time grasping the concept of God, let alone developing a working definition of God, Jesus both points me toward a definition of God and then lives that definition. Jesus Christ is the freedom that laughs uproariously at the things of this world, while loving me dearly for being human enough to lust after them. He is my soul’s safety from all harm. He is the avatar of aloneness, a compassionate and unsentimental narrator of the soul’s exile on earth, and proof of the soul’s triumphant homecoming at the end of the incarnational struggle. He is not afraid to put his hands anywhere to affect healing. He mourns, and weeps, and scolds, and invites. He is life more abundant and conqueror of the existential condition of fear.”
From Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley: Today, Jesus remains a central figure of my religious identity. And yet I don’t often call myself a Christian because there is no agreement on what the term Christian means, either within Unitarian Universalism or without…There are conservative and liberal understandings of the Jesus story and Christian witness, and none of these has any exclusive claim on Jesus or those who seek to follow him. In my Christian witness, no one’s soul (or spiritual salvation) is dependent on a particular ritual, obligation, or statement of belief. There is no giant cop up in the sky dictating who will go up and who will go down. And yet I have been moved to tears by liturgical expressions of the story of Jesus and his work as a mystical teacher. It’s most accurate to say that I am a nominal Christian who has also found truth and wisdom in pre-Christian and mystical religions, earth-centered spiritualities, religious humanism, womanism, and other theologies of liberation. I have embraced the spiritual practice of Thai Chi and the wisdom of Buddhist philosophy. I am a Unitarian Universalist because I do not exclude any particular theology. As the spiritual says, there is “plenty of good room” at the banquet table.

These excerpts don’t do justice, of course, to their full stories, and they are only a few of the 15 contemporary essays. What I have presented to you is about what they think about their faith; in the essays themselves you get the amazing stories of how they have arrived at these conclusions of the mind. You see how their faith is as much a matter of the heart, the gut, the hands.

Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley wrote about not excluding, and UU Christianity for me is about being on a particular path, digging a particular well, but not being exclusive. I think that I could spend all my time just losing myself, and finding myself, in even just one of the short and powerful parables of Jesus, or in the Passion Parable itself, or in the Lord’s Prayer, my daily meditation practice. But when I encounter people on different paths and hear their encounters with the Holy, it only helps me go deeper and get more out of a chosen parable, or story, or prayer.

The religious landscape in America has changed vastly since 1945. In UUism, in Christianity, and in UU Christianity. These UU Christian voices now are more diverse than you would have found when the UUCF began. Surprise, surprise, they are still changing. For a faith that roots itself in the theological belief that revelation is not sealed and cannot be sealed, it seems we too still resist change. I once had a church member say “When I joined this church I guess I thought it had always been the way it was when I joined, and would always stay that way.” But when we talk about ongoing revelation, we don’t mean continually throwing the baby out with the bathwater in every successive generation, as if that is the mark of a progressive faith. Sometimes, often, it means returning to our touchstones and knowing them more fully because of where we have been, and being touched and supported by them even more deeply and strongly because of it.

There are four words that I think sum up the relationship between Christianity and Unitarian Universalism—in terms of history and still now. They are: Commonplace. Contradiction. Conundrum. Convergence. (I have borrowed the first three from the Rev. Earl Holt who was minister of First Unitarian in St. Louis and is now minister at King’s Chapel in Boston—Anglican in worship, Unitarian in theology, congregational in polity. I updated to add the fourth, convergence.)

Once upon a time, to speak of Christian voices in our movement would have been a commonplace thing, as redundant as saying Methodist or Baptist Christian. It hasn’t been all that long ago, as I mentioned earlier. In a 1936 national survey of Unitarians only, some 92 percent of the respondents said they considered their local church to be a Christian church. Now, of course, there were many in the so-called Christian church then who would have argued against that. As there are today. But, I don’t think it is spiritually healthy to let others define you, and what is interesting is how the Unitarians saw themselves. For the Universalists, by and large, they didn’t consider it then an issue to be surveyed about, so integral was Christianity to their identity.

Speaking of not letting others define you, reminds me of the story of the UU who was at another church and went up to take communion and an official there, knowing the person as a UU, tried to stop them in the aisle, to which the UU said, “I received my invitation 2000 years ago.”
But I have to confess, that though I have an ecumenical spirit, when I see what my brothers and sisters in Christ often proclaim in the name of Christ (all kinds of ways of blocking people from God’s table), I too am tempted to do some throwing out of my own, adopting the spirit of Jesus as witnessed in the Temple with the money-changers or with his own disciples. I too can point out perversions, perversions of what Jesus said and meant and lived and died for, and the people who make their exclusivist fearful proclamations from on high or from inside television studios shouldn’t be allowed to wrap themselves in the term Christian either without challenge and consequences.

Between the rise of our liberal Christian movement in America around 1800 and the time of that 1936 survey, there had been many changes and developments in how Unitarians and Universalists saw themselves as Christian, how they looked upon Jesus and God and the scriptures. I bet a small percentage in 1936 would have agreed with the official American Unitarian Association statement of 1853 that “WE BELIEVE in Jesus Christ, the everlasting Son of God, the express image of the Father, in whom dwelt all the fullness of the God-head bodily, and who to us is the Way and the Truth and the Life. WE BELIEVE in the Holy Spirit, proceeding from the Father and the Son, the teacher, renewer, and guide of mankind. WE BELIEVE in the Holy Catholic Church as the body and form of the Holy Spirit, and the presence of Christ in all ages. WE BELIEVE in the Regeneration of the human heart, which, being created upright, but corrupted by sin, is renewed and restored by the power of Christian truth. WE BELIEVE in the constant Atonement whereby God in Christ is reconciling the world to himself. WE BELIEVE in the Resurrection from mortal to immortality, in a future judgment and Eternal Life. WE BELIEVE in the coming of the Kingdom of God, and the final triumph of Christian Truth.

And that was from the heretical Unitarian Liberal Christians of the time.
No, though I am sure that there were some who still resonated with that language and those ideas, and still do among us, I expect by 1936 more would have resonated with the language of the 1935 Universalist Affirmation that “The bond of fellowship in this Convention shall be a common purpose to do the will of God as Jesus revealed it and to co-operate in establishing the kingdom for which he lived and died. To that end, we avow our faith in God as Eternal and All-conquering Love, in the spiritual leadership of Jesus, in the supreme worth of every human personality, in the authority of truth known or to be known, and in the power of men of goodwill and sacrificial spirit to overcome evil and progressively establish the Kingdom of God.”

Those were the days when it was commonplace to consider Christianity and Unitarian Universalism as conjoined. And let me add that even today in some places this remains the same. So much so that in 1984 churches where that is so joined together to form the Council of Christian Churches within the UUA. These are churches that are free and non-creedal and have theological pluralism in the membership. They are particular in their orientation but not exclusive. This is the case at The Living Room Church (www.epiphanyspirit.org) where we are a part of that national Council, though our radical vision of being church in an emerging small group way and informal liberation-style worship and communion is itself very different from the historic churches back East. And there are those UU churches who aren’t members of the Council but who still include the Lord’s Prayer in weekly worship and celebrate the occasional Christian communion and have crosses in their sancturary, but don’t see themselves as primarily Christian-oriented.

No wonder we are confusing to folks, even to ourselves. No wonder there is the natural inclination to clarify things by simplifying things and making all churches uniform and fit into category A or B but never the two at the same time. Faith, however, as we have always stood for, as something inherently freedom loving and community driven, just keeps complicating thing.

Still, when the UUCF was formed in 1945 it could no longer be assumed that the commonplace connection between UUism and Christianity still existed, especially beyond New England. The handwriting for the next few decades was already on the wall. Instead in the 1950s things were moving toward the relationship being a contradiction. In some new places it wasn’t just that our churches were places that were More Than Christian, a phrase I’ve always liked, but they were places that were Anti-Christian. Formed more on a sense of the negative than the affirmative.
I came into UUism in the mid-1970s when much of this spirit still reigned, but I was fortunate, I think, that I attended churches in Oklahoma City and Tulsa where that spirit might have been evident on the edges but not in the mainstream. Since that time, there has been a sea-change in how Christian voices in UU churches are treated; I’m not saying it isn’t still a challenge; perhaps it never should be, but there is much less antagonism and excommunicating going on. We often say now that in the UU world we are all theological minorities.

We have moved through the contradiction stage (though I am sure there too it still exists in certain places) and into the conundrum stage. This is where people say I don’t get it but if it works for you and you don’t get in my way, that’s fine with me. Peaceful co-existence. Parallel Play religiously-speaking. In my perspective, that’s where we seem to have moved in large measure. For UU Christianity, this coincided with the rise of new Jesus scholarship, and with the popularity of the Jesus Seminar in many of our churches. Oh, you’re that kind of Christian, well then that’s all right with me. I think Jesus was a cool revolutionary in his time, too. Maybe I should be content with this kind of tolerance and even respect. When I think of how much damage has been done in the name of Jesus and in the guise of Christianity, getting communities to show that level of respect might be as good as it gets.

But I think our free faith calls us to more than that. I know my Christianity does too, that the spirit of Jesus calls me to more than this. I think living in covenant and right relationship with those who are different from us calls us to more than that. As our great UU historian and essayist Conrad Wright wrote, there is a difference in being a member of a church and a member of something like the National Geographic Society (or to update it, NPR or your non-profit of choice). A church, he said, is more than a collection of religiously-concerned individuals. It is a people. And so I think we are moving out of the state of conundrum and into the state of convergence. Of engagement. Of mutual transformation. Of self differentiation and real relationship. Of generosity and creating congregations not in the spirit of scarcity but of abundance. And I think this brings us closer to the spirit of Jesus.

There is so much more to Life and Truth than we can ever own so let’s not be afraid to see what’s out there in others, and to cast ours to the winds. This was part of the core message of Jesus, and the thrust of his life.

As he said, radically in his parable way, “to those who have, more will be given; to those who have not, more will be taken away.” Not something people at first glance might expect coming from the nice-guy long-haired hippie Jesus cool Dude. But he’s saying, in a Creation Spirituality way, If you see yourself as living in a society or culture of limited goods, or limited truth, then you will always be fighting for your morsel of it, until your morsel possesses and becomes you. If you see yourself as living in abundance where nothing that truly and everlastingly counts can be taken away from you, because of Whose you are, then the world is transformed from a battleground of conflicting fears to a playground of peaceful growth.

In the spiritual community I know best called UU Christianity we have seen an eruption of this kind of convergence. We have people at home with us who are all over the theological spectrum of Christianity, and even more widely expressed than reflected in the voices from the book.
There are, for example, those whose Christianity is in following the teachings of Jesus mainly, that’s where they encounter Jesus. Those whose Christianity is in the traditions of liturgy and prayer and community. Those who find Jesus mostly in liberation work for social justice, and those who converge all of these. There are people who answer the human-divine and Trinity questions of Jesus in lots of different ways.

As well as those who converge their Christ with their practices of Buddhism or Earth-Centered Spirituality or Passion for Science or the Arts. On one level, those folks back in Boston in 1945 wouldn’t recognize the UU Christianity as it shows up some places today—a decade ago our national president of the UUCF was also on the national Board of the Covenant of UU Pagans--but on a deeper level, if they had eyes to see and ears to hear, they too would find the spirit of Jesus shining through all these lives and voices now.

It is these voices, from the Trinitarian Universalists to the Atheists enraptured by the Jesus Seminar scholarship, whom we nurture and provide a place for convergence within the UUCF where we say you don’t have to be a UU to be among us and you don’t have to be a Christian to be among us, and we don’t think Jesus would have it any other way. In fact sometimes I am more concerned not with why more UUs aren’t Christian but why more Christians aren’t UUs—hence why I would have liked to see a reversed title to the book.

There are lifelong UUs, there are those who were raised in many other faith communities, and may still in fact be participants and members in more than one faith community, Christian and otherwise, and there are those who were raised unchurched. There are those who grew up in and only know UU Christian Churches, and those who are still in churches where the only time the name Jesus Christ is heard is when the preacher falls down the stairs, and those who transferred their Christianity in from other denominations, and many, many of those who became Christian or Jesus-smitten only after first being UU and non-Christian. What we have in common is a passion to be part of a Great Historic and Ongoing Conversation without creeds but with Jesus as a song in the heart.

As the Rev. Carl Scovel says, in the foreword to the book, “These witnesses point toward a Jesus who is not just human but humane, not just in touch with God but in touch with them. This Jesus is relational, robust, and real.”

Relational. Robust. Real. Those are good touchstones for an ancient-contemporary-future-oriented faith. May our lives, by whatever faith we commit them to, and may our churches, wonderful in their particular diversities, be known likewise. Now and forever. Amen.