Rev. Kendyl Gibbons
First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis
March 3, 2002
Practicing Humanism: Beyond These Walls
The story is told of a frontier community in the early centuries of the westward movement following the American civil war. There was a Methodist church and a Universalist church in town, and their rivalry was well known. By and by the Universalist minister died, and the members of his congregation were desperate for someone to conduct the funeral services. Finding that no other ordained Universalist could get there in any reasonable period of time, they reluctantly approached the Methodist minister to ask if he would preside. "It's the Christian thing to do," agreed the orthodox pastor, "but I will need to have the permission of my bishop." Anxiously they sent off a telegram to headquarters. "By all means," came the reply; "bury all the Universalist clergy you can!"
Orthodox Christians always had trouble understanding the Universalists at the height of their popularity. "If you don't believe in hell or damnation or punishment for sins," they said, "if you don't need to pray for God's forgiveness or warn people of their peril, then why have a church at all?" It is a question that we conjure with as humanists today. While the new fundamentalist mega-churches like Willow Creek in Barrington, Illinois - a former neighbor of mine - attract thousands of people to multiple services every weekend, and construct multi-million dollar state of the art church campuses, most of our Unitarian Universalist congregations limp along from one unenthusiastic fund drive to the next, bringing in about as many members as they lose each year, and focusing their energy on internal squabbles about what color the carpet is, or how many hymns to sing. Why do we bother? I know why they bother at Willow Creek; their mission statement is clear as crystal and carved in stone; they exist to make unchurched people into fully devoted followers of Christ - simple, right?
But it is not merely for the comfort of theologically cloning themselves that people are flocking to Willow Creek and churches like it. Rather, I would contend that there is both a lesson we should learn, and a secret we should recognize, in the rise of the mega-churches. First, here's the secret; their success is not a function of their theology. Indeed, I would contend that fundamentalist Christian theology is no more true or compelling today than it was when the Universalists challenged it more than a century ago, or than it has ever been. If anything, it is a harder sell in today's skeptical, secular culture, and so it should be. These congregations are coating an out-dated message in the appeal of a very up to date institution and ministry - and that's the lesson we need to learn. The thriving congregations of today, whether they are newly-founded suburban mega-churches or revitalized hundred year old downtown parishes, have one thing in common, and it's not Jesus or the Bible or Heaven; it's a commitment and focus on ministry outside their own four walls. They have profoundly seen the shipwrecked lives around them, and have come together to try whatever they can do to help the floundering souls who perish every day before our eyes in the rip tides of life's tragedies and challenges. That they are doing it in obedience to a commandment and in hope of a salvation that does not inform us is irrelevant. When you are going under for the third time, you're not in the mood for a theological discussion with the person who seeks to help pull you to shore. And when you're the one doing the pulling, you don't turn around and push somebody back under the waves if they don't use the same religious vocabulary that you do - no one ought to understand that better than we do.
Religious community, I would argue, has its origins in the acknowledgement that our spiritual experiences are collective as well as individual. We are sustained by the universe not just separately, but together, and our gratitude seeks mutual acknowledgement. We confront death in moments of common loss, and experience beauty and goodness in shared reverence. We are held accountable, not just for the shape of our individual lives, but for the quality of the world we build together. Coming together to face the most basic powers of the world, whether in the form of divine wrath, or pleading for god's favor, is an instinct as old as the first fur-draped shaman with his rattle, and the painted caves of humanity's pre-history. But from that day to this, one essential question hangs over all such gatherings, and it is this: whatever our rituals, whatever our theologies, whatever our religious practices, do we do them for our own sakes, or do we do them for the sake of the world? Are we celebrating and seeking to protect our own good fortune and favor, or are we engaged in some ministry to the larger community? Are we running yacht clubs, or life-saving stations?
On the one hand, you would think that this would be an easy question for a bunch of humanists, for we have no divine personal correspondent with whom to curry favor. One more time, consider the definition of humanism from our newsletter masthead: To be a humanist is to affirm the sufficiency of human experience, and a commitment to learning to live with greater human dignity in this world, in pursuit of meaning and joy. In this world; no other world, no other life, no rescue and no reward. Whatever is going to be the meaning of our days, it is going to be made here and now; if there is anything more, it will be a surprise to us. Therefore, our adventures in religious community are going to be focused here, in this world, among the people with whom we share that world. And yet the question remains, which people? The ones just like ourselves, the ones who agree with us? Have we built this whole Society, with its building and its programs and all the sacrificial effort and giving it has cost over the years, just so that we can have a cozy place where we can get together and feel safer and smarter than everybody else? Or do we have something here to offer those shipwrecked lives all around us - those shipwrecked lives that are sometimes in fact our own? Those dazed and shivering people who will drip sea weed and salt water all over our nice clean floors - are they an interruption into our comfortable circle of like-minded friends, or are they the reason we are here; are they the point of the whole enterprise?
Because here's the thing; if we just want to be a community of mutually supportive, like-minded friends with shared tastes, then the only people who are ever going find that we have anything to offer them will be those who can be pretty sure that they will fit into the like-mindedness and the mutual support and the shared tastes - and there is a rather limited universe of such folks. If that is indeed what we want, then our challenge is to figure out where those kinds of people are, and how to tell them about our community, and how to make them comfortable when they get here. And I suspect that we are likely to gain about as many as we lose in any given year, provided that we can negotiate the generational shifts in things like technology and music and coffee preferences and expectations around institutional involvement. Such change is not necessarily a given, and it will take some work, but in the service of maintaining our valued connections here, it can be done. However, if we do that, we are ignoring first of all the lesson that the thriving churches of today have to teach us, and second, and more importantly, we are turning away from the true genius and the dearly bought heritage of the liberal religious tradition whose heirs we are.
For it is not my observation that people come to faith communities, ours or others, to be made comfortable - unless life has already hurt them badly, and they are in the midst of their own shipwreck. No, it is not for comfort, but for the opportunity to find meaning in service, and to make a difference in the world around them, that most people seek out a congregation like this. We want our lives to be ordered, grounded, and significant; we want to be better people than we are; we want to help sort the wreckage and see if we can't save some precious things that might otherwise be lost, like our brothers and sisters here on earth for instance. Willow Creek and the other mega-churches have found that by offering people this, the structured opportunity to serve the needs they see in the world, the chance to make their own and others' lives different, any theology can be made palatable. The congregation that is committed to meaningful ministry beyond its own walls does not need to spend lots of time or money letting people know that it exists; the word will get around. It does not need to take exquisite care of making sure that everyone is always comfortable; what it cares about is that everyone is engaged and challenged and being transformed - when that is the case, comfort is the least of anyone's concern.
You would think that a congregation of humanists would be uniquely suited to create such a community of transformation and service; after all, our salvation is created here, in the midst of the earth. And yet, we have also a unique difficulty and temptation to overcome. For while we are not lured to false comfort by the assurance of justice and harmony in another world, we also have no divine task master, periodically reminding us of our assignment. If we fall into the trap of maintaining community only for our own entertainment and reassurance, there is nothing but our own higher aspirations to call us to account, and to prod us back in the direction of actual service to our neighbors and fellow citizens of the planet. The frustrating thing is that we have the opportunity to engage ourselves together in ministry, in reaching out to help heal the hurts of the world, without asking for the suspension of disbelief that much typical theology requires. We invite people simply to believe what their senses, their reason, and their conscience tells them, rather than committing ourselves to an uphill battle trying to swallow wholesale a collection of literalized ancient myths. It ought to be easier the way we do it.
But the question is, do we do it? Is this congregation structured for and energized by the opportunities all around us to make a difference in the lives of others, or is it designed primarily for the comfort and convenience of those who are already here? Think for a moment about this city, about the community where you live. What are the challenges that people face; what rocks are the ships of their lives wrecking on, even as we speak? What trials and tragedies have you survived yourself; what compassion and wisdom might you bring to those who are walking a dark path that you once traveled? What is wounded in our world that stirs you to protest, to action, to hope? What draws you; homeless children, hungry men scrounging in dumpsters, unloved teenagers battling drug addiction, gay, lesbian and transgender people pleading for equality and the right to walk down the street without fear, bewildered refugees struggling to start a new life in a foreign land, broken families with broken dreams, mothers who can't afford health care for their families, overwhelmed schools cheating vulnerable children of the education they so desperately need, the heavy legacy and lingering taint of racism - friends, there is no end to what this city needs from us; there is no end to how our lives might be transformed by the ways in which we could help each other reach beyond these walls. And there are more people than we might imagine who would join with us on that journey, if we made it clear where we are headed. And it doesn't matter if we start out as the most homogenous group of white, overeducated, high-brow liberals ever assembled; once we get our ministry out beyond these walls, the encounter with diversity is inevitable, and inevitably transforming.
Let our work in the world be our recruitment and our public relations campaign. Our former intern Barbara Kellett relates a telling story about her new hairdresser. At her first appointment with a black male stylist she had not worked with before, they made the usual casual chit-chat, and he learned that she was a seminarian. He revealed that he was gay. Finally he asked the inevitable question, "What denomination?" Preparing for the typical explanations, Barbara answered, "I'm a Unitarian Universalist..." "Oh, right," he responded knowledgeably; "so you don't believe in hate." What a poignant, powerful statement! Somewhere, somehow, that man had at some point encountered a Unitarian Universalist congregation being true to its mission, and doing ministry beyond its own doors, and that was the message that he took away with him. We are the church that doesn't believe in hate.
So I'm going to change my mind about something: When I say, Don't define humanism negatively, don't give people a laundry list of what we don't believe in, like Jesus and God and the virgin birth, this is an exception. If you want to say what we don't believe in, say that we don't believe in hate. And then put that 'don't believe' to work in the world.
The poet Marge Piercy makes a similar observation in her poem, To Be of Use:
I want to be with people who submerge in the task,
Who go into the fields to harvest, and work in a row and pass the bags along,
Who stand in the line and haul in their places,
Who are not parlor generals and field deserters
But move in a common rhythm when the food must come in
Or the fire be put out.
The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
Has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil, Hopi vases that held corn,
Are put in museums but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry, and a person for work that is real.
You know they were made to be used; a person cries for work that is real. So much of the work we find ourselves doing does not seem real, and we were made to be used. That is what the church should be, when it has matured into its real ministry - the community of those who go into the fields together, to work in a row, and get the urgent harvest in. The needs are always there, and they are ever-changing; the only question is whether this society was made to be used, whether we understand our purpose as serving ourselves or serving others.
I like the fable of the little community of life-savers, and their determination not to degenerate into an exclusive club, but I think there's an important element missing. In the time between their fearless forays into the teeth of the storm, what this group ought to be doing is building a lighthouse, with a bright beacon to warn sailors of the treacherous coast. To save what we can from the shipwrecks is important and necessary work, and to lose sight of that is to be led away from what makes our little community useful and real. But how much better a world in which the signal is there in the darkness, flashing forth the hard-won wisdom of how best to navigate these waters. I think we are that light house, too; offering the guidance and inspiration of what we know so that people may not only be rescued from the sea, but may find their way to sail boldly and bravely through the shoals of life, trusting the flame that we have kindled and continue to tend.
Dearly beloved, surely it is for the sake of that work that we are here; to be the church that does not believe in hate, to reach beyond these walls and help our fellow beings with all the wisdom and sustenance that we have to offer, to be of use, to do work that is real. In the final analysis, the practice of humanism is service; service to a world much wider than our own beliefs, our own culture, our own comfort. And it is when we are engaged in that service that our ministry will speak for us, and tell the world in no uncertain terms what humanism is. Let us lift high the light that is within us, the light that we are together, and let it shine.