Unitarian Universalism defined negatively, begins in 325 CE when Christianity defined itself as Trinitarian, which we are not. But defined positively, as a religion that holds that God is one and all souls share a common destiny, our roots are deeper and broader than Christianity. From those firm foundations we preserved and defended a liberating faith through the centuries.
Here we are at the beginning of a new church year, looking ahead from here to that distant land called June.
This year I’ve planned worship around a series of five themes that are the work of interim ministry: History, Leadership, Mission, Vision, and Connections.
As your interim minister, I have a particular task, and a contract, to help you move through the period from the exit of your previous settled minister, to whomever you will choose to be your next settled minister.
We’ve had one year together. Our plan is for me to work with you for two more years. This year, some of you will need to decide whether you’d like to serve on the search committee and prepare yourselves for that important task. At the end of this year we will elect the search committee. Next year, 2024-2025, (or Hebrew year 5785) the Search Committee will do their work. Hopefully in spring of 2025, the search committee will settle on a candidate. Then you will have your vote, and if all works well, your new minister will start in August of 2025.
That’s the plan. To get there, the Search Committee has an important job to do. But so do the rest of us. Our job, is to prepare ourselves so that the new ministry will be as successful as possible.
That means knowing ourselves. And knowing what we want to do and what’s at stake for us. That’s why we looked last year in worship at those questions of Identity, Meaning and Purpose. You want to call a minister who will be your minister, who fits your personality, and who wants to work beside you and help lead you on the work that you want to do. The interim space is the time to work that out. You want not just any minister, but an excellent minister. And not just any excellent minister but an excellent minister who complements the identity and purpose of this congregation.
Another piece of our job is to undergo an honest assessment of our role in the minister-congregation relationship. Particularly when a congregation experiences conflict and a previous ministry ends unhappily, a congregation needs to ask, “What mistakes did we make?” “Are we owning up to our role in the break-up?” “What did we learn?” Without self-examination we may be setting ourselves up to simply re-run the same unhealthy behaviors that got us into trouble last time.
So we start with self-reflection, a personal accounting, a looking back. We start with history, which fits well with celebrating the 80th anniversary of this congregation next month.
Then we look at leaders and leadership. Often, a time of ministerial change results in lay leaders stepping down as well. Folks can get burned out from leading a church through conflict. Or they can feel they were the right person to work with the previous incarnation of the church, but as the church changes toward something new, new skills and energy are a better fit for the future.
Mission and vision confirms the work we want to do, and the church we want the next minister to help us become. We will look at that during the winter months
And a final task of the interim ministry for the spring of this church year is to look at connections beyond the church. A church with a long ministry can start to isolate. A comfortable minister and church can feel self-sufficient. A minister and church in conflict can start to feel helpless. The interim period opens an opportunity to look outside again: who are the other churches in our area, what support is available from the UUA, who are the community partners in our neighborhood we want to develop relationships with?
That’s our year. And, of course, we will look at the spiritual side of these issues, not replace worship with interim ministry workshops. And we’ll make room as we need to, to respond to other important issues that come up during the year.
We start with the theme of history, the question of who we were, and what that tells us, about who we are.
Our name, Unitarian Universalist, pushes together two theological beliefs. These are old beliefs. Very old.
Unitarian is simply the belief that there is one God. Not two, or three, or many. But one. One supreme God. If there are other divine beings, then they are subordinate to the one main God.
We have the specific name Unitarian, because in the Christian tradition that we grew out of, God is defined as Trinitarian. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, are held to be three distinct persons, who share one being: all three of them fully God, equal in power, equally eternal, separate persons but somehow, mystically, when combined together making only one being.
We’re not that. We’re not Trinitarian; we’re Unitarian.
But another name for Unitarian is simply monotheism. One God. And that’s a very old, and very widespread belief. Surrounded by Christian churches, in a majority Christian nation like the United States, being Unitarian can seem very odd-ball. But in an historical and global context, monotheism isn’t out of the ordinary at all.
Jews are monotheists. Muslims are monotheists. And, of course, Christians also think of themselves as monotheists.
Unitarian, defined simply as monotheism, could connect us all the way back to the Egyptian Pharoah Ahknaten, 1300 years Before the Common Era, who promoted worship of the singular sun God, Aten. The Zoroastrian religion was founded 1000 years Before the Common Era by a prophet named Zoroaster who promoted worship of the single God, Ahura Mazda. Abraham worshipped the one God Yahweh. And it was Moses who received the commandment, “I am the Lord your God, and you shall have no other god before me.”
Why is monotheism, or Unitarianism such a big deal? Why does Trinitarian Christianity insist that it’s three persons are really one being? Why is monotheism seen as an advance over earlier polytheistic cultures?
Because monotheism proclaims that it is the same God who gives both blessings and curses. One God for the flood and the rainbow.
Rather than presenting the changing fortunes of human lives as the by product of multiple divine entities battling it out among themselves, competing for favor and power, and dividing the world into competing tribes, monotheism unites, one God for all, the world as a single, rational and moral system.
Rather than our good God that loves us battling for us against the evil God that hates us, monotheism says there is only one God who sets an expectation of behavior for us and we have the power to follow or stray. In Deuteronomy (30:19) God says, “This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live.”
Monotheism becomes ethical monotheism, do the right things and the one God will reward you, do wrong things, and face the same God’s wrath. Morality not a battle between two Gods with us stuck in the middle. Morality is a battle within ourselves, adjudicated by a God of virtue and justice. Monotheism moves human culture in the direction of humanity taking responsibility for our own actions. It puts us in control. It gives us a standard to live by.
Remove the supernaturalism, and even remove the God, if you like, and you’re left with a faith that could be defined by a moral code, a Sermon on the Mount, or principles for living, like our Unitarian seven principles.
Universalism, like Unitarianism, is a name that attaches us to our Christian roots, but again, defines a concept that is much more ancient and broad.
The broadest formulation of this spiritual question is simply, “Are there different destinies for different people, or do all people share the same destiny?”
In Christian belief, people are separated after their deaths and eternally ever after with some rewarded in Heaven and some punished in Hell. Islam has the same vision of Hell, called Jahannam. In Judaism there is realm of the dead called Sheol, but we all go there together. The Greeks and Romans shared a conception of a single Underworld for all.
And in eastern religions, all persons are continually reincarnated until we eventually arrive together at our final destination, Nrivana. It takes bad people a little longer to get there, but eventually we all end up in the same place.
That’s Universalism.
In the Christian context, the Unitarian and Universalist theologies appear in the earliest centuries after Jesus. These aren’t new ideas. These are perennial ideas that emerge in all cultures when humans ask questions like “Why be good?” “Am I the same or different from other people?” “What happens after I die?” “What should I do with my anger at the people who wronged me, or hurt the ones I love?”
Christianity, which grew from monotheistic and universalist Judaism, and had early Bishops who preached concepts that we would today label as Unitarian and Universalist, eventually condemned those theologies as heresy and went a different way.
But the theologies remained and eventually became the faith of you and I.
I had hoped this morning to give a long, but quick history of all of Unitarian Universalism, from the beginning to the nineteenth century, leaving the more modern history for next week. But clearly there isn’t time.
So, let me close by introducing you merely to two early Christian Bishops who we recognize as Unitarian and Universalist. Rather than give you just their names, Origen and Arius, I also want to give you a little of their words.
This is drawn from a valuable resource published by Skinner House Books in 2017 called A Documentary History of Unitarian Universalism in two volumes. This is a collection of excerpts from original sources in chronological order: a history of our faith tradition in the words of the people who made our faith history.
The first selection in the first volume is from the Christian Universalist named Origen. He lived from about 185 to 253 CE, first in Alexandria and later Caesarea (present day Egypt and Israel but both part of the Roman Empire at the time).
Origen wrote a book of Christian theology around the year 225, called, “On First Principles”. His Universalist argument begins with the premise that all persons were created by God and thus created good. But God wanted the good in us, to be our good, not merely a good forced upon us. So, God gave us rationality, and free will.
Origen writes, “For the Creator granted to the minds created by him the power of free and voluntary movement, in order that the good that was in them might become their own, since it was preserved by their own free will; but sloth and weariness of taking trouble to preserve the good, coupled with disregard and neglect of better things, began the process of withdrawal from the good…. And so each mind, neglecting the good either more or less in proportion to its own movements, was drawn to the opposite of good, which undoubtedly is evil.”
Because we choose evil, or fall into evil by laziness, according to Origen, it is appropriate for us to be condemned. But drawing from the language of scripture, Origen holds that we condemn ourselves.
Remember that Origen is a Christian Bishop, so he grounds all of his arguments in references from scripture. He wonders what to make of that “eternal fire” Jesus mentions in Matthew? (25:41) The verse is, ““Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.”
To make sense of this, Origen quotes Isaiah (50:11) where Isaish writes, “Walk in the light of your fire and in the flame which you have kindled for yourselves.” Origen says, “These words seem to indicate that every sinner kindles for himself the flame of his own fire, and is not plunged into a fire which has been previously kindled by someone else or which existed before him.”
Origen compares our own bad actions becoming the fuel for a self-punishing internal fire to the way that eating too much or bad food causes heartburn and indigestion. He writes, “so when the soul has gathered within itself a multitude of evil deeds and an abundance of sins, at the requisite time the whole mass of evil boils up into punishment and is kindled into penalties; at which time also the mind of conscience, bringing to memory through divine power all things the signs and forms of which it had impressed upon itself at the moment of sinning will see exposed before its eyes a kind of history of its evil deeds, of every foul and disgraceful act and all unholy conduct. Then the conscience is harassed and pricked by its own stings, and become an accuser and witness against itself.”
Later, the 18th century Universalist Hosea Ballou would say that this outcome of sinful lives shouldn’t be seen so much as punishment, but merely the natural consequence of the sinful deeds themselves. It’s our sinning that makes us miserable, with no further punishment required.
Ballou was what is called an “ultra-universalist” because he believed that sins carry their own negative effects and so justice requires no further punishment after death. Therefore, for Ballou, no Hell is necessary, but even the worst sinner goes directly to Heaven after death. Most Universalists, though, were called Restoration Universalists, who imagined that at least for some sinners, some time in Hell was required, with God continuing to be present to the denizens of Hell until they finally see their error, reform, and are restored to the salvation God always intended for them.
Origen was of this type, that the continued purging of the effects of our sin might continue after our bodily deaths.
Origen writes, “We must not think, however, that it will happen all of a sudden, but gradually and by degrees, during the lapse of infinite and immeasurable ages, seeing that the improvement and correction will be realized slowly and separately in each individual person. Some will take the lead and hasten with swifter speed to the highest goal, others will follow them at a close interval, while others will be left far behind; and so the process will go on through the innumerable ranks of those who are making progress and becoming reconciled to God from their state of enmity, until it reaches even to the last enemy, who is called death, in order that he, too may be destroyed and remain an enemy no longer.”
For our Unitarian church Father we have another Bishop of Alexandria, born at about the year that Origen died; his name is Arius.
It’s a little more difficult to quote Arius exactly because when he was declared a heretic at the Council of Nicea in 325, it was also ordered that all of this writing be burned. The only words we have of him therefore are what other people quoted from him in their own writings, primarily a Bishop named Athanasius, who was, at Nicea, Arius chief rival and who therefore quotes his enemy only to disagree with him and present him in the worst possible light.
Arius’ Unitarianism is quite different from ours. Like Origen, Arius considered himself a Christian. And he considers Jesus to have been a divine being. But Arius preserves his monotheism by maintaining a clear distinction between the original, eternal, uncreated God “the Father” and the Father’s Son, who reveals the Father God to us, but is himself created and has a beginning.
Here is a quote, as given to us by Athanasius, “God then himself is in essence ineffable to all. He alone has neither equal nor like, none comparable in glory. We call him unbegotten because of the one in nature begotten. We raise hymns to him as Unbegun because of him who has beginning. We adore him as eternal because of the one born in time.
Arius, as a Christian, reveres Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, and even goes so far as to affirm a trinity of divine persons but he says, “there is a trinity with glories not alike; their existences are unmixable with each other; one is more glorious than another by an infinity of glories.”
But the Christian church at Nicea were perhaps right to see the danger in Arius’ theology. If Jesus is not God, then what is he? If he is another god, then he is either in conflict with God the Father, which destroys monotheism, or he is entirely compatible with God, which makes him redundant. And thus, removing Jesus from the godhead, but wishing to keep him relevant, it became necessary for Unitarian Christians to give Jesus a different job description: not supernatural savior, but human teacher. And then, as human, Jesus lost his special religious place entirely, both opening our Unitarian religion to the influence of other great spiritual teachers from all traditions, and focusing the faith, not on the human persons who said the great things, but on the great things that were said by whatever human person.
Thus we follow principles in our faith, not prophets.
From these two ancestors of our faith, and both of them emerging themselves from long histories of human culture that shared similar ideas, these two theologies, one holding that God must be an uncomplicated unity, and the other that all creatures shares a single destiny, our Unitarian and Universalist streams meandered their way through early Christianity, went underground in the subterranean river of heresy, sprung up again when the fountains of human thought were set free in the Renaissance by Unitarian thinkers like Laelius and Fuastus Socinius; flowed from Italy to Poland and Transylvania where they found institutional homes and royal protection through men like Frances David and King John Sigismund. And from there swept into Western Europe and the Spaniard Miguel Servetus, martyred for his Unitarian beliefs, across the channel to England and the science of Isaac Newton and Joseph Priestly, and then across the ocean to colonial America and the prophets of liberty Adams and Jefferson.
North American Universalism was organized as the Universalist Church of America in the early nineteenth century. The American Unitarian Association was founded soon after, by men and women whose names we still know: Ballou, Channing, Emerson. And women leaders like Margaret Fuller, Olympia Brown, and the woman who brought the Unitarian faith to Los Angeles, Caroline Severance.
The river flows to us today, and will flow beyond us, surely, toward some future ocean of free religion we cannot see but will create together.
I’ll tell some of the history of Unitarian and Universalism closer to our present day, next week, before picking up our own church’s story the week after that.