The defining feature of a liberal religion like Unitarian Universalism is our belief that we get closest to the truth when we allow all voices to speak. Rather than rely on an outside authority, a guru, or a scripture, we trust our own experience, then refine our individual thoughts through discussion and debate with others to approach a shared truth. If we exclude persons from our conversation, we will arrive, at best, at a partial truth.

            Here’s the worship plan for the remainder of this church year.

            This month and next, I plan to focus on the fifth of the five tasks of interim ministry that we’ve been looking at all year.

            These are the work areas that through experience congregations have learned are helpful during interim ministries to prepare themselves for a successful new ministry.

            In September and October, you remember, we looked at history.  We began with some long ago history of the Unitarian and Universalist faith, and then our own church history as we celebrated our congregation’s 80^th anniversary.

            In November and December, we looked at issues of leadership.  We asked, “What kinds of qualities should a congregation look for in its leadership, both the professional leader you will ask to be your next minister and in your lay leadership?”  And I proposed some qualities such as putting the health of the community first, leading from the middle of the community, using their leadership style as a model for the community, inspiring others to do their best, not merely for the leader to do well themselves.

            January through March we looked at the tasks of refining a church’s mission and vision.  What are we here to do?  Who do you want to be?  Where do you want to go?

            Certainly, we haven’t exhausted all of the work that could be done in those areas.  And history, leadership, mission and vision are perennial issues for churches to address whether you’re in an interim period or not.  But I hope you’re starting to feel a sense of readiness for the next chapter of this church’s story, and for selecting a minister who will write that chapter with you.

We’ve confronted our history, celebrated it, learned from it.  We contemplated leadership qualities, what we need, what we don’t need, how we support our leaders and hold them accountable.  We’ve thought about the mission of a church, and how, unlike a mission statement appropriate for a commercial corporation, or a cause-based non-profit organization, churches should avoid tying themselves to single-focus, action plans.  We do many things, but our primary, core mission, is simply to be.

            And now we turn to the last of the five tasks for interim ministry:  connections.  This is the work of acknowledging the partners of our church, the people and organizations available to work with us, and support us.  Supportive partners like sister UU churches in our local area, and the programs of the UUA.  And supportive partners in our local community who work with us on shared interests.

            Part of the work of interim ministry is to break apart old habits and systems of a church, which can tend to get calcified after a long ministry, so that those ways of doing things can be put back together again deliberately, choosing what continues to serve and taking the opportunity to discard habits that no longer serve.  Lifting up our partners allows us to evaluate the health of those connections, and to remind us that when we need help, we aren’t in this alone.

            Our church has connections to several neighborhood organizations.  Every Sunday we collect food items for the Neighborhood Interfaith Food Pantry.  Every Tuesday we serve as a host site for a drop-in program for our homeless neighbors managed by the North Hollywood Home Alliance.  We participate in the UUAs “UU the Vote” campaign, and we are aligned with broader UU concerns about climate change, and so on.  I’ll speak about all of them in coming weeks.

            In thinking about how to talk about these connections, and to help us consider the reflective question of why we have made connections with these particular issues and organizations, I thought that I would tie each program to a relevant principle of our UU Seven Principles.  Seven sermons for seven principles from now through June second.

            This also gives us time to take a deep look at those Seven Principles as they are currently being considered for elimination.

Let me begin there, so that we’re all aware of the possible fate of the Seven Principles, coming up for a vote at this year’s UUA General Assembly, June 20 to 23.

The Seven Principles, exist as language in the Bylaws of the Unitarian Universalist Association.  Specifically, they are a section of Article II of the UUA Bylaws, an article called Principles and Purposes.

The Seven Principles are meant to serve as a description of the core of our famously eclectic Unitarian Universalist faith.  They are meant to name what unites us.  What does it mean to say one is a Unitarian Universalist?

The Seven Principles were adopted by a vote at the General Assembly in 1985.  They are themselves a revision of a statement of faith principles that was written at the time of the merger of the Unitarians and Universalists in 1961, building off of similar, earlier statements of faith from each of our parent traditions.

So you can see the Seven Principles as the most recent iteration of an ongoing series of statements that name who we are, adapted as need be to keep up with the evolution of our living faith, and the changing world around us.

By the way, if you’re not familiar with the Seven Principles they are printed in the front of our hymnal.

Aware that our faith evolves over time, and that the culture around us changes over time, and the English language changes over time, when the General Assembly adopted the Seven Principles in 1985, they also instructed the UUA to periodically review our statement of faith, to make sure it continues to reflect our evolving faith.

The proposed revision of Article II up for a vote this June is the result of a many years-long review.  At last year’s General Assembly, the delegates approved a draft and inaugurated a year of further congregational study of the proposal.  At this year’s General Assembly, the delegates will be asked to vote either to approve or reject the final language.

You can learn more about the proposed revision of Article II by attending a Zoom course that Jacki Weber has arranged for us over the next four Sunday afternoons, facilitated by a UU seminarian named Amy Brunell.  I encourage you to take advantage of that opportunity and see Jacki if you want to register.  The class begins at 4pm this afternoon.

But very briefly, if adopted, the revision will eliminate the Seven Principles and replace them with seven or possibly eight single words:  generosity, pluralism, transformation, equity, love, justice, interdependence, and possibly reason.  Each single word is then defined by a sentence or two.  And then each definition is followed by a covenant statement which is an action statement instructing our congregations and all UUs how we should live out that value, following the particularly defined meaning of that word.

You can find the proposed revision on the UUA website, by the way.  Or if you have trouble finding it, send me an email and I can give you the link.

Now it isn’t my purpose in today’s sermon to debate the revised Article II proposal, although I do have a lot of thoughts.  What I would like to do, after the four Sundays of Amy Brunell’s Zoom course is to arrange a forum where we can share our thoughts and decide how we would like to encourage our congregation’s delegates to vote at the General Assembly in June.

My purpose today, and for the next several weeks is to look at the Seven Principles as they are today, so we know what’s at stake.  We are connected to the UUA and the language of their bylaws directly affects our church and our identity as a Unitarian Universalist congregation.  Before we vote to eliminate the Seven Principles, let’s make sure we know them, and what we will miss if they’re gone.

I’m going to start with the Fourth Principle.

I’m taking them out of order so that I can match particular sermon themes with some of the holidays coming up in the next few months:  Earth Day, Mother’s Day, Memorial Day, and Pride month.

But I also want to start with the Fourth Principle rather than the First, because the Fourth Principle is foundational to the kind of debate and deliberation that I hope our congregation will have about the vote to adopt or reject the Article II revision.

Our UU Fourth Principle is:  “A free and responsible search for truth and meaning.”

Since 1985, we have defined one of the guiding principles of our faith as, “a free and responsible search for truth and meaning.”

            Our fourth principle defines what it means to be a liberal religion.

            You may have heard the term “liberal religion” used to describe Unitarian Universalism and thought that meant that we were a politically liberal church as opposed to the politically conservative churches that get all the attention.  It is true that we are mostly on the left side of the political spectrum, although there’s no necessity that you be politically liberal to join our spiritual community, but in any case, that’s not what liberal religion means.

            Liberal religion means, that in our approach to religion, Unitarian Universalists follow the system of classical liberalism, best summed up by the definition of the word liberal itself, related to the word liberty, from the root word, liber, meaning, free.

            We are a free religion.  You are not bound here, to a particular belief, or a particular spiritual practice.  You can read whatever scripture you want, or any other book, or none.  You can follow any guru, or none.  You can pray how you like, or not, to whatever god or goddess, or pantheon attracts you, or none.  And so on.  You are free.  We are a free faith.

            And yet our freedom doesn’t mean that we come together just to wander around empty-headed, and aimless.  We are free because freedom is the best way to conduct a search for the truth.

            The liberal method of discerning truth is to open the field as wide as possible, to allow all who want to participate responsibly to come in, and then in freedom, debate and discuss and propose and argue, and offer suggestions, and accept criticism, to hypothesize, and experiment, and share results, and reason it out, and in that way, following the liberal method, to approach the truth.

            As a liberal religion, we apply to religious questions the same liberal method of sifting fact from falsehood that scientists use in the laboratory, the same liberal method of democracy that leads to the best governance possible, the same liberal method of discussion and debate that improves every aspect of a free society.

            Instead of an authoritarian despot, we all participate in decision-making.  Instead of a single guru leading a cult, or a single holy book:  impenetrable, unquestionable, and unchanging, the liberal method is freedom wed to responsibility.

            Tell us what you think.  Start from your own life, your own mind.  Tell us your experience.  Tell us what you think you know.  And we’ll tell you what we think we know.  And between us, we’ll refine our thoughts further and further until we start to spiral in toward something that approaches truth and meaning.

            Now you can see, that to make this work, a couple of rules have to be in place.  That is, our fourth principle implies some other foundational principles.

            One is that we must include as many voices as possible.  If the truth doesn’t belong to any single person, but rather the truth is found after receiving the input and experience and differing opinions from many people, than the more people we include the clearer the truth will become.  And the opposite corollary is that if we exclude voices, experiences, and opinions, then the truth will be harder to find.

            Imagine you’re trying to draw a circle.  If you include only three data points, you’re going to get something like a triangle.  If you include four points, it will look like a square.  If you connect a thousand points, you’ll start to draw a true circle.

            So we must include people, welcome their diverse opinions, and listen to them seriously.  We cannot rule anyone out.  We cannot shout them down, or lock them out of the room.  “May all who seek here find a kindly word; may all who speak here feel they have been heard.”  We cannot create processes that exclude unwanted voices from the discussion, because you may be excluding the truth, or at least a piece of the truth.

A free and responsible system for truth-seeking must be willing to hear and consider everyone who sincerely wants to participate in the search.  Yes, you can exclude those who merely want to disrupt the process, or those who refuse themselves to consider dissenting opinions.  Truth-seeking need not abide hecklers and trolls, but we should be careful that in shielding our discussion from conflict we might also be shielding ourselves from an uncomfortable truth.

            The second rule of the liberal method is this:  as we are careful not to arbitrarily rule anyone out, we also cannot rule anyone unquestionably in.  That is, every opinion must be open to the same level of scrutiny and debate.  There are no received truths in a liberal system.  There are no gurus.  There is no scripture.  There are different levels of expertise, sure.  But experts should be expected to make their case based on evidence and reason just like everyone else, not merely because of who they are. “Because I said it,” doesn’t count as evidence in a liberal system and need not be respected. And even an expert opinion can be made better, so even those who are pretty sure they’re right should welcome new evidence or a different perspective.

            This is why I choose for our Call to Worship this morning the words of the Unitarian Universalist Minister Robert Weston in praise of doubt.  “Doubt is the attendant of truth,” he says.  “Cherish your doubts.”  

“Doubt is the key to the door of knowledge:  it is the servant of discovery.  A belief which may not be questioned binds us to error, for there is incompleteness and imperfection in every belief.”

This is the warning to those of us who think we’re so right about everything.  Unless we are able to doubt our opinions, then we will close our ears and shut out the voices that might be leading us closer to the truth.

In a liberal system we don’t receive the truth, we approach the truth.  And we do that by drawing the circle wide.  By allowing as many voices as sincerely want to participate to speak.  Like so many streams, gradually joining as they find common ground, then joining with other streams further down the hill, and more streams further along the way, until the many, many streams meet as one, and find together the sea of truth.

As we discuss the proposed revisions to Article II of the UUA bylaws, or any other sensitive issue that comes before us in this congregation or in our relationship with Unitarian Universalism, I hope that we can honor our liberal religious tradition, and use the liberal method of truth-seeking defined in our fourth principle.  I hope that we will cling to doubt as a friend of our own position.  That we will listen with curiosity to the piece of the truth that someone else is offering.  That we will exclude no sincere participant, either from entering the debate, or from the requirement that they defend their opinions with evidence and reason.

Then we can have a free and responsible search for truth and meaning.