Although religion explores realms not available to empirical study, speaks in myths and parables, and, for some, includes the supernatural, to be valuable, religion must engage with reality. I’ve always appreciated that Unitarian Universalism is what I call a “reality-based religion.” But it isn’t just our foundation in reality that counts, it’s also our commitment to end in reality, with real lives made really better for real people.

            I’m spending this year in worship, September through June, gathering up all of what I consider to be the foundational issues of faith.  I mean the general issues of faith:  fate and free will, and what happens after we die. Spiritual concerns like courage, and power, joy, sacrifice, sin.  My idea as I did my worship planning last summer was to spend this year, my last as a professional minister, summing up what I’ve been thinking about, and preaching about, for thirty years now.

The issues won’t go away, merely because I’m having my last look at them.  The spiritual issues don’t have conclusive answers.  We will always wonder about questions of identity, purpose, and meaning, which means that spirituality will never not be a part of human life.  Perhaps the religious institutions we’ve created to address those perennial concerns will change drastically, or close entirely.  Why should today’s religions be any different than all the religions and religious practices that humans have invented and abandoned over the centuries?  But the need to engage with the spiritual questions will never end.  It’s part of every person’s human development.  Everyone asks these questions and answers them in some fashion, whether they call themselves spiritual or not, whether they’ve ever stepped inside a church, or wouldn’t be caught dead in one.

            But without claiming that I have “the” answer to these questions, I wanted to model that I have “my” answer to these questions.  That after thirty years of thinking about, and preaching about these questions, that my personal spirituality has advanced somewhere.  Our spiritual lives should not be merely an endless spinning amidst these unsolvable riddles, but spiritual maturity means claiming for ourselves our own answers.  Not for everyone and not forever, but for us, for now.

            Spiritual health means knowing our own spiritual answers, our own theology.  Not right or wrong, as I’ve said many times, because these questions don’t have right or wrong answers, but answers that serve a good life.  The goal is to create a personal spirituality, useful to me in achieving the life I seek.  Qualities such as those the Buddhists identify as the “divine abodes”:

Loving-kindness, which is wishing others well, avoiding agression
Sympathetic joy, which is celebrating the joy of others, avoiding jealousy or envy
Equanimity, which is accepting what is, avoiding attachment or greed
And Compassion, which is feeling a call to relieve the suffering of the world.

Or perhaps qualities which the Christian tradition identifies as the cardinal virtues:  Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance.

The task of building a useful spirituality is asking, “What spiritual foundations must be in place for me to support my growth into being the sort of person I hope to be?  What personal theology can I develop that will support that life for me?”

While contemplating those general faith questions this year, I’ve also been considering some of the more specific qualities of the Unitarian Universalist faith.  What distinguishes the Unitarian Universalist way of doing religion?  What does it mean to be a UU?

Last month I looked at optimism as a foundational characteristic of Unitarian Universalism.  We aren’t doom-sayers or apocalypticist.  Optimism combines our belief in the openness of the future with the perspective that given sufficient time human beings are incredibly effective in re-shaping our world toward our vision.

Also last month, I looked at the gifts and challenges of the democratic process, linked, as democracy is, to the fundamental principles of classic liberalism.  Unitarian Universalism is a liberal religion.  Liberalism, in religion, government, science, economics, is a process for achieving truth and justice by following two simple rules:

One, is that everyone must participate in the work.  No one should be excluded from the process by rules or practices that limit who is allowed to speak and vote.  Nor is anyone allowed to separate themselves from the process by claiming that their opinion is so special that they shouldn’t have to submit to the same process of evidence, reason, and debate as everyone else.

And the second rule of liberalism, and there are only two, is that we agree that no truth or justice is ever final.  We must continue to do the work, again, and again.  It’s not liberalism to say, “Well, that’s the way we’ve always done it.”  Or, “This is what it says in this book from two thousand years ago, so that’s that.”  The world changes.  Circumstances change.  So what we mean by truth and justice must also be available to change.

            Today, I want to look at another foundational spiritual issue, for Unitarian Universalists, a way of looking at the world connected to that last point of the liberal method:  that the world is constantly changing, that reality changes.

            Reality changes.  The Unitarian Universalist religious practice is to be ready to change along with it.  Our religious goal is to stay connected to the world the way it really is.  As reality shifts, we constantly re-assess our religious response.  As reality moves, we move.  As the world dances away from us, we follow its lead.

            As we learn more, we question old beliefs.  As new evidence is presented, from new people joining us and telling us new stories, or science discovering a new marvel of the way the universe is constructed, we test our religion and change what must be changed to acknowledge the new reality.  Our religion is not shut-up inside sanctuary doors reading old texts, but our doors our open.  We engage with the world, including those parts of the world we have no control over. When a new world presents itself to us, we ask again and again whether what we are doing is still the best strategy to achieve the world of peace, love, and justice we seek.

            I call this a “reality-based” religion.  Unitarian Universalism strives to be a reality-based religion.

            On Wednesday evenings, a group of us have been reading the Gospel of Luke together.  When we finish, we’ll go on to read the second book of the Bible by the same author, The Acts of the Apostles.

            If you were with us at Christmas time you heard a little of the Gospel of Luke read during the Christmas Eve service:  the census that requires Mary and Joseph to travel from Nazareth down to Bethlehem.  The birth of Jesus in a stable because there was no room at the inn.  The angel announcing the birth to the shepherds and the shepherds hurrying to the stable to see for themselves.

            From there, the gospel jumps to a single story of Jesus as a boy teaching at the synagogue, and then the gospel leaps again to Jesus as an adult, about age thirty, being baptized by John the Baptist.

            From there, the gospel takes an interesting dual structure.

            Part of the gospel, is Jesus expounding on his vision of a society ordered around moral principles:  a social order he calls the Kingdom of God.  He talks about the need for compassion and mercy.  He talks about fully integrating into society the people that are excluded, because of their sex, or nationality, or religion, or disability.  He points out the trap of prioritizing the temptations of this world:  material wealth, political power, or religious self-righteousness, and how those can prevent us from achieving what really matters:  peace, love, justice.

            It’s an astounding message.  It’s also challenging.  It’s often confusing and counter-intuitive.  And Jesus seems to insist that his followers, and also those of us who are studying his message, make changes to our comfortable lives we’d rather not make.

            The other part of the gospel, intermixed with Jesus’ moral teachings, is a series of stories where Jesus wanders around Judea, encountering people in distress for one reason or another, and Jesus instantly, miraculously, solves their problem.  He heals the sick.  He raises the dead.  He makes the blind see and straightens broken limbs.  He calms the waters of a lake whipped up by a storm.  He feeds thousands of hungry people from just a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish, and still has baskets of food left over.

            What should we make of these stories?

            As I said when we looked at the miracles of the Christmas story back in December, there are two ways that folks usually understand those stories.

            Believers believe them.  These are true accounts of what really happened.  The gospel truth, as they say.

            Sceptics believe them too but find non-miraculous explanations.  Spontaneous healings do happen occasionally, especially if a person is powerfully motivated.  Maybe the person thought to be dead was just in a coma.  Fierce winds can suddenly stop or change direction.  Perhaps Jesus performed the “miracle” of getting people to share their provisions instead of secretly hoarding them.

            But I think the more likely explanation is a third way of looking at these miracle stories:  that they didn’t happen.  I don’t believe them.

            Luke wrote his gospel forty or so years after Jesus died.  Another thing that we’re learning in our Bible study is that the earliest memories of Jesus soon after his death are records of what he said.  What Jesus’ first followers thought was important about him and worth remembering were the challenging, confusing, and counter-intuitive lessons he taught about creating a moral society.  The earliest record of Jesus’ ministry contains no stories of miraculous healings, no stories of walking on water, or multiplying loaves and fishes.  There’s no story of a miraculous birth or a resurrection after death.  Just a book of quotes:  Jesus said this.  And then he said this.  And he also said this.

            The healings and miracles and magic all come later.  Forty years after Jesus’ death, Jesus’ Kingdom of God still hadn’t arrived and people were starting to move on.  So, to keep the interest alive, people began to make the story a little more exciting by claiming that Jesus was more than just a thoughtful man:  he was also a miracle man.  By the time we get to Luke some stories were probably already old stories that had been shared orally, and others Luke probably invented himself.

            But they aren’t real.

            So what happens when real moral sayings get mixed together with unreal miracle stories?

            I suspect that the first person who imagined for Jesus some supernatural power, intended that by making Jesus more special people would be drawn to his teachings and maybe feel called to continue his mission of reordering society around moral principles.

            But instead, what happens is, by making Jesus special, people are drawn to the person of Jesus, rather than his teaching.  Supernatural Jesus is exciting.  The teachings are kind of uncomfortable.  And anyway, it’s easy for Jesus to be so perfectly good and smart and strong, because he’s special, some even say he’s God incarnate, whereas I’m only human.  We cling to a divine Jesus and abandon what he taught leaving us with neither the real man, nor his real message.

            This is what turned me away from Christianity as a teenager.  Jesus as defined in the Bible, and in the church, can’t be real.  Actual dead persons cannot be made to live again.  Pregnancy requires two people, not a girl and the Holy Spirit.  As a teenager I knew enough about science, physics, and biology, to know that the world runs by natural laws not arbitrary miracles.  The supernatural religious story isn’t real.  And discounting the miracles of religion, I then abandoned the entirety of religion.

            If religion required supernaturalism, I wanted none of it.  No miracles.  No fables about the creation of the world.  No divine powers.  No spirit beings.  No fights among the gods, or otherworldly realms, levitation, visions, prophecies.  If religion asked me to believe nonsense, then I could dismiss the whole thing as nonsense.  And I did.

How refreshing then to discover, as a young adult, mostly by accident, Unitarian Universalism, which was premised on the idea that one could have religion without supernaturalism.

            I learned that Unitarian Universalism embraced science.  Unitarian Universalism embraced reason.  Unitarian Universalism confirmed my conclusion that moral calls to peace, love, and justice could be made by appeals to human conscience rather than divine command.  Unitarian Universalism agreed with my perspective that people didn’t need to be tricked or beguiled into following a healthy spirituality, and in fact that the tricking and beguiling was usually more of a danger than an assistance in leading people to spiritual health.

            I learned that Thomas Jefferson was a Unitarian and he had made a personal Bible for his own use by cutting out all the supernatural passages where Jesus performs miracles, leaving a gospel that includes only the moral teachings.  A gospel, by the way, very like the one that Jesus’ first followers would have written.

            And once I came into the Unitarian Universalist church I was excited to learn that this faith continues to be engaged with the real world.

            Our faith centers on this world, not another world.  And this world today.  What can we do today to make this world more like the world we seek?

            We look to educate ourselves.  What is the truth of climate change?  What is the truth of the immigrant experience in the United States?  What is the truth of human sexuality?  What is the truth of disparate treatment about race?  Only by knowing the truth, the really real, can we begin the work of making a real difference in the real lives of real people.

            But this requirement to stay connected with reality is a challenge for Unitarian Universalists, too.  We also fall prey to magical thinking.  We are as tempted as are any other human-beings to entertain ourselves with interesting, exciting stories, and to believe them incredulously.  Our temptation is to distance ourselves from reality by inventing theories, and not demanding, as liberalism requires, that theories be supported by evidence and reason and subject to argument.  We read books instead of talking to real people.  We prefer ideology to materiality.  We silence disagreement rather than engaging with real, but challenging truths.  We’d rather stay loyal to our pure self-righteousness than consider a strategy that might be effective in making real world change.

            We violate our own faith principles when we let our lofty intellectualism transport us into some other-worldly realm, rather than confronting the real world we actually live in.

In our Call to Worship, Teilhard de Chardin praises the constraints of reality:  “Blessed be you, mighty matter, irresistible march of evolution, reality ever new-born;  you who, by constantly shattering our mental categories, force us to go ever further and further in our pursuit of the truth.”

Pursuit of the truth means a constant shattering of what we think we know, to re-experience reality directly and always start from the real.

Not post-doctoral dissertations about ideal communities, but this community.  Not magic and miracles, but human effort amid human limitations.  Not another world.  This world.  This city.  This day.  This flower.  This actual social, political reality present in front of me.  Keep us here.  This person.  Her story.  His pain.  The physics of this material world.  The psychological truths of what actually motivates people to change.  The real suffering, of real people, asking for real help, in this real life.