Click here to watch a video of this sermon<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nWe\u2019ve been exploring together, over the last three months, our religious beliefs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Beliefs are those ideas about ourselves and the world that we hold to be true.\u00a0\u00a0Beliefs are our worldview.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When we look out at the world, what do we see?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Beliefs are just the first part of a complete faith.\u00a0\u00a0Adding to our religious beliefs we have our religious values.\u00a0\u00a0I\u2019ll switch to talking about values after the new year.\u00a0\u00a0And a complete faith also includes what we do with our beliefs and values, the actions that we take in the world as we live our faith.\u00a0\u00a0I\u2019ll talk about the actions part of faith in the spring.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I want to emphasize that when I talk about beliefs as the foundation for a complete faith, I don\u2019t mean just beliefs about immaterial, so-called \u201cspiritual,\u201d subjects, like belief in God or belief in reincarnation, or belief in Santa Claus, or what have you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I mean beliefs as our entire worldview.\u00a0\u00a0Beliefs, in the way I\u2019m using that word, refers to everything we know or think we know about the world around us.\u00a0\u00a0Beliefs are our description of reality, including everything that we think is part of reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I use the term this way, because when a person considers their beliefs, they don\u2019t draw clear distinctions between the beliefs they have good evidence for and the beliefs they hold based only on a hunch or feeling.\u00a0\u00a0All our beliefs have the same weight and serve the same function to our faith.\u00a0\u00a0A person might have objective evidence for a belief like, the age of the universe, and only subjective evidence for a god belief, but those two beliefs amount to the same thing in guiding the person through their life, their faith life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We can draw distinctions between beliefs based on hard evidence, beliefs based on reason and logic, and beliefs based on myths and traditions and subjective feelings, but all of those together serve the same function in providing the base for our faith.\u00a0\u00a0So I call them all beliefs.\u00a0\u00a0This is what I believe.\u00a0\u00a0What I know for sure because I can prove it.\u00a0\u00a0What I can reason out using logic.\u00a0\u00a0And what I believe because it feels true for me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWhere do beliefs come from?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
How do we go about gathering up the things we know, the ideas we\u2019ve come to hold, and the hunches we work with?\u00a0\u00a0How do we gather the collection of beliefs, our personal beliefs, that comprise the base of our complete faith?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019ve been organizing my preaching about beliefs over the last three months by following a little scheme that appears on our Fellowship website.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Under the page titled, \u201cOur Faith\u201d there\u2019s a section titled, \u201cOur Beliefs\u201d and in that section there\u2019s this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cUnitarian Universalists believe more than one thing. We think for ourselves, and reflect together, about important questions:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The existence of a Higher Power
Life and Death
Sacred Texts
Prayer and Spiritual Practices<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019ve preached about three of those. Today I want to look at the last: sacred texts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For many people, the answer of where they turn to gather their beliefs, is to point to a book.\u00a0\u00a0A sacred text.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Upanishads.\u00a0\u00a0The Bhagavad Gita.\u00a0\u00a0The Lotus Sutra.\u00a0\u00a0The Torah.\u00a0\u00a0The Tao Te Ching.\u00a0\u00a0The Gospels.\u00a0\u00a0The letters of Paul.\u00a0\u00a0The Koran.\u00a0\u00a0The Book of Mormon.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Every culture that has writing has sacred writings.\u00a0\u00a0Nearly every religion has a sacred text.\u00a0\u00a0Unitarian Universalism does not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Although we grew from Jewish and Christian roots, and we continue to have a special connection to the Bible because of our religious tradition and our national culture, Unitarian Universalists don\u2019t consider the Bible sacred, in the way that Jews and Christians do.\u00a0\u00a0Although we love many of the texts I just mentioned, and many others, we don\u2019t consider them sacred, the way people of other religions do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Why don\u2019t we have a Unitarian Universalist sacred text?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We don\u2019t have a sacred text because we don\u2019t believe that any person\u2019s experience of the holy, including our own experience, can ever be authoritative beyond that person and that time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We don\u2019t have a sacred text, because our Unitarian Universalist experience of encountering spiritual teachings from others, is always to judge that teaching against our own experience, rather than to judge ourselves against that teaching.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I don\u2019t consider the Bible a sacred text, because when I read the Bible I sometimes find verses in the Bible that seem good, and true, and beautiful to me, and then I find that text useful in someway to my spiritual life.\u00a0\u00a0But other times I find Bible verses that seem immoral to me, or ugly, of untrue, or clearly bound to the particular time and circumstance they were written and irrelevant to me.\u00a0\u00a0And then I dismiss the words of the Bible.\u00a0\u00a0I pay them no mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If the Bible were a sacred text for me, it would have authority.\u00a0\u00a0If I encountered a Bible verse that contradicted my own experience I would believe the Bible, and question myself.\u00a0\u00a0If I encountered a Bible verse that said something I was doing was actually wrong or sinful, I would believe the Bible and try to change my ways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I don\u2019t do that when I read the Bible.\u00a0\u00a0And I don\u2019t do it with any of the other texts that are sacred to some people but not to me.\u00a0\u00a0I like what I like and ignore the rest.\u00a0\u00a0I pick and choose.\u00a0\u00a0I judge what is true in the text by what I already hold to be true in myself.\u00a0\u00a0I don\u2019t expect the text to teach me, at least not much any more, but to confirm me.\u00a0\u00a0I don\u2019t change my sense of what is true or moral.\u00a0\u00a0Sometimes a text will inspire me to be better at being the person I already know I want to be.\u00a0\u00a0Sometimes a text can still challenge me, but they don\u2019t often change me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now I would say, parenthetically, that the way I read the Bible, picking and choosing, and finding the places that confirm my thinking rather than changing my thinking, is actually the way that most people read the Bible, including the ones who claim it as a sacred text.\u00a0\u00a0I just try to be honest about that fact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A truly Sacred Text should have power over you, change you, judge you, challenge you, be more true than your own experience. But Unitarian Universalism doesn\u2019t work that way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Instead, we say that our personal experience is the most important source for our spiritual wisdom. We begin with what we know for ourselves, from our own experience. And then we pull from other, broader experiences, but test them against our own experience first, before we allow them into our faith.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You\u2019re probably aware that we name a list of six sources of our faith. If you don\u2019t know these six sources you can find them on the UUA website, and they are also printed in the front of our hymnal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The first source is \u201cDirect experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life.\u201d So we begin with direct experience, our primary source, our own unmediated interaction with the world around us: what we see, what we feel, what we notice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The second source is \u201cWords and deeds of prophetic women and men\u2026\u201d So that is a secondhand source. Someone else has a direct experience and then through their words and deeds they teach us what they know and we learn from them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But we can ask right there: why should we trust someone else\u2019s experience as being any more authoritative than our own? They are just people, too. In Unitarian Universalism we don\u2019t recognize any special beings, no saviors or messiahs. We recognize prophetic people, but not prophets. We know some people are especially good, or heroic, or inspired, and we can learn from them. But they aren\u2019t an authority over us, just a teacher, and maybe a model.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The third source is: \u201cWisdom from the world’s religions\u2026\u201d And the fourth source is \u201cJewish and Christian teachings\u2026\u201d These are secondhand sources. Somebody else had an experience of the holy and then talked about it or wrote it down. But there\u2019s no reason to trust their experience as more true than a direct experience I can have myself. Whatever experience they had was mediated through their own person, through their own time, through the biases and assumptions of their particular culture, and the particular question or problem they were concerned with. Sometimes what they discovered and said or wrote down would have wisdom for me, but other times the particularities that shaped their experience would make their insight irrelevant to me, or even wrong for me to follow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The fifth and sixth sources are a little different from the others in that they provide what might actually be authoritative over me: an objective source of wisdom, not secondhand experience from someone else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The fifth source is: \u201cHumanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe guidance of reason and the results of science\u201d is, actually, an authority beyond ourselves I believe we should recognize and respect. Reason doesn\u2019t ask you to substitute someone else\u2019s experience for your own. Reason is a tool anyone can use and use the same way. The results of science are the same for me and for you: a true wisdom source outside of either one of us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If my experience tells me that the earth doesn\u2019t turn and the sun moves across the sky once each day, but science tells me I\u2019m wrong, I believe the science. I try to follow the science, and listen to reason, when I\u2019m making choices in my life about vaccines, and climate change, and human sexuality, and racial identity, and so on. I am my own authority on many things. But I also recognize that my personal experience doesn\u2019t count as evidence for many issues where reason and science give us answers on good authority.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The sixth, and final source of our UU faith is \u201cSpiritual teachings of Earth-centered traditions which celebrate the sacred circle of life and instruct us to live in harmony with the rhythms of nature.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That source, too, in a smaller way, points toward an objective source for our faith. \u201cthe sacred circle of life.\u201d \u201cThe rhythms of nature.\u201d The pagan holidays based on the changing seasons. The agricultural cycle. The relationship between the sun and the earth, the weather, the features of the natural landscape. All those are objective facts and provide an objective source for our faith. I don\u2019t practice a pagan spirituality, but I\u2019ve always appreciated how that six source of our faith grounds us in the real. Religion can so often float off into the transcendent realm. It\u2019s nice to have a reminder to connect our spirituality to the world around us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So Unitarian Universalism recognizes no sacred text because we regard all texts as records of particular people, essentially no different than ourselves, and their experience in their time and culture, and therefore can find no reason to elevate their experience above our own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And yet, because we are also merely people, not saviors, or messiahs, or prophets either, but flawed people like everyone else; our own experience might be mistaken, or incomplete.\u00a0\u00a0We might misunderstand our experience.\u00a0\u00a0Or we might not see that our experience is also a product of our own time and culture, and our biases and blindspots, and shouldn\u2019t be regarded as truth.\u00a0\u00a0We might be wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So we need something more than just our experience to get to the truth.\u00a0\u00a0A sacred text isn\u2019t the thing for us.\u00a0\u00a0But what could help us see the deeper truth beyond ourselves?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One is those objective sources I just mentioned.\u00a0\u00a0We subject our personal experience to the tests of reason, logic, and the scientific method.\u00a0\u00a0And we stay wary of floating off into our own heads by staying grounded in the real world around us.\u00a0\u00a0In the words of our fifth source, we follow the \u201chumanist teachings which \u2026 warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And there is yet another tool we can use to test and challenge what we think we learn from personal experience.\u00a0\u00a0A tool that brings us back to the essential quality of this Fellowship.\u00a0\u00a0The tool is each other.\u00a0\u00a0The tool is this community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s in that quote that I read earlier taken from our Fellowship website.\u00a0\u00a0It says, \u201cUnitarian Universalists believe more than one thing. We think for ourselves, and reflect together, about important questions:\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We think for ourselves.\u00a0\u00a0And we reflect together.\u00a0\u00a0I bring my experience.\u00a0\u00a0You bring yours.\u00a0\u00a0I tell you my story.\u00a0\u00a0You tell your story.\u00a0\u00a0I defend what I think it true.\u00a0\u00a0But maybe you convince me that the truth is more subtle or complicated than I thought it was.\u00a0\u00a0Or maybe that what I thought is true isn\u2019t true at all, now that I\u2019ve listened to the stories from my community.\u00a0\u00a0I change.\u00a0\u00a0I change you.\u00a0\u00a0We grow together.\u00a0\u00a0I become aware of my weak spots, my biases and prejudices.\u00a0\u00a0I learn to say, \u201cI never thought of it that way, now I see a new way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Our Fellowship, then, becomes a kind of living, evolving, sacred text.\u00a0\u00a0Each of us writing a verse, then discussing and changing what we\u2019ve written, then coming back next week with new experiences to share, new verses to write.\u00a0\u00a0A scripture written in water, written in air, written with our lives, that changes with us, and changes between us, and has authority over us, only because we find ourselves written in it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The first source of our UU faith is our personal direct experience. That will probably always be the most… Read more Sacred Texts<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1883","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sermons","category-writing"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rhmcd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1883","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rhmcd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rhmcd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rhmcd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rhmcd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1883"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/rhmcd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1883\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2053,"href":"https:\/\/rhmcd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1883\/revisions\/2053"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rhmcd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rhmcd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rhmcd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}