A Sermon by the Reverend Ellen Rowse Spero
First Parish Unitarian Universalist Church,
Chelmsford, Massachusetts
October 23, 2005
Ancient Reading: #668: "Faith Cannot Save" from the Book of James:2
Modern Reading: Let Your Life Speak by Parker Palmer
Copyright 2005, Ellen Rowse Spero. All rights reserved.
When I was a teenager, I watched a documentary called "Weapons of the Spirit." It was about a small, Huguenot town in France, Le Chambon sur Lignon, whose citizens sheltered 5,000 Jews from the Holocaust during World War II. In doing so, they doubled the population of the town. And for it to work, every member of the town had to participate. At any moment, any one of them could have decided it was not worth the risk and gone to the authorities. The writer and director of the documentary was Pierre Sauvage, who was born in Le Chambon to one of the refugee families. He did not learn the story of Le Chambon and his family until he was a grown man. He returned to there to find out why the citizens of the town did what they did. In an interview with Bill Moyers, he shared some of his learnings. "I had to undo a lot of preconceived notions in order to come to this, the most fundamental one, I think, being one that’s been handed down by the dramatists and the novelists and the artists…The very process of that is to build around conflict and tension and drama, and they’ve sort of passed on the notion that good people, people who put their lives on the line, people who take major risks, are people who agonize over their decision, spend sleepless nights worrying about what they are going to do, and then maybe in the morning…finally do the right thing. I’ve come to believe this is nonsense, that people who agonize don’t act and people who act don’t agonize." The people of Le Chambon did not discuss what they were doing before, during, or afterward. They did not agonize. They simply did it. And they drew strength from that effort. As Sauvage noted, "I live in Los Angeles. To anybody who lives in a big city, life seems difficult. Rearranging your car pool is a big production. And these were people who took in two, three strangers, had their whole routine disrupted. But it was…natural. They don’t look upon effort as something depleting. They look upon effort as something through which you live fully and you derive strength. It’s really quite different."
It is quite different. I held this in contrast with something I have been reading, the UUA Commission on Appraisal’s report, "Engaging our Theological Diversity." It had many important observations and insights. But essentially, it felt like a lot of effort around what is essentially a consumer report: how can we have our individuality AND a sense of community? Their conclusion, a chapter entitled, "2004 Statement of Agreements and Tensions" includes the following disclaimer: "We are including this document with some trepidation, lest it receive an undue amount of attention and seriousness" (p. 155). Talk about agonizing: "here is what we think, after spending the past four years researching and interviewing and listening, but if it doesn’t speak to you, hey, that’s okay. Whatever makes you feel good." I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
I should give the Commission a break. They were tasked with exploring a volatile issue that has been studiously avoided since the merger of Unitarianism and Universalism in 1960. We have two traditions and two histories that began in very different places, culturally, economically, and theologically. At the time of the merger, there were two main roadblocks: the first was ecclesiastical, how churches would be organized in relationship to one another and as a whole. The second roadblock was theological: how to articulate the message, the gospel, of this new hybrid faith. As the Commission reports, "We took two religious movements, each with clear and distinct historical roots and at least some clear and distinct theological assumptions (such as the oneness of God, the goodness of God, the univerisality of salvation) and merged them organizationally without attempting to sort through the theological issues. In fact, we seem to have dealt with the thorny issue of potential theological disharmony by essentially banning all theology from the newly formed movement (p. 20)." No wonder the report came across the way it did. And no wonder we constantly define Unitarian Universalism in terms of what we aren’t, what we don’t believe. No wonder 80% of those raised Unitarian Universalist leave for another faith or for nothing at all. This unconscious ban on discussing theological diversity beyond saying we value it creates real problems for our congregations and our association as a whole. We risk creating communities of faith that are about me and what makes me happy rather than about serving a Larger Purpose or Greater Good. People come to our congregations looking for something meaningful, something that will root them and connect them to something larger than themselves, something that will support them in projecting their spirit on the world in ways that matter for good. But if we can’t talk about what matters to us, for fear of offending someone or of finding that our beliefs are incompatible, then we are doomed to agonize and never act as a people of faith.
Theology matters. It is more than thinking about what we believe. It is about how to live deeply. Paul Rasor, one of Unitarian Universalism’s new generation of theologians, and my predecessor at First Parish in Lexington, examines the history and current state of liberal theology in his book, Faith Without Certainty. He writes, "Theology is not just about examining our ideas but about examining our actions in the world and our justifications for them. That is, theology is (or should be) concerned as much with practice as belief. This includes the internal practices of our congregations and faith communities, the daily habitual activities of our individual lives, and the larger scale social and institutional structures that make up our culture…Theology is…work that all of us can do and that most of us in fact do, at least part of the time. Whenever we think about things that matter in our lives, whenever we struggle with tragedy in our families or express outrage at social injustice, we are doing theological reflection. Our struggle and our outrage are always grounded somewhere…to be worth bothering about, theology has to satisfy two basic criteria. It has be make sense and it has to make a difference…Theology is not something we do just with our heads. We must also use our hearts and guts, as well as our hands and feet (pp. xviii-xx)."
So, theology does not mean that we have to have creed. We don’t have to all believe the same things about doctrinal issues, like the nature or existence of the divine, life after death, the nature of good and evil, the sources of spirituality and revelation. What theology challenges us to do is integrate our spiritual, our ethical and our daily lives, to "…not only live one’s life doing justice and practicing kindness and love, but also to know why (Rasor, xxiii)."
It is in order to help one another to, to engage with one another to give expression to our theology that we gather as a Unitarian Universalist community of faith. The purpose of worship, of child, youth, and adult religious education, of our caring for one another, and our social outreach, and all we do in our congregation is to give expression to our values, our spirituality, and our deepest hope. Not just intellectually, but with our hearts and our guts, our hands and our feet. Not only to debate whether or not we should allow the use of words like God or prayer, but to wrestle in the stuff of real life and to give it powerful language. To engage and struggle together with what it means to do justice, to practice loving kindness, to walk attentively with the sacred and the holy, toward wholeness and healing in a world where human life is held very cheaply. where power over others is valued more than power with. where profit matters more than community or ecology. where there is violence and suffering, earthquakes and hurricanes, wars and terrorism. where the Holocaust of World War II was only one act of genocide and where several others have happened since. where each and every one of us has suffered failure, a broken heart, lost someone we love and will one day die ourselves. As Parker Palmer notes in the reading I shared, "The spiritual traditions do not deny reality of the outer world. They simply claim that we help make that world by projecting our spirit on it, for better or worse…We can make choices about what we are going to project, and with those choices we help grow the world that is. Consciousness precedes being: consciousness, yours and mine, can form, deform or reform our world." Theology is this consciousness.
Which brings me back to Le Chambon and "the weapons of the spirit." I know that "weapons of the spirit" sounds uncomfortable to our ears, with its militaristic tone. But Sauvage chose it deliberately because he saw in Le Chambon a group of people who fought against the darkness and evil of their time with the only weapon they had, the strength of their spirit.
What were their weapons of the spirit? It was not simply a matter of belief or doctrine. Otherwise other communities would have responded the same way. To Sauvage, they were "..very ordinary people with simply a good hold on what was important." This "hold" did not spring up from nowhere. It was grounded in their theology, how they lived their lives in ways congruent with their history, their values, their faith, with how they understood doing justice, loving kindness, and walking attentively with their God. The people of Le Chambon were well acquainted with their roots, their history as a Huguenot Protestant community that had suffered persecution under the Catholic rule in France some five hundred years before. From this, they had cultivated what Sauvage described as an inner serenity, a solidity, like that of a tree, which deeply rooted, knows it can survive and offers the shade and strength of this story and this hope to others.
Sauvage made another point about how this community cultivated weapons of the spirit. " Something I also learned from Le Chambon is not to overstate the significance of leadership. Now it happens that Le Chambon…had extraordinarily inspired leadership. Pastor Trocmé was a brilliant man. And an extraordinarily committed man. But at the same time, you had a community that had in its nature…" Moyers finishes his thought, "Leaders don’t create communities. Communities raise up leaders to express and manifest their character." And Sauvage answers, "That’s right."
Leaders don’t create communities, communities raise up leaders to express and manifest their character. I believe this is true. The dedicated and creative lay leaders of this congregation, who give generously of their time, energy, and talent express the health and vibrancy of this growing congregation. As for me, I feel a joyful privilege for this call and I love being your minister. But Sauvage’s point is well taken. My ministerial leadership does not create or define this community. This community creates the conditions for me and for others to lead. In order for us to do this, we need to know why we are here, what we are living for as a community of faith. This is what I am asking us to pay attention to, to discuss, clarify, and articulate this year. We can have diverse expressions and diverse theologies, but we need to know what binds us together, the roots that support our growing branches. Otherwise, we will never act, only agonize. As Carla Corey said in her chalice lighting last Sunday, may we be a blessing for one another and for our world. How do we live this out?
Bibliography
Parker J. Palmer. Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation. San Francisco: JOssey-Bass, Inc., 2000.
Paul Rasor. Faith Without Certainty: Liberal Theology for the 21st Century. Boston: Skinner House Books, 2005.
http://www.chambon.org/weapons_moyers_interview_en.htm.