First Parish Church - Hoehler Journey to UU Christianity

JOURNEY TO UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST CHRISTIANITY:
A PERSONAL PILGRIMAGE

A sermon by The Rev. Harry H. Hoehler
November 8, 1992
Texts: Philippians 4:4-9 and Luke 4:14-21

         Some years ago a ministerial colleague asked me if I would present a paper to a group of clergy on my personal pilgrimage to Unitarian Universalist Christianity. For a variety of good reasons I was unable to take up that assignment, but the topic has always remained in the back of my mind. “Someday,” I said to myself, “I will probe my religious odyssey, at least for my own benefit if for no one else.”
         Not long ago a member of this congregation made a similar request. It was after a Sunday service, and I had just preached a sermon on “What It Means to be a Christian: A Unitarian Universalist Perspective.” “Why don’t you tell us how you arrived at your viewpoint?” my parishioner-friend asked. He went on: “I suppose that like most people who attend this church, you are a ‘come-outer.’ Your roots are not in Unitarian Universalism. Some of us fellow ‘come-outers’ would be interested in knowing what led you to where you are today – what were the compelling influences in your religious journey?”
         For a long time I shied away from preaching on this topic. The main reason was that unraveling that special cloth that makes up one’s religious pilgrimage is no easy matter. Why? Because the individual fibers, which compose it, are so intricately and closely knit that even the pilgrim is not able to perceive them all. Yet over the years I’ve come to recognize that there are certain threads, which give the whole cloth its pattern and design. That means that though the entire fabric cannot be unwoven and examined, at least the primary strands can be noted and highlighted. The overall pattern can be observed and partially traced.
         Keeping in mind, then, the always-limited nature of this kind of endeavor, let me share with you a few of the dominant threads, which have gone into shaping my religious outlook. Though specific to me, perhaps illumining them will shed light on patterns in your own lives.

Needless to say, the first significant strand in my religious pilgrimage was my upbringing. My parents were Lutherans who took their faith seriously. They attended church consistently, and they insisted that we children – there were three of us – either go to Sunday School or accompany them to church. At eight years of age, much over the protests of a favorite aunt who believed that all non-Lutherans had already slipped through salvation’s rather porous net, I was not only permitted but encouraged to join the local Episcopal Church’s boys choir. My mother, a trained singer and music teacher, saw this as a way of introducing me to the music of the church as well as to the discipline of choral singing. I also suspect that both my parents saw it as an opportunity for me to be a regular participant in Sunday worship, not just a Sunday school attender. For five years I was a member of that wonderful choir of 40 boys and men. At age thirteen I was confirmed an Episcopalian; later I served the church as an acolyte.
What I gained from my years as an Episcopalian was a depth-appreciation of incalculable worth. If I were to encapsulate it, I would sum up that understanding as the conviction that there is a “more” to the meaning of life than the matter-of-fact world of empirical evidence. There is a grandeur and mystery to reality, which encompasses yet far transcends human existence, and somehow the powerful liturgy and matchless prayers of that church helped confirm that conviction within me. It helped convey the sense of reverence and awe which belief in a Holy Presence at the heart of things inevitably entails. And let me say at this juncture: this belief has never left me. At the center of my faith-stance has always been the affirmation that we human beings belong to a mystery and vitality far greater than ourselves. There has always been the base-line assumption that we are intimately connected to a power and presence which we neither create nor control but which nevertheless works in us and through us, making us the men and women we are meant to be. That power and presence which sensitive souls experience at the foundation of their lives, let me call (for want of a better phrase) “the near side of God.” One of worship’s singular tasks, it seems to me, is to aid in the disclosure of this near side of God, and there is no doubt that worship in the Episcopal Church did this for me.

II.

         Well, if this is so, why did I leave? Why the pilgrimage to Unitarian Universalist Christianity? Of course, the reasons for such a shift are invariably complex. They involve numerous steps – emotional, intellectual, spiritual. For me personally, the main push was theological. That is, it had to do with my beliefs. Actually it had nothing to do with the basic proposition that “God exists.” That proposition I had accepted, and I accepted it relatively early in life. Rather it had to do with a far more difficult issue: the nature of the God in which I believed. More precisely, it had to do with how I interpreted God’s involvement with humanity.
         As is the case with so many people, religious questioning, although cracking my belief-structure here and there in my high school years, split the walls of that edifice wide open in college. It was there that I learned to view the Bible as the kind of book it truly was: not as an inerrant document dictated by God to earthly stenographers but as the story of a particular people’s evolving faith-history which illumined in so many vital ways our own personal faith-histories. The Bible, I learned, first and foremost is about a people’s search for God and God’s dealings with them. Its greatness lies not in the fact that “every book of it, every chapter of it, every verse of it, every letter of it is a direct utterance of the Most High,” as fundamentalists claim. Rather its glory rests in our knowledge that as we pursue its story, as we link ourselves to its transcendent vision, we see mirrored in its pages our own tensions and ambiguities, our own joys and sorrows, the goodness and the evil imbedded in us. We see reflected there our own reaching out to God and glimpses of God’s abundant manifestations to us. In short, I came to view the biblical story as the brightest of beacons shining on my own life-story.
         But it was also in my college years that I began to apply the double test of reasonableness and necessity to the doctrines and creeds of the church. Now, do not misunderstand me. It wasn’t that I presumed that human reason could plumb the depth and mystery of God. Hardly! Mystery, after all, remains mystery; no probing exhausts it. It was that I had become convinced that what we did know about God, as paltry as such knowledge was, did not contradict reason. That is, what we knew (or believed we knew) was not irrational. It is true, faith may point to experiences which transcend our usual categories of understanding, but this does not mean that our interpretations must offend reason.
         As for the test of necessity, I began to ask myself whether some of the key doctrines of the church are necessary for sustaining the conviction that the God of the Christian faith is not an aloof God apart from creation, but a God who bends into existence as a healing, transforming presence in the middle of it. From a Christian perspective, the question became: are these doctrines necessary for promulgating the truth that our God is an involved God, a God whose redemptive and reconciling activity in the world Christ makes manifest?
         But where, I inquired, did this leave some of the traditional dogmas of the church – doctrines like the virgin birth, the doctrine of the Trinity, the doctrine of the atonement? Was it reasonable and necessary to believe that the infinite God could and would shed his infinite nature and become a finite creature by way of a virgin birth? Yet this, among other things, is what the doctrine of the virgin birth maintained. Was it reasonable and necessary to hold that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were wholly God (of one undifferentiated, undivided substance) yet wholly distinct (three unique, separated identities)? Yet, this, among other things, is what the doctrine of the Trinity declared. Was it reasonable and necessary to contend that for finite man to be forgiven his finite sins, God – the Infinite One – had to become flesh, substitute himself, and pay for those sins by dying for them? (Why? Because only the Infinite could atone for the finite!) Yet this, among other things, is what the doctrine of the atonement claimed. Such were the doctrines to which orthodox Christianity tenaciously clung. Such were the doctrines which its historic creeds espoused. Of course there were other issues in those days that influenced my move: the hierarchical nature of the church, the second class status of women, the church’s almost conscious isolation from concerns of the world.

III.

         Yet it was because I no longer could say “yes” to certain of the church’s fundamental tenets that I left orthodox Christianity. I left because I wanted a faith which would affirm the grandeur and mystery of God without demeaning human reason. I left because I wanted a faith which would bear testimony to the transforming presence of the divine power, not only in Jesus Christ but also in some measure in people everywhere who chose the hard difficulties of the Christlike path. I left because I wanted a faith which would permit the human mind to explore the deep things of the spirit unencumbered by the constraints of official dogma and creeds. I left because I wanted a faith which practiced not ecclesiastical exclusivism but Christian openness to all who sought and struggled, in prayer and deed, to live as instruments of God’s healing and redemptive power. And I left because I wanted a faith which, above all, put first things first. I left because I wanted a faith which called men and women not to dogmatic purity but to a new birth of the spirit, a new birth that comes through living in Christ and permitting that Holy Spirit which was in him to abound in us, anointing us, as it did Him on that day in Nazareth: to carry good news to the poor, to bind up the wounds of the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and to break the yoke of the oppressed (Luke 4:18).
         I found such an unfettered faith in Unitarian Universalist Christianity. What becoming a Unitarian Universalist Christian did for me, as I am sure it has done for some of you, was to provide the milieu in which I could grow spiritually and religiously. It provided a rare kind of community of believers and seekers in which all were invited to revisit and rethink earlier held beliefs without fear of falling into doctrinal incorrectness. Here or in churches like this one, I could still worship the Lord of life and creation, acknowledge the incarnation of the divine presence pre-eminently in Christ but also in some part in all whose hearts were opened to God’s self-giving spirit, and do so without worrying about whether I had God’s relationship to Christ and Christ’s relationship to us just right. What Unitarian Universalist Christianity was saying to me, and how many others, was that you have embarked on a lifelong quest for greater understanding of the divine/human encounter. You belong to a community which not only honors your venture but also encourages you, in interaction with other believers and seekers, ever to enlarge the range and depth of that quest.
         St. Paul in a verse from one of the noblest passages of the New Testament reminds us that “now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face” (I Cor. 13:12). As long as we remain earth-bound creatures, the apostle is telling us, we cannot ignore life’s mysteries. God’s fullness is always hidden from human view. But this does not mean that we cannot know something of God’s presence in our lives and the direction in which that presence seeks to lead us. This, after all, is what the religious pilgrimage is all about: growing in the knowledge and love of God. Unitarian Universalist Christianity in its churches offers the free context for such growth in the spirit to flourish.
         The late Wallace Robbins, for years minister of the First Unitarian Church of Worcester, spoke of the nature of that context. Here are some of his words:

Ours is a non-creedal church – not because we have no beliefs, but because we will not be restrained in our beliefs.

Ours is a church of conscience – not because we hold that conscience is infallible, but because it is a meeting place of [the soul] and God.

Ours is a church of reason – not because the human mind is free of errors, but because the dialogue of mind with mind, and mind with itself, refines religious thought,

Ours is a church of moral work – not because we think morality is a sufficient religion, but because we know no better way of showing our gratitude to God, and our confidence in one another.

[Ours is a church] which takes Christ seriously – not because Christianity maintains a measure of social acceptance, but because Jesus in his way, his truth, his charity, his saving health to all nations, continues to mediate the endless power of God’s love among us.

         This is the context – the open door that maintains unhampered the quest for a deeper, fuller Christianity – that Unitarian Universalist Christianity offers to you and to me. It is why I still find my spiritual home inside its somewhat fragile walls.

         Welcome to the journey.