The Secret Ecumenical Church

A sermon by the Rev. Dr. Thomas D. Wintle, Senior Minister of the First Parish Church in Weston, Massachusetts,
delivered at the New Orleans UUCF Revival on February 25, 1999. The gospel was Luke 24.13-35.

“Did not our hearts burn within us, while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?”  (Lk. 24.32)

I.

         It seems like yesterday that I first walked into the Unitarian Church in Omaha.

         It had (and still has) a distinguished-looking brick colonial-style building.  I didn’t realize it then, but its architecture was intended to be a little bit of New England in the Midwest.  The church was founded in the 1860s largely by executives of the Union Pacific Railroad who had just established their headquarters in Omaha; and they were from New England.

         The decoration was discreet and understated.  There was a bronze plaque on the back wall in memory of the Rev. Newton Mann, one of the early ministers whose claim to fame, said the plaque, was that he was “the first American preacher to accept and proclaim the doctrine of evolution” – independent thinkers, these Unitarians.  They didn’t fit anybody’s stereotype either: one of the members was Nebraska Republican Senator Roman L. Hruska (Senator Hruska’s only claim to notoriety, if not fame, was his defense, on national TV, of President Nixon’s nomination of G. Harrold Carswell to the Supreme Court – “So what if he’s mediocre,” said the Senator, “so are many of us and we need some representation on the court”!!).

         What really attracted me that first autumn, however, was the social conscience of the preacher.  My passion at the time was civil rights, and on the Sunday after the three civil rights workers were murdered in Selma, Alabama, the parson gave a sermon the memory of which even now moves me to tears.  And the sermon ended with the announcement that this middle-aged, frail and gentle minister was leaving that afternoon to march in the civil rights demonstration in Selma.  It was so much better than what I saw as the irrelevance of the Presbyterian and Episcopal churches of my family.  Here was a place, I decided, where our finer, nobler emotions were touched, where deeds were more important than creeds.  I was hooked.

         That’s not the end of that story, however.  Only years later did I learn that – at just about the same time I was rejecting the church of my childhood, the Rev. Eugene Carson Blake, Stated Clerk of the national United Presbyterian Church, was being arrested and unceremoniously hauled off in a paddy wagon for trying to help integrate an amusement park not far from where I’d grown up in Maryland.  I didn’t know that at the time.  In my ignorance, I had judged them inadequate.  I’ve never forgotten that, and it tempers my denominational arrogance to this day.

         I learned much in that church.  It felt good and right, and I felt good for having gone.  I felt cleansed and refreshed and invigorated.  I dumped my worries and aggravations halfway through the service, and was, by the time I left spiritually renewed.

         I think that I prayed in that church long before I knew if I believed in God.  And I think that God answered my prayers in that church even when God had no reason to believe in me.

         It was from the UUs that I learned there are theological options, and levels of theological discourse: that it’s not simply a matter of “do you believe in God or not?” – but what kind of God do you reject or affirm, what vision of God, what experience underlies the very idea of God??  It’s not just “do you believe in the virgin birth?” – but it’s a matter of asking: what would it mean, for people to tell the story in a patriarchal culture, of a woman who gave birth to the messiah, who played a key role in God’s plan, without the help of any man! . . . I have learned that the Bible is alive, a living document – in which we are invited to encounter our true selves and our God, and to do so in a way that transforms our lives.

         All that was years ago.  As I think about my 35 years as a Unitarian, and about what I have known in Omaha and for 24 years in New England, what has meant the most to me about Unitarianism can be expressed in one word – “space”: there is space for the individual to grow.

         Think about that – space, open and spacious, light and room.  There are no creeds to memorize or complicated rules to observe but rather there is room to grow in faith at-your-own-pace and as God gives you the grace.

II.

And what of the future?

        I have to tell you about the most extraordinary thing that has been happening to me the past few years – I have discovered that there is “a secret ecumenical church” out there!  Perhaps some of you have discovered it, too.  I say it’s a secret because bishops and denominational bureaucracies do not seem to recognize it.  But people recognize it when they recognize comrades in arms beyond denominational labels, brothers and sisters in Christ.

         I saw the secret ecumenical church in California when I was on the UU Ministers Association executive committee.  I was the executive visitor to the Pacific Central District ministers’ retreat.  It was at a Benedictine retreat center in Malibu, high overlooking the Pacific. (Tough job but somebody’s gotta do it.)  We had our UU worship at the civilized hour of nine in the morning.  The small group of Benedictines had their morning prayers and mass at 7:00 am.  I went one morning early, met the elderly priest, said I’d like to attend.  “You are welcome,” he replied, “but, of course, you may NOT receive communion.”  That’s fine, I understand.  I participated in the service, only three or four of us standing around a small altar.  I said the responses, I prayed, but did not receive.  And the same thing happened the second day.  And then, on the third day, he asked me if I would read the gospel!  I did.  And then, on the next day, without saying anything special, as he handed out the wafers, he handed one to me.

         No bishop saw this! No council approved! But I think the people in the secret ecumenical church recognize each other. And we recognize each other when we look across tables, not walls.

         I have seen the secret ecumenical church on retreat in an Episcopalian monastery in Cambridge, where four times a day we chant ancient Jewish psalms. And we recognize each other when we look not in judgment upon the psalms, asking whether we agree or whether we should rewrite some part of them to make them more “acceptable,” but when we realize the psalms are songs of our people, our hearts, our souls . . . and we become one with them.

         I saw the secret ecumenical church when my brother died a couple months ago, and almost immediately after we arrived in our hotel room in Omaha before the funeral, a telephone call came from Sam Hollo, the minister of a church in Weston so evangelical that they won’t belong to ANY denomination – “just wanted to tell you we’re praying for your family.” We recognize each other in the secret ecumenical church when we realize that sometimes the love of Christ speaks in unfamiliar accents, sometimes even in evangelical and fundamentalist voices.

         I have seen the secret ecumenical church in so many ways, so many places. And so have most of you – when we sing Lutheran chorales and Wesley’s hymns and Taize chants and African-American spirituals, when we recover communion prayers of the Didache from 1st century Syria, when we study the Catholic Hans Kung, the Episcopalian John Spong, the Orthodox Kallistos Ware.

         And I wonder if this secret ecumenical church is not exactly what our own George Huntston Williams meant when he wrote in his study of Frederic Henry Hedge that if we are “the loyal opposition to the Great Church” we must be “no less attached to the Christian tradition than is the Great Church, actively devoted to the goal of the Kingdom, (even if) seriously, at times differing with the strategy and restatements of faith acceptable to the majority.”

         And I wonder if this secret ecumenical church is not exactly what William Ellery Channing meant when he wrote “I distrust sectarian influence more and more. I am more detached from a denomination, and strive to feel more my connection with the Universal Church, with all good and holy people. I am little a Unitarian, and stand aloof from all but those who strive and pray for clearer light, who look for a purer and more effective manifestation of Christian truth.”

         I wonder if Christ is found in every denomination. In the words of Ignatius of Antioch: “Where Christ is, there is the universal church.” I wonder if the time of denominations is passing.

III.

         The secret ecumenical church, my friends, is a spacious church – it has no walls, and it has many, many tables. It is eucharistically-centered, enlivened by prayer, emboldened by a sense of the presence of the Risen One. It thrives best, I think, in places where the fullness and richness of Christian faith is presented, but also where the individual is free to acknowledge doubts as well as belief – for the only real faith is honest faith.

         Perhaps the best way I can explain it is this: Henry David Thoreau once wrote: “A broad margin is as beautiful in a life as in a book.” (repeat). Margins in a book are not just empty space, rather they draw our eyes to that which is in the center, what is important; and without margins, a page would be unfocused, confused, overwhelming. So it is with our lives – we need that spiritual space, that margin of safety, which unclutters our week, cleanses our souls, redirects our attention, and renews our lives.

         In a word, my friends: what I have found, and what I hope you find also, is space – sacred, holy space – wide and open and light and spacious – for it is there that God seeks to enter our lives. We will know we are there when our hearts burn within us, beat wildly with the silent joy of hearing a distant yet familiar voice.

         Where Christ is, there is the secret ecumenical church.

         Gracious Lord, we give you thanks and praise for the places where our spirits have found a home. Help us each, we pray, to so enlarge our hearts that your Spirit may find a home in us. Through Jesus Christ, thy son our Lord, we pray. AMEN.