"Being Good For Nothing"

by

The Rev. Sarah York

August 4, 2002

In my last year of divinity school, I was the minister for a small church in Massachusetts. One Sunday after the service a woman came up to me, and without even the usual greeting or small talk she asked very directly and urgently, “Do you believe that Jesus was divine?”

She caught me off guard. “Oh, no,” I thought. “This woman is going to try to convert me.”

I answered carefully, with a question. “Do you mean what do I believe or what are the Unitarian Universalist beliefs?”

“What do you believe?” she said.

            Well, I couldn’t cop out and make some vague statement about how we all believe differently, so I answered, “I believe Jesus was divine just as you and I are divine.”

            “Then you don’t believe that Jesus is the only son of God?” she asked.

            “No,” I said. “I don’t.” I was prepared to hear a few Bible quotes that would surely prove to me that I was dead wrong.

            Instead, she let out a visible sigh of relief. “Oh, how wonderful!” she exclaimed. Some invisible chain that had been binding her soul seemed to fall off in that moment. (I have to admit to feeling somewhat relieved, myself, when she did not try to save my soul.)

            The next day she called. “Where do I sign up?” she asked. I suggested that she might wish to attend services for a while before she signed the membership book. But she knew what she wanted, and didn’t even want to wait for Sunday. She “signed up” as she put it to be part of a religion that gave her freedom of thought. She had found a home for her doubts and heresies.

After a few weeks, however, she came to me with another urgent question, and this one threw me more than the first one had.

            “Am I going to hell?” she asked. And she sincerely expected I would know the answer.

            My first impulse was just to say no, and be done with it, but I asked why she was concerned about going to hell, and she said, “Am I going to hell for coming to this church?” 

            At that point I wanted to tell her that if she did, I would see her there and we could suffer together, but I could tell she wasn’t joking. So I suggested she make an appointment to talk with me.

 Kurt Vonnegut tells the story of going to a Unitarian Universalist church where the minister said that if they listened closely to the bell on the church, they would hear that it was singing, over and over again, No Hell, No Hell. “No matter what we did in life, the minister said, we wouldn’t burn throughout eternity in hell. We wouldn’t even fry for 10 or 15 minutes.” Vonnegut adds, “He was just guessing, of course.”

That woman came to me and said, “Am I going to hell?” and I can still hear the desperation in her voice. Her mind had heard the bell saying, “No hell, no hell.” But she could not live peacefully with her heresies until she resolved some of the issues from her Catholic background. As you may know, a Unitarian Universalist lapsed Catholic is someone who doesn’t believe in God but is still afraid of her.” Or in this case, it’s someone who doesn’t believe in hell, but is afraid she will go there.

            Perhaps one of her issues had to do with the notion of sin and how you deal with it.

            One of the theological issues that distinguish us as religious liberals is that we do not believe in the concept of original sin. That is, we do not believe that human beings are all born with the stain of sin on our souls and that Jesus died to somehow ransom us out of our depraved and miserable state. We believe that human beings are born with the potential for good or evil.

            And as Kurt Vonnegut said, we don’t believe in heaven and hell as places where you go on judgment day. As the saying goes, Universalists of the last century believed God was too good to damn them to hell. Unitarians believed they were too good to be damned.

            But we have our convictions about what is right and true and we know we fall short of living up to them.

           I sat at the bedside of a dying man some years ago and he said, “Sarah, I believe in the Judgment Day.” He was only 42 years old and was a kind generous man, but he needed to confess a few things before he died. So I listened and I watched, as he appeared to be relieved of a strange restlessness. He died that night.  I never believed he would go to hell if he did not confess, and I don’t think he believed that either. But he knew what he knew about himself, and more than confessing to God or to me or to the Great Cosmic Judge, he was taking stock of his life and naming the ways in which he had not measured up to his own notion of goodness.

            You may not call it sin, but you know when there is a gap between the way things are and the way they might be. You know when you are betraying some of the cosmic laws of justice.

            How do you know?  If you are Jewish, the law tells you. If you are Catholic, an infallible Pope tells you. If you are Southern Baptist, you sing that old song,  “How do I know? The Bible tells me so.” But chances are many of you are here because you do not accept the authority of the law and you do not accept the authority of the church, and you do not accept the singular authority of a book that was written by human beings.

            Gordon McKeeman (U.U. minister and former President of Starr King School for the Ministry) says we Unitarian Universalists “attract the unhappy and the unholy. We take in people who have been wounded by religion and try to heal them. This makes us a kind of religious hospital.”

            Many of you, I suspect, are recovering Catholics or recovering Jews or recovering Methodists, coming to terms with your faith tradition while you figure out what you really believe. 

            Early in this century, Fanny Holmes, wife of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. was talking with her husband’s court clerk one day about religion. She said, “You’re Catholic, and we know something of Catholicism. But what do you know about our religion, Unitarianism?”  The clerk mumbled something about it being a liberal offshoot of Congregationalism, then Mrs. Holmes said, “Well, in Boston you have to be something, and Unitarian is the least that you can be.”

            Ouch! We have to do more than come here to a religious hospital to lick our wounds and be the least that we can be.  We have to do more than bring our doubts and questions and expose them to fresh healing air of reason.

            After all, in this age of managed care, we have only two days to get well.

            I am in this faith because I want to articulate and live up to my own values, and I live in a world where that is not an easy thing to do. I am not here because of what I do not believe, but because of what I do believe.

            What our faith is really about is being the most that you can be, and we are here to help each other be the most that we can be. One way we do this is by living with one another in community. I once visited a Vedanta Center where the guru, Mataji, told me that living in community is the most difficult spiritual discipline. I believe it. Genuine community will expose the best and worst that is in you. A community of faith, like this church, will go a step farther and support you in confronting the worst while you seek the best.

            But what is it—just what is it—that motivates you and me to submit to the pain of seeing the worst and the challenge of seeking the best? If we are neither enticed by the prospect of heaven nor frightened by the threat of hell, then why do we seek the good?  I cannot speak for anyone but myself, so I will tell you what does it for me.

            What does it for me is a vision of harmony and wholeness for all sentient beings and the environment that supports them. You can call that God or Goddess or Allah or the Great Spirit if you wish. Or you can call it heaven. Or you can call it peace or justice or love. What you call it does not matter. What matters is that there is a vision of something good and true and that you and I can make a difference if our lives are directed toward that vision. But we have so many things working against us that we need to join forces to do that. 

            So you can be an Atheist or a Christian or a Buddhist or a Pagan and make this your religious home. Because what you have in common with others is not the theological beliefs you have rejected or affirmed but how your beliefs call you to your best self. 

            If you affirm that there is a Loving Spirit that gives you hope, it is not because I tell you that such a Spirit exists, it is because you have been given hope during a tragedy or crisis in your life.

            If you affirm that prayer is powerful, it is not because the Bible tells you so, it is because you have received strength and comfort from your own life of prayer.

            If you affirm that it is wrong to lie and to steal, it is not because the Koran forbids you to do so, it is because you have heard the voice of your own conscience when you lied and when you stole.

            If you believe in being kind to another person, it is not because the Buddha teaches compassion, it is because you know what it is like to have someone be kind to you.

            How do you know? You know because you apply your mind and your heart to your knowing. You know because human history tells the story over and over in every language, of the need to love one another.

 

When someone asks you what Unitarian Universalists believe, tell them. Tell them first what you believe. I mean make a statement of personal faith, and put it in positive language. Then tell them something about our faith, too. But don’t say what we don’t believe; tell them what we do believe.

Don’t say “We don’t believe in sin and hell”; say “We believe in being good for nothing.”

Don’t say, “We don’t believe Jesus was God”; say, “We believe that Jesus and Moses and Buddha and Mohammed and Confucius were men of insight and moral vision, but they were all men, so their vision could not contain all of truth.” Say we draw from many sources for truth, masculine and feminine, eastern and western, god-fearing and goddess-affirming.

And don’t say we do not have any creed, even though that is true. Say that each of us is free to define our own beliefs while we hold our principles in common and covenant together to live by them.

            And if you aren’t sure what those principles are, I invite you to turn now to the page in your hymnal where they are written. It is two pages before the first hymn, and begins with the words, “We, the member congregations….”

            Let’s read the whole page together before we sing our final hymn.

 

WE, THE MEMBER CONGREGATIONS OF THE UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST ASSOCIATION, COVENANT TO AFFIRM AND PROMOTE: 

·        The inherent worth and dignity of every person;

·        Justice, equity, and compassion in human relations;

·        Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations;

·        A free and responsible search for truth and meaning;

·        The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large;

·        The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all;

·        Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.

 

THE LIVING TRADITION WE SHARE DRAWS FROM MANY SOURCES: 

• Direct 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 that create and uphold life;
• Words and deeds of prophetic women and men which challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love;
• Wisdom from the world’s religions which inspires us in our ethical and spiritual life;
• Jewish and Christian teachings which call us to respond to God’s love by loving our neighbors as ourselves;
• Humanist 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.
• (And one more that has been added since the hymnal was printed: Spiritual teachings of earth-centered traditions which celebrate the sacred circle of life and instruct us to live in harmony with the rhythms of nature.)

 Grateful for the religious pluralism which enriches and ennobles our faith, we are inspired to deepen our understanding and expand our vision. As free congregations we enter into this covenant, promising to one another our mutual trust and support.